Activating their connection was surprisingly easy. The moment he touched her the string-like connection suddenly became a bridge. All that was necessary was to supply it qi and focus on it. Marina needed so much skin contact before to make the bridge more stable to make up their lack of qi.

Raul didn’t have much qi on hand, just the minimum Marina had poured into him before fainting. He knew he’d have to live with that awful feeling until Marina woke up afterwards, but he didn’t hesitate to use it.

Thankfully the bridge really didn’t take much, and he’d barely poured in a tenth of what he had before the bridge came to life and that addictive feeling of becoming whole washed over him.

He didn’t revel in the feeling and instead jumped right into figuring out what was wrong. He first tried to judge if there was a fault with the connection by switching his focus from his body to hers repeatedly, but that was a futile effort.

The bridge was only metaphorical. Once triggered there was nothing like a travel time, it was as simple and instantaneous as switching your focus from you hand to your foot.

That failing, he decided to go with the more direct approach and see if there were any hidden dangers within her. He gasped the moment he saw her dantian and meridians.

Her dantian was half the size of his, but it looked ok, what truly shocked him was her meridians. There were cracks all over them that looked like they’d been sewed shut. Raul didn’t know much about cultivation or the medical arts, but even he could tell this was only a temporary fix and not a cure.

‘I’m gonna strangle that quack physician!’ Raul swore angrily. He had no idea that compared to most cultivators three months after having their cultivation abandoned, this was simply a miraculous recovery.

Physician Lee was entirely truthful when he said she was recovering exceptionally and that he’d love to discuss with her, yet he’d unfairly been labeled a quack due to Raul’s lack of knowledge.

He looked around to see if he could find any other problems, but quickly realized that he had no idea what to look for. He wasn’t a physician, unless it was an obvious problem like the cracks on her meridian there was no way he could tell an abnormality apart.

‘Damn it, am I really this uneducated?’ He questioned in frustration. Finding no more abnormalities would usually be a good thing, but in Raul’s case he recognized that he was so ignorant he wouldn’t recognize an abnormality even if he saw it.

Frankly, this could only be attributed to Raul’s lack of studying. While most cultivators do not become physicians, almost every cultivator at least had basic physician knowledge.

Cultivators moved around a lot of energy in their bodies, and internal injury were extremely common, if they had to go to a physician for every minor damage and cut then they’d go bankrupt.

He resolved to make a trip to the Vault Family Library in the future to solve this failing of his.

It was frustrating, but there wasn’t anything more he could do here. The best thing he could do was tell Tai about her meridians. But there was one more place to check first.

He switched his focus to her head. It was obvious to check there since she’d supposedly fainted from shock. But when he shifted his focus to her head, a spike of pain ran through his as he ran into a brick wall.

It wasn’t her whole head, but there was one section cut off from his perception. Her internals weren’t actually unperceivable, he could clearly perceive that there were no obvious issues with her skull, muscles, or brain, but there was a strange disconnect, an invisible wall keeping him from seeing more that was there.

‘The heck is this?’ Raul wondered, certain there was no such thing in his own head. What he didn’t know was that he’d stumbled upon Marina’s mindscape.

A mindscape is an unreal mental palace that manifests a person’s thoughts and emotions. Usually only high-level cultivators could perceive it, and even then, only if they focused on mental cultivation. The only reason Raul was perceiving it was because of the specialness of the Divine Pairing Hearts technique.

He cautiously observed the anomaly. He’d just learned earlier that brute forcing it wasn’t good, and he didn’t want to accidently hurt Marina again. He simply wanted as much information as he could get about anything strange for when he reported it.

He gently touched the invisible divide with his perception, trying to figure out its dimensions, but the moment he did, the ring on his finger glowed. Their connection trembled and grew. Instead of a bridge, it now resembled a sturdy corridor.

What was originally an unbreachable wall suddenly became like quicksand, sucking Raul’s prodding perception in before he even realized what was going on.

He screamed like crazy as he was suddenly falling through dark space while his perception gathered together to make a mental replica of himself, down to the clothes he was wearing.  When the final spot of his boot finished gathering, the falling sensation stopped.

The darkness stripped away, and he fell on his butt. “Damn, what’s going on?” He muttered as he started to push himself up.

“Hiss!” He winced and recoiled as a burning sensation crawled up his hand. It was unlike anything he’d ever felt before, rather than heat it felt like pure rage and anger had scorched him.

He looked at the spot and found that he’d touched a burning staircase. He shot up to his feet in shock, and finally got a good look at the place.

It was clearly originally a posh giant mansion, but now the walls were cracked and broken, the paintings and books ripped from the walls and shelves, the furniture broken and discarded carelessly, and everything was covered in some level of fire and soot.

“Where the hell am I!?” He backed away from the flaming staircase, but it only brought him closer to more flames. The burning rage and hatred beat down on him from all directions while the ash in the air slowly suffocated him. He had to get out of here!

It was then he saw a familiar face in one of the charred paintings. Marina. Everything he’d done up to that point came back to him at that moment. “Damn it!” He cursed while changing his plans from finding the nearest exit.

“Marina! Marina!” He yelled repeatedly while running around the mansion, but no answer came. He searched the entire first floor and made it to the second as he was nearing his limits.

He weakly walked along the wall while coughing uncontrollably. He could handle the pain and anger from the flames, but the suffocation from the ashes was starting to make him feel faint. He needed air, fast.

He looked to the window embroidered in flames and clenched his teeth. He ran at the window with his remaining strength. With his current body surviving a two-story drop would be no problem.

Although he didn’t know if that applied to this mental rendition of his body, everything else about it worked similarly, so he could only hope it was as sturdy. Besides, if he fainted he doubt he’d survive here, much less find Marina.   

He broke through the window and braced himself for impact. But he didn’t fall. Outside the mansion was nothing, just an endless empty void. He tried to get back to the window, but he couldn’t move.

Sadness, fear, regret, loneliness, pain, a plethora of emotions crushed Raul in place to the point that he couldn’t breathe, but it was short lasting. Despair and despondence filtered all the other feelings away and filled him to the bone.

It resonated with the feelings he felt the day he received the party invitation and fainted during cultivation, and amplified them.

Raul’s eyes turned empty, and like a carrion eater the void swooped in. His body started to unravel and fade into the emptiness. There was no pain in the process, only a sweet relief.

He was aware that he was in danger, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. His body just felt so heavy. What did it matter anyway? All his goals were so far out of his reach, who was he kidding?

It was all hopeless. If he just lie here, if he simply surrendered, then he could continue to experience that powerful relief till his final moments, just like he did that day…

“No!” A spark of life returned to Raul’s eyes as he yelled. That relief wasn’t the end of it. That day he realized he still had other things he wanted to do, goals he planned to fight for, he made a plan for himself that didn’t involve cultivation. He didn’t give up on himself then and he wouldn’t now!

A strong wind burst from his body. He instinctively used it to push himself out of the void and back into the flaming mansion.

Fear flooded his eyes as the heat pushed the remains of the cold despondence out of his bones. The fire and ash were a lot more bearable now as the small layer of wind around him filtered them.

He looked down and sucked in a cold breathe upon realizing both his hands were gone and his legs had large chunks missing from them. He looked out the window and trembled in fear.

If he’d stayed in there a few seconds longer he certainly would’ve disappeared like a bad dream in that emptiness. That was unquestionably the most terrifying experience in his life. It didn’t simply almost kill him, it’d made him want it.

The void kept trying to encroach on the mansion, reaching for him hungrily, but the flames kept it from entering. It dawned on him that everything was on fire to keep that emptiness out.

This place is too scary!

He glanced down, feeling a small relief that his missing pieces were slowly getting filled in by whatever was making up his current body. But even then, he instinctively knew he wasn’t regaining what he lost so much as stretching out what he still had.

The wind barrier as well was using up some unknown resource of his as he could feel his body thinning.

As soon as he was able, he moved away from the flames and dropped the wind barrier. The raging emotions immediately started beating down on him again as ash filled him with every breathe. He wouldn’t last long like this.

He looked around at a loss. Inside was a blazing hell, and outside was an endless void, there was simply no escape!

He glanced at the window again then trembled in horror. There was no way he was stepping into that again. He grit his teeth and committed to searching the mansion while using his wind to rest occasionally.

‘My best bet is to find Marina. Here’s hoping she’s in this mansion or else I’m screwed.’