[running sounds]

Looking at those creatures, Ben starts to ponder, remembering about one of his biggest misconceptions towards life. When he reincarnated in this place, he was enthusiastic about his future, since he remembered his past life.

His mind was overworked as he thought about all the possibilities and hopes about an exciting future.

Because of that, Ben developed, even more, his big obsession for fantasy and spent many years analyzing every idea he could come up with, original or not. The years later were quite harsh, due to him believing he should be unique but finding out he wasn’t.

‘Maybe conscious is cursed to think of oneself and their kind as unique. However, look at those creatures. How long did I take to understand how mysterious the so-called weak monsters are? Life is ironic. Here I’m choosing to walk the same road, but how long did I spend thinking of them as barbaric?’

‘Keeping memories is exceptional. You can start asking the big question from the beginning since you don’t waste time maturing your consciousness. You even have a point of reference to compare everything to, but those values chain you. For me, it’s especially so because of my fanaticism about the supernatural.’

Back on Earth, Ben had one big obsession in life. From his childhood to the day of his death, Ben had always been perplexed about human imagination. How could reality be hardwired?

He spent most of his time on anything magical. His hobby and work were always related to fantasies and the supernatural. ‘Not reality’ was his life.

‘Back then I never really found anything mysterious, but maybe I didn’t want to. Wasting time inside my head wasn’t that bad anyway, and while I don’t remember everything I spent my time on, that way of living left a big impression.’

‘It was because of that impression that I suffered, but also why I could move on. My similarities to those creatures show how much I changed. How blur the line is between barbaric and efficient? They aren’t the weird ones, humans are. We chose to be so stiff, and I don’t understand why. Thinking about why the world is like this still gives me the most anxiety, and I wonder if it will ever change.’

[stones cracking]

‘I should move, as they seem to be doing something big. The pressure is suffocating.’

Looking at the monkeys working with the stones gave Ben a bad omen.

His first impression that they were trying to recover seems to be wrong since the atmosphere around begun to change, and they didn’t.

‘Ah, most of the tunnels are already blocked off. Was it done to stop the intruders? Did they forget this tunnel because they don’t use it? I get why I felt the change in density so much after coming down. This place is like a pressure cooker.’

After reading the flow in the air, Ben notices that the only tunnel fueling the room is the one under the ventilation he’s within.

‘They’re coming and going from two other tunnels, but have, so far, ignored the source. Yeah, let’s go. I should take the risk. Hopefully, I will survive and even find some inspiration.’

Ben could either wait or go down since the other tunnels are in constant use by the monkeys. Luckily, something is different about those creatures, and a reliable way to find clues is to look at the source of their change.

The question Ben made to himself was: ‘What’s so special about this vein that those monkeys took the risk to absorb it? How can their instinct validate this mutation?’ As long as he can look at the source, maybe he can infer their reasoning.

Taking extra care to not make any sound, by making use of the dark and the slightly violent energy in the air, Ben goes down and begins his journey even deeper into this cold hell.

—

Deeper and deeper he went, as the darkness of his chosen path welcomes him.

‘Surprising, it’s not getting colder.’

Although it didn’t get colder, as he went down, the air became denser and denser. That by the time he finally got to another fork, reaching a non-artificially tunnel, walking felt like moving inside a river.

‘If this energy smelled terrible, we could well name it sewer.’ he joked to himself.

It wasn’t only the atmosphere in Spirit World that was different from Earth. When considering what’s deeper underground, the changes are much more shocking.

Take those tunnels with natural energy. They’re like veins in this world and work surprisingly similar to human blood vessels. Those things are all around the world, interconnected like a maze, giving a magical breath of life everywhere.

[Heavy deep breath]

Looking at the vein, Ben is awed. Every time he reaches such depths, he can’t but be shocked.

‘Amazing…’

The tunnel has a diameter of around five meters, shaped like a cylinder. The wall is quite smooth but not exactly perfect, giving a feeling of natural made. However, the most astonishing element is the runes on its surface. They’re natural runes made due to the density and flow of freezing energy. Those runes strengthen the walls and boost the flow while emitting some light.

Feeling the flow going from right to left, Ben pauses. He notices that by now, his appearance has changed quite a bit. He became icy white, and his hair and clothes became frozen.

With the dim light present, Ben can look at the white skin of his hand, and he sees a small layer of snow covering it.

‘It’s too dense, so I can’t sense far way anymore, but despite the change, it doesn’t feel as cold.’

Ben wasn’t dispersing his energy around anymore. The air around him is too dense and pure for his senses to be effective. Fortunately, this place is dim-lit, so he isn’t going around blindly.

Looking at the direction that has the most traces left by other creatures, Ben begins to move to the right. However, his pace becomes slower.

After walking for a couple of dozen minutes, He finally caught sight of a big carved room. He notices the architecture style used.

‘The Sunset Empire style.’

At the center, Ben sees an altar-like structure. This whole room was carved to support the altar. Around it, many small platforms, the kind that people generally sit on and meditate, form a circle. Unfortunately, the place emits a feeling of abandonment, since the ones that used to come here and maintain it are long gone.

The most beautiful detail about this place is how ice and fire complement each other.

‘It’s cold and hot. I’m frozen and am not. While my ice node is singing happily, my fire node is cracking because of this place pressure.’

This place uses a dual vein, and naturally, two energies come in, but surprisingly, only one comes out!

‘This place should be pumping the fire energy somewhere else, probably fueling the arrays above. But then what are the sources left above doing? I heard the system above is complete and should work for a long time but still die off in the far future. However, if this palace is fueling it, those things will only stop if the world ends!’

Unfortunately, Ben is unable to discover the ins and outs of this system. The whole thing is too complicated and layered with all kinds of protections. Even guessing some stuff is too hard, since this place was abandoned a long time ago.

Although this place kept its mysticism, the luster of its noisy grandiosity is gone.

‘Times eat everything. Nature took over. Feels so lonely.’

[sigh]

‘If even standing around is such a burden, how can I discover how this works?’

A sense of tiredness flows inside his body, as Ben’s mind has too many questions and worries.

Moving on, Ben sits in one of the platforms closest to the center and begins to reshape his two nodes.

—

Hours later, the ambiance in the room has changed.

A reddish glow now fills the once dim-lit space.

The change is because the energy Ben absorbed not long ago, by burning the body’s resources, was expelled from his body and replaced with energy from the natural vein.

Both nodes slightly below his heart are now made from a similar source, making their structure more balanced.

Ben’s appearance has also changed. He doesn’t look frozen anymore. The layer of white snow is gone, and a slightly mixed blue and red aura took its place. He has achieved his peak on the synchronization with the vain, by making full use of the ancient altar.

‘Am I too greed? I want more!’ he grumpily complains once his body reaches its limit even when helped by the structures.

[sigh]

‘I need to hold in, patiently wait for a better chance and not waste anything more. Hold in, Ben, hold it in! AAGH! THINK ABOUT THE BIG PICTURE! 0, 1, 2, 3, 4…’

He kept counting until his mind calmed down.

“aggwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…” his voice still gone.

[deep breath]

‘I should close the cultivation of those nodes for now. After, I will look around a bit, but I also need to consider leaving soonish, since who knows when something will come down here.’

Ben has been too deep underground to hear any more of the battle from above. Besides, this place is reinforced to an extreme extent, so he has been blind about what has been happening.

It took roughly another hour for him to stabilize the nodes. By the end, the surrounding had eaten almost all the remnants of the fire glow in the air.

‘Is there something around here? I don’t think the monkeys would care that much about anything else than the benefits they get from sitting around here.’

Taking off his shirt, a black flowered shaped tattoo can be seen in his chest, partially filled with seven petals in total.

From the black circle in the middle of his chest, Ben takes a little transparent stone using some spatial technique.

‘Alright, I shall use one of those, if I can’t find anything by the time this little lantern goes off, I’ll leave.’

After taking the stone, the tattoo hides.

[cracking sounds]

The inside of the stone cracks, as it starts to emit light. Using it, Ben begins to explore his surroundings in detail.

He left the exploration for last because the pressure for him when he arrived was too much. It was only after the stabilization that his body stopped crumbling down.

With his newly gained physique, walking around here doesn’t feel like hell anymore.

‘Beautiful!’ he looks at the altar in the center.

In the middle, a three-meter statue depicts four persons. Each is making a pose in one of the cardinal directions.

‘It aligns.’ he looks at a compass confined at the statue feet.

‘I don’t know their language tho.’ Ben sadly sighs after looking at some words engraved close to the compass.

‘I hope it only says who they’re and I’m not missing anything important.’

The statue is made of some pastel-colored marble, and they have an array engraved on them. Those runes are connected to the floor and continue on the walls and ceiling.

‘Was it alchemy? I don’t see a single joint. The whole thing seems to be a one-piece, as smooth as it can be.’

Sensing the marble, he discovers that the structure has no seams, not even between the statue and the marble cube below it or between that and the ground.

Walking around the altar, with the light, he finally sees that the people seem to be two couples. Two men and two women, paired together by holding hands.

‘They don’t look alike, so I assume they were lovers.’

[cracking sounds] the light stone dims a little bit.

After finishing looking at the statues, Ben begins to look at the meditation tables around it.

‘Despite emitting an abandoned feeling, the whole thing is quite clean. Auto-clean properties? Can I do that to every house I move in?’

[Heavy laugh]

Looking for passages, Ben finds the dual vein on the opposite side of the tunnel he used. Those two are the only corridors connected to this room.

Ben gets closer.

‘It’s quite the slope, if one isn’t careful then they will roll down. I bet this is the only connection to the dual vein, or else people would have already found this place. Oh! I haven’t thought about this, but if true and this array is holding the heat here, then should this be the reason the ground above emits such cold? Suppressing the dual vain tipped the balance off?’

Using the light stone, he sees that the synthetic array doesn’t go much farther.

‘Maybe the Empire did something to fulfill the surrounding needs. However, no one is around to maintain such a system, or maybe it was robbed for its values. Time showed what the lack of the Empire represented to that area, and since no one found this place, those dots were never connected. Although maybe, only maybe, the cold is still only a consequence of the state of protective arrays. But I wouldn’t bet on that since the chill feels so weird yet not quite aggressive.’

There was no history that the ground of the Empire was cold. So most assume such a condition was created by the situation in the city. Since there is so much danger inside, the coldness of the surroundings surprises no one.

However, with his new finding, Ben began to reconsider. Who would believe such a complex structure that transforms a dual vein does not affect the area above? Ben wouldn’t.

[cracking sounds]