Suicide

Ryan desperately shook his head, which was already half-bare bone. His lips had long since melted away, and his teeth clattered violently in the cold air. The sound coming from his throat fell into the silence of the cave, turning into a raspy, slithering hiss that sounded exactly like a venomous snake crawling through the cracks of bones.

In a place like this, in a bone cave filled with death and unknown terrors, to encounter a mutated aberration covered in bone spikes, dripping with out-of-control Glory, frantically crawling toward oneself while letting out a chilling shriek...

What would happen?

What kind of reaction would any extraordinary being with their sanity intact, who had scraped by in the field of the occult, make?

Before he could even figure out the answer to this cruel question, the young Ryan ahead had already whipped his head around the instant he heard the sound.

In that instant, two pairs of eyes—completely different yet originating from the same source—locked onto each other in the freezing air.

Ryan's heart stopped beating at this moment.

Because in the eyes of his younger self who had just entered this place, he saw three distinct looks that he was all too familiar with—

In the first second, it was the instinctive tension and extreme vigilance of a transmigrator facing an unknown horror.

In the second second, it was the obsessive-compulsive disgust and wariness of a 【Lantern】 Scholar detecting a highly concentrated source of illegal pollution.

And in the third second...

...it was a cold, almost cruel intent to kill, devoid of any human emotion.

“Oh no.”

Despair—a despair heavier and more ironic than all his countless previous deaths combined—instantly pinned him to the spot.

He watched his younger self take a step forward, posture erect, eyes freezing cold.

Suddenly, Ryan did not want to crawl anymore.

His mangled, spike-covered right hand fell weakly into the pile of white bones, just three meters away from the other's toes.

So that was it.

So that was how it was.

He finally understood why countless loops always ended in the exact same place.

He finally understood why there was never an answer in the deepest part of the bone island, only a skeleton of his own.

The thing that ultimately killed him had never been the devourment of the Black Bone.

Nor had it ever been some imaginary realm behemoth hiding deep in the fog.

It was himself.

It was his most perfect self, who every single time believed he was on the right path and decided to eradicate all unknown pollution to maintain his sanity.

Time seemed to freeze completely at this moment. He watched his other self slowly raise his left hand, tracing a perfect arc in the air with his index finger, pointing it directly between his brows.

Gathering at that fingertip was the purest 【Lantern】's Glory, something he was incredibly familiar with and proud of.

That was supposed to be his power.

“Farewell... my clever, ignorant self.”

Ryan closed his mutated left eye, his lips curling into an extremely absurd smile forced together by shattered bone and flesh.

...

Ryan slowly came to a halt beneath a massive whale ribcage.

The air was thick with a nauseating stench of dead fish and the scent of stale lime powder.

Just a few minutes ago, he, Alvin, and Simon had agreed on a time.

For the sake of efficiency, and to find even a shred of a clue to survival in this bizarre place, they had ultimately chosen their own entrances. Alvin went left, and Simon went right.

As for himself, he stepped into the middle entrance, which looked the deepest and darkest.

“Six hours.”

Ryan looked down at the brass pocket watch in his hand. Its glass face was completely shattered, and its hands were locked tightly onto some unknown position. He gave a self-deprecating laugh and stuffed it back into his trench coat pocket.

He took a deep breath, forcing down the restless emotions brought on by the oppressive environment.

The glow in his left eye lit up, casting a pale cone of light about five meters wide directly ahead.

Outside the beam was a pitch-black darkness as thick as a physical substance. Within it... was a mountain of piled white bones that made his scalp tingle.

Human skulls, fractured ribs, and thick whale vertebrae were jammed together in layers like worthless pebbles. In some places, severe weathering caused pale powder to rustle and fall under the direct beam of his light.

As Ryan stepped on them, every footstep made a piercing crackle. In such an absolutely silent, enclosed space, the sound was amplified infinitely, sounding as if countless invisible people were snapping their fingers beneath his feet at the exact same time.

Out of habit, he reached up to adjust the wire-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose.

However, when his fingers touched cold skin, he suddenly remembered—his glasses had fallen into the bottomless, pitch-black sea the very second The Voyager was smashed by the Black Bone.

Now, looking even slightly into the distance, everything had a fuzzy blur to it, like looking through frosted glass.

This feeling of restricted vision was lethal and frustrating for a seeker of the 【Lantern】 path. Because the 【Lantern】 meant clarity and exposure. Being unable to see clearly meant danger; it meant the defenses of his sanity were beginning to fracture.

“Something is wrong.”

After walking about fifty meters, Ryan abruptly stopped in his tracks.

He squinted his gray eyes slightly, enduring the mild double vision from losing his glasses, and stared intently at a relatively flat pile of shattered bones ahead.

There, several human phalanges and ribs of varying lengths were interlocked at an extremely deliberate, unnatural geometric angle. If viewed from directly above, the lines formed by those bones very clearly spelled out a neat, standard English letter. No, a word.

【TIME】.

Ryan's brow furrowed tightly instantly, and his heart rate began to quicken uncontrollably.

“A prank? Or some specific ritual node left behind by ancient cultists?”

He did not approach blindly. Instead, staying at a safe distance, he slowly lowered the lantern in his hand.

A thread of pure Scholar's glow, carrying the 【Lantern】 aspect, extended from the gaps of the lantern cover, carefully sweeping over those bones.

There were no residual extraordinary laws.

No high-intensity illegal mental pollution.

No active tissue squirming.

These were just a pile of the most ordinary, common human bones. Their level of weathering was between thirty and fifty years—so ordinary they looked like specimens dug up from any random cemetery.

Yet this was precisely the greatest anomaly.

Where was this? This was inside the body of the deity "Black Bone," a history independent of the Secret Histories of the real world. In this twisted domain where even time and magnetic fields were completely tangled, how could a pile of such "ordinary," "normal" bones arranged into a perfectly neat English word appear?

This felt like suddenly seeing a perfectly standard waste sorting sign drawn in pencil on a wall in the deepest depths of an ancient ruin filled with Cthulhu-esque unspeakable monsters.

It was absurd. It was filled with a powerful, hair-raising sense of cognitive dissonance.