The Loop

Ryan stared deeply at the word spelled out by the finger bones, forcing himself to calm down.

He stepped over the pile of bones and continued forward, his vigilance dialed to the maximum.

However, after walking a mere twenty meters...

On the rough, recessed bone wall to his right, nestled in the gap between two massive, pillar-like ship keels, a second familiar pattern suddenly crashed into his blurry vision.

It was the exact same set of letters.

Ryan's face grew slightly pale.

He did not stop; instead, he quickened his pace.

A third location...

A fourth...

A fifth...

Those words were like persistent cankers clinging to the darkness, impossible to shake off. No matter how he walked, at the most prominent position of those shattered bone piles, the word 【TIME】 spelled out in pale white skeletal remains would always abruptly appear.

【TIME】.

【TIME】.

【TIME】.

This felt more like a madman who had been trapped to death in this darkness forever. In the final hours before his sanity was entirely wiped out and his mind completely collapsed, he had used every ounce of his strength to frantically, hysterically write the same concept in every corner along the way.

Through this method, that madman was sending out the most desperate wail to any latecomer.

He wanted to tell those who came after: time is broken.

Or rather... beware of time.

“Damn it.”

Ryan took a deep breath. The icy air rushed into his lungs, bringing a burning sting.

Yet, he still chose not to turn back. He knew all too well that for a practitioner of the 【Lantern】 path, the only way to survive when facing the unknown was to “know.” If one shrank back in the face of truth, their aspect would wither, and their sole doctrinal defense line in these Secret Histories would instantly and completely collapse.

One could only march forward, using a stronger light to illuminate the deeper darkness, and drag the mastermind behind it all into the open.

Just as he was about to take another step, an extremely faint yet highly discordant sound suddenly drifted from deep within the thick fog ahead.

It was an unpleasant noise, sounding like a massive, bloated serpent frantically dragging its fleshy body over countless sharp, shattered bones.

In the absolutely dead silent cave, this dull, crisp clattering of bones rubbing and colliding against each other sounded incredibly jarring.

“Something is coming.”

Every muscle in Ryan's body tensed to the absolute limit in an instant, like a fully drawn bowstring.

Without a hint of hesitation, he instinctively took half a step back, hiding his body in the shadow of a massive whale bone.

At the same time, he acted with extreme caution, dimming his glow. The beam of light that had been cast directly ahead retracted instantly, and the entire cave plunged back into a thick, absolute darkness where one could not even see their own hand.

In this darkness, he could only rely on his senses to lock onto the approaching sound.

The sound grew louder and louder, now less than ten meters away from him.

Accompanying the sound was an extremely violent, highly concentrated occult pollution that sent his internal 【Lantern】 Principle screaming with alarms.

What kind of aura was this?

Chaotic, bloated, taboo, and filled with a sense of aberration from being forcibly bloated by excessive knowledge. In Ryan's gray eyes, within the invisible darkness ahead, a massive, blinding, yet twisted mass of pale white glow was currently crawling rapidly toward him in a jerky, hitching motion.

This was absolutely a high-level Aberration that had completely lost its human form from peering into some deity of the imaginary realm.

The pollution tension radiating from it was too strong. Even across a distance of just a few meters, Ryan felt his sanity plummeting at a terrifying speed, the veins around his temples throbbing with violent pain.

“I must eliminate it here. If a source of pollution of this intensity gets any closer, I won't last three minutes before being assimilated.”

Ryan gritted his teeth in the darkness, a cold, ruthless rationality flashing in his eyes.

In this unreasonable, mysterious world, when facing highly aggressive and polluting creatures of the imaginary realm, the most foolish thing to do was to try to communicate or flee.

Before it could discover him, he had to use the cleanest, most violent extraordinary means to completely erase its doctrinal core in an instant.

He slowly raised his left hand.

Ryan slowly exhaled a breath of turbid air.

The fog ahead abruptly parted at a corner. Aided by the chaotic, dim light radiating from the Aberration itself, Ryan finally caught sight of the monster's upper body in his blurry field of vision.

With just a single glance, his stomach churned violently. A powerful human instinct welled up within him, producing an extreme sense of nausea and disgust.

It truly could no longer be called a living creature.

It was a massive, semi-transparent block of human wax covered in pale bone spikes. The skin on its face had completely vanished, revealing the outline of a skull beneath, from which fluorescent powder continuously drifted.

Beneath its ribs and on its shoulders, countless sharp, mutated bones resembled inverted daggers. As it crawled in extreme pain and madness, they dragged across the surrounding shattered bones, kicking up large showers of sparks.

Yet, what Ryan found most unbelievable, absurd, and alarming was...

The monster was actually wearing a piece of clothing... shredded to tatters by the bone spikes.

It was exactly the same as the one he was wearing.

Ryan snorted coldly in his mind. The gray in his eyes faded entirely in this instant, replaced by a non-human, sacred, and dead-silent blind white.

He did not care what this monster's origin was.

He did not care why it was wearing his clothes, or why it stared at him so intensely with those gray, weeping eye sockets that seemed filled with immense pain and agony.

He did not even care that the monster was currently trembling as it reached out its bone-spiked right hand toward him, its lips writhing continuously as it tried to utter some unintelligible, muffled whimpers.

In the face of the ultimate rationality of the 【Lantern】, any existence that did not conform to the logic of the current material world was merely an “erroneous stroke of ink” that needed to be corrected and erased.

“I am Ryan. I am a sober seeker of knowledge.”

Ryan silently said to himself. His eyes held no warmth, nor any of the hesitation and fear that belonged to mortals.

His left index finger traced an absolutely straight, geometrically perfect arc in the empty air.

Where his fingertip stopped, it locked dead onto the sunken skull right in the center of the mutated monster's forehead.

The air trembled violently in this instant.

A beam of pure, cold, magnificent light, completely devoid of any human emotion, suddenly erupted from his fingertip and every gap of his left eye!

The beam was so thick, so bright. The moment it lit up, the darkness in the entire middle cave was torn to shreds within a thousandth of a second.

Ryan watched expressionlessly as that perfect glow of his own completely engulfed the mutated monster, which was still trying to crawl toward him, still trying to explain something.

He heard no screams.

Nor did he hear the sound of flesh dissolving.

Under the supreme baptism of the 【Lantern】 Principle, the monster disintegrated at an incredibly smooth and silent speed.

“Phew... it's over.”

A few seconds later, the light gradually faded.

Ryan slowly lowered his slightly numb left hand, a layer of fine cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. Although he had cleanly eliminated a massive potential threat, it had consumed nearly a third of his extraordinary reserves.

He stood in place, taking one last look at where the monster had vanished.

Not far away, in the pile of yellowish, shattered bones, a fresh human skeleton gleaming with a faint, ancient fluorescence quietly slid down.

The skeleton was perfectly intact. It lay there silently, soundlessly merging into the dead sea of countless identical skulls around it.

“As expected, it was just a bluffing monster.”

Ryan let out a slightly contemptuous laugh and adjusted the collar of his slightly messy black trench coat.

He did not linger in this lifeless clearing for even half a second longer.

He walked in a hurry.

Because he could not wait to see what lay at the end of this path that would allow him to completely escape this place.

The wind continued to let out low, howling wails in the empty bone island.

And diagonally above the clearing that had just been cleared, in the gap of an old whale bone, a few finger bones that had just been shaken loose by the aftershocks of the battle rolled on the ground. After a few turns, they coincided to spell out a crooked, brand-new word once again:

【TIME】.

This was his final ripple...