{Main mission: Stranger in a strange land
Difficulty: High
Mission description: You do not remember who you are, but someone else might. Survive. Remaining time 29 : 23 : 57 : 53
Note 1: Your draugr bloodline has been suppressed!
Note 2: All your elemental magic has been weakened!
Note 3: Status slightly affected by the loss of abilities!
Note 4: You are in critical condition! All attributes -2! Regeneration halved!
Warning: As this is a special dungeon, you do not have the option of failing the main mission. In case you do, death awaits.}
Looking around, Aki found that he was in a rather familiar condition, battered, bruised and chained to a wall, though it much more looked like he was a dangerous patient than a dangerous prisoner considering he was literally just strapped to the bed with his wounds covered in bandages with poultices. The restraints were also not very bad, he could even just pull his hands and feet out thanks to his dexterity. Obviously he didn't do anything of the sort though, nor did he try to heal his most obvious wounds, just stabilizing him rather grody looking organs was fine too.
This place was actually far from normal. Rather, it looked normal, but be it the burning incense, the open window leading to a beautiful garden, the unlit candles on the wall... Both the design and appliances indicated an oriental stile with rather 'classical' methodology, but his perception was still more than good enough to tell that there were several strong people around, many in their numbers having a gentle aura, which led him to believe that the system may have thrown him into a xianxia novel or the like.
So he waited. He didn't know shit about this place, so talking to a doctor like he had lost most of his memory was the best he could do to gather any kind of knowledge without straight out sounding like he was retarded. Plus, finding out how he'd gotten there by asking just seemed to be the best way. Some fifteen minutes later, a teen came in and changed the incense, though he seemed mortified to hear him speak up for some reason though. Had he killed a lot of people in the narrative? He highly doubted, things like that generally lead to death penalties in a place with cultivators, and if he was a known killer the main quest would be too easy.
The stuttering boy was quick to call for a doctor though, the man in his thirties giving off a strong and wise vibe despite his soft colored robes with few decorations.
"How do you feel?" The doctor asked as he touched his pulse and sent a wave of his energy through his body, seeming quite surprised for a moment as he noted he was rather fine.
"I'm fine, as you are able to tell. I'm here mostly out of gratitude, my injuries were not light when i woke up, and i cannot tell how they were when i got here. You see, i was hoping you would know who i am." He sighed, slowly removing his hands from the restrains.
"You?!..." The doctor was surprised, his face and aura both suggesting so. A rank perception was mighty useful for social interactions it seemed, so Aki really wanted to unlock his S+ rank on all attributes again.
"I take you are also uncertain." He nodded with visible sadness. "Onto other matters then. I am unable to pay for my stay with anything but gold and my services, may they be whatever you require." Was his answer to the situation, yet the other man seemed confused for some reason.
Turns out, it was common courtesy to be virtuous like this, and after he expressed his thanks to the house mistress herself he only needed to answer a few questions to the local guard before being discharged, though both he and the investigator both had progressively graver expressions as the questions kept coming and he knew not how to answer them.
He literally answered nothing but his name, which he said was guesswork from the writing on his bag. The paper itself was written with his hand writing, so it was likely something his dungeon self had prepared, but there was little else but his name and a sentence about not trusting anyone, which made a lot of sense considering how he'd awoken in this world.
It barely took an hour to get out of the hospital he'd found himself at really, even with the guard still tailing him rather obviously. There wasn't much to do though, he could only walk around town and ask people if they had heard about him, which yes, led to plenty of missunderstanding he had some fun dispelling. The lord of this town was what he'd come to call a low grade demigod however, so he couldn't just go around and make trouble before even getting his attributes back to max.
By nightfall, he'd already bothered over half the town however, mostly thanks to his speed since it was actually quite the big town, so he just went back to one courier station he'd passed by beforehand and sent a letter to the mistress of the resting house, saying he'd be in the forest to the south, hunting beasts, and that they could call for him if something happened as he'd be staying around for quite some time.
And so he left the town at night.
There wasn't anything like an adventurer's guild or the like, just people commenting about dangerous spirit beasts that held strength comparable to cultivators, which made him reach for exactly this kind of place to deal with his boredom.
Aki was not an investigator, tracker or even a hunter, he didn't know the second things about getting to his targets besides painting a juicy mark on his behind, so he decided to grind some materials and try to form cores on his fresh kills if they didn't already have one, something he'd been trying to do with the espers in the last dungeon and ever since his energy manipulation had reached it's current level.
The process was nothing special, but would allow for what he could only call a easy and clean energy source. Since so many of his enemies held mana then of course the system wanted him to harvest and use it.
Aki was very much impressed things had worked out only a day after he arrived, but when he came back to find that his special 'draugr' bloodline had been shared among a shit ton of people by a cult, he was pretty miffed. According to idiots A and B information, it was very likely that the cult had caught him after he'd already been weakened by someone that had tried to destroy or absorb his 'cultivation'.
Draining both of them of their essence injected a bit of his strenght back at him, but now he had to prepare an even bigger trap, though for that he'd need the permission of the city lord. If he were to do it anywhere near the city that is. There was a mountain range nearby, so there shouldn't be any problem as long as the carnage was over ten to twenty kilometers away, right?
*****
One such city lord, did in fact care about anything happening in the surroundings of his city, even if it was deep into the World's spine. Specially because a ton of crazy people started showing up until after three days of that crazy cultivator doing whatever it was that involved so much blood Qi and basically cleaning the forest he guarded against of the presence of any beasts below immortal level.
He'd have gone himself if he didn't need to make sure those guys didn't come close to the country's border, and he even found out about the thing he had been sending guards to figure out from exactly one of those beasts, who literally came to ask if the maniac doing a blood feast was one of their. It took a great deal of will to remain respectfull of the tiger while he wished to simply go and kill whoever decided that a forbidden ritual of rage was ok as long as it only sacrificed beasts.
Worse, the immortal beasts themselves refused to near the place due to the fact that from the very beginning it'd been powerful enough to make one of them go beserker and eventually die in the meat grinder, nevermind now that some of said beasts had died inside of it.
By the time he got the word of each and every one of the beasts in question however, four more days had already passed, and even the city lord could feel the pull when he neared the ritual. Blood and bone stained almost every surface, an obvious direction being the source of the attacks that ended killing so many beasts, the muddy ground showing several indentations from blades and energy attacks, everything raised his cautioness, but the man was not ready for what appeared beneath his foot as he neared the very center.
A black darker than a starless night, a sinuous tube for a body, rows and more rows of gray pointy teeth oozing a viscous black that passed for blood...
The city lord doubled his speed, fear harassing his mind and making him more and more affected by the ritual. As he started finding more and more horrors dead and distorted, some seemed alive, trying to feed on their kind, so he immediately froze and impaled them, his efforts yet again increasing as the ground became completely covered in the black imitation of flesh of the creatures of the nothing.
Wolves made of shadow with moons for eyes, bone white spiders with several different kinds of heads, colonies of purple worms, a compendium of frenzied monsters attacked him and each other, though most laid on the ground, either husks without ichor or cremated in strange poses and carrying the distinct smell of ozone in the middle of this giant formation of carnage, not even the high amount of fetid corpses masking the thunder trying to purify the monstrosities.
Reaching the main battle site, the immortal eyed the dirtied figure wearing strange clothes, who used his bare feet to kick away the most corporeal of the creatures, blood repairing any damage from their touch as his became living tempest around the monsters surrounding him, goliaths of white, purple and flesh lying craved against the mountain's sides as many more tentacles surrounded what seemed to be mouths that floated on shadow and void, their mockery of what flesh was supposed to be disgusting in too many ways to count.
His presence was rapidly noted, the monsters becoming slower in droves as the weaker ones dropped dead to his full might.
"DON'T BOTHER! JUST GET THE ONE OPENING MORE..." *BANG* "PORTALS!" Even as he was interrupted by a whiplash to the chest that sent him flying, the man, no, the immortal landed on the ground with posture ready to strike at those nearing his reach and finished his warning, suddenly flying between the carnage that much faster as he created a perimeter around the newcomer, great currents of electricity going at the same intensity despite any change in the environment.
Aiguo spread his senses, looking past one behemoth to see another appearing through a way too small breach in existence itself, and right besides it's gut retching display of invading a place it should not be, there was a humanoid figure, a man enveloped by an uncountable amount of purple and black veins, his eyeless head staring at him as he appeared in a completely diferent place and started to slowly tear space apart with a blade of bone that came out of where it's arm should be.
He had his mission. The very realm counted on them, because no one else would ever come near such a place in time to stop this disaster.