Ren He finally made it to the fissure, even after seeing it in the distance it took half a day to reach.
"Amazing! Exquisite! Haha! Sister look what I found!"
Taking in his find, Ren He felt proud. This was a feeling deep within any cultivator. He had found a great history of the past, his blood boiled like it was bordering a star.
Ren Xing smiled as she drew closer to her sibling. She too was excited, the Ancient City of Marble was a legend that could change anyone's life, even a mortal's. It was where the last golden age lasted and where many secrets of cultivation stayed sealed.
But truths could form lies, and guesses were only guesses. Ren He didn't notice the veil behind him lift like a curtain. It was unnatural, it was beyond the order that laws controlled. Behind the curtain were indescribable things, but they were blocked by the creature coming out.
Ren He couldn't understand why, as he saw his lower half slowly drift away from him, his crimson blood floating around his waist. But then he slowly turned around, his pupils dilated, and he screamed.
He died in shock, of fear, before the blood loss could affect him.
His sister fared no better, her heart began to beat so fast it stopped. She clutched her chest as a large tentacle of hair and iron wrapped around her. Although she would describe the tentacle as being of hair, iron, and the like, she realized that they only looked similar.
As the hair-like tendrils touched her, it felt like rough stone and floating dust touched her simultaneously. It didn't make sense, but that was the point. Her body was crushed, flesh and blood tangled in what looked like stands of hair fitted with molten iron.
Cain watched from afar as the veil became wider and the creature came out. Seeing its full body, even Cain couldn't control himself.
Long winding limbs of hair that seemed to have been dipped in molten metal, a body of a black charred trunk of wood with a massive hole, inside was the head of a gigantic worm with no eyes.
These were the only human descriptions Cain could come up with, but this thing wasn't human, words weren't made that could fully express its appearance, nor could they be made.
(Let me take over. Now!) An anxious and surprised voice echoed in Cain's mind. Everything was happening too fast, he was scared.
That delay was all it took. Even with the creature being so far away, the tendrils of hair struck. The law dictating space was disobeyed, the tentacles traveled as much as they liked, but this was only temporary. The world the beast had stepped into was ruled by laws, this was absolute, and even this creature would soon succumb to them, as it has been, taking on a more describable form.
Unable to react, Cain's head was crushed instantly as the hairs touched him. Spurts of blood and fragments of grey matter floated through space as his body jerked back and stopped moving.
He floated like that for a while. But soon, the fragments of bone and streams of blood gathered. From his corpse, a red mist escaped his pores and his clothes changed into that of a black robe fluttering without a breeze. This thin robe became a cocoon and moments after its creation a hand broke through its frail fabrics.
"Prick."
A pale hand ripped the black apart, revealing a contrasting white inside. A red-eyed man gritted his teeth. His body was almost pure white, his face paler than snow, his black hair fluttering just like his robe.
He was of conflicting colors.
The beast across space roared, and the man took a step. In that step space bent, and he ended up right in front of the beast.
"I'll kill you, then I'll study everything about you."
A large spike condensed above him, silky red mist quickly wrapped around the spike before plunging into the creature's body. The wood was like rubber, burning a horrible smell and slowly stretching to resist the force of the spike, but there was a limit and it had passed that already.
A terrible screech escaped from the beast as the spike fell deeper into its body, leaving a dark hole with the spike nowhere in sight.
"Haha! You're lucky I can go all out. Fighting in the void is so liberating! Haha!"
The void was like a different world, a place outside territories. It was unfortunate it wasn't out of the reach of the system, but if that were the case the Landfill wouldn't be a very good prison.
Cain sent hundreds of attacks towards the giant hairy worm. Eat time the worm would become weaker, it was slowly nearing the curtain it came from. It was thinking of retreating.
'I don't think so!' Cain clenched his hand and a massive net of red and black appeared, blocking the creature from its escape.
Roaring, the beast went into a frenzy, but the net was enforced with dreams and distorted to be stronger than any physical material. More and more spikes and attacks went deeply into the creature's flesh. At first, death in this way couldn't possibly kill it, but rules became ever-present, and its body slowly had to bend to these rules, granting it mortality.
Six days later, it was dead, riddled with holes, its head removed from its body. Cain had never been through such a long fight.
'In the end, it was only a beast, a mindless thing.'
He grunted and panted as hundreds of red ghosts appeared around him. Leon came forward and bowed.
"What is it that you require my Lord."
"Get me a flat piece of land and collect the corpses of the two cultivators and the monster. Set everything up far away from the strange rift." Cain commanded.
"It will be done." Leon and the rest moved to fulfill their Master's wishes. a day later everything was prepared, the rock the ghosts gathered couldn't completely hold the monster's corpses, so it was just tethered as everything drifted through the void.
...
"Experiment 32, the flesh of this creature is strange. It seems to disobey sense, but as time passes it becomes ever-present it does. Strange... I believe this creature could hold the key to escaping fate, to disobey the fundamental laws is bizarre. I'm becoming increasingly interested in this power."
Cain repeated his mental notes as he carefully controlled his mist and added human flesh from one of the siblings into a container of liquefied monster flesh.
The two reacted and the human flesh rapidly mutated, turning into a random material. He's done this hundreds of times now.
"The outside shows no signs of discrepancies. But samples from inside the body have properties of dreams almost, having the property of randomness. Hah, I have no exit and I'm about done with my research. This sample is expiring fast, it's like the other side of the veil is like a world of ice, and once this thing came out it rapidly thawed and began to rot. I have no choice but to enter the veil to find an exit and continue my research. This is just too fascinating to give up."
(You can't, I have to cultivate!)
Cain's eyes brightened, and his zombie-like state stopped, "Oh, I forgot you have dementia. Don't worry, there's the mandate, I can cultivate for you. Now be quiet." Cain snapped his fingers and the inner voice of his other self vanished.
'This might become a problem. Oh well, I'll deal with it later.'
Cleaning up everything by fire, Cain collected all his servants and headed to the veil. He lifted it ever so slightly, just touching it caused his hand to accumulate strange black warts but he dealt with it using his mist. '
Peering into the other side, he saw a sea of madness. Everything was moving, everything flowed, but it was all in different directions. Colors he knew and didn't mingled and created children, creatures that passed made weird noises, their forms hard to objectify, causing a headache for the human mind.
Cain took a moment to relax, and he then stepped inside. As he did, he felt like he had stepped through gelatin, like he entered another world, because he did enter another world, a world of Chaos, disaster, and contractions.