Black skies and an extensive land of black; it was no wonder he couldn't see at all before. There was no source of light in this place; everything he saw was pitch black. He had the thought of exploring, so he took a step forward. However, a sudden headache assaulted him, his balance was disrupted, and disorientation assaulted him like a tide. He slumped down on the ground, heaving for breath.
Before, he had the entity to guide his movements, but now that it had left, he was left to figure it out himself.
Jacob continued to lay on the ground, his face scrunched up as he rained curses upon the entity. He didn't seem eager to stop even after his headache had subsided. But suddenly, his movements stalled; the mark on his chest seemed to become a little bit wider, and a thought popped into his head.
"Abyssal walker?... What the hell does that mean?"
Jacob didn't even get to finish his sentence before a pool of information flooded his head. An extensive guide on how to move in this place, from the smallest of movements to cultivation-like movement techniques. Images of how-to lessons were also among it.
"Well, seems he wasn't all that bad... still, it's all jumbled together."
Jacob was hit with a lot at the same time, so he took a while to organize the knowledge in his brain. Fortunately, he instinctively knew which came before which, so it wasn't all that difficult to reach the required step-by-step guide.
And surprisingly, the very first step, or more accurately, the very first process was to learn a breathing exercise. This made Jacob more than a little confused because technically, it was his soul that was here, and by that logic, he shouldn't be breathing at all, right?
Putting this at the back of his mind, Jacob began to 'recollect' the new process of breathing. As he kept remembering, he got an answer to his earlier question. The term breathing in this process wasn't in the literal sense, although when stripped down to its basic definition, they were synonymous.
The breathing iterated on in this process was a technique that allowed one to maintain equilibrium with the environment. It was a process that would enable Jacob's body to not be seen as a foreign body in the abyss. It was like how the immune system of the body acts when a pathogen that doesn't 'move' or 'act' the way body cells do is detected and then swiftly attacked by it.
Similarly, Jacob now is seen as a pathogen by the abyss, and its first instinct was to get rid of him. The breathing would allow him not to be detected by the abyss' immune system since it gives the illusion that he was part of the 'abyss' body'.
This information threatened to give Jacob a headache, but he was already ready for that, so he left it and decided to focus on something else entirely—the actual process. First of all, he had to be able to sense the abyssal particles that were like the air of the abyss. Then he was to absorb said particles into his body. When he succeeds in this, the next step was to expel the exact amount of absorbed particles. Basically, he had to make himself a very well permeable membrane.
Jacob finished recounting all this and got to work immediately. The longer he stalled in this, the harder the abyss would try to repel him. Still on the floor, Jacob closed his eyes and tried to feel around him for the abyssal particles. He cleared his mind of useless thoughts and sunk deeper into tranquility, feeling around with his senses until he tugged at something.
Before the clock could even start counting, he could already feel something. In the darkness of his closed eyes, he thought he saw something that was even darker, but he dismissed it. However, he saw it again and dismissed it again.
He turned his head to another area to continue his search, but those darker pockets only seemed to keep increasing, so he opened his eyes hoping to start again. However, his eyes widened; they weren't just darker pockets anymore. They were now little perfectly round balls of black that moved around irregularly, and they were everywhere.
"It isn't supposed to be this easy, right?"
Jacob asked himself with a stunned look on his face, but if he was only a bit wiser, he would have realized the reason why. After already succeeding in step one, Jacob began to feel more confident and immediately attempted step two: to absorb these blobs of black. And this was even far easier than the first step; he barely had the thought before the particles rushed all the way to him, penetrating different areas of his body.
At this point, Jacob himself started to become skeptical of his prowess. He began to recollect how the entity had always referred to him as a fragment. He mulled over this for a while before it seemed to click.
'Is that possible, a fragment of the abyss huh?... Well, who cares? If it makes my cultivation easier and faster, then it's very welcome.'
After a couple of seconds of continuously absorbing abyssal particles, Jacob could feel his body or rather his soul become stronger in real-time. But he decided to stop for now; who knew if he could become oversaturated with these things and directly pop. He didn't want to take any chances.
Without hesitation, he attempted the last step. But it seemed his luck had finally run out; it seemed he had too much affinity to these particles; they didn't want to leave his body; on the contrary, more even entered.
Jacob was already starting to feel the pain begin to stir up in him again, so he grit his teeth, clenched his butthole, contracted his diaphragm, and held his breath. He continued building pressure inside himself, trying to force the particles out. The pain continued to increase, and by now, it was a searing headache; however, he didn't stop; it was either he got these particles out, or he died.
Far up above the dark clouds that shrouded the abyss, a pair of eyes gazed down at the struggling man on the ground. Its gaze showed no empathy towards the suffering human. Its pupils were in the shape of the yin half of the yin-yang symbol but they weren't the typical ones. They had three white dots rather than one, all of varying sizes.
The larger one was at the head area where the only dot usually was, the smaller one was behind it towards the tail area, and the last and smallest one sat at the tail area. It was a strange pattern, and the meaning wasn't clear, but it was certain they had some significance. The eyes seemed tired at witnessing the human suffer and blinked its ethereal eyes.
When it opened it again, the smallest white dot in the left eye had vanished.
Back on the ground where Jacob was laying, he looked like he was taking the hardest shit of his life, and at the same time, someone was hacking at his head with an axe. Well, that wasn't too far from what he was experiencing. No matter how he tried to force the particles out, they refused to budge.
All of a sudden, all the particles in him were forced out of his body. He coughed up and closed his eyes to allow the headache to subside. During this time, he started to recount what had happened at that moment.
One second he was on the verge of death, and the next he was relieved. And he was sure it wasn't by his own power.
"I knew the particles didn't stop assaulting me relentlessly even when I tried to expel them. In that moment when everything changed, I sensed another particle entering me. Although I couldn't tell the difference, there was something peculiar about that one... Well, as long as I'm fine, guess it all worked out, hehe.
"Now what's next... Hmm, ah, I see, guess I'll have to repeat this a few times. Tch, well, here goes nothing."
So Jacob performed again, only this time he skipped the first step. There was no need to try sensing these particles; he could already see them. So he just directly jumped to the second step. He blitzed through this as well but absorbed less than he did before since he thought more was going to come in when he tried to expel them.
The third step came as a shock to him. The moment he thought of expelling the particles, it was as if a grenade went off inside him and blasted any particles inside of him. He was so shocked at this; his jaw dropped. If Jacob looked down at the tattoo on his chest, he'd discover a new white dot that wasn't there before. Unfortunately, he didn't."