Some where in the Serpent Realm, In a surreal landscape, a beautiful garden appears, captivating the imagination with its dreamlike charm. The water, instead of showing the harshness of poison, looks mystical, shining in unusual colors like liquid silver, opalescent blues, and purples, forming a unique underwater scene. A majestic being could be seen resting near the water and having a peaceful sleep, its presence alone there add another layer of mystique to the scene, as if completing the picture of a painter.
But this is disturbed by an portal that opens and a women with white eyes can be seen walking briskly towards that being. She is excited about something and her bouncing feat are a testament to it. The sleeping being having been woken up by the sudden intrusion in his Adobe opens one of the eyes and observe who has come to disturb him.
He enquires in heavy and manly voice that why was she here. She stops just near the eye and looking at him fearlessly, she replies back " C'mon father don't be like that, I have exciting news for you" , the being doesn't want to reply to it so he just nods and tells her to go on. She then goes on to explain the recent happenings of the world. She explicitly mentions some one from the lower realm getting blessed by the higher deity.
This peaks his interest as there are not many beings that can get the attention of the higher god's to be more accurate not many are capable enough to get their blessings. He is now curious, so he asks her what is the source of the information, and which category of Higher gods are you referring to.
Knowing that he will be interested in this, she takes out a crystal and hands it to him. The crystal shows the phenomenon in the 3rd realm and some of the independent associated realms connect to it. There are even some changes observed in the valley of the 9 supreme goddesses.
The being who is widely known as The Vasuki is looking at her daughter while having a expression of an experienced old man who has lived a long life and hearing what she said goes into deep thought " Is she telling me that some one received a blessing from them. someone who is not even in the upper realms ?? This is not possible. The 9 goddess have not actively participated in worldly affairs ever since the great primordial era about 4000 years ago. They have not blessed anyone ever again. The last one to get blessed by them went on to bring calamity of existential levels to the whole world . He still gets jitters remembering that era and that Man."
Father...
Father...
She calls him back from his thought , and looks enquiringly with an cute expression asking him what to do. Vasuki looks at her, tells her to verify it first and try to find out who got the blessing. He also asks her about who told her about this, she tells him that it is visible in the blessings temple of the gods located in the 1st realm. One of the workers informed us that one of the lamp of the 9 goddess temple has lit up. So she came to tell him that. we cannot verify which goddess have the blessing as we can't enter the temple but as the light reflection is visible from distance , We know it. As for why we know it is from the lower realm, the Initiation and god's alter ceremony was to be conducted for all the lower realms together by CNC today. And there was no ceremony held in the upper realms in the previous 2 days.
Vasuki looks at her and tells her to summon the child who was in admin duties in lower realm . He wants to talk to her personally. He does not tell her the reason for summoning, but he doesn't want to take any chances so he decides to take up the matter with other Admins after he is sure who is the individual who got that blessing and from which realm he is in.
She nods and leaves in the same way she appeared.
While all this was happening, the new candidates have just entered the train. Raghu remembers being enveloped by an blue light and it was as if some one was pulling him towards themselves with extreme force and currently his whole body making a inverted C, started travelling at high speed. The travelling force and pressure has made him loose consciousness for a while .
He opens his eyes after a while trying to adjust his eyes to the darkness around him. He can hardly feel any thing in his body, his body is aching all over and he seems lying on a rocky floor, with narrow and winding pathway of edgy and rocky walls which have water receding all over the place.
He notices that he is completely wet and is in a cave with sparsely populated grass and algae growing in and around the water. The whole place stinks like hell and to top it all off he also feels slightly burn on the parts where water has made contact with skin. He feels its acidic in nature and is burning those parts of the skin. Overall he evaluates that he is not a a very great condition.
He checks his halo watch to know the time and what the hell just happened as well as to to get any update on his situation. He notices that he has 3 notification that are unread. When he was about to open the first one he hears an announcement in his mind.
" Welcome to the doom train, you have to survive in this place for 15 days. All the best "
Raghu yells out ....well fuck.... And this reverberates and echo's around him for 15 minutes non stop making him realize that any thing he speaks here will probably be echoed for a 15 minutes in his surroundings giving him another headache.
Wanting to understand the situation more ,he checks out the messages he received, he doesn't get much information there as well, as they are just welcome mailers for the participants and the perks CNC offers to everyone. The rules and the standard information on how to use the CNC network to benefit from it in their climbing. Only the last message said the first challenge being mandatory for every one ,urging them to give full effort and to wishing that they can come out of alive.
Well that's cheerful from them ,he thought . At least they are hopeful that we may live. Good to know. Now, he needs to evaluate his condition and try to find out what this place is. The announcement only said survive for 15 days and nothing else. He checks to see if his spatial ring is working and he has access to all his equipment, only to find out that to his horror that he can take out nothing. He is not having access to any of his material, his knife and other materials were in there. How the hell is he supposed to survive here.
Calming himself down, he analyses the situation. He has only these wet clothes and a small knife that is hidden in his boots. That Knife is normal one and is not made from death ore, as this is a standard issue knife he used to carry around when working in military. The only reason it is here is because of his habit as he never changed his shoes and he wore the same ones while coming here. He has another thing but it will not be useful to him, at least not now. His belt may have uses in the future.
He gets up from the floor finds a dry place and starts to strip down to his underpants so as to dry himself. He lets them dry for another 6-7 hours after which he wants to starts a round of exploration, He wants to see where he is and scout his surroundings trying to map out some parts of this god forsaken place.