When I opened my eyes, the world around me was still cloaked in darkness, but it was different—thicker, like a suffocating weight pressing down on me from all sides. I blinked, trying to focus, but my vision was blurred, the edges of reality rippling like water disturbed by a stone. My body felt strange, too, as though I wasn't entirely grounded in it. For a brief moment, I couldn't remember where I was or what had happened.
Then it hit me. The crystal. The entity.
I pushed myself up from the ground, my muscles protesting the movement. The temple chamber was still there, but it was… warped. The walls that had once been solid stone now shifted and pulsed with an unnatural energy, and the carvings etched into them seemed to writhe like living things. Shadows gathered in every corner, coiling and stretching, reaching toward me with ghostly tendrils.
