Chapter 109: Thank God this is not a horror novel
"Why...is it dark?"
My first initial response was surprise.
I felt that one second of feeling like my heart dropped, which meant I had entered the compressed space between two portal gates. The moment my forward foot touched the ground, I should arrive in the Lord Castle’s garden.
But instead, my foot landed in a dark space. I said space because although I landed on a solid platform, I couldn’t be sure about it. There was nothing around me but darkness--no land, no walls, no sky. No Jade.
I realized then that I couldn’t feel Jade.
It wasn’t just a matter of ’It’s not there’ beside me, but I couldn’t feel the bird, my familiar, who should have been connected to me through our soul. Even if I couldn’t physically see Jade, I should be able to feel him, supposedly.
But I felt nothing. Or rather, something was obstructing our connection. Was it this darkness?
My second response should be fear, or at least worry. My brain logically thought about it. And yet, rather than feeling scared, I feel intrigued instead. For some reason, despite the isolation and the darkness, it didn’t feel uncomfortable or scary. It actually felt...familiar.
I feel like I had encountered a place like this before, once upon a dream. A dream that I couldn’t remember.
But once I acknowledge it, I started to feel something--there was something in this dark space. And that something was calling for me.
Now, I knew that my response should be ’Wow, Val, really? You’ll just saunter away to something they calling at you in the dark?’ or something like that. But listen--I was someone who took a hand of a stranger and negotiate with a Demon Lord while I was drunk. I was someone who followed people into a dark secret passage for funsies and just dipped into the art of transmorphing without a proper teacher. You should have known already how bad my situational judgment was.