Chapter 458: Pride
It wasn’t a nice feeling to be trapped in your mind, to be suffocated by your own weakness and choke on your own breath. The world to Theron was still so very dark. He could hardly feel anything of the outside worlds, his feelings and thoughts consumed by the pain shredding his abdomen, splintering his mind, and rupturing his soul.
The aching agony felt so eternal, one flash of severed thought and memory after another coming to mind, as though he was forced into the dream he dreamt every time he closed his eyes, but only so much worse...
Because this time, he couldn’t get up.
It always came every night without fail... his bubbly little sister trying to get him to come with them, his mother’s gentle but expectant smile, his father’s wink as his tacit promise to get them off his back.
And then came the rain, the heart-rending realization that something was wrong, the way that same heart pounded out of his chest as he ran as fast as his legs would allow him, only to get there only just in time to watch them all die once again.
But this time the dream had more than just that. It continued past that point, continued past the indifferent and then suddenly cheerful glance of that man who hung in the skies, continued past those vindictive, provoking words...
He saw himself rush after the man in the first bout of fury he had ever felt in his life. He felt the aches in his knees as his legs gave out from under him, pumping too fast for a mortal without the slightest hint of cultivation.
Then he watched himself dig through the rubble, peeling his nailed back against rough rocks and sweeping layers of ash that could have very well been the remnants of his family.
He remembered his hair standing on end as the field of electricity and the probing might of the Tribulation Clouds above seemed unsatisfied as it looked for another victim to smite and relieve its fury.
And then he remembered his body collapsing from exhaustion, and how for the first time the rain pelting from above didn’t give him the same peace it normally did.