Chapter 8: In an unknown body
*POV: Linfer*
"Where am I?" I thought. "Am I... dead? Just like that? Did that bitch kill me?"
I stood naked in a crimson world, an infernal landscape where desolation and fear seemed to breathe around me. The sky was veiled by thick, red clouds. Beneath my feet, the coppery earth stretched out, crisscrossed by rivers of blood that lazily snaked through, feeding a world of morbid terror. Grotesque creatures slithered along these courses of horror, some even leaping into the sky, casting nightmarish shadows over the apocalyptic landscape. Around me, apple trees with dark, cracked bark grew in this dead soil, bearing vivid red apples, shiny and tempting.
"Is this my inner world?" I wondered, plucking one of these radiant fruits. Everything felt strangely familiar, as if I had trodden this infernal ground before. But when I brought the apple to my lips, I noticed with horror that my hand was cracked, like fragile ceramic ready to shatter at any moment.
"My spiritual body is disintegrating..." I thought, a shiver of dread running through me. "How much time do I have left?"
I took a bite of the apple, which burst into a juicy, sweet nectar on my tongue.
Looking down at this inner world from above, so haunting, stretching for hundreds of miles, it reflected the primal form of my soul: that of a thousand-headed serpentine being. Every moment in this place felt both real and unreal, a fragment of eternity stretched beyond time itself. I didn’t know if years, decades, or centuries had passed. But I remember spending those endless days gazing at the crimson sky, bathing in the bloody rivers, and mingling with the gigantic serpentine creatures that populated this macabre realm. I knew them all, every form and movement. As if they were part of me—and they were.
Sitting on the red grass, staring at the horizon as usual, an unexpected sound echoed.
*Crack.*