As soon as Ulrich plunged into the heart of the Scar, the water crashed into him with the force of a speeding truck, bludgeoning his entire body at once.
He felt every molecule of his being scream as the Maelstrom caught him in its jaws and yanked him under.
He could not move.
Not so much as a single finger.
The crushing pressure of the spinning vortex pinned his limbs to his sides as though he had been wrapped in bands of solid steel. He tumbled end over end, again and again, completely at the mercy of the current.
The first wave of pain struck almost immediately.
The water smashed against him, each impact feeling like the ruthless strike of a hammer.
His skeleton, refined by generations of noble lineage, bones dense and forged strong by centuries of selective breeding held for exactly one second.
Crackkk!
His left arm snapped first
He felt the break with clarity, though he couldn't hear the bone give way over the deafening, apocalyptic wailing of the Maelstrom. The noise threatened to rupture his eardrums despite the enchanted amulet straining heavily against his throat. Ulrich had purposely replaced the amulet's original chain with a reinforced cord, but now it dug into his skin like a deadly garrote.
"Nghh!"
A heartbeat later, his right arm followed, accompanied by a choked grunt.
Both arms were now broken, bent backward at unnatural angles, thrashing uselessly in the surge.
Had he not downed the vial of pain resistance beforehand, the physical shock would have undoubtedly caused him to pass out on the spot. Yet even with the potion's aid, the pain remained nearly unbearable.
But the worst danger wasn't the physical trauma but the water itself.
Because this water was not merely water.
The Maelstrom of Forgotten Depths swirled at the exact site where a Demon God had fallen, where a transcendent human had physically torn out a divine core. As a result, the crushing depths were entirely saturated with ancient mana. It was wild, poisonous, and deeply mingled with the Demon God's own corrupted, lingering essence.
It forced its way into him through his mouth.
Through his nose, through his eyes. It seeped into the tears in his skin where splintered bone had ruptured through the flesh. It invaded through every pore and every opening.
The demonic essence crashed into his internal system immediately overwhelming him.
And by all means, it should have killed him instantly.
Such dense, corrupted mana was a highly volatile poison. It ruptured cells. It dissolved organs. It crystallized blood in the veins. Any normal person, possessing a healthy core and an intact vessel, would have been melted down from the inside out within seconds.
But Ulrich was far from normal.
His core, that pathetic, leaking, porous, entirely broken mana core, loved it, to say the least.
The dangerous mana flooded into him, and just as immediately, it began flooding right back out.
His Core Sickness, the very curse that had made him a laughingstock among his peers, the terminal flaw that was supposed to take his life by thirty, effectively turned the deadly poison into a fast-flowing river. The mana passed through him like water through a rusted sieve. It simply could not remain inside him long enough to burn his flesh. It could not pool in enough quantities to burst his organs.
It flowed in and...poured out, taking nothing and leaving him miraculously untouched by the corruption.
Ulrich's body should have dissolved into nothingness.
Instead, it drew strange, impossible breaths of the saturated water.
It was almost ironic.
Had it not been for his extreme, terminal case of a leaking Mana Core, he would never have even entertained this suicidal plunge in the first place.
Soon enough, Ulrich sank deeper into the abyss, the swirling beginning to steady slightly as he slipped past the most chaotic upper layers of the vortex.
The encroaching gloom shifted into a suffocating darkness.
The Maelstrom had swallowed him whole.
He could see virtually nothing, despite the drops he had placed in his eyes. He still couldn't move. He could barely even think through the swelling tide of physical pain.
His arms were already broken.
Then his left leg...
Then went his ribs: three, four, five... he lost count.
They broke and cracked against each other sharply.
He could actually feel pieces of his own skeleton floating loose inside his flesh.
The healing vials were working, fighting a desperate if not impossible war against the trauma.
But a dampened pain was still pain. The distance the potions provided was not an absence. He still felt the destruction of his body.
The pain was simply too much.
His eyes, already useless in the pitch black of the trench, fluttered and began to close.
His body had endured too much. His mind had processed too much trauma. The vials could only repair so much tissue at once, and his leaking core could only filter the poison so fast. The rest was left up to his mortal limits, and they had finally been breached.
True darkness rushed up to swallow his consciousness.
And Ulrich closed his eyes, and continued to fall….
.
.
.
"Silas."
"Silas…"
"Silas!"
"Huhh!"
Ulrich snapped awake instantly, but the sudden consciousness was immediately swallowed by a wave of pain.
He groaned, his face pressed flat against the freezing, hard ground.
His blurry vision tried to take in his surroundings, but he could only see what lay directly in front of him.
He was a broken, crumpled heap on the floor. His body was a huge mess of shattered bones, though he could feel the fractures slowly beginning to knit themselves back together, the lingering effects of his vials finally taking hold.
Crackkk!
"Mmghhn!" He grunted against the stone as a dislocated bone snapped back into its socket.
He grindeed his teeth together, fighting the instinct to scream, and simply weathered the agony.
He needed to recover if he wanted to move.
And he needed to move if he wanted to reach his bag. Miraculously, the leather satchel was still attached to him though it hung by a single, badly frayed strap clinging to one shoulder.
For the next ten minutes, the hollow, freezing space was filled with the sounds of bones popping, cracking, and grinding back into place, accompanied by Ulrich's muffled groans of maddening painn.
When his right arm had finally recovered enough, he reached toward the bag and fumbled with the clasp.
He let out another groan when he saw that most of the vials inside had been completely shattered, the glass shards mixing with spilled liquid. But he had predicted exactly this.
That was precisely why he had wrapped a select few of his most critical vials in layers of cloth and stashed them inside a reinforced iron box.
He pulled the small box free and instantly retrieved a high-grade healing concoction, one that had easily cost him another hundred gold coins.
Yanking the cork out with his teeth, he swallowed the thick liquid in one fluid gulp. Almost immediately, he felt the acceleration of the healing process strike his body.
Consequently, his grunts of pain became even louder, echoing sharply around.
Slowly, his left arm regained mobility. Then he managed to drag himself onto one knee. He stayed there, trembling until he finally managed to push up onto both knees, gasping heavily for breath, his hands shaking against the cold floor and his soaked red hair plastered flat against his face.
He remained in that position for a full minute before forcing himself to rise. His legs shook like leaves in a tornado under his weight as he finally stood up and looked ahead.
He was inside a temple.
Though it hadn't exactly been built.
The walls were clearly not carved stone; rather, they were large jagged crystal formations that had taken untold millennia to grow, glowing faintly from deep within with a pulsing violet light.
Looking down, he saw that the floor was completely smooth, almost perfectly polished but freezing and slick beneath his bare feet. His boots were gone, torn away by Maelstrom. The rest of his clothes hung in tatters.
He was standing on a long, narrow path.
Straight ahead, as far as his eyes could see, the path stretched deep into the gloom. But it wasn't complete darkness….there was a faint light waiting at the end.
To his left and right lay nothing. The raised path was suspended over an expanse of water so perfectly still it looked like a sheet of black glass.
Cursing softly under his breath, Ulrich began to walk.
He walked for what felt like hours.
Or perhaps it was only minutes.
Eventually, he reached an archway.
It was huge, easily fifty metres high and thirty wide. It wasn't built from separate blocks, but seemed to have grown directly out of the surrounding crystals, forming a single sweeping curve of glowing purple material that almost appeared to be breathing.
Beyond the arch lay pure darkness.
Ulrich stopped dead in his tracks.
The arch clearly marked a boundary.
He could feel it in the air now.
But on the other side... there was something else entirely.
'The Hollow Core is in there.'
Ulrich narrowed his eyes.
He could feel the pull of it.
He took a step forward.
The temperature plummeted instantly.
With his next step, the faint light bleeding from the crystal walls began to dim.
He kept walking until he stood directly on the threshold.
The darkness ahead abruptly shifted, and Ulrich's eyes widened.
There, floating silently in the centre of the absolute void, was an Helix-shaped spiral.
It was an Helix mass of pure, condensed crystal turning slowly and endlessly upon itself, pulling the eye ever inward toward a centre that never seemed to arrive. It glowed with the exact same violet light that ran through the temple walls.
The Hollow Core.
One of the three legendary fragments of the original shattered core that had once belonged to the Human God, the very first being in history to awaken a mana core.
Ulrich walked toward it.
He stopped just inches away, standing in silence as he stared at the artifact, his dark red eyes perfectly reflecting the mesmerizing spin of the crystal.
Then, without a single second of further hesitation, he reached out and closed his hand around it.
The instant his fingers made contact, he froze completely, a sudden terrifying numbness hitting his entire body.
He let out a sharp choked cry before collapsing hard onto his knees. All sound was sucked from the room, replaced only by a dry deafening crack that sounded like a cannon firing directly inside his own skull.
He stared down at his arms in watching thick, glowing purple veins protrude and spread across his skin.
"Nghhmm!"
The sensation rapidly consumed his entire body, and then he felt it, deep within his chest, his original broken mana core shattered entirely, exploding into microscopic fragments.
Crackkk!
Ulrich's eyes blew wide as blinding purple light erupted from the crystal still clutched in his hand. The energy shot into his chest like thousands of burning needles plunging directly into his heart. Each strike sent a wave of mind-boggling pain through his body.
His nervous system began to shut down, incapable of processing the volume of pain yet Ulrich remained forcefully awake. It was as though the Core itself refused to let him pass out. He could feel every excruciating second of the energy flooding his chest, filling the empty void where his old core had died, as something entirely new began to slowly forge itself into existence.
It was more than his mortal mind could endure, and the moment the new core finally solidified, it was the final straw for him and his body...
Thudd!
He collapsed face-first onto the cold stone, swallowed by the darkness once moree.