Damned Healer-Chapter 601: Trap or Feast?

The firmament shattered.

No one knew what those creatures had done, but the very structure of reality collapsed. A colossal rift tore through the sky, a black scar that seemed to devour light itself. Right after that, chaos followed: an overwhelming suction force twisted the surrounding space.

Darian felt like a castaway in a raging ocean, where the waters violently converged into an eternal whirlpool. His expression darkened instantly.

He swallowed hard. Now that he didn't have his full power to rely on, if he got dragged into that spatial rift, not even his soul would be left to tell the story.

Darian ran in the opposite direction with every fiber of his being, but the vacuum was ravenous, shackling his speed. Around him, less resilient life forms were pulled away like leaves in the wind.

Before they even touched the edge of the rift, their bodies were torn apart by invisible "teeth" of spatial pressure. Flesh and bone turned into nothing in a matter of seconds.

In the middle of the despair, a creature appeared at his side, swinging a bone spear with insane light in its eyes. It was an act of pure spite: if it was going to die, it would take Darian with it.

Darian's body swayed in a fluid motion, dodging the attack by a hair's breadth. He was swimming against a current of death; any mistake, any impact, would be the final push into the abyss.

More and more beings were sucked in. Some, as they passed by Darian, launched suicidal, frantic attacks. Thankfully, those creatures' techniques were crude. Darian moved like a fish in stormy waters, dodging death with surgical precision.

*BOOM!*

An explosion echoed ahead.

That woman from before was hit by a stray projectile. It pierced her leg, tearing open a massive hole.

She still tried to force herself to move, but the impact broke her momentum, and a series of follow-up shocks threw her backward, straight into the critical suction zone. While her companions managed to reach the safe edge, she was left behind, dragged toward the void.

The screams of her people were drowned out by the roar of collapsing space. Darian saw other warriors who looked powerful being swallowed. Their cries were cut off abruptly by the absolute silence of the rift.

As the woman passed by him, being pulled toward oblivion, Darian reached out and grabbed her arm tightly.

The weight hit immediately. His already precarious speed plummeted. The woman looked at him, eyes wide with shock and gratitude, shouting words in an incomprehensible dialect.

Darian didn't answer. He just clenched his teeth, every meter advanced feeling like a battle against a mountain. The woman clung to him with her four arms from the front, while Niara remained on his back.

Darian was in a rather ridiculous situation, carrying two people using nothing but his own physical strength while trying to escape a spatial black hole.

In the distance, the survivors dressed in animal skins desperately tried to improvise a rope using their belts.

"Idiots..." Darian cursed under his breath. They had tens of thousands of people. Why not split into multiple groups to increase efficiency? If only one person did all the work, how long would it take?

The ground below began to crumble. Rocks the size of houses flew through the air. Darian had nowhere to brace himself and had no power at all, aside from that coming from his curse; his body was his only weapon, and that weapon wasn't strong enough.

If it were just Niara, he could barely make it out. But adding one more person was definitely a useless burden. Darian's logical mind knew this.

But… Darian clenched his teeth and kept moving. He felt that the only reason the woman was in this situation was that she had tried to warn him about this danger earlier; he hadn't understood her words at the time, but now he was certain.

Abandoning her now would betray his own nature.

"FUCK!!"

With a roar of effort, Darian twisted his body and hurled the woman forward with all his physical strength. She flew through the air like a projectile toward her people's improvised rope.

With an awkward effort, she managed to grab the end, and her companions immediately began pulling her to safety.

Free of the extra weight, Darian should have sped up...

...but it was too late.

The effort of the throw pushed him backward. He began to slowly slide toward the mouth of the rift.

The woman, now safe, screamed in despair, reaching out toward the man who had saved her. But there was nothing she could do.

Risking his life for a stranger who might even be his enemy? Darian thought to himself, feeling like an idiot.

That karmic connection he had felt made him act before thinking, as if that person were truly someone important, not a stranger.

Even so, he was calm. For some reason, feeling the soft breathing and warmth of the woman on his back, Darian felt an unprecedented confidence in himself. She was sleeping deeply, so relaxed and so certain that he would handle everything, that it rubbed off on him.

The suction increased exponentially. Light began to bend around him. Realizing that fighting physics was useless at that moment, Darian relaxed his body and stared into the darkness.

"They say good things are always hidden in the most unexpected places. So let's see what's on the other side of this rift."

Darian completely let go, allowing himself to be swallowed by the abyss as the creatures' screams of horror echoed in his ears one last time.

He entered a point of no return, where everyone who was dragged in exploded into a mist of blood. But Darian let his white power cover him completely, along with Niara. Combined with his forced control over spatial power, neither of them suffered the slightest injury.

Of course, if he reached the core of it all, it would be impossible not to be destroyed.

Space had collapsed there. It was as if the jaws of a gigantic beast were devouring the sky and the land.

A thunderous roar filled his ears. Darian let himself drift like a floating log being sucked into a whirlpool, but his speed toward the core was relatively slow.

There was nothing he could do now, except watch as he was forcibly pulled toward the center... then, Darian remembered something.

His eyes lit up. He raised his senses to the limit, focusing on the center of everything and personally studying that space-time power.

Three hours later, he had covered half the distance to the core.

Darian came to two conclusions. From the core, there was a subtle fluctuation identical to those creatures; in other words, that spatial rift had been created by those life forms. It really was an act of collective suicide, meant to drag their enemies down with them.

Somehow, they had the ability to create something like this with relative ease.

The second certainty...

'I really did find a treasure. The level of spatial power here is probably above that of a high-level universe,' he thought, excited.

Darian had already visited a high-level universe before and felt the space-time power that existed there. Because of that, he was sure that what lay ahead of him was something superior.

He could feel the energies, the power runes, and the overwhelming flow of everything. It was like watching a Grandmaster fight and train. Darian had never had the chance to truly study space-time power before, and now that opportunity had finally arrived.

Reading about it, studying techniques, or theories was effective, but only up to a point. Actually practicing and observing something of such an absurdly high level right in front of him was worth far more.

How many people would even be capable of being there like him, observing and feeling everything while remaining completely safe?

Possibly only an immortal... no, Darian was certain that the power of that core could kill even an immortal. So no one would be crazy enough to stay that close like he was.

At that moment, he swallowed hard. A bold idea surfaced in his mind.

'This is going to be risky...' Darian took a deep breath and didn't hesitate.

He waved his hand, activating his domain over the surrounding spatial power. Then he guided a small portion of it directly into his body... more specifically, into his soul.

Doing that was basically suicide. With the slightest mistake, he would explode. But Darian trusted completely in the control granted by his curse. That was a power beyond an immortal, one he had been using for decades.

He began to sweat heavily, fully focused on making the spatial power connect with something hidden deep within his soul.

Slowly... it touched it... and connected... 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

*Crack*

A dull sound echoed.

"It opened!"

Darian managed to open his inventory using spatial power. Since that inventory itself existed through spatial power, the only way to open it was by using the same principle.

Eleri, Tir, and Awel were unconscious inside it. They had been completely exhausted after helping him with the previous attack. Even so, Darian had done all this because he was looking for something very specific he had stored there.

He took out a cluster of runes that sealed something non-material inside.

Darian stared at it seriously. "My father's spiritual root..."

When Vanh died, Lucy sealed his body and took it back to Earth. Later, she extracted the spiritual root, knowing Darian would want it.

Darian, in turn, knew he wouldn't have time to learn how to use it properly, and since another difficult battle was still ahead, he chose to postpone that step until things calmed down.

Now...

He took a deep breath, and the information on the demonic assimilation technique Caliris had taught him flowed through his mind.

"Fuck it..." he muttered, closing his eyes. He removed the seal and quickly moved it into his soul.

Darian, unlike all other Spiritual Guardians, didn't have a spiritual root. When he had taken the test, he ended up creating one in Niara instead of himself. It had never made much difference, since his main power had always been his curse, not a blessing. In fact, it turned out to be a good thing, since Niara was able to develop and grow powerful because of it.

It didn't take much effort. Darian could control soul power perfectly. He just used his own internal energy to form the necessary connections.

In less than half an hour, Darian opened his eyes.

A different light appeared in his gaze.

There was a new clarity to his vision, a perception he had never experienced before. The space-time around him, once a storm of invisible blades, now felt like a gentle sea, calm and predictable.

'My father had immense potential... too bad he chose the worst possible path.'

Darius had undergone a genuine ancestral awakening. The talent of his root to manipulate the laws of the universe was terrifying. If he had followed the path of the Guardians, he would have created an unprecedented blessing.

Darian focused again on the center of the rift. Feeling the terrifying power move in sync with his new perception, a smile appeared on his face.

He was no longer falling into a trap.

He was standing before a feast.