Damned Healer-Chapter 602: Life And Death

An hour passed.

Darian took a deep breath and, with a calm gesture, waved his hand. The chaos around him seemed to acknowledge him as an equal; his body stopped being dragged toward death, and the devastating flow of energy began to divert around him, ignoring his presence.

Before, he relied on a forced, crude dominance over space-time, but he was still being pulled. Now, even though he still didn't have full control, everything flowed smoothly and a thousand times more efficiently; with that, he managed to stop completely.

'It'll still take a good while for my soul to fully adapt to this spiritual root. But... the difference between now and before is like heaven and earth,' Darian thought, letting out a sigh of relief.

Feeling steady, he didn't retreat. On the contrary, he took deliberate steps forward, advancing on his own against the current. He approached the edge of the core and stopped, analyzing every tiny detail of that flow.

He wasn't just analyzing and memorizing anymore; now he could actually train, using the power in the surrounding space to try to replicate that power. This was a legit luxury training session.

***

Hours turned into an entire day.

Darian sighed. He couldn't stay any longer, and now he only had six days left.

Darian finally turned his back on the center and started walking in the opposite direction. The level of that rift was far too high to be completely tamed, but what he had extracted from it was immeasurable.

He felt like he had gone from an amateur to someone with real experience in spatial manipulation. It was like watching a master craftsman for hours on end, copying every movement until exhaustion.

He approached the exit of the "point of no return zone," moving with the ease of a fish in water. However, when he tried to cross the threshold into the outside world...

"!"

An invisible, overwhelming shockwave blasted him backward.

Darian stabilized himself, tense. The understanding came right after: that space was a one-way trap. It allowed entry, but blocked the exit with absolute force. Escaping wouldn't be a matter of skill, but of raw power.

"There has to be a way."

He activated his maximum dominance and shot forward like an arrow, crashing into the invisible barrier. He stopped abruptly to avoid being repelled, but noticed something: the void cracked. There was a sign of rupture.

His eyes lit up for an instant, but his expression quickly darkened. The cracks healed in a microsecond, restoring the prison's perfection.

"Again!"

Darian charged forward once more, using all his understanding of the current space.

The void shattered, on the verge of exploding, but by the smallest margin, he failed to break through.

It was a duel of wills. He realized that while the core of the rift was pure spatial power, that barrier was made of *frozen time*. Every time he caused damage, time around the breach regressed, returning to its previous state as if nothing had happened.

Time and space were one and the same, like Yin and Yang, which seemed like different things but were just different sides of the same coin. In other words, Darian needed to study both together if he wanted to go far with them.

After dozens of exhausting attempts...

*CRACK!*

The barrier finally gave way. Darian crossed the rift, letting out a manic laugh of victory. However, his laughter was cut short when another wave of power hit him, throwing him back into the depths of the vortex.

"What?!"

Darian was shocked. Hadn't he gotten out? What was going on?!

He closed his eyes, expanding his senses to read the structure of that prison. The truth was more cruel than he had imagined.

"There are nine time barriers. Unless I have the power to cross all nine at once, I'll never get out of here."

He deeply regretted it. Time was a terrifying power. Advancing, freezing, regressing... that was just the basics.

He knew this because of that book. The author of that book was a specialist in it and gave very long descriptions of this power. He was trapped in a *Time Dimension*, an isolated pocket of the universe where chronological laws were dictated by their own rules.

Despair began to creep into his mind. The silence was absolute, broken only by Niara's soft breathing on his shoulder. That familiar sound made him relax. He needed to think. What did he have available?

Darian activated his curse and pushed his senses to the absolute limit.

"!"

Suddenly, a strange perception hit him.

At first, he thought it was a mistake in his senses, but soon he was sure: something colossal was moving above him, making space-time itself ripple in a subtle yet profound way.

When he looked up, he felt it.

It was something gigantic, moving through the skies from far away. Darian felt a terrifying Yin of death emanating from it — its power was so abnormal that it even affected the temporal prison he was trapped in.

He watched its movement closely. The entire place began to change as it approached. Until…

"That's primordial power! That thing is… a Primordial Beast's corpse?!"

He murmured, stunned. That thing was dead, yet it sailed through the skies with divine authority.

It was an opportunity that appeared out of nowhere.

Shockwaves began to form in the space ahead of him, generated by the creature's passage. Those ripples defied all known laws, tearing through time and space wherever they passed.

Darian's eyes widened. He felt that if he tried to dominate that energy, he'd be pulverized instantly, so he simply dodged.

The beast's carcass passed right over his head, and the trail of its passage tore open a violent, ragged hole in the prison of nine barriers. Through that temporary rift, he could finally see clearly what lay on the other side.

It looked like a bird of prey from Earth, but on a colossal scale. A Primordial Beast, shrouded in darkness and death, glides through the skies like a ghost ship.

Its eyes glowed with a sickly crimson, but there was no life or soul left inside. It was a colossal corpse defying the laws of nature, slowly beating its wings and dragging its six long, feathered tails that nearly brushed the ground, like chains of a forgotten fate.

Darian swallowed hard for a moment. But without thinking twice, he leapt with all his strength and grabbed onto one of those tails.

The instant his fingers closed around the icy feathers, his soul shuddered. He felt as if it were about to be torn apart by a pressure that didn't belong to that plane.

Still, Darian endured it with grim determination, clinging to it as if his life depended on it. He could hear the deafening sound of spatial walls exploding around the beast, but his senses could no longer process immediate reality.

Countless scenes began bombarding his mind at a frantic pace. It was as if he were passing through the raw flesh of space-time itself. He saw glimpses of a world bathed in light, followed by visions of deep hell and battlefields where blood formed oceans.

Moments of intimacy and peace appeared only to be swallowed by ages of chaos. It was like watching the reincarnation cycle of an entire universe in fast-forward, a cycle of life and death compressed into seconds.

It wasn't exactly an illusion. That was because he saw alien life forms and savage creatures staring at him with hatred. They could see him. Some tried to attack, others fled in panic, but all of them were instantly shredded in the very next second. It felt like a dream, yet the pain and weight were terrifyingly real.

Then, a female voice cut through the delirium, roaring in his ears:

"Let go of that, idiot!"

Lost in the daze, his reactions were slow. That voice sounded distant, as if it came from another universe. Still, the shock of the command snapped him out of it. His fingers weakened, and he let go.

What followed was the sensation of falling into a bottomless abyss. He was sinking… sinking into an infinite void where gravity seemed not to exist. But suddenly, a familiar warmth pierced his chest.

'Niara.'

She was still on his back, and the thought that she might suffer even a single scratch forced his consciousness back into his body.

*BOOM!*

With superhuman effort, Darian stabilized himself in midair and fell from the skies, hitting the ground on his feet with an impact that made the earth tremble.

He fled that place, but his soul and mind were exhausted, drowned in absolute chaos.

As he struggled to keep his vision focused, a figure appeared before him.

It was the woman from before, the one he had saved and with whom he had an inexplicable karmic connection. From her gaze — a mix of relief and shock — Darian felt that, for now, they were safe.

He allowed his eyes to close. His external senses faded from exhaustion, but his instincts remained like living embers: if any danger came close, the monster inside him would awaken before the first blow was even struck.