Leveling Up by Seducing Milfs-Chapter 299. The Walls Fell Down, and the City Was Still There Underneath
Rick took the ward-suppression eyepatch out of the socket, and the room fell apart.
The room didn’t fall apart completely or all at once.
It was like a piece of fabric that became see-through in patches. One corner of the room became see-through for a short time and showed something behind it that was purple-black, thick, and moving.
Then the fabric knit itself back together, and the room was back to normal, but now he knew what was behind it.
The socket was on fire.
Not the ambient corruption burning, which refers to the general decay he had been causing for weeks, and not the targeted retrieval burning, which is the focused effort of the Archon pulling at the corruption medium during the Severance Rite.
This was very specific and deep, and it felt like something had been pressing against the socket from the outside for a long time, so long that he had stopped noticing the pressure.
And when he stopped feeling pressure, he stopped asking questions.
He understood then, with the sudden and complete clarity of something that had been coming for a long time, why Heinz had said the same thing twice, why Carmilla had said welcome back, why the candle hadn’t burned, and why the stars hadn’t moved.
He wasn’t at the mansion.
He wasn’t in Valdris.
He was in a different place, and the thing that made this space had done a wonderful job of it. Unbeknownst to him, he had been in this space for an indeterminate duration, until the socket discovered its intended object.
The room pushed back when he tried to stand up.
This was not a physical obstruction; the floor did not hinder his movement.
But as soon as he put weight on his legs to stand up, his awareness of the room sharpened in the wrong direction. Every detail came into focus with an intensity that made him feel like he was being watched.
Then Heinz came to the door with Sophia on his hip and said, "She was looking for the cold again."
For the third time. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂
Rick said, "Heinz."
"Yes?" He paused, maintaining the same clear and simple expression.
"This is the third time you’ve said that to me."
"Huh?" Heinz stared at him. "I don’t get what you mean."
Rick walked toward the door, and Heinz stepped aside as if he were making room in a small space. But Rick stopped in the doorway and turned around to look at the room behind him.
There was nothing moving in it. The papers on the desk, the candle flame, and the shadows don’t move.
He stood in the doorway for thirty seconds and watched the room. Nothing in it moved.
Rick called out, "Heinz," without turning around. "Is Sophia... still breathing?"
Heinz said, "Of course."
"Look at her." Heinz paused to take a moment to observe Sophia. "She’s okay."
"Look at how her chest is moving." There was a pause that stretched on too long. "She’s asleep."
Rick looked at Sophia, who was on Heinz’s hip with her eyes closed and her chest not moving. She wasn’t asleep, but she looked like a perfect still picture of a nine-month-old sleeping, taken at that moment and held there.
The plug burned more brightly.
Rick said, "You need to put her down."
Heinz gave him a look that was open and simple. "She’s at ease."
"She isn’t breathing, Heinz."
The look on their face changed. Not into anything else.
The same phrase was used, but with a different meaning behind it, similar to how a mask appears distinct when you realize it is a mask. The open, simple surface remained intact, but something else beneath it looked at Rick with interest, and it was not Heinz’s gaze.
Rick took a step back.
’What the fuck is going on around here...?’ Rick gritted his teeth. ’I fucking knew it... this is probably the Archon’s trick...’
And then the room pushed again. This time it was clear.
The walls moved in a way that made the space feel smaller. They didn’t move physically, but the quality of the space changed, like something huge and aware changing its posture because one part of the contained environment had started to act strangely, creating an unsettling atmosphere that made Rick feel as if he were being watched.
"Sebastian," Rick said.
"Yes?" came from the study behind him.
"Show yourself to me...now!"
Sebastian appeared in the doorway of the study. He resembled Sebastian, complete with his monocle, straight posture, and the demeanor of someone who was always slightly ahead in conversation.
However, when Rick focused on him with the socket burning at full attention, it revealed what it was designed to uncover: a corruption shaped by an absence, reminiscent of a mold that retains the form of whatever was cast into it.
This is PROBABLY not Sebastian.
This was the shape of Sebastian, crafted by something that had observed him long enough to capture most of the details accurately but had inevitably miscalculated due to insufficient time spent on the nuances of his deflections.
At that moment, Rick understood precisely what he was experiencing.
"It’s a simulation," he said to no one in particular, as no one there was truly who they claimed to be. "This is all just a simulation."
He considered the system notifications and interface that had been showing up in a regular way, using words like "affection" instead of "love," with simple descriptions that lacked the emphasis typical of real system architecture.
He remembered the unique style that appeared when Zephyra first registered, indicating that the system was handling an unusual situation as if it were normal, which meant the actual system would have marked it differently.
He thought about how none of the bonded partners had felt like bonded partners through the bond network since he had been in this space. He thought this was because they were worn out, far away, and still dealing with the effects of the Severance Rite.
He thought about how long he had been in this room, but he couldn’t remember how long it had been.
He stared at the candle.
He gazed at the stars.
"Let me the FUCK out of hereeeee!!!" he said out loud, in the perfect silence of a space that had been listening to everything he said.
The walls fell down.
Not slowly. The studied correctness of the simulation vanished abruptly, revealing a space that was not empty but instead filled with a swirling, purple-black corruption. This corruption flowed through the area in currents that had been present all along, hidden behind the constructed room.
The corruption architecture of something that had been cautiously building a container around him.
The Archon’s distinct mark was familiar to him from the Severance Rite, from the entity’s domain, and from the times the socket had burned with the precise kind of external retrieval. This was the same writer.
The area that the corruption took up was Valdris. The city was still there under the fake room, but it wasn’t the city he knew.
Everyone in it was still there, but they were all connected by purple-black lines that ran from the corruption currents to their bodies and back again. The currents all moved toward something that was huge, very far away, and not visible.
And they were all looking at him.
’N-No... what the fuck is this...?!’
’This is... disturbing as fuck!’
Carmilla was in the hallway. She looked just like Carmilla in every way, but the lines running through her were bright and active, and her eyes were not like Carmilla’s when they met his. Someone was looking at something that had moved unexpectedly through her face.
Zara was at the end of the hall. Sylvia was at the crossroads. Natasha was at the door to the study. All of the people in the bond network were here, in the right places in the mansion, and they all had corruption lines running through them that hadn’t been there when the simulation was working.
Sebastian appeared beside Natasha, and the corruption also permeated this version of Sebastian. The corruption ran through his shape in the same currents.
"The simulation’s integrity is compromised," not-Sebastian said in Sebastian’s voice, and the quality was gone, replaced by something flat and directed.
"Yes." Rick said, "I saw."
He looked at the corruption lines and followed them back through the city, through the faith network infrastructure that Zein had built and that Fredrich had revealed was supposedly suspended.
He understood that the suspension motion had worked, but the network itself hadn’t stopped existing; only the Council’s access to it had.
The network was still around.
And it had been used to make something around him, such as a protective barrier or a new structure that altered his environment.
Rick asked, "How long?"
Not to Sebastian—this was not Sebastian. He was inquiring about the space itself, the architecture of corruption, and the entity that had constructed this container around him and populated it with shifting replicas of the people he recognized.
The space didn’t say anything.
