Chapter 165: What Refuses to Die

“Really, nobody knows how this world was created, or at least not someone like me, and an average civilian of The Tides, what this wicked place is called.” She lifted her arm, moving her hand in the air, trying to explain to him how a world can appear out of nowhere. “It was like this, we were all living a normal life when boom.” She tried to mimic an explosion. “There was a random monster that killed many, and then after you died, you woke up here.”

Aether looked at her, dumbfounded. Did she seriously think he was a five-year-old who couldn’t understand words? Did she think he had the attention span of a child, and that she had to keep him entertained to pay her attention?

Either way, even if he had taken a little offense to her style of explaining. She at least gave him some valuable information, like the name of the place he was inside. I mean, shouldn’t that be the first thing he learned? Either way.

’The Tides, huh? It makes sense, after all, this place looks like it’s underwater or something close to that.’

He already had a rough idea of what had happened in the beginning, after all, the description of the book already told him that the world started to fall when monsters began to appear, but it was nice for it to be confirmed.

“So, um, after that, the world began infested with these monsters, and some places had corals grow inside of them, just like the corals from The Tides… which, between the two of us, are created from the world feeding off the remains of the dead.”

She looked slightly uncomfortable talking about that, and he got why, I mean, knowing that after you die, your body would be left to be devoured by the world, and that every single coral you saw was a life, it was… uncomforable, but something een worst not even she was aware of was that their shadow was still alive in this place, mouring the death of their master and trying to act like them, trying to trick themselves that they are still alive.

If he thought about it, most of this place was… filled with denial. The people in the Inn were trying to trick themselves they were still alive by trying to get drunk, acting as if it was working even if it was not. And the shadows, which, while in his world too, acted like their owners, they were their own person; they weren’t trying to imitate their masters.

After all, your shadow is bound to act like you, since it’s created after you, and lives by following you, no one else, but when it gets to the point that even after your death, it is desperate to pretend you are alive, it’s past the point of normal. Like how the mage, who tried to fire spells at him how probably his master used to do.

Denial…

He too had been in denial when he had first entered this book, he was unable to accept that his party had rely died, and part of him… stil believed they were alive really, he wanted to get rid of it, he knew they had died, and yet in his mind, he still created scenarios where they found a way to survive, even after he had… accepted the truth… he still clung onto lies.

Was it… that he still hadn’t stopped denying their death?

…

’Was it what this place is… a place where people could deny things they can’t accept, after all, what is the hardest thing one can accept… their death.’

It was madness if that was the case, who knew, maybe the reason they were alive was that they denied that they had died, maybe the Tides were created by those who didn’t want to die. Who tried to find a way to survive.

After all… wasn’t that also how he got here, trying to escape his own death… and technically it didn’t work, he had died, but at the same time, he hadn’t fully died… well, really, it’s left for everyone to interpret.

Because he didn’t know what came after death, he couldn’t know if this was really just the afterlife…

Who said he was still on trial?

Sure, the Abyss has said that he would help him clear the trial, which confirmed that he was still inside Demon of Dread, but did he know himself what dying looked like?

He tried to think he was still inside the book, and that this world was just one that existed inside the book… but at the same time, he didn’t have any proof.

Really… the only thing that made him think this was because he didn’t want to think that this was the end.

So in the end, it was Denial… yet again.

…

…

Aether left the Inn, walking into the city again.

He had learned a lot, yet so little at the same time.

The Tides was the world of the dead, a place of agony and… insanity.

Which meant that this place was one to test your physical endurance, how much you could endure pain, but also one to test your mental health, to see just how strong your will was, how strong your hope could last before it was destroyed

’Cling onto hope, but in doing so, beware that the world punishes those who dream of salvation.’

It was the last thing the description of the book had said, and really, he could see where it was coming from, The Tides, that was who it was talking about, the world it talked about wasn’t the real world people like the old lady used to live in, but the Tides themselves.

The Tides wanted to fully destroy hope, and so, for those who still thought there was a way, even after their death, it designed itself to crush that hope. To eliminate every last small piece that slipped through the fingers of the horrors that lived in the real world.

The two worlds also had nicknames.

Layer 0 and layer 1.

’For the embers are slowly fading and the world is descending further and further.’

How ironic.

The first layer was the real world, and the other was The Tides… and yet, as the hope of the real world is slowly fading, it was descending further and further, so who knew, maybe the real world could replace the Tides, or maybe even fall lower than this world.

Which made him ask the question, was there another Layer beyond the Tides, or maybe more than one.

But if so, then how did you descend, and how did you ascend up the layers… he didnt have an answer, since the old lady also didnt know, but aprrently, there was a myth to how someone from the Tides could get back up… by being let up by the Demon of Dread himself… by clearing a trial, proving your strenght.

’The Demon of Dread… how much of a mystery you are.’

Who, or what even was he… did he have a physical form, or was he something else? Where did he live? What were his powers, and if he was the ruler of the Tides, then why? Why had he created this world? Why did he choose to rule it, and why had he attacked the real world?

And if the answer was that he just didn’t exist yet, then how had he been created?

’What came first, the Tides themselves, or the Demon of Dread?’

Really, it didn’t matter which was the first, since both gave you the same series of questions, which all revolved around the vague concept of creation. How does something come from nothing?

It was something he was too young to understand, so he didn’t want to think about it much.

’It doesn’t matter which came first, both of them are here now… It’s how to get rid of them. How do I complete the trial left to ascend?’

The Demon rewarded a second chance to those who prove their strength… but what is that strength…? Wouldn’t it be what he considered power? Maybe even someone as strong as a Breaker wouldn’t be able to ascend, just because they don’t have the strength that the Demon is looking for.

So then what was it, what was the true strength the Demon was looking for, who did he consider a strong person?

…

’Demon… of Dread…’

If his intuition was right, then it was Will. The ember inside the soul. The Demon of Dread wasn’t testing whether one was physically strong, but if they were mentally strong, if their mind and soul could accept that they had died, and wished to become undead.

The Trial wasn’t some monster you had to fight, but the world itself, the Tides.

Again, they had been created to crush the hope of someone completely, every last fragment, every little piece of hope you still clung to; their job was to destroy it.

So… was the trial to see if you could keep that hope alive.

…

But if the Tides were filled by Denial…

Was the trial to defeat Denial?

…

…

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