"GRRROOOO—!"
The beast's scream shook the entire forest. The gem was torn from its forehead, leaving a bleeding cavity that oozed thick black blood like ink. The beast staggered, thrashing wildly, its face blinded by rage, its claws striking in every direction like a mad harvesting machine.
Niklaus hit the ground hard, the bloody purple gem clutched in his fist. It was warm, pulsing like a small living heart. He ignored the silent System, ignored the stone's nature. He shoved it into his magical ring without a second thought. He tore a piece from his already shredded cloak and bound it tightly around his bleeding wounds.
The beast was still alive, convulsing, trying to stand. But it was blind, and its bleeding was profuse. One blow was enough. Niklaus leaped toward its skull and drove his dagger into the wound left by the gem—a deep stab to the hilt. He felt the dagger's tip hit something solid inside.
The beast collapsed like a crumbling mountain, sending a faint tremor through the ground.
Silence.
Niklaus breathed with difficulty, his entire body groaning. But this time, he was still standing. Barely—but standing.
He looked around. Among the nearby trees, he saw a giant nest of black silk. Inside, five or six eggs the size of human heads, covered in the same glistening sticky threads. But one of them was different. It was black, smooth, engraved with golden patterns—the same engravings he had seen in the river. The same lines, the same symbols, the same concentric circles. And beside the eggs... scattered human bones. Remains of the spider-beast's previous meals. Skulls, ribs, femurs—all stark white, as if death had purified them of any trace of life.
"Damned novel... wretched System... bastard world..." his bloodied lips whispered words filled with spittle and blood, as if he was spitting all his hatred for this place.
The sight of the bones broke something inside him. He hated weakness, but he hated the idea of dying as prey more—becoming one of these scattered bones, just the remains of a beast's meal. He gritted his teeth and tightened his grip on the dagger, then lunged madly toward the beast, which was still thrashing in its final death throes, its yellow eyes gleaming with vengeance and hunger together.
"Do these stinking beasts take turns on me?!" he shouted as he charged.
The beast opened its mouth wide, intending to bite him. But Niklaus charged madly toward its maw, letting himself be swallowed.
The light vanished. Darkness became absolute.
Inside the beast, the viscosity, the warmth, and the pressure were immense. Digestive acids began burning Niklaus's skin, and he felt his flesh ulcerating as if submerged in liquid fire. But the dagger between his teeth was his only weapon. With all the strength he had left, he began cutting, slashing, and tearing through the thick flesh from within! Desperate, violent, blind stabs in the darkness—each strike sending sparks of pain through his hand. The beast's external growls turned into choked whimpers. The inside was hell—pain, nausea, the stench of blood and acid mingled together.
Through a tear he'd made with his hands and dagger, Niklaus crawled out, choking on the foul internal fluids. His body was covered in viscous purple mucus and his own blood, dripping from both. The beast, despite its fatal injury, was still alive, screaming and thrashing violently against the ground, its claws carving deep furrows in the earth.
Niklaus saw the eggs in the nearby nest. With an unsteady step, he approached and took two heavy eggs. They were heavy, warm, pulsing with life within. With all his remaining strength, he hurled them toward the beast's eyes!
"SCREEEECH!"
The beast's scream was terrified this time. For a moment, it was distracted trying to remove the sticky fluid from its eyes, its claws striking blindly through the air.
That moment of distraction was enough. Niklaus, with one final desperate step, climbed onto the giant beast's swaying head and drove his dagger to the hilt into the pulsing point where the gem had been. Then he pulled the gem out with his other hand.
A long roar... then silence.
The beast collapsed like a crumbling mountain, shaking the ground. Niklaus fell on top of it, then rolled to the ground, covered in his own blood, the beast's blood, and its foul mucus. He breathed with difficulty, his eyes closing.
He placed the gem in his magical ring with difficulty, his trembling fingers struggling to fit it through the small opening, while his breath came in ragged gasps. Hunger—that internal beast he hated more than any enemy—tore at his empty innards.
He looked at the strange purple flesh oozing foul fluids. The meat might be poisoned. It might kill him. But he didn't care about the taste, or the toxins, or the consequences. Weakness was the only enemy he would never surrender to.
He reached out with his hand, wet with his blood and the beast's, grabbed his dagger, and cut a spongy piece from the beast's hide—a piece the size of his fist, trembling under his fingers. He raised it to his mouth. The pungent smell made his stomach recoil in refusal, as if his body was trying to stop this madness. He closed his crimson eyes and bit. The texture was sticky as mud mixed with clay, and the taste... bitter as mold, with a sharp acidity that burned his tongue as if corroding the cells of his mouth. He swallowed with difficulty the raw lump of meat stuck in his throat like a challenge, then slid into his stomach with a heavy weight.
He didn't vomit.
No emotion showed on his rigid face. Just survival. He chewed and swallowed another piece, then a third, until the edge of hunger dulled slightly. It wasn't food it was fuel. Just something to keep his body working.
He crawled toward a nearby tree. He leaned his back against its black, rotten trunk, his bloody body bleeding the last of its energy. Beside him lay the black egg, engraved with golden symbols, which had begun to glow with a faint light.
"Am I hallucinating this now?" he thought wearily. He didn't bother investigating. He closed his heavy eyes, and darkness swallowed him quickly.
But this darkness wasn't empty.
It pulled him toward a nightmare that never ended. The images weren't as clear as before, nor fully comprehensible. They were hazy, distorted—like a torn memory with no one to gather its fragments. A man with undefined features appeared, melting into shadows as if made of smoke. His right arm was missing from the shoulder, replaced by a dark void like a black hole in reality. In his only hand, he gripped a long sword that radiated light.
Before him... stood Niklaus. But not the current Niklaus. It was the man from the river's reflection. long black hair, deep crimson eyes carrying immeasurable weights of memory, the thick scar on his left eyebrow. He looked gaunt, exhausted, shattered. a gaze that could melt stone and make the inanimate weep.
The one-armed man stepped toward him. Not hostile. His movement was filled with old pain and vague longing. Suddenly, he opened his only arm and embraced the frail Niklaus. In the dream, the frail Niklaus grabbed the man's shirt with a trembling hand and buried his face in his chest—like a child seeking shelter from a storm.
Then... the whispers.
Not from outside. From inside Niklaus's skull in the dream, as if a voice was emanating from his own depths:
"... I... I'm sorry... D... Do... Don't... be... like... like me..."
"... Re... regret... e... eats..."
Broken words, distorted sounds, striking his mind like hammers on a rusted bell.
He woke with a start.
"Huh!"
He sat up suddenly, his hand pressing on his chest as if searching for the trace of an embrace, for the warmth of an arm that wasn't there. He breathed deeply, trembling, his eyes wide in the gray darkness. Cold sweat mingled with old blood on his forehead, dripping down his cheeks like dry tears.
"What was that...? Who was that man? And why did I look... so weak?"
The questions flooded like a deluge. Was this from the novel's events? Or an inevitable future? Or something else entirely? He gritted his teeth until they nearly cracked, tasting blood seeping between them.
"None of this concerns me. That person... isn't me. I am Arthur, not Niklaus. Not me."
He tried to kill the curiosity that had begun gnawing at his bones like a white worm, but it remained, reminding him that there were questions with no answers.
"I'll just find out why I'm here. The rest... doesn't matter."
Beside him, the egg was glowing!
The golden engravings had become lines of liquid fire moving beneath the black shell like blood in a living creature's veins. Golden light filled the area around it, banishing the forest's darkness for a moment—for the first time since entering, he saw real colors: gold, orange, red. It was cracking! Fine fractures appeared on the black shell's surface, like glass breaking slowly.
Combat instinct flared within him. He grabbed his dagger, but before he could strike, a burning pain—like molten iron—pierced his right shoulder, the same spot where the arrow had struck him upon first entering the forest, which the System had partially healed. But this pain was different—deeper, as if something was being carved into his bone from within.
"AAARGH!"
His spine bent, his forehead touching the ground from the intensity of the headache and physical agony. He felt his skin burning to a depth beyond description—as if the fire had consumed past the bone itself. From his shoulder, a brilliant golden light erupted, piercing through the mist and darkness, strong enough to blind Niklaus for a moment. He felt as if a spear of lava was being driven into his flesh and bone, as if fire was being born beneath his skin.
He slammed his head against the ground, growling in pain, his world drowning in agonizing, endless whiteness.
When vision returned...
He slowly lifted his head from the ground, the pain still piercing his skull like a chisel. Beside him, the egg lay wide open. Empty. No beast, no creature, nothing. Only scattered black shell fragments, their golden light quickly fading.
But the pain in his shoulder... was fading. Not completely, but as if a raging fire had settled into faint embers. Even the wounds from the last battle—the deep gashes, the bruises, the bone-deep pain—began to ease noticeably. A strange warmth flowed through his broken limbs.
He felt something strange on his skin. Where the burning pain had been on his shoulder. He slowly reached out, ignoring the lingering ache, and touched his right shoulder beneath the torn fabric. He twisted his face to see if there was a wound. But what he saw made him freeze.
There was a tattoo.
He couldn't see all its details—part of it extended down his back beneath his clothes. But what he saw made his crimson eyes widen slightly, rare emotion showing on his face. Complex black lines, intertwined like a cosmic spiderweb, glowing faintly beneath his skin. The shape of a dragon coiled around his shoulder, its wings spread as if flying beneath his skin. It wasn't ink on skin—it was something alive, pulsing with the same rhythm as his heart, warm as a sun trapped in a cage of flesh. Its form looked ancient.
He muttered in disgust: "What is this now?"
He stood slowly, ignoring the lingering pain. He didn't understand. He didn't know if it was a blessing or a new curse from this mad forest.
He turned his cold eyes toward the deeper darkness of the forest, where the unknown awaited. He pulled the letter from his ring. Opened it, read it again—the words he now knew by heart:
"In the Forest of Death, you will find all the answers... or perhaps most of them."
"Where are the answers, you stinking writer?" he whispered in a hoarse voice, words mixing with dried blood on his lips. "All I've found are beasts, a tattoo I don't understand, and nightmares without meaning."
He folded the letter and returned it to the ring. But before closing it, he looked at the engravings he'd seen in the river, then at the scattered shell fragments. They weren't illusions. He was beginning to be sure of that. The engravings on the river and now on the egg—both carried the same patterns, the same winding lines leading northeast, like a map drawn in light.
He looked in that direction. Dense darkness, tangled trees, mist moving like a living creature breathing slowly. But he felt something there. A faint pull—as if something was waiting for him. Or perhaps it was just another illusion.
"I'll follow the river..." he whispered to himself, his voice rising slightly in defiance of the silence. "And where it leads me."
He returned the letter to his ring. He looked at the new tattoo on his shoulder one last time, then at the direction the engravings pointed. He took a first step toward the northeast, then another.