Pain, horrible and agonizing pain. I won the ‘duel’, but at a pretty steep price. The Demonic Jellyfish Juice was able to heal the superficial wounds pretty quickly, but it wasn’t instant. Those broken ribs and my torn-up abdominal muscles were still really sore. Xiaotong and Legion were totally silent, and I could still see the burns on my right hand slowly disappearing.

As I walked through the tunnel, I realized that I picked the wrong one. However, even after I went back and tried a few others, I couldn’t figure out which fucking tunnel led to the outside of the mountain.

“Whatever, there’s so many of them… I’m definitely going downwards, so it should be fine. Ugh~, damn it!” The number on the back of my right hand suddenly fell down to three, though it quickly rose back to four again. My Dantian had a ‘leak’, or maybe more than one. It was kind of like a bladder filled with piss that someone poked a few holes in… Qi was slipping out through those rips and tears, while my abdominal muscles were still screwed up as well. Maybe the worst part about it all, was the fact that there was barely any ‘Nature’ mana floating around in that shitty cave.

“Uh-oh, I think I’m starting to suffocate? Yeah, definitely have trouble breathing down here… Plus it’s freezing… This necklace isn’t really helping either.” I could see that it was ‘absorbing’ the Yin Qi in the air, but it didn’t really make things better or worse.

Eventually, I came across some stairs that led down into the vaguely illuminated depths. There was a thick black fog permeating the tunnel, though the bright-blue crystals and fungi on the walls were enough to allow me some mild visibility.

My whole body was shivering and I really wanted to go back the way I came… However, the moment I turned around, it was a dead end. I walked over and felt the solid rocky wall, but there didn’t seem to be any sort of control panels laying around.

“Fucking magic… Goddamn it, I’m gonna be pissed if this is some kinda dungeon.” Don’t worry, it wasn’t anything quite that ridiculous. Although, maybe that’s more of my own personal opinion.

Since I couldn’t go back, I could only go forwards, down into the cold-ass creepy-depths. A layer of frost started to form on my skin and I could tell that my core temperature was dangerously low. Not to mention the whole asphyxiation nonsense. 

The ground suddenly started rumbling and I heard a quiet feminine voice murmuring something in some language I didn’t recognize. Well, it was too soft for me to make out, even if she was talking in English.

At the bottom of the stairs, there was a small and relatively plain-looking door. It was made out of a silvery metal and extremely reflective, so I was able to see exactly how terrible I looked. There were no doors and I couldn’t push it open, but there was a tiny Crescent Moon symbol at the very center of the door.

It took exactly three seconds for me to realize “Oh hey, it totally looks the same as my necklace!” I tried to place the pendant into the engraving, but the chain got in the way. Yeah, it took me like two whole minutes to figure out how to unhook the chain and pull off the Moon part.

As I placed the dark-blue crescent into the slot, the ground began rumbling even more violently. Then I heard thousands of voices screaming inside of my mind, as words began appearing upon that mysterious silver ‘door’. I glanced around behind me and noticed that the stairs had totally disappeared and it almost seemed like there was nothing but darkness in every direction. My feet felt wet, so I gazed down and realized that the floor was covered in a pitch-black sludge.

Then a soft and feminine voice asked “Who is like God?” Those words were also engraved upon that shiny silver door in front of me.

Without hesitation, I shouted “Michael! Right? That’s one of the translations for the name Michael!” What? Are you wondering why I knew that? Well, the answer is pretty simple actually… I looked it up on the internet a few times in my last life. When I pick a name for a character on an MMORPG, I always look up the meaning behind the name and do research!

Those letters at the top of the door disappeared and the moon was abruptly surrounded by a hexagon engraving. Then two triangled entangled with each other around that hexagon, creating what was essentially a Star of David, or six-pointed star.

Within the top triangle, a golden symbol appeared. It looked like an equally balanced scale. That feminine voice whispered “Michael, Immortal Soul who is like God… The oldest incarnation… Obsessed with ‘justice’ to the point of insanity… One of the seven responsible for creating Karma, Dharma and Samsara.”

There was a long pause, before new writing was inscribed upon the top of the door. As I was reading it, I heard that mysterious woman murmuring “The Destroyer.”

“Ah, that’s obviously Abaddon… This trivia is actually pretty easy though. Well, maybe that’s just because… Oh, yeah, I guess people in this world probably wouldn’t know this kinda stuff, huh?” 

No shit! Well, I was slightly delirious from exhaustion, blood-loss, lack of oxygen and whatever weird illusion spell I was experiencing. Honestly, it was amazing that I could even mentally function at all under those conditions.

An obsidian sphere slightly bulged out of the center of the top-right triangle. It almost seemed to be composed entirely of Darkness Qi and I could see the metal around it warping, as if it was being pulled inside of that strange orb.

That girl whispered “Abaddon the Destroyer… of Everything. After fighting for so long in order to ‘fix’ the worlds that Michael created, he finally realized that it was pointless… The seven of them had made a horrible mistake. Without destruction, it is impossible to remove corruption… Also known as Exterminan, Apollyon and the Abyss, Abaddon is little more than a weapon now. A mindless, volatile, hateful monstrosity that wishes to simply obliterate everything in existence.”

Once the words were erased, they were once again replaced by something else. The voice softly stated “I am Earth’s only Moon.”

“Luna! Tsuki, Lua, Kuu, Lune, Mond, Then Gali, Ma Chang, Oi, Moonay~, ugh, I can’t think of any other way to say it!” Most languages had a different word for Earth’s Moon, so I just went with the shotgun approach and said as many as I could think of. I really didn’t want to find out what would happen if I couldn’t open that door.

There was a quiet voice that giggled within my mind, then that dark-blue crescent in the middle of that hexagon began glowing bright silver. It made me remember gazing up at the sky back when I lived out in the country.

“Luna, the Eternal Observer… There was once a time when Luna was nothing but a lifeless husk; a dead planet, floating eternally through the Chaotic Void. Perhaps by coincidence or by design, she encountered an errant Celestial Vessel. The crew of that ship decided to hollow her out and create a home for themselves inside of her body. However, when they finished installing the ‘Soul’ of their Celestial Vessel within her core, they had accidentally unleashed the trapped Spirit of Abaddon. Fortunately, when the two souls fused together, they created Luna… Although she was tainted by the Darkness, she found a way to turn it into ‘life’.”

I kind of expected her to continue the story, but it just randomly stopped. Then a new ‘question’ appeared. The voice murmured “Joy, passion, pleasure, sexuality, love…”

“Oh, oh, umm~! Venus? No, uh, Hanael? Anael, Haniel, Aniel, Anal, Astarte?! I don’t fucking know, there’s way too many possibilities! Can you be more specific?” However, while I was panicking and trying to think of every name I could remember that related to love or lust, the next symbol was starting to form.

There was a bright-red heart, wrapped in rusty iron chains and there were six brightly burning angelic wings on the sides. It appeared within the bottom-right triangle, below that creepy black-hole.