No More Pain For This Villain.-Chapter 386: Avarice-5

[Ren Hilton POV]

.... I am dead.

I should be.

Then why do I still...feel.

Blaze's voice echoed through my mind. He's still here, but... I can't make out what he's saying.

I opened my eyes and witnessed it—far away from me, a star was falling.

Far from me, it felt like someone had drawn a luminescent line through the starry sky, and I can feel it from miles away.

I should have been there.

I was there just a moment ago.

... I failed too.

I failed to perform the spatial magic.

A light blob then streaked down from the sky, then descended onto the crimson desert below, and soon came a sound so deafening that my ears started to bleed—light so brilliant that I was blinded, but at the same time it blurred the lines between seen and unseen.

I could see both—the particles of mana and my bones wrapped underneath my skin at the same time.

Then it ended.

I couldn't tell how long it took, but it did end, leaving a crater spanning miles and still so far from me—as if someone had punched a hole into the world itself.

How'd I get out there?

Even if I had succeeded in doing the spatial magic—I would've been dead.

I knelt on the sand, alive somehow.

"For fuck's sake," I cussed.

Where am I?

"Is that a profanity?"

Asked someone, voice lighter than Blaze's and surely unfamiliar—it was not even in my head, but from right behind me.

I turned around slowly. Behind me stood a being so ethereal that... it looked divine.

It....he? He was tall, skin dark as the night sky, adorned with an upper body covered in mesh and ornaments made out of yellowish gold, and a flowing white cloth that covered from the waist below—striped cloth wrapped around the head, making him look like a pharaoh.

His face was sharp, oozing with calmness and wisdom, his irises filled in with liquid gold.

"You speak a foreign tongue." He spoke.

I tried standing upright, but I had spent a lot of mana before that, and it was hard to do even such a simple task.

He stood a dozen feet away from my kneeling self, as if assessing me from higher ground, thinking.

"Have you lost your ability to converse....Ren?" He spoke again, this time sending a tremor of shock through me—how does he know my name?

I opened my mouth, "What are you?"

I asked almost instinctively.

I entered this place, similar to memories of Ignisara, but here I get hurt, so it must be real. If not, then it's hard to say anything otherwise... forgotten land of gold.

He stayed, observing me.

"Geb?" I blurted out unconsciously. What is happening—why is it hard to keep my mouth shut, for God's sake!

It was only then that he showed some emotion. He stepped closer and closer to me till he was just a step away. "You know our Lord's name, yet your soul is unfamiliar to me. Who are you, Ren?"

His Lord?

"Who are you, and how do you know my name?" I asked. Let's start with the basics.

"I am Nubira, Lord's chosen one and guide to the souls of his kingdom." He said so fluently, not a speck of malice in his voice.

"Where am I?"

Nubira blinked as he then bent, bringing his face closer to mine, and I instinctively pulled back a bit.

"You really do not know." He muttered, "This is Kushret, The Land Of Gold."

The Land of gold.

"And what am I doing here?" I asked.

Molten gold in his eyes moved, "That's... something I should be asking you. Who are you?"

I stayed silent, searching for something, but everything is so fragmented and confusing that I am more than afraid of giving away something that I was not meant to.

Is this a memory or a place like Nightshade Sanctum... did I get transported through that mist to here? Am I still in Ellora's Veil?

"You seem like an avid thinker, that is certainly something I have not experienced in a while." Nubira's voice pulled me out of my thoughts.

I tried backing away, but each muscle of my being was spent, hurt in some way or another... I am out of mana too.

"Why not rest... does not seem like you have to be anywhere soon." Nubira straightened as he stretched his hand, as if reaching for something in empty space.

In an instant, a jade staff with one end of it crescent like the moon materialized in his hand... out of thin air, woven by threads of light.

Familiar, too much even... like how I summon anything using the system.

It was more or less similar to that, at least visually.

He tapped the bottom of the staff, and all of a sudden I felt... better, but empty too, as if I was still low on mana.

"I have hastened your physical recovery, though I am afraid that it's not within my powers to fix... replenish? Yes, replenish... your source of energy, your power... mana, is it?" He spoke in a very fragmented manner, as if the words he referred to were foreign to him.

It just then hit me... something far more terrifying, making my skin crawl.

"You are reading my mind?" I asked.

Another expression evoked itself onto the face of the ethereal being.

"You are in my mind?"

Or am I in his? Is this place nothing but a construct of his mind—

"Hold your horse... that's how you use that idiom, right?" Nubira gestured. "Yes, I have read your mind, and I know about you, but what I know is... not worth anything. Not to offend you, but most of your soul is lost to the essence of God."

"Huh?"

"I have yet to know who you are, but I am trying, so be at rest." Nubira said as if it was the most obvious thing ever.

Be at rest...

"Fuck off." I cussed out of ridiculousness of this whole situation.

"You are quite repetitive with your profanities even with such vast collection of... experiences, shame." Nubira sighed as if I had disappointed him.