Eliza’s protest faded into a reluctant sigh as Kai shook his head.

He stood before the towering obsidian gate that marked the entrance to the abyss, feeling the unnatural chill bleeding through the stone.

"You stay here," Kai said, keeping his voice steady so she wouldn’t hear the knot tightening in his throat.

"This place is way too dangerous, and if things go wrong, I need to know you are safe. I can’t be watching my back and yours at the same time."

Eliza looked like she wanted to argue, perhaps throw an iceball at his head just to prove a point, but she eventually crossed her arms and nodded.

Kai offered her a reassuring smile that he absolutely did not feel, then turned and stepped through the shadowy threshold alone.

The interior felt wrong from the very second his foot stepped in.

The air was freezing, carrying the distinct, unsettling scent of dust mixed with the dried blood.

Faint, ghostly starlight pulsed weakly from the pitch-black stone walls. The stones were covered in weeping runes that leaked a thick, tar-like substance down the corridors.

As he walked deeper, whispering voices began to echo through the gloom.

They were fragmented murmurs spoken in dead languages that nobody had heard for thousands of years.

Help....

Lord of the stars...

I want to see the sun...

’Are they begging me to remember them?’ Kai thought, shivering as a particularly breeze brushed the back of his neck.

’I can barely remember where I left my boots this morning. You guys are asking the wrong person.’

[Area Discovered: Temple of Forgotten Stars]

[Warning: Extreme spatial instability detected]

[The environment is actively hostile]

[Proceed with extreme caution.]

’Oh, lovely. The architecture wants to kill me,’ he muttered internally, swiping the glowing blue text away.

For the first ten minutes, there was nothing but suffocating silence and a growing sense of dread.

The corridor seemed to stretch on forever, winding deeper into the abyss.

Every footstep echoed a little too loudly, making Kai feel like a walking dinner bell.

He kept his hands raised, frost already dancing across his knuckles, fully prepared for something to jump out from the shadows.

Nothing did.

The anticipation was honestly worse than an actual fight.

Creak.

Then, the floor abruptly fractured beneath his boots.

Huge cracks spiderwebbed outward with a sickening crunch. The stone gave way, revealing an endless abyss far below the broken floor.

Swirling pools of dying starlight illuminated the bottomless drop, casting blue shadows up toward him.

’Fuck.’

Kai scrambled backward, digging his foot into the remaining solid stone just to keep from falling into the glowing void.

From the cracks, long, gray fingers reached up and grabbed the edge of the broken floor.

Twelve-foot-tall abominations began pulling themselves up from the depths. They were formed from black stone and corrupted celestial flesh that looked like decaying constellations.

Their eyes were hollow, burning with a pale blue fire that held absolutely no sanity or soul.

[Enemy Identified: Starfallen Giant]

[Level: ??]

[Description: A corrupted celestial guardian]

[Highly resistant to physical trauma. Its burning touch inflicts Frostburn.]

’A level with question marks? Why does the system even exist if it is just going to shrug at me?’ Kai thought, backing up as three of the giants hauled themselves fully onto the corridor floor.

’This is at least a primordial beast.’

The first giant swung a fist the size of a boulder straight at Kai’s head.

He didn’t try to block it; taking a hit from something that size would turn his bones into powder.

Instead, he dropped into a slide, conjuring a sheet of ice beneath his boots to glide right under the sweeping arm.

’Let’s get creative,’ he smirked, though his heart was beating fast against his ribs.

He spun around and aimed both hands at the giant’s knees. Instead of firing standard ice spikes, Kai gathered a dense pool of supercooled liquid mana and splashed it directly over the monster’s joints.

The corrupted flesh froze instantly, locking the creature in place.

When the giant tried to take a step forward, the frozen joints shattered.

Shriek.

The sudden break caused the monster’s legs to explode into hundreds of razor-sharp icy shrapnel pieces, tearing through the celestial flesh of the second giant standing right behind it. The first monster collapsed into the abyss with an echoing wail.

The second giant, now full of icy shrapnel, roared and charged.

Kai didn’t retreat. He sprinted forward, manifesting two curved blades of solid frost in his hands.

He ducked under a clumsy, wide swing that would have easily crushed a normal man’s skull. Slashing upward, he severed the creature’s wrist.

Slash.

Corrupted black blood sprayed across his coat, burning like acid wherever it touched.

’Ah, great,’ Kai thought, gritting his teeth against the pain.

He spun gracefully, driving both frost blades directly into the giant’s knees to bring the towering beast crashing down onto the stone floor.

Before it could recover, Kai leaped onto its broad back and plunged a spike of absolute zero energy straight into the back of its neck.

The creature turned into a beautiful ice sculpture before exploding into fine dust.

He quickly realized he wasn’t just fighting the monsters.

The temple itself was waking up to join the fight as walls groaned loudly, and the entire corridor suddenly shifted sideways, tilting at a sharp angle.

’Oh no.’

Kai lost his footing and slid toward the edge of the pit, frantically conjuring an ice pick in his right hand and slamming it into the stone floor to stop his fall.

Then, gravity reversed entirely for three dizzying seconds.

Kai fell downward, crashing hard onto the stone ceiling with a brutal impact.

"Gah!"

The breath was knocked right out of his lungs. He hung there, staring down at the floor above him, while a confused giant tried to figure out why it was suddenly floating.

Before Kai could even formulate a plan, gravity returned to normal, dropping him back down to the floor with a painful thud that rattled his teeth.

’Pick a direction and stick with it, you stupid building!’

The third Starfallen Giant charged at him while he was distracted. Kai raised his hands, focusing all his energy into a dense spear of black ice, and hurled it straight through the burning hollow eyes of the beast.

Stab.

The giant stumbled, clutching its face, before freezing solid from the inside out and crumbling into a pile of cold ash.

Before Kai could celebrate, skeletal hands emerged from the weeping runes on the walls.

The freezing fingers grabbed his ankles and his wrists, trying to drag him directly into the stone.

’Get off me, you creepy wall-perverts!’ Kai panicked, channeling frost through his entire body.

A shockwave of sub-zero energy blasted outward from his skin, freezing the ghostly hands until they became brittle enough to shatter.

He kicked himself free and ran, sprinted over the cracked floors, dodging swinging stone fists and leaping over sudden gravity-wells that tried to pull him into the ceiling again.

Up ahead, a rune-covered door stood slightly open, glowing with a warm light that contrasted sharply with the gloomy corridor.

Kai dove through the opening, rolling across the floor, and kicked the door shut behind him.

He scrambled to his feet and threw three layers of reinforced ice over the hinges and the lock, sealing the room completely.

He looked down at his hands, disgusted to see them covered in black monster blood that smelled like rot. The safe chamber was small, lit by a single glowing crystal in the center of the ceiling, offering a brief sanctuary from the madness outside.

The system pinged quietly in the back of his mind, notifying him of the newly acquired experience points and minor stat boosts. The danger of this place was exactly what he needed to push past his current limits.