Ivan

An unexpected event awakened the gray-haired man from his eternal slumber.

He slowly opened his eyes, and the first thing he saw was a huge Crystal that emitted a hazy, faint light.

This enormous Crystal hung upside down in mid-air, its lower half disappearing into the ceiling. The gray-haired man looked up at the ceiling and discovered that this so-called "ceiling" was actually made up of countless intertwined tree roots.

The tree roots intertwined and coiled, forming a huge pillar behind him, and the root chair he sat on, which resembled Throne.

Tree roots extended from these Throne, piercing through his limbs and binding him tightly to the Throne made of tree roots, but incredibly, he felt no pain.

The tree roots that were wrapped around his limbs were already rotten and fragile. With a little force, the gray-haired man broke off the roots and turned them into fragments.

After breaking Restraint the tree roots, the man had several wounds on his limbs where the roots had pierced through. However, no blood flowed from these circular wounds; only pitch-black darkness.

Under the influence of an incredibly weak force, the wounds on the man's limbs gradually healed and returned to normal. His emaciated body also gradually swelled up, restoring his normal appearance. However, he felt a strange sense of emptiness.

His body was like an empty shell; it looked shiny on the outside, but he had lost almost everything inside.

The gray-haired man suddenly had this realization.

He gripped the armrest of the Root Throne, slowly rose, and began to descend the steps. As his foot touched the bottom floor, he suddenly felt he had guessed something, and the object beneath his foot shattered with a crisp sound.

He lifted his foot and looked down, finding a pile of Crystal fragments on the ground. They appeared to have fallen from the irregularly shaped Crystal hanging upside down from the ceiling, but unlike the Crystal on the ceiling that emitted a faint glow, these Crystal fragments on the ground had lost their luster.

His awakening from eternal slumber was perhaps due to the detached Crystal hitting his head.

"What bad luck, I..."

He groaned, clutching his forehead, a faint, phantom throbbing pain emanating from his head.

"Where am I? And who am I again?"

He walked around the room filled with tree roots, still unable to recall his own name, but found an upward passage on one side of the room.

The gray-haired man pondered for a while, realizing that staying there would be pointless. Moreover, the faint light emanating from the Crystal conveyed a strange sense of urgency and crisis, as if someone was urging him to keep moving in a certain direction.

"That's strange."

As the gray-haired man groped for the exit, he muttered, "Could this Crystal be related to my past self before I lost my memory?"

He walked out along the dark passage, and the surrounding darkness gradually deepened, enveloping him and swallowing him up, leaving him walking in complete darkness, unable to see the room he had come from, nor the way out.

Now, when the gray-haired man turned around, all he could see was darkness. There was no way to go back now, so he could only rely on his senses and walk forward into the darkness.

As he walked, his head bumped into something cold and hard. The gray-haired man groped around in front of and beside him and suddenly realized that he was in a dark, cramped, and narrow space.

He pushed forward with all his might, finally managing to knock the thing blocking his way to the ground.

Bang!

The things he had pushed over fell to the floor, kicking up a huge cloud of dust. Suddenly, light appeared before his eyes, causing the gray-haired man, who was extremely uncomfortable with the light, to cry out and close his eyes.

His shout sent a cloud of dust into his lungs through his nostrils, causing the gray-haired man to cough incessantly.

After finally regaining his composure, he had time to look around at his surroundings. To his surprise, the gray-haired man discovered that he had actually crawled out of an upright Stone Coffin.

He touched the bottom of the Stone Coffin behind him and confirmed that there was no passage leading to the dark depths behind him, and there were no other human remains inside the Stone Coffin.

In front of the Stone Coffin, there was a Stone Stele. The gray-haired man walked over, reached out and brushed away the accumulated dust, and saw the words below.

Perhaps it was a lingering memory from the past that allowed him to recognize the characters without any difficulty.

"Ivan?"

He didn't understand whether the name belonged to a stranger buried there who had no connection to him, or whether it was related to him, or whether it was simply his original name.

"But I came out of this empty tomb, and I have no memory of it."

The gray-haired man touched the Stone Stele and murmured, "Excuse me, may I borrow the name Ivan for a moment?"

The light from the outside world isn't actually that intense.

Perhaps it was due to the time, but the Sun was already setting, exuding an air of twilight. The whole world was shrouded in the last, lingering rays of the setting sun. Ivan stood in a Graveyard, where Stone Stele and Stone Coffin lay scattered on the ground. Some graves had been dug up, the Coffin removed, and the graves were empty. Other graves remained untouched in the earth, clearly neglected for many years.

Ivan glanced at his own decaying clothes, then at the remains in the nearby Coffin, some still wearing their clothes, and made up his mind.

A few minutes later, he found a tattered suit of armor and a half-damaged cloak among the nearby corpses.

He put on the clothes and then walked along the only path in Graveyard towards the outside.

After walking for a short while, a strange clicking sound suddenly came from the nearby cemetery.

Ivan looked around warily, a dormant instinct stirring within him, warning him of the impending danger.

Bang!

Suddenly, the Stone Coffin in front of Ivan were kicked open from the inside, and several bare white skeletons jumped out of them.

Holding Sword-Spear, hammers, and axes in one hand, they picked up their fallen skulls from the ground with the other and placed them on their heads. At the moment the skulls joined the cervical vertebrae, a faint light, like the fluorescence on the spatial Crystal, suddenly appeared in the eyes of these skeletons.

Then, with a terrible scraping sound, they approached Ivan.