Commanding the Stars

The tree-shaped Star Marrow Pillar radiated a silver glow that the denizens of darkness loathed.

By all rights, no inhabitant of the Inverse Realm should have approached this place, but the Inverse Realm had always been a world full of uncertainties.

What passed for common knowledge was merely a theoretical framework established by the fortress scholars after decades of exploration.

Yet the history of the Inverse Realm stretched far beyond those few short decades.

So discrepancies in that knowledge, or even outright errors, were hardly cause for surprise.

Tianyang faced the passage as he backed toward the Star Marrow Pillar. Its sacred silver light gave the boy the courage to withstand the darkness.

At last, it appeared.

Long black hair drifted like a mass of seaweed suspended in water, held aloft by some nameless force, radiating an intangible malice.

Beneath that hair was a young, beautiful woman's face, with delicate, snow-white skin and features as soft as flowing water.

Her neck was long and straight, but everything below the hollow of her throat was concealed beneath a dark gray cloak that enveloped her entire body.

Five fingers tipped with pitch-black nails scraped gently along the passage wall, making the sound Tianyang had heard earlier.

Almost.

For just a moment, Tianyang had almost believed he had encountered a human.

But when she entered the silver light cast by the Star Pillar, blue smoke suddenly rose from her beautiful, smooth face with a hiss.

Then a small strip of skin peeled off and fell to the ground, writhing like a white maggot!

Tianyang suddenly felt sick.

If that woman was made of those same things, then the sight of her body coming apart would probably be beyond anything the word disgusting could describe.

The woman-shaped creature cautiously stepped back. A milk-white liquid seeped from the wound on its scorched face, filling the damaged area, and its face soon returned to normal.

She-no, it!

It stared at the Star Marrow Pillar with hatred in its eyes, then reached a hand out from beneath its cloak.

An unusually slender, graceful hand.

Yet in the next instant, that hand turned hideous.

Its arm first swelled, then the muscles beneath its skin writhed, and its complexion shifted from white to red.

Finally, the skin burst open, and the hand became a blossoming bud.

Only what bloomed were not lovely petals, but tendrils of twisted flesh and blood. They plunged into the wall, tore away its surface, and ripped out a slab of concrete roughly a meter across.

Then hurled it at the Star Pillar!

The slab whistled through the air like a cannonball. Tianyang instinctively dropped to the ground, then heard the dull crash of impact and the patter of fragments as the shattered stone fell to the floor.

The boy hurriedly looked toward the Star Pillar. A small piece of "bark" had been chipped from the crystalline tree.

Seeing that the damage was negligible, the woman let out a maddening shriek filled with hatred, as though it and the Star Pillar were mortal enemies.

It suddenly flung open its cloak, but the body beneath it was the polar opposite of its beautiful face!

It was a horror that belonged only in nightmares. Words like ugly or hideous seemed utterly inadequate before it.

Tianyang swiftly looked away, unable to bear even another second of looking at it. Fear coiled around his heart like an icy python. Even afterward, however desperately he tried to remember, the boy could only dimly recall that the body beneath the cloak had hundreds of mouthparts.

From the corner of his eye, he could vaguely see thin streams of mist spraying from those mouthparts like venomous snakes.

The black mist fought the Star Pillar's silver light for space within the tunnel.

Where the two met, silver light darted through the black mist like lightning flashing inside summer thunderclouds.

Then the black mist vanished and the silver radiance receded, each canceling out the other.

Tianyang panted inside his helmet. He now knew what he had encountered.

The Girl of a Hundred Mouths!

Or, as it was also known, the Black-Mist Spreader!

The Reverse Realm Safety Manual had mentioned it. This denizen of darkness was regarded as a walking plague, a humanoid nightmare, an enemy of the light...

Spreaders released extremely concentrated black mist and were among the few denizens of darkness that did not fear the pillars' radiance. In fact, once they discovered a Star Marrow Pillar, they would treat it as an enemy and try every means possible to destroy it.

Its danger rating was three, on a scale based on Ascender ranks.

In other words, only Ascenders of rank three or higher could fight a Spreader.

For ordinary people, the manual's advice was to run-if they could get away.

So the moment the boy recovered his senses, he turned and ran, but the nightmare had no intention of letting him escape.

Before he could circle around the Star Pillar, something tightened around Tianyang's ankle. A sudden tug sent the boy crashing to the ground.

He looked back.

A cluster of tendrils had emerged from beneath the Spreader's cloak. Their surfaces were covered in clinging nerves and blood vessels, and they had wrapped tightly around his left foot.

"No, no, no!"

Tianyang sat up and tried to cut them with his dagger. Unfortunately, the Alloy Dagger, corroded by the Wanderers' bodily fluids, was no longer as sharp as it had been.

And though the Spreader's tendrils looked soft, their outer skin was outrageously tough.

The blade scraped across them with a teeth-grating sound.

The tendrils suddenly contracted, dragging Tianyang toward it. That loathsome body grew larger in the boy's vision. Even with all his strength, he could not stop himself from being pulled into the nightmare.

Tianyang was hoisted upside down into the air until his eyes were level with the Spreader's lovely face.

The woman parted its delicate lips, but what emerged was not an alluring red tongue. It was a mosquito's mouthpart magnified countless times.

The black, needle-like tube lightly touched Tianyang's visor. Fine, ice-like cracks appeared in the high-strength polyester faceplate, which could withstand over a ton of pressure.

Tianyang's pupils widened slightly in fear. With a faint snap, the deadly tube finally pierced the visor.

Nothing remained between it and the boy.

Darkness swiftly engulfed Tianyang's left eye. With a stab of pain, the cold tube, slick with mucus, punctured his soft eyeball!

"Aah!"

The boy let out an agonized scream. Amid the excruciating pain, savage fury replaced the fear in his remaining eye. Tianyang tightened his grip on the dagger and drove it viciously into one of the Spreader's eyes.

A tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye!

Surprisingly, the Spreader's eyeball was just as soft, and most of the blade sank into it.

The woman's mouthpart abruptly retracted. Only then did Tianyang see black mist leaking from the tip of the tube and dispersing.

The boy's heart sank. Had the Spreader injected something into him when the tube pierced his eye?

Before he could find an answer, his body flew through the air. In pain, the Spreader had lashed its tendrils and hurled Tianyang away.

He struck the Star Pillar, tumbled beneath the great tree, and landed facedown across its tangled, undulating roots.

Pain!

Agonizing pain!

It felt as though molten lava had been injected into his skull, flowing through the grooves and lobes of his brain, burning through everything in its path!

His face rapidly flushed scarlet inside his helmet, and black mucus streamed from the eye the Spreader had pierced.

Tianyang tore off his helmet without a thought, exposing himself to the air of the Inverse Realm. Clutching both temples, he curled up on the ground and howled in pain.

Pitch-black veins gradually bulged across his face, spreading like some sinister pattern and exuding an evil presence.

Blackness slowly crept along the edges of the boy's intact eye socket, shrouding the world before Tianyang in an impenetrable darkness!

Tianyang felt himself sinking. Everything he had experienced in his short seventeen years flashed across the wilderness of his consciousness.

Just before his consciousness sank into darkness, his mother's sorrowful eyes and Qin Wu's sneering face alternated endlessly in Tianyang's mind.

On one side was the family bond he could not bear to let go of; on the other, a hatred etched into his bones. The two emotions intertwined.

For one final time, they struck hard at Tianyang's nerves.

Then a thought surfaced in his mind.

I don't want to die...

I don't want to die.

I don't want to die!

I... want revenge!

A second thought arose, so powerful that it easily overwhelmed the first.

That fierce obsession sliced through the darkness like a blade, and the boy saw light.

Silver, sacred light, filled with hope.

Reach out. Grab it with all your strength!

Clang.

The Spreader pulled the dagger from its eye with a tendril. Ignoring its profusely bleeding socket, it turned its remaining eye toward the Star Pillar.

It resumed its attack.

It would not stop until it had destroyed this crystalline tree.

It failed to notice that the boy lying beneath the Star Pillar had closed one hand tightly around a root.

Within the silver radiance cast by that root, tiny glimmers seeped through the glove of his protective suit and settled on Tianyang's fingers.

Then...

They sank into them.

The boy's fingers lit up one after another, as though his flesh and blood held an entire galaxy!