I Got Here Just Fine, but Now I Can't Get Back!

"Eternal Elden Lord;

You are the light that shines across the Lands Between;

You are the one who brought the Golden Order to an end;

The king who walks beside the princess of the moon;

I pray for your gaze;

I pray for your power;

I pray for your guidance and your blessing."

A few candles illuminated the gloomy basement.

A group of fanatical black-robed believers surrounded a dying man, praying in unison to a certain taboo existence.

A tall, gaunt man at their head held a dagger aloft. At the end of the prayer, he brought it down, plunging it deep into the "sacrifice's" chest. Blood gushed out.

Suddenly, the candlelight twisted and spread across the walls. An oppressive pressure descended in an instant, filling the cramped space.

The black-robed figures were ecstatic. They prostrated themselves and cried out in unison.

"Lord! Aagh-" The prayer abruptly turned into a scream. It was brief, as though something had cut it off in his throat.

The basement fell silent for a moment. Everyone raised their heads, only to see half a corpse and a bloodstained fist.

The fist belonged to none other than the "sacrifice"!

"Where the fuck have I ended up? This isn't Earth!"

The great Elden Lord, the undefeated legend who had fought his way through the Lands Between, the king who had sealed the Frenzied Flame, the possessor of the perfect Golden Order, the moon princess's consort, Ranni's blade-the Tarnished-was staring blankly at the blood spraying before his eyes.

Of course, he could also be called by the name he had borne before transmigrating from Earth to the Lands Between: Li Ang.

Warm blood splattered onto the empty ground nearby. The black-robed figures remained on their knees, not one of them moving.

The Oracle was dead. A veteran Sequence 7 had returned to the Erdtree's embrace without a sound, without even time to react.

Yet the grisly sight did not frighten the believers. Instead, they grew even more fanatical. In an instant, the entire space filled with the sound of restrained, excited breathing.

It must be the Lord's blessing!

Li Ang sat up. His body responded more slowly than he had expected.

His combat instincts were still adapting to this new body. It was young and healthy, but lacked the tempering of countless battles.

He looked down at his hands. His fingers were long and slender, without calluses, and his nails were neatly trimmed. These were hands that had never gripped a sword hilt.

Why did only my soul descend?

Li Ang was puzzled. He had sensed the aura of his homeland among the stars, but when he followed it here, he found that it wasn't his home.

At the very least, he couldn't sense anything familiar.

"Good thing I became a god," he said. "A simple soul transmigration like this can't stop me!"

He intended to control his spirit body and return to the stars, but he froze when he looked down and spotted the dagger hilt in his chest.

He vaguely recalled that the aura of Earth he had sensed earlier seemed to have been shrouded in a Gray Fog he couldn't see through.

Perhaps he could look for fellow Earthlings he had met in other worlds and see if any of them were here.

Li Ang recalled the undead who had burned themselves as firewood, as well as the fellow Earthling who had worked as a Hunter in a world undergoing an industrial revolution. He took out a severed finger, a summoning item he had left behind long ago.

In the years since becoming a god, his only hobby besides searching for a way home had been collecting fellow transmigrators.

They had agreed to gather if any of them found news of Earth, but now was not the time.

So he reached out, gripped the dagger hilt, and pulled it free.

He tossed it aside, and the sound of metal striking stone brick echoed several times.

The wound closed as though an invisible hand were pressing it back together. Within seconds, only traces of blood remained.

Li Ang surveyed the crowd prostrated on the floor, disgust showing in his eyes.

Whether in the Lands Between or other worlds, he hated these fanatics.

For the moment, he had no desire to pay these ants any attention. Instead, he closed his eyes with practiced ease and began taking in the remnants of this body's memories.

Loen Kingdom, Tingen City.

Leon Kaspar was the name of this body.

He was the last surviving blood of a secretive family. The family had once possessed some Sequence Potions of the Apprentice and Reader Pathways, and its members often used occupations such as clerks, lawyers, teachers, and detectives as cover in ordinary society.

The body's original owner had been left a considerable fortune by his parents before their deaths, but for the sake of revenge, he had joined the Erdtree Church. He had even volunteered as a sacrifice to obtain the "Tarnished," a Pathway bestowed by an Outer Deity.

As a result, this group of fanatics had accidentally taken things too far.

Of course, the moment the great Elden Lord descended, he had indeed become a Beyonder.

The price had simply been a little steep.

Li Ang silently mourned the poor minor character, then opened his eyes and looked at the prostrate believers.

These people, who looked like there was something wrong with their heads, were actually his believers?

Then again, that made sense. Few who believed in the Erdtree had their heads screwed on right.

According to the original owner's memories, these people were absolute traitors to their own kind. Was their ultimate goal to have the Order of the Lands Between take over this place?

Have they had too many good days? Still, these people weren't entirely useless.

Li Ang sensed the prayers coming from all over this world. Among them were existences stronger than even those demigods of the Lands Between.

These people's faction seemed to be more powerful than the original owner remembered.

But the believers before him certainly couldn't be allowed to live. Though he had never been fond of killing, they had all seen the original owner's face.

Fortunately, none of them were good people. If he lined them up and chopped them down one by one, some might not deserve death, but if he killed every other one, some would definitely slip through the net.

Killing them all would count as a good deed.

And so, beneath the sidelong gazes of the prostrate black-robed figures, Li Ang slowly walked into their midst.

In an instant, a ghostly blue light spread out, and a flash of sword light traced an arc. The ghostly blue Dark Moon Greatsword appeared in his hand.

He heard the sound of fleeing footsteps, but didn't hurry to look.

The blade swept past, and most of the black-robed figures fell.

Their bodies were severed through the middle, the cuts smooth. Blood took a moment to well out.

Four people were still alive. They had already run to the edge of the basement, to the foot of the wall farthest from the door.

Li Ang paused.

It wasn't because he hadn't expected the fear of death to overcome their fanaticism. It was because his sword strike had actually allowed several people to run out of its range on their own two legs.

Was that the so-called power of Potions?

He looked at them curiously, then caught up to them in a flash.

A few breaths later, he ran the last person through from behind, the sword tip emerging from his chest.

Li Ang stood in the center of the altar and flicked the nonexistent blood from his sword.

The Dark Moon Greatsword dissolved into motes of light, and the basement grew dim again. Only the few nearly spent candles continued to burn weakly.

In Li Ang's sight, tiny golden motes slowly drifted out of a few scattered corpses and entered his body.

He looked around. There were no survivors. Dozens of corpses lay across the floor, their cuts smooth, blood seeping into the gaps between the stone bricks.

Now the whole family was together, every last one accounted for.

Even if someone did find them, they wouldn't connect it to him.

A cult had gone mad and fought among themselves.

Cultists dying violent deaths-how pleasing that sounded!

How reasonable!

Just as Li Ang was admiring how wise he still was, he heard footsteps again.

They came from outside the door. There was more than one person.

Boot soles struck the stone pavement at a steady pace. These weren't the casual steps of passersby; they were trained. And they were approaching the door.

Li Ang turned and fixed his eyes on the wooden door at the basement entrance. The footsteps drew closer and reached the door.

He heard a low male voice say something, another person respond, and then the doorknob began to turn.

He turned his wrist, ready to summon the Dark Moon Greatsword again.

Whoever it was, he would cut them down first and talk later.

Anyone appearing here at a time like this had to be connected to the black-robed people on the floor.

If he killed the wrong person, he would just call it silencing a witness!

The door opened a crack, and light squeezed through, cutting a narrow strip across the floor.

Li Ang tightened his grip on the hilt, his forearm muscles tensing as he prepared to leap at them with a greatsword Lion's Claw.

Then his knees suddenly buckled.

Without any warning, as though someone had kicked the backs of his knees, his body pitched forward and his face met the floor.

He tried to get up, but found that, starting at his fingertips, it was as if something were being drawn out of him. His strength, warmth, and consciousness were all being pulled away together.

It was too late. The door was pushed fully open.

Light flooded in from outside. Li Ang's vision was already beginning to blur, and he could only make out several backlit silhouettes standing in the doorway.

One figure walked at the front, with gray eyes and a dark trench coat. There were two others behind him: one was slender, and the other stood very straight.

He suddenly realized something.

A Sequence 9's recovery couldn't keep up with the power he had unleashed. The young master's body had already reached its limit by lasting this long.

Oh boy, I overdid it!

But it didn't matter. At worst, he would just stop playing.

With some regret, Li Ang controlled the spirit body within the Elden Ring to break free. It raced toward the world's atmosphere, intending to return to the stars.

Play it safe first, then find my fellow Earthlings.

But just as he was about to ascend into the starry sky, a massive barrier abruptly stopped him and bounced him back into the body that was about to lose consciousness.

When his vision returned to the body, only one thought remained in his mind.

I got here just fine, but now I can't get back!!!

In his final moments of consciousness, he heard the gray-eyed man say one thing.

"Klein, there's still someone alive."