I had a dream. Or rather, another dream.

  Distorted avenues and bifurcations opened across the terrain. An oppressive air of danger lingered over the uneven lands of that place, while the tall, menacing buildings kept every sense in my body on alert.

  The image felt familiar, yet… incomplete. There was the feeling that something had been removed from where it rightfully belonged.

  Between the shadows cast by the buildings, creatures moved. As deformed as the place itself. They attacked each other, tore at one another, devoured one another — like shadows fighting for space beneath a nonexistent light.

  Until a familiar silhouette emerged.

  That tower again…

  In the next instant, everything crumbled into dust.

  I woke to the crackle of the campfire beside me. Still dazed, I remained motionless on the cave’s stone floor, watching the shadows cast by the flames dance along the wall.

  I sighed.

  “Again…?”

  I don’t know how long I walked.

  The wind never stopped. It simply existed — constant, heavy, as if it wanted to push me away from any possible direction. Snow covered everything. Sky and ground were the same.

  A dense white, without horizon.

  My legs ached. Still, I kept walking.

  There were no traces of my own footsteps. The wind erased everything seconds later, as if I had never been there. As if walking left no record in that place.

  Then I saw it.

  In the middle of the void, something wrong.

  A massive tear stretched across the air, irregular, pulsing slowly. It emitted no true light, yet it fractured the surrounding white like an open scar in the world. The blizzard did not touch it. Snow vanished before reaching its edges.

  It was terrifying — but it was different.

  And in that place, difference was all I had.

  I didn’t think. I didn’t even look back. If that was death, at least it wouldn’t be white oblivion.

  I walked toward the tear.

  The cold vanished suddenly.

  After that…

  I remember nothing else.

  When I woke, I realized I was in a very familiar place.

  I stood at the top of a high mountain — very high. High enough to grant me a clear view of where I was. It stretched for miles, revealing uneven terrain carved by trails, ravines, and natural bifurcations.

  Something in the distance caught my attention. I strained my eyes — and then I saw it.

  The tower.

  Black. Colossal. Stretching into the heavens as if it had no end. Even from that distance, its presence crushed everything around it.

  In that instant, everything fell into place.

  The images from the dream came back in disordered flashes — distorted avenues, wrong paths, that same silhouette watching from afar. The feeling that had followed me since waking finally found a name.

  Familiarity.

  I studied the terrain around me more carefully. My memory had never been good with images, but it didn’t need to be. The arrangement of the trails, the cuts in the mountains, the natural paths forced by the landscape…

  Everything pointed to the same place.

  It was a mountain range very similar — perhaps identical — to the Passagem de Keal’var.

  Yet still different. Darker. More hostile.

  Like a distorted reflection of the real place.

  Snow was still there, but it thinned as the horizon stretched on, giving way to exposed rock and shadows too deep for that hour.

  A few meters from where I had awakened, I noticed an ancient altar. Broken structures, fallen columns, stone worn by time — or by something worse.

  I stood there in silence.

  After a few minutes, the sun began to rise.

  It was strange. Too white. Its light did not warm as it should; it only revealed the landscape with uncomfortable clarity.

  That was when I felt it.

  A tingling beneath my skin.

  It began at my neck and slowly slid down to my left arm, crawling like a venomous snake. My body reacted before I could understand.

  When the light of that white sun fully touched my skin, the mark appeared.

  Like a living tattoo, formed of bifurcated patterns that seemed to move subtly. The smell came right after — heavy, nauseating.

  It reeked like the curse it was.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  This thing does not appear because it wants to or without reason. Nothing in this system manifests without cause or explanation.

  Everything meant one thing: the place where I stood was not safe. The danger here was constant. Intimate.

  This place was Tartarus. That explained the unrest within this thing.

  I don’t know how many days have passed since I parted ways with Ilen. Guessing, probably four or six.

  The sense of time in this place is complicated. The sun, most of the time, remains hidden behind clouds, making it difficult to distinguish day from night.

  Eventually, I had to find another way to measure the hours.

  I observed the creatures.

  Most do not hunt during the day. In that period, the fauna decreases drastically, making the environment slightly less hostile. Not safe — just less active.

  That was how I began to recognize time.

  All those cruel details only reinforced, day after day, how different that place was from anything I had ever known.

  In the past few days, my routine had been reduced to three things:

  Cultivate.

  Fight.

  Survive.

  I must admit that life in the streets and outskirts of the city had accustomed me to constant hostility. But there, danger came from people trying to rob you, deceive you, or stab you when you let your guard down.

  Here, it was different.

  Here, deformed beasts killed each other all the time. And I was just another potential prey among them.

  Even so, patterns existed.

  The creatures I had faced so far were not random. All hunted in specific ways, exploiting clear advantages — speed, strength, ambush. But they also shared something in common: weaknesses too evident to ignore.

  It was impossible not to notice.

  Like the Crawler, they were specialized… and limited.

  Once I observed enough, victory stopped being brute force and became timing and position. Waiting too long was death. Attacking too early was also death.

  The system itself seemed to agree.

  Whenever one of those things fell, the term was always the same.

  Wretches.

  No matter the form or size — the name repeated itself. As if that were less a species… and more a category.

  Perhaps that was why they were like that.

  Incomplete predators. Dangerous — but defective.

  In five days, I learned more than I wanted to. Tartarus favors no one — but it responds.

  There are alternative means of advancing cultivation — crystals, herbs, remains of things that still pulsed with energy. All of it made the mark react, as if it recognized food.

  The problem was always the same.

  Nothing there remained unguarded.

  Where there was concentrated energy, there were Minor Spawns. Some lived around those sources; others simply appeared, drawn by the invisible scent of energy and souls.

  In the end, I was no different.

  To them, I was also a source.

  Perhaps that was why I spent most of my time hidden. Observing. Survival came before growth.

  Another thing became clear far too quickly: souls matter.

  Not as an explicit transaction, but as a pattern. The more I hunted, the more the mark reacted — slow, sluggish, but reactive.

  Here, souls were value.

  And the more I observed, the more an uncomfortable idea took shape.

  Everything seemed connected.

  My penance beginning before the others. The Crawler outside Tartarus. The black tower, present even in my dreams.

  Maybe it was paranoia.

  But in Tartarus, ignoring patterns was the fastest way to die.

  I had spent the entire night cultivating inside the labyrinth of shadows — the place that had already been taken from me during my first attempt.

  The mark was still there, embedded beneath the skin, pulsing irregularly. It no longer hurt like before, but it had not disappeared either.

  I took a deep breath and remained still for a few seconds, waiting for the sensation to subside.

  When I finally managed to move, I sat up slowly. Every muscle complained. Prolonged cultivation had its cost, and constant exposure to the Mark of Sin left traces that did not appear on the skin.

  I picked up a piece of dried meat, torn from one of the smaller creatures I had slain the day before. The taste was bad — too metallic — but it sustained me.

  I ate without haste.

  Outside, the sky was beginning to brighten. The pale light of dawn pierced through the thick clouds, revealing distant silhouettes of mountains and irregular trails ahead.

  I stood.

  It was time to keep moving forward.

  I walked along narrow trails, natural stone formations that resembled suspended bridges over the void. Ahead, the terrain opened into a tangle of irregular rocks, rising like gravestones in a cemetery.

  Something dangerous caught my attention.

  A pack of lupine beasts prowled the area — low, muscular bodies, six eyes distributed incorrectly across their faces. They hunted in silence, alert.

  When one turned its head in my direction, I knew there was no choice.

  I vanished using [Null Step] in that same instant.

  Even so, they already knew someone was there.

  My body disappeared between one shadow and another, swallowed by the absences cast by the rocks. I did not move quickly. I moved correctly.

  One wolf fell without making a sound, its throat opened before the others understood what had happened.

  Another tried to react.

  It failed.

  The shadows of the terrain worked in my favor, and the MoS responded better than before — cold, patient, almost comfortable within that rhythm.

  One by one, they fell, without ever forming a proper pack.

  And so on.

  Before the scent attracted other hungry predators — or scavenger Spawns — I used the beast’s own canine tooth to tear a portion of its hide free.

  Like a cloak, I draped the wolf’s pelt over my shoulders.

  Then I continued on my way.