Chapter 371: Layer Skipping

Words : 1930 Updated : Oct 9th, 2025

Chapter 371: Layer Skipping *** {Inside The Projection} Darkness. A familiar kind. It was oppressive and suffocating, pressing down from every direction. That darkness materialized in an underground arena. One carved deep beneath the world. Ancient, likely to have existed before the concept of "surface" was even a thing. Indeed, this was Al-Fawra’s Second Layer... And Malik stood at the dead center of that. He had come back to what once made him tremble. His golden eyes calmly locked forward. Far. At the very far end of the arena. There it was. An upside-down cross. Massive, towering, and crooked. Nailed to it was a man. Bearded. Robed. Tattered. Ragged. Skin cracked and peeling but not decayed. No. This thing wasn’t allowed to rot. His arms were wide. Hands speared through the palm. His feet stacked. Ankles crushed beneath stakes thicker than Malik was tall. The head was tilted down at first, chin to chest, eyes hidden beneath a wild mane of hair. He was still... lifeless, until— Creeeaaak. The neck jerked. It snapped upwards, a puppet pulled by invisible strings. The hair parted, and Malik saw it. His face. Pristine. Too pristine. Its eyes were locked onto him, pitch black and bottomless. A wide grin made it onto his face. Too wide, ear to ear, his teeth far too many. There was no need for it to speak, for that smile said all that it needed to say. And besides, Malik already knew what its goal was. He raised his right hand, showing three fingers. ...Three seconds. Invisible hands of Corruption went forth. Two. He tilted his head, dodging them. One. Another came from below, but before it could reach him... "Zero." Malik flicked his pointing finger at it. A spark of white fire formed, killing all that was around him in a pulse. Then it shot forth—FWOOOM—with a loud detonation, hitting the grinning statue’s head. It was obliterated at once, shattering into dust from the top down. Everything behind it was destroyed, forming a tunnel. A perfect, straight tunnel bored deep into the earth. This was his Path forward. Malik lowered his hand. "...Hm." He walked. *** {Outside The Projection} The projection unpaused moments before the impact. First frame—FWOOOM, the twisted monument that beheaded Malik twenty-five years ago was gone, turned into dust by a flick, a tiny spark of flame, erased like it never existed, perhaps forever. The crowd didn’t react. It was too sudden. They just turned to the projection and watched him calmly walk. Walk further down Al-Fawra, the Abyss. It was incredible. Terrifying. So, so terrifying. A glimpse of what weight he carried. They all now confirmed what he planned to do. What he was currently doing. The Zeroth Layer. He truly went there. To the Mouth of God. That was how he entered Hell. That was ’Where All Paths Lead.’ That was how he was, ’Beneath The Olive Tree.’ Malik had done the impossible once more. He had done all that he could to save them. The knives in their souls twisted... Oh, they were unworthy. *** {Inside The Projection} Wind howled and dust whipped past. Malik stood right on the edge of a cliff, his boots planted firmly. He stared down, his hands behind his back. The cliff was massive. No... calling it a ’cliff’ felt wrong. This thing was someone’s nightmare given form. A vertical wall of jagged black rock, a straight drop ten miles down. It looked scary at first glance, but it wasn’t exactly a hard obstacle. Yes, mortals would find it impossible, but Mithqals like him? They could just jump down without any problems. But of course, it’d never be that easy. This was the Third Layer, and here... Gravity was backwards. Down was up, and up was down. Essentially, Malik had to climb upward to reach the bottom. He’d have to fight through gravity that would get heavier and denser, Aether spiking it way beyond possible the further down he went. Now ’climbing’ would’ve taken too long, so Malik wanted to improvise. He shifted his weight and tested it with a single step. The moment his foot left the ledge—whooooom—his body jolted out of the hole, flying upwards like someone yanked him by the neck. Yeah. Reverse gravity was confirmed. Going down meant climbing. The old Malik might’ve taken a moment, thought a little, planned, and maybe even looked around, checking for an easier way down, or a tool, a trick, or a spell. This Malik, however, didn’t need any of that. The ground beneath his boots cracked. Hoves of fire burned deep. BOOM. A single stomp. Malik didn’t climb. He walked... Walked straight down the cliff that tried its hardest to throw him back. The air compressed, bent the world, and gravity quadrupled with each step downward. Somewhere past halfway, it felt like the entire planet was sitting on his shoulders. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. His footsteps echoed louder than any war drum. Those ten miles? He ’climbed’ them in ten seconds. By the time he hit the bottom— BOOM! The walls of black rock shook, breaking off. Marks of his passage remained burned into the cliff face, a signature he left for those who came after him. Malik stood at the bottom, his chin tilted down. He stared at the next path ahead. The Fourth Layer. A desert. An endless, Shamsless, merciless wasteland. It wasn’t sand, though. No. This wasn’t some pretty little dunescape. This was just... flat and cracked, dead earth. Gray. Black. White. Bleached by things no mortal Shams could ever burn. And it stretched. It stretched forever. Malik’s golden eyes scanned the land. Beneath the burning sky, there were Anomalies. Thousands, tens of thousands... maybe millions. They tore reality apart, stitching, snapping, and undoing themselves. Over and over and over, little bubbles of broken Laws that popped in and out of existence. One second, a piece of the ground folded into itself like paper, and the next, it imploded in color and light, destroying all that was around it. A fully grown tree appeared, blossoming at once, and then imploding. A river split open in the middle of the air; it ran like a waterfall for five seconds, froze over, shattered, and then burned into dust. Nothing here made sense, for no Laws were followed. And Malik, of course, was familiar with these Anomalies. It was only that the one type of Anomaly he knew was the type that imploded and killed him more times than he bothered to count. What he wasn’t so familiar with were these rare Anomalies that were barely visible through the destruction. Because sometimes—just sometimes—something stayed in the wasteland. Right, after a few whined their loudest, items were left behind. Holy Relics... Objects that didn’t obey the rules of God or men. But most times? It was just failure, more implosions. Malik didn’t know what to do exactly. Most of what he read about this Layer was useless. The seekers that dove here were few and far between, and most of those that did never made it back up, either unable to handle opposing the flow of Aether, or just too greedy, having overencumbered themselves by carrying too many Law-breaking things, ruining all their chances of survival. Still, the few that survived claimed that this was the home of— BOOM. ...BOOM... .....BOOM..... A loud tremor came. Malik paused mid-step. The ground beneath him rippled. A shadow revealed itself... no, a shape, a body. Something was buried deep under the crust of this broken layer. Something with a back, a spine made of millions of jagged, armor-plated segments. The plates cracked the surface and rose, curved like mountains, each bigger than a palace. BOOOOOOOOOOOM. Then a limb breached through the earth. A leg?... No. An arm? It was hard to tell. It slammed down somewhere far, far away from him, but the quake alone made the ground around him scream. Was that on purpose? Did it care that Malik was here? Oh yeah. It certainly did care. This limb chased after him. Another pierced through, closer this time. BOOM. Malik couldn’t waste a single moment, immediately stepping out of there. Still, he wasn’t safe. Every few seconds, one of those enormous limbs shot out of the ground, getting closer and closer to him, even as he moved. And those close enough tried to crush him, swipe him, snatch him, and even drag him under. It didn’t work. Malik didn’t seem to care. A being beyond anything he had ever fought wanted to feed on him, but he casually walked forward, every step a dodge from death’s widest embrace. Indeed, for those limbs belonged to what was above Elder Sandworms, whom he once believed to be their oldest, their Venerable. The protector of their species, a thirteen-cored Simurgh, a Behemoth, two Major Ranks below the peak of the Cursed Hierarchy. He could fight it, perhaps even win, but it’d be a very tough battle, even for the current him. It had thirteen cores, which meant that it neared becoming a Zahhak, a being of Chaos, capable of destroying literal planets and bending reality. So, instead of wasting his time doing something he wasn’t supposed to do, he kept stepping forward, dodging, and searching for the hole that’d send him to the Fifth Layer. But just as he landed another step, an Anomaly suddenly spawned right in front of him, forming a cube of inverted light, something that would’ve erased anyone and anything from existence if it were touched. Malik just flicked his fingers and stepped past. The cube met his white fire. It shattered. BOOOM! At the same time, a bolt of lightning cracked down from nowhere. Malik stepped back, and it split the ground before him into molten rivers. His cloak fluttered in the wind as he watched. Blinking once, he walked forward. That was it, no other reaction. Almost as if he were disconnected from the world. Did he care about the horror chasing after him? No. He didn’t even bother to look out for it. It chased, it swiped, and Malik walked. And walked. And walked. He took no breaks. Just endless walking. Minutes? Hours? Years? He didn’t know; again, time didn’t exist for him. Walking was all that was on his mind. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. Until finally... "I found you." His Path downward. A perfect circle leading straight down. It was pitch black with no bottom in sight. Malik paused at the edge and looked down. Ever so casually, he took a quick glance behind him, at the rapidly approaching Simurgh, and then stepped forward, falling into the dark. His body vanished. *** {Outside The Projection} Yeah... no one was exactly surprised anymore. Not after everything they’d seen... After watching him rip through the impossible so easily. But still... It was a SIGHT. A man walking straight through the Fourth Layer, one of the worst, the kind of place where entire expeditions died just trying to map. He didn’t fight anything but went with the flow. It didn’t matter if it was gravity bending, Anomalies popping, or reality itself screaming and folding. Malik walked unbothered. He literally skipped everything! Nothing was conquered or defeated. It was all ignored. A Layer that entire generations of seekers, kings, and lunatics would kill to survive. He skipped it like stepping over a puddle on the road. Skipped over their complex habitats and challenges. This was what pure power and control allowed. The crowd stood with their breath held. They had long since stopped arguing. There was only silence now. Humbled silence.

Chapter 371: Layer Skipping

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