Nightmare's Call

Lin Sheng played the harp for a while with a target in mind before he headed home. At home, he briefly explained himself to his parents and sister and then hit the sack to go into dreams.

His aim was the face of a thousand arms at the bottom of the pool. Without the ax, he could do nothing. He had tried last night without the ax many times. Even with his half-dragon form, Sacred Blood, and sacred power activated at the same time, he could barely rip off one of the limbs of the face with a thousand arms and leave some bruises on its skin.

So, Lin Sheng was determined to kill the face with a thousand arms and make it his summoned creature.

While lying in bed with his eyes closed, Lin Sheng commanded in his mind two vault guards to patrol the perimeter around his house and kill anything that posed a threat. When his mind settled, he let his consciousness dip so that it went into a state of trance.

Soon, Lin Sheng heard the clock ticking, and he regained his consciousness.

When he opened his eyes, he found himself standing in a dim, misty space between the stone chamber and the pool, surrounded by walls that glimmered in green. Up ahead, a bright green light leaked through the gap in the wall of the stone chamber, and behind him, two arms were creeping on the ground.

Lin Sheng quietly lunged into the stone chamber and summoned his sacred power so that it shrouded him before he deftly snatched the ax from the stone statue’s hand and darted over to the pool. He had done this a dozen times over, and most of the time, it took less than five seconds to complete the whole action. Apparently, his rehearsal of last night had paid off.

He soon heard some muffled sound in the pool. The face with a thousand arms was only as large as a basin now, but it still could not seem to evade Lin Sheng’s attack. Needless to say, it was brutally hit by the ax in the face.

“No!” The face with a thousand arms howled and groaned in pain, with the same response each time. It had apparently lost its mind and become delirious.

All of a sudden, the ax disappeared into a ray of white light, and in the blink of an eye, it was back in the hand of the stone statue in the stone chamber. Again, Lin Sheng came back in, snatched the ax, and returned to the pool. And then the entire process started all over again.

Things went on for an hour before a voice wailed antagonistically, and the vault began to shake violently. Lin Sheng stood by the pool, striking the ax into the pool for the one last time. The face with a thousand arms, only the size of a human face now, was slashed across its face from left to right, leaving behind a large cut wound that glimmered in green light. Immediately, a gray mist of fervent heat spurted out from the gash.

Again, the face with a thousand arms wailed loudly.

The vault began to shake violently. Rocks and sand started to fall from the ceiling and walls cracking open. The same happened under Lin Sheng’s feet as dark and seemingly bottomless fissures formed in the ground. The only place unaffected by the collapse was the stone chamber, as if what happened on the outside did not concern it.

The situation was becoming desperate for Lin Sheng. There was not a place for him to rest his feet on as the whole place was falling apart. He was forced to back up into the stone chamber. Standing at the entrance, he quietly observed the scene of the disaster outside.

Soon, the tremor stopped. By then, rocks, big and small, had filled the pool, and a large portion of the green liquid had flowed out through the cracks, revealing the real face of the monster in the pool.

It turned out that a skinny, white-haired, mummy-like old man wearing a dark-yellow magician robe was at the bottom of the pool. Holding a staff in hand with his eyes closed, he looked just like any other elderly. But when looking carefully, Lin Sheng found that the mouth of the old man had been stitched up. Not only that, this old man had a missing arm, and his only arm was covered in a light-gold tattoo. It was not easy to spot it at first because the gold color of the tattoo had blended in with the yellow of the robe.

The old man slowly opened his eyes, revealing a pair of cloudy and vacant yellowish pupils. He seemed to want to say something, but he could not. His mouth had been sewn. Very quickly, the old man’s body dissolved, vaporized and turned into plumes of black smoke, which rapidly took the shape of a thick blackline before flying toward Lin Sheng.

“So here it goes!” Lin Sheng was ready for this moment. After all the painstaking troubles, he could not afford to mess up the absorption step.

He stepped out of the stone chamber, just in case when he passed out, the stone statue attacked him because he was unable to use his sacred power to shroud his body.

Although the tremor around the pool had stopped, cracks were all over the place. But as long as Lin Sheng watched his steps, he should be fine. He quickly loped to a safe spot at a corner, and as soon as he sat down with his legs crossed, a blackline dived into his chest.

He heard a loud boom in his mind as if his brain had exploded. Whispers, distorted breaths, messages and sensations rushed into his mind. Feeling like his skull was going to fall apart, he dropped to the ground, and his body began to twitch uncontrollably.

The experience was very different from previously. Images were dark, colorless and formless. Aside from utter darkness, there was nothing else. The whispers were unintelligible, the voice sounding like the buzz from a beehive—there were noisy, evil, painful, helpless, fury, and madness. He could sense all the negative emotions from the whispers, and the only physical sense available to Lin Sheng was his hands.

“Could you lend me your hands?” a voice suddenly said in the dark.

Lin Sheng froze, as an unexplained, eerie chill spread through his body, which then quivered violently. It was horrifying, but he could not tell what emotion it was.

Then in the dark, he seemed to see a lonely, horrific soul gradually turned creepy in loneliness and distortion. The sense of touch was its only way to learn about the world. Not only that, this sense of touch only worked with his hands while the rest of its deformed body was merely a shell devoid of feeling.

To satisfy its exploratory desire, this soul gradually became a monster. It greedily asked for help from others, from whom he would harvest their hands. As time went by, its collection of hands grew until an old man in a golden mask found it and traded one of his arms for this place—in the pool.

The memory stopped abruptly. Following that, the blurry face of a child emerged in the dark, smiling at Lin Sheng. He suddenly fell facedown and began to retch. A cold was running through his body, which twitched violently as if some of his nerves had withered while some overgrown. His hands became overly sensitive—it was so touchy that he would feel a sharp pain whenever his hands touched the ground. But what was more appalling was that he could feel the soul fragments he acquired this time were as many as the entire collection of souls he had taken in previously.

“Khadula...” Lin Sheng retched, uttering a name that carried fear in itself. “Your name is Khadula.” His mind a muddle, but the smiling face of the boy was vivid and clear in his mind.

Khadula was the name that the old man with a gold mask gave to the boy. It meant sin in ancient Rehn language. Coincidentally, a character was the only differentiation that set apart the syllables of the name and ‘sacrament’ in ancient Rehn.