LEVEL 0 IMMORTAL

Chapter 195: You Hold Three

To say he fully understood the nightmarish event that had just transpired was wrong, but Elias was mostly following his instincts, and luckily for him, at this time, those instincts had not led him wrong, but he had seen what should be the third object he needed to find, and he swam toward it.

His body was slow and heavy, as if the weight of the dead had been permanently added to his body, but Elias swam stroke by stroke, and it helped that he only had to direct himself over the glowing gem.

The gem pulsed with soft blue light, and as he drew closer, he could see that it was not a gem at all, or if it was, it was the strangest gem he had ever seen. To him, this was a tear, resembling a single drop of water, frozen in time.

Darkness was slowly closing around him, and Elias wondered if he had been underwater for hours. He could no longer deliberate on this issue, and he reached for the gem. The instant he touched it, the surrounding water erupted.

He had felt them beneath him the whole time, these unknown beasts of the deep, the ones that had circled him when he first entered the lake. Now they exploded from the darkness below, massive shapes, larger than the Alpha, even larger than any of the bone trees in the forest.

Elias could not perceive their entire shape, only glimpses of massive tentacles that could crush him into paste, gigantic teeth larger than his body, and a sense of power that dwarfed his own, making him feel like a mortal in front of gods.

This was all he saw before his surroundings changed, and he was not in the lake anymore. He was in a white void, and the Tear was warm in his hand, pulsing with a rhythm that matched his heartbeat.

"You took it," a voice said, and Elias froze, because he recognized this voice, and it belonged to the Fragment of the goddess that had killed him inside the Fragment and whose cleansing had created his infinite pools of Lumina.

"They always take it. They always think it will save them."

A figure appeared in the void. It was a woman, no, a goddess, tall and pale, her hair the color of water, and her eyes the color of the sky before a storm.

Elias felt he was seeing a small part of her beauty and presence, like a mortal who stands on the shore of a beach and thinks they have seen the entire ocean, and yet, she was beautiful in the way that deep water was beautiful, terrible, and serene, holding depths that could drown you if you looked too long.

A thought passed through Elias’s mind. ’I should write a song to you, for you are beautiful and terrible like a storm... I can understand how mortals would worship beings like you.’

It was as if this goddess could hear his thoughts as she smiled, and her teeth were like those of sharks.

"You are not the first to come here, little vessel. You are not the first to take the Tear. Others have come before you, strong and proud, certain that they could bear the weight of what it holds. They are all dead now. Or worse, and the Tear returns to the depths."

Elias frowned. He did not know why Commander Yseult created this trial or its purpose, but it did not seem normal, and Elias had been able to push through most of the madness and strangeness surrounding the trial because he believed that this was related to his training and the mysteries surrounding his life.

However, with everything that was happening, Elias could no longer believe that this trial should be looked at as a trial any longer, and he should be a bit more careful with every step he took.

He looked down at the Tear in his hand, and because this goddess seemed to be present here, he asked, "What does it hold?"

"Sorrow," she said. "The sorrow of the world. The sorrow of the gods who died, the sorrow of the men who killed them, the sorrow of everything that was lost when the old world ended, and the new world began."

She stepped closer. Her eyes were deep, deep as the lake, deep as the ocean, deep as the void between stars.

"You have survived much. You have killed many. You have carried much. But you have never carried sorrow like this. You have never carried the weight of a world that ended, of a future that was stolen, and a hope that was drowned in blood. It is better you give it up."

"If I give it up, what happens to me?"

"You have touched the Divine, you will die."

Elias sighed, "Then I will carry it... until the weight kills me."

She studied him for a long moment. Then, slowly, she smiled. "Perhaps, you can."

Her figure vanished, and Elias blinked, wondering if everything he had just seen was real, or if he was still drowning inside the lake and this was his mind trying to preserve something left.

Suddenly a heavy weight filled his chest, as if water was pouring into his lungs, and he nearly screamed, but he was not feeling pain, but something greater... sorrow. They poured into his body, and Elias stared at his hand, where the Tear glowed brightly, and he smiled despite the sorrow filling him so much that he could barely breathe.

When it was over, he was on his knees. The void was gone, and the lake was gone. He was kneeling on the edge of the still lake, and the Tear of Sorrow was cold in his hand, his body broken and bleeding, his lungs burning, and his heart pounding in his chest.

It was almost as if everything that had happened was not real, and he checked his Status Screen to see that indeed it had all happened.

Vitality: 1123 / 4551

Stamina: 089 / 973

A deep groaning sound made him look up, and the surroundings had shrunk; he could see the stone pressing in from all sides, and it would not be long before the ceiling was low enough to touch.

The cavern was dying, and he was still inside it. How long had he spent inside that lake, and how much damage would his body have suffered if he had not exited it in time?

He tucked the Tear into his torn vest beside the Heartwood and the Echo Stone and pushed himself to his feet, and turned around, his eyes on the tunnel on the other side of the bone forest. He had gotten three objects, and now for the last.

Elias noticed that the bone forest was silent, the roots no longer left the ground; it was as if they were aware that this entire place was about to collapse, and they had resigned themselves to perish alongside it.

A frightening thought entered Elias’s mind: what if this entire place was created by Commander Yseult for the purpose of this trail alone? What sort of power would someone have to attain to be able to do something like this?

The more of the test that Elias had gone through, the more he began to appreciate the sort of power that had gone into its creation.