After a few more days of rest, Belial finally felt better.
Not great, but better. The poison had mostly left his system—still a faint burn in his bones, a lingering sting in his joints—but he could move again. Stretch. Think clearly. Breathe without that crackling tightness in his lungs. The regeneration had taken longer than he expected, and his stomach hadn't stopped growling since morning.
It growled incessantly, a low rumble that had started at dawn and grown into a persistent demand. The chamber's rations were long depleted. The he hadn't hadn't restocked, and Belial wasn't one to wait for charity. He was a predator, not a patient. If he wanted to eat, he'd have to hunt.
Night had fallen—or at least, what passed for night under the artificial sky of this strange, crystalline world. The dome above gleamed with a cold, glassy sheen, reflecting pale, lifeless light. No stars pierced its surface, no constellations offered guidance. Just an endless expanse of grey, smooth and unyielding. Belial stepped outside the bedroom chamber, rolling his shoulders to test their strength. His wings unfurled with a soft snap—leathery, wide, their crimson veins faintly glowing in the dim light. The air felt synthetic, a manufactured breeze that carried no scent of earth or life, but it was enough to lift him.
He flew.
Each beat of his wings sent a dull ache through his frame, a reminder of his still-healing body. But he pressed forward, cutting through the cold air, his senses sharp despite the lingering weakness. The landscape below was a jagged maze of crystalline spires and shadowed valleys, a terrain sculpted by a civilization long dead. He scanned for movement, for any sign of life in this desolate place.
His nostrils flared, catching a faint, musky scent—a Hollow.
It wasn't large. A runt, barely more than a juvenile, its scrawny form skittering across the cracked ground below.
Belial's eyes narrowed.
A baby Hollow wasn't much of a meal, but it would do. He tilted his wings, angling into a silent dive, when the creature spotted him. It let out a shrill, piercing shriek that echoed across the valley, a call for something bigger, something meaner. Belial cursed under his breath. A full-grown Hollow was the last thing he needed in his condition.
He didn't hesitate.
Swooping low, he snatched the youngling mid-air, its shrill cries muffled as his clawed hand closed around its slender frame. The creature squirmed, its talons scrabbling uselessly against his armored grip. With a powerful beat of his leathery wings, Belial surged upward, vanishing into the low-hanging clouds just before the answering roar of a larger beast echoed across the jagged terrain below. Survival of the fittest, he thought grimly. The law of this world, same as any other.
Back in the chamber, the crystalline walls shimmered faintly with the light of the rekindled fireplace. The old pit was nothing but cinders now, long gone cold during his last absence, so he'd built another—cruder, but functional. Flames danced within the polished stone basin, their light refracting off the crystal and casting fractal shadows across the floor and ceiling like a slow-moving kaleidoscope.
He worked quickly. Skinning and gutting the Hollow was second nature by now, his fingers moving with the clinical precision of someone who had done this far too often. The ether-stove embedded in the wall hissed to life, its cold blue flame curling hungrily around the meat. It sizzled and popped, filling the air with that now-familiar earthy, bitter scent. It wasn't appetizing—but then again, survival rarely was.
He sat on the edge of his cot, gnawing through the tough, stringy flesh with methodical indifference. Each bite was a reminder that he was still here. Still breathing. Still fighting.
When the meal was done, he wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist and leaned back, exhaling slowly. His eyes wandered upward to the glowing ceiling, where the firelight shimmered like distant stars trapped in stone.
He looked up at the firelight going up until he noticed something familiar..
There it was. The locked door.
It hung above him, set into the ceiling of the chamber, its surface etched with the same crystalline patterns he'd seen in the archives. Hexagons and orbiting glyphs glowed faintly, floating just above the door's surface. Belial recognized it instantly—a relic from the game that had shaped so much of his understanding of this world. Back then, it had been a puzzle, one of those infuriating "flip mechanics" that reversed gravity and forced the player to walk on the ceiling to progress. It was designed to challenge perception, to twist logic until the solution clicked. But the protagonist of that game had been powerless, reliant on scripted mechanics and clever tricks.
Belial was no protagonist. He had wings.
With a stretch and a few strong flaps, he rose into the air, the ache in his muscles a dull reminder of his limits. The ceiling-turned-floor approached, and he landed lightly, his boots clicking against the smooth surface. The locked door loomed before him, its glyphs pulsing with a soft, etheric resonance. In the game, this puzzle had been a nightmare—a timed rotation challenge layered with code fragments and abstract number sequences. Hours of trial and error, of memorizing patterns and cursing the developers' sadistic creativity.
But here, in this reality, it was different. Belial could feel the solution. His eyes scanned the markings, drawn to the symbols that hummed with energy, their rhythm syncing with the faint pulse of his own etheric core. His fingers moved almost instinctively, pressing and rotating the glyphs in a sequence that felt less like logic and more like intuition. The pattern lit up, a soft white glow spreading across the door's surface. With a low, resonant hum, the door shuddered and slid open.
Beyond it lay a chamber unlike any he'd seen.
He flew through, landing gently on what should've been the ceiling but now felt like the floor. The room seemed to rotate his sense of orientation, a slow, disorienting shift until everything felt right again. It was as if the space itself adjusted to his presence, bending the laws of gravity to suit its own logic. A workshop, but upside down—tools scattered across walls, hanging as if pinned by an invisible force. Shelves jutted sideways, their contents defying physics. Workbenches spiraled upward and downward in impossible, Möbius-like loops. Floating bits of metallic crystal hovered midair, cycling between phases of solidity and light, their movements hypnotic.
Belial's boots echoed softly as he walked, the sound swallowed by the vastness of the chamber. Everything felt ancient, untouched for centuries, yet perfectly preserved. The air was thick with the weight of time, as if the Crystallites' presence lingered in the walls, in the very structure of the room. How had they built this? How had they manipulated gravity itself, crafting a space that defied every natural law? The Han Empire's power was no myth—it was etched into every surface, every tool, every fragment of this forgotten place.
His eyes roamed the workshop, taking in the strange beauty of it all. The tools were unlike anything he'd seen—some resembled blades but shimmered like liquid, others pulsed with faint light, as if alive. The workbenches were cluttered with half-finished projects: crystalline circuits, partially assembled devices that looked like they could harness stars. Belial's fingers itched to touch them, to unravel their secrets, but he held back. This wasn't a place to disturb lightly.
Then he saw it—something out of place, tucked beneath a cluttered desk half-fused to the table.
He crouched, his wings folding tightly against his back. There, wedged between two hollow crystalline prisms, was an object that didn't belong. It wasn't metal, wasn't crystal. It was organic, soft, its surface dusted with the faint grime of ages.
A notebook.