SSS Awakening: All My Clones Have Divine Bloodlines!-Chapter 30: A Glimpse Into the Abyss

It started subtle.

A faint ripple of energy spreading outward from where he sat, silent and almost imperceptible, like a stone dropped into still water. It moved through the walls of the storage room, past the manor, and out into the sleeping city of Lirath, further still, bleeding across the barony, then beyond, stretching out across the kingdom in a wave so thin and quiet that no ordinary being would have felt a thing.

Almost imperceptible, but enough to set off a chain reaction Evan never could have imagined, not even in his wildest thoughts.

His eyes snapped open.

The space in front of him had begun to ripple, slowly at first, then faster, reality itself seeming to twist and fold in on itself again and again until what remained was something that looked like a slowly rotating void. A tear in the air. Black and silent and wrong in a way that had nothing to do with sight.

The moment it formed, the temperature in the room plummeted.

Evan felt it immediately, a deep, overwhelming sense of death seeping into him from all directions, pressing against his skin like cold water rising around a sinking stone. He couldn’t move. For one long, breathless instant, he was simply frozen, every instinct in his body screaming at him without managing to produce a single coherent response.

And with it, his mana reserves had begun draining at an exorbitant rate.

’What the hell is going on?!’

***

Far away, somewhere dark, somewhere deep, a different world existed beneath the surface.

Water. Vast and black and lightless, stretching in every direction without end.

In the depths of it, something moved.

A figure, slender yet enormous, standing nearly three meters tall, cut through the water like a missile. Humanoid in shape, but only just.

Its arms were longer than they should have been, muscular but lean, ending in three massive fingers webbed by thin membranes that caught the current with each stroke. Its feet were the same. Its tail, long, powerful, almost skeletal in its leanness, drove it forward with terrifying efficiency. Its body was a sharp thing, a mix of dense muscle and sharp bone, thin but not fragile, built for speed and violence in equal measure.

Its entire form was covered in overlapping scales, gray-black in color, dull and matte in the dark water, giving its body a sleek, armored appearance. They looked both flexible and incredibly tough, as if they could bend with movement yet deflect a blade without effort.

Where a face should have been, there was nothing. Only a long neck that stretched and curved, ending in an enormous mouth lined with jagged, hooked teeth, and a tongue that hung long and dark between them.

The kind of thing that would make anyone freeze just by looking at it.

It was in the middle of a massacre, tearing through other figures just as nightmarish as itself with fluid, merciless efficiency, when it stopped.

Something had changed.

All around it, the other creatures stopped too, their frantic movements going still as whatever instinct drove them caught the same thing.

The space nearby had begun to distort.

It twisted slowly, folding inward, until a dark spiral appeared, a vortex, motionless in the water, neither pulling anything in nor releasing anything out.

But they could feel it.

All of them.

The scent of life.

Something warm and vibrant on the other side, something their instincts screamed at them to reach, something their very nature compelled them to consume.

The reaction was immediate and savage. Every creature in the water lunged toward the vortex at once, turning on each other with even greater ferocity than before, biting, tearing, clawing, each one desperate to be the first through.

The slender figure with the tail moved differently. Faster. More deliberate. It carved through the others with cold efficiency, leaving ruin in its wake, and surged toward the vortex until it was almost there,

almost...

Then the vortex shuddered.

As if something had intervened from the other side, it vibrated once, violently, and dissolved.

Gone.

The creature stopped where it was. For a long moment, nothing moved.

Then it released a pulse of energy, dense, deep purple, reverberating outward through the water in every direction, making the entire place shudder around it for miles.

***

Back in the closet, Evan was breathing hard.

His chest heaved, sweat cold on his skin, as he tried to process what had just happened. Whatever had come through that vortex, or nearly had, had almost stopped his heart.

That aura. The sheer weight of it. For a moment he had been completely paralyzed, unable to think, unable to move, unable to do anything but sit there and feel it pressing down on him like something ancient and enormous had turned its full attention his way.

He had nearly run out of energy entirely, and without realizing it, that was exactly what had closed the vortex. His reserves had hit their limit, cutting off the flow, collapsing the tear before whatever was on the other side could push through.

He didn’t know that. But what he did know was that it had been a very, very good thing.

’What the hell... what was that?’

His hands were trembling slightly. He looked down at them, then back at the empty space where the vortex had been, now nothing, not even a trace of distortion left in the air.

He let out a long, unsteady breath.

His mind slowly calmed as a strange clarity spread through his thoughts.

He had gone from absorbing void energy, to connecting with the Abyss, and then that. It didn’t take him long to understand what it had been, and what, or who, had been on the other side.

’So that was a Hollow? Luna wasn’t even remotely at that level,’ he thought.

It wasn’t about strength or anything so simple, but the sheer pressure that such existences emanated, a presence that suppressed all uncorrupted beings, one that instinctively made anyone tremble.

These were the creatures of the Abyss, the same ones that had brought terror and destruction in the past.

He had thought he already had an idea of how terrifying those creatures were, but this reality check had just shown him a completely new side of them.

"Fck... but why did a portal open? The Abyss... wasn’t it supposed to be sealed? Then why did a portal appear?"

And as if someone had finally taken the system off mute, its voice echoed in his mind,

[That is because the Abyss was never truly closed.]