A few more days passed like that, and life gradually settled back into its usual quiet rhythm.
Every morning began the same way. I sat beneath the great tree and completed my cultivation while the village slowly woke around me. The cool morning air, the soft rustling of leaves, and the familiar flow of refined energy had become a peaceful part of each day.
Beside me, Camose remained in its deep hibernation.
The little serpent had still not shown any signs of waking. It stayed curled quietly near the roots of the tree, sleeping through each day as if time itself no longer mattered. Even though Charlie continued to assure me that this was normal for beasts during awakening, I still found myself checking on it every morning out of habit.
That morning felt no different at first.
The early morning air was cool and calm, and the village was still quiet as I sat cross-legged beneath the great tree, cultivating in silence. The first light of the day filtered softly through the branches above, and everything around me felt peaceful.
I slowly circulated refined energy through my body, guiding it with steady focus. The familiar flow moved naturally through my body toward the black dot present in my forehead, the mysterious energy core that had changed my life since the day it first appeared.
My breathing remained calm as I continued. Then suddenly, a sharp pain struck my forehead. My eyes tightened instantly, and my entire body tensed.
The pain was familiar.
It is happening again... the thought came to me immediately.
I gritted my teeth and forced myself to remain completely still, resisting the instinct to break my cultivation posture.
I need to endure this pain. I had felt this pain twice before, both times when the black dot in my forehead had changed and increased slightly in size.
I continued sitting cross-legged beneath the tree, refusing to move, but this time the pain was far worse than before.
It felt as if something deep inside my forehead was being compressed and pulled apart at the same time. The pressure was sharp and heavy, like an invisible force was squeezing directly against my mind itself.
Each second made it worse.
The pain spread quickly, sharp and heavy, making even clear thought difficult. It was no longer just a sting in my forehead. It felt like the pressure was pushing deeper, reaching into my mind itself.
Sweat slowly formed across my body despite the cool morning air.
My breathing became heavier, uneven at times, and my hands trembled slightly where they rested on my knees. Every instinct told me to stop, to break my cultivation and escape the pain, but I forced myself not to move.
If this was truly another growth of my energy core, then I had to endure it.
The pain only kept increasing.
It felt as if my mind itself was being crushed from the inside, as though something invisible was pressing harder and harder against my consciousness. My vision blurred slightly at the edges, and for a moment I felt dangerously close to losing consciousness.
My body felt heavy, and my thoughts were becoming harder to hold together, as if my consciousness itself was slipping further away with each passing second.
Still, I held on.
I clenched my fists tightly, my nails pressing into my palms, and forced myself to stay awake. I refused to let my consciousness slip away, no matter how overwhelming the pain became.
I had endured this before... I could endure it again.
I kept repeating that thought in my mind like an anchor, holding onto it as everything else threatened to fall apart.
For what felt like forever, I remained there beneath the great tree, silently fighting against the unbearable pain and forcing myself not to collapse.
Then suddenly— the pain stopped.
It vanished so abruptly that it left me disoriented, as if something had been forcefully cut off. One moment, my mind was drowning under unbearable pressure, and the next, there was only silence.
For a brief second, I could not even process what had happened. Before I could recover, something far stranger happened.
It felt as if my soul itself had been squeezed out of my body.
There was no warning. No time to react.
A strange pulling force gripped me from somewhere deep inside, and in an instant, everything around me blurred. The great tree above me, the house behind me, the ground beneath me, all of it stretched into meaningless shapes, as if the entire world was being pulled away from me.
It felt like I was being dragged through space at impossible speed, faster than thought itself.
I could not understand what was happening. There was no sense of direction, no feeling of the ground beneath me, no sky above me, and no way to tell where I was being taken. My body felt completely weightless, as if I no longer existed in any normal space at all.
There was only movement, endless and uncontrollable.
I could not tell whether I was being pulled forward, falling endlessly, or simply being carried somewhere beyond my understanding. Everything around me was blurred beyond recognition, and for a moment, even my own sense of self felt unstable, as if I might disappear into that motion entirely.
Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, everything stopped.
The violent motion vanished in an instant, leaving behind a strange and eerie stillness that felt even more unsettling than the movement itself.
I found myself floating in complete darkness.
I looked around in confusion, trying to understand where I had been brought.
Where am I?
There was nothing around me.
Everything was pitch black, endless and silent, like an empty void without beginning or end. There were no trees, no ground, no sky, no sound, nothing that could tell me where I was or how I had arrived there.
I was simply floating. There was no weight to my body, no sensation of standing or falling, and for a strange moment, I was not even sure if I still had a body at all. It felt as though I existed only as awareness, suspended in an endless darkness that stretched beyond imagination.
Far, far away in the distance, I could see tiny white dots scattered across the blackness.
They looked like stars... small, distant, and impossibly far away, they were the only things breaking the endless darkness around me.
I stared at them silently, unable to understand what I was seeing or where this place could possibly be.
Before I could think any further, the same strange force pulled me again.
There was no warning, only that sudden, overwhelming sensation of being dragged away. My soul moved rapidly once more, and the endless darkness around me twisted and blurred as if the entire space was collapsing into motion.
The distant white dots vanished from sight, swallowed by the rushing blur around me. Everything became unclear again, and the feeling of speed returned so violently that I could not even hold a single thought.
Then suddenly, I opened my eyes.
"Young master…? Are you fine?"
Charlie's voice reached me first, pulling me fully back to reality.
I was lying beneath the great tree.
The familiar sight of the house, the roots, and the morning light returned all at once, replacing the endless darkness I had just been trapped in. My body felt heavy again, and for a moment, I simply stared upward, trying to understand whether what had happened was real.
Charlie was kneeling beside me, looking at me with clear concern written across his face.
I slowly pushed myself up and sat down, still trying to understand what had just happened. My body felt slightly heavy, and my mind was still caught between reality and whatever strange place I had just seen.
My head still felt strange, as if I had returned from somewhere impossibly far away. The sensation was difficult to explain, like waking from a dream that had felt more real than the world around me.
I looked at Charlie, still trying to steady my thoughts.
"What happened?" I asked quietly.
Charlie frowned slightly, clearly still worried.
"You suddenly became unconscious. You collapsed without any warning," he said. "What happened?"
I rubbed my forehead slowly, still feeling the lingering sensation there, as if something inside had changed.
"I am not sure," I replied honestly.
Then I looked at him again, still trying to piece everything together.
"How long was I out?" I asked.
Charlie thought for a moment before answering.
"For few minutes, young master."
A few minutes…
Was that a dream?
The thought came quietly, but even as I asked myself that, it did not feel right.
It had felt far too real.
Nothing like that had ever happened before, and the memory of that dark, silent space still lingered too clearly to dismiss it so easily.