Time has a way of slipping away when you are completely focused on a task.
Mastering magic was one of the few things that could hold Rey's undivided attention. It was like a mountaineer conquering peak after peak—the sense of achievement was addictive.
Rey had a natural aptitude for this. However, the greatest challenge of the Mist Form spell wasn't understanding the theory, but adapting to the physical sensation of the transformation.
Once transformed, he had no hands, no feet. His method of movement changed entirely. It was incredibly disorienting. Rey felt like a toddler learning to walk again; the "hardware" was there, but his proficiency was effectively zero.
Once, twice, three times...
After countless attempts, Rey finally managed to stabilize his mist form and hover in the air.
The first time he flew without any external support, he careened wildly from left to right, unable to find his bearings.
In the air, direction isn't just up, down, left, or right. It's a 360-degree sphere of movement. If he lost focus for even a second, he would crash straight into the ground.
With gravity negated and his body as light as smoke, mastering this deceptively simple spell wasn't something that could be done overnight.
About a week passed—though Rey couldn't calculate the exact number of days.
It might have been a week. It might have been a month.
But finally, Rey mastered Mist Form. He had even developed his own technique for controlling it.
If he wanted to move in a certain direction, he simply had to tilt his "head" (or where his consciousness was focused) in that direction. The rest of his mist-body would naturally follow.
It sounds simple, but it required a high level of muscle memory—or rather, magical memory—for the mist form to move with coordination.
Now that he had the spell down, it was time to find a way out.
No matter how abundant the dark magic was here, this was not a place to stay.
Humans belong in the sun. Rey feared that if he stayed in the darkness too long, he would never be able to adapt to the light again. Even now, in this pitch-black environment, he could see every detail of the cavern clearly without any light source.
The dark magic was subtly altering his body.
It wasn't changing his fundamental nature, but it was forcing an adaptation for survival. Just as a normal person's eyes adjust to the dark after a while, Rey—fueled by dark magic—was developing permanent night vision.
Finding an exit and returning to the surface was now his top priority.
With Mist Form, the size of the tunnel didn't matter. This made finding an exit much easier.
For a wisp of smoke, even the smallest crack was a wide-open door.
---
The massive cavern was silent. Apart from the dried corpses, there was nothing else—not even the swarm of Dementors that had been there before.
Ever since Rey had absorbed that one Dementor, the rest had vanished as if they had never existed.
Rey was slightly disappointed. He hadn't determined if absorbing them was a repeatable process or a one-time fluke. If it was just a lucky break, his dream of quickly power-leveling his dark magic was over.
Flying as a cloud of black mist offered incredible stealth. Rey flew to one spot, materialized to investigate, and then transformed again to move to the next.
This spell saved him from having to scramble over piles of desiccated bodies.
Walking through a sea of corpses wasn't just about courage; it was physically revolting and difficult terrain. Avoiding that experience was one of the main reasons Rey had been so determined to master this spell.
Heading deeper inward, Rey kept his speed slow.
This was an exploration, not a race. Fear of the unknown is natural, and caution was his best defense.
The cavern narrowed as it wound deeper underground.
The further he went, the fewer corpses he saw. With the Dementor swarm guarding the entrance, very few victims ever made it this deep into the cave system.
After flying a few hundred meters, Rey materialized and landed on solid ground.
The tunnel here was about five or six meters wide, filled with jagged, chaotic rocks. Clearly, this area hadn't been excavated or smoothed out by the Church like the entrance hall.
Continuing forward, Rey heard the sound of water.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The sound was sharp and echoing in the silent darkness. After flying over a pile of obstructing boulders, he saw the stalactites.
The cavern opened up here. It was larger than the previous tunnel, giving a sense of space.
Water dripped slowly from the sharp tips of the stalactites, gathering into a small stream that flowed sluggishly into a crack in the rock.
"Should I turn into mist and follow the cracks?"
The risky thought popped into Rey's head, but he dismissed it instantly.
Aside from not knowing if it led to an exit, if his magic ran out while he was squeezed inside a solid rock fissure... the consequences were too horrifying to contemplate.
Shaking his head with a self-deprecating chuckle, Rey moved on.
The path continued downward to the right, but the opening shrank significantly. The entrance was now less than half a meter wide.
It was small, but not impassable. Even without Mist Form, he could have crawled through.
---
The moment Rey entered the small tunnel, back in the massive entrance hall, the "vanished" Dementors suddenly surged out from beneath the piles of corpses.
They looked around frantically, spreading out as if searching for something.
Finding nothing, they eventually returned to their usual calm, drifting in the air to await the next unlucky soul the Church threw in.
However, several of them—darker, ink-like, and nearly identical to the one Rey had absorbed—didn't stop. They drifted toward the inner tunnel.
They were following Rey's path. And they were moving much faster than he was.
---
This tunnel has to have an end.
Rey was losing patience. He had been in this hellhole long enough.
His body dissolved into smoke. Pumping magic into the spell, he transformed into a long, trailing stream of black mist and shot deeper into the tunnel.
One of the biggest advantages of Mist Form was that he didn't have to worry about collisions. In a narrow, winding tunnel like this, it was the perfect mode of travel.
About an hour later, Rey's vision cleared. He had squeezed through a final natural fissure no wider than a rice bowl and arrived at the very deepest point.
A man-made stone chamber!
Rey was shocked. As the mist poured out of the tiny crack, he found himself in a structured space.
Calling it a "chamber" wasn't quite right. As Rey materialized and looked around, he realized it wasn't a room—it was a deep, square shaft. He was at the very bottom of a well.
The shaft was perfectly square, about two meters wide on each side. It went straight up, uncapped, disappearing into the darkness above.
In the dead center of the floor grew a strange purple plant.
It stood about a meter tall and resembled a giant purple mushroom. It had a thick stalk the size of a man's wrist, with fan-shaped leaves spreading out in layers. There were exactly twelve tiers of leaves.
"This looks familiar..."
Rey muttered to himself, racking his brain to remember where he had seen it in a Herbology book.
Just as he was trying to recall the name, a heavy grinding sound echoed from the top of the shaft.
Rumble...
It sounded like heavy stone moving against stone. Moments later, a blinding light pierced the darkness from above.
Far, far overhead, someone had opened the lid of the well.