The moment Theon closed his eyes, the world dissolved around him. When he opened them again, he stood in a place both alien and intimately familiar—his soul sea.
A shallow expanse of liquid stretched endlessly in all directions, its surface rippling just below his knees. Above him yawned an abyss so absolute it devoured the very concept of light—no stars, no horizon, only an infinite void pressing down like the weight of the cosmos itself. The liquid at his feet and the boundless darkness above created a surreal expanse that seemed to stretch infinitely in all directions.
Theon dipped his hand into the water, letting it slip through his fingers.
The water was comfortable to the touch and felt…. right. It defied description—one moment icy as a mountain stream, the next warm as blood; sometimes viscous like molten glass, then fluid as rain, each alteration no less comforting than the last.
The surface of the sea reflected the same duality. One moment, it was as calm and serene as a mirror; the next, violent storms churned the waters, waves rising and crashing before settling once more into stillness. The shifting chaos and calm seemed to mirror something deeper, something within Theon himself.
Most soul seas were stable, their waters clear as glacial lakes—a reflection of a cultivator's harmony. Not this festering wound.
'This is my soul's reflection?' Theon thought as he waded forward, feet disturbing the water. Soul seas revealed one's potential—vastness mattered, but what lay beneath mattered more.
That's when he noticed—no, felt—the seabed beneath the water.
The seabed wasn't sand.
It was flesh.
A grotesque, pulsing expanse of pinkish putty stretched beneath him, veined with black like rotting sinew. Patches of skin stitched together with crude sutures formed a grotesque mosaic, some seams neat as a surgeon's work, others fused as though burned into place—it was an amalgamation of mangled skin, stitched and fused together to create a cohesive yet deeply unnatural landscape. The longer he stared, the more details emerged—puckered scars, half-healed gashes, even what looked like bite marks along the edges.
At least when the sea was calm.
A tremor ran through the sea. The water convulsed, waves slashing at the sky. As the tempest subsided, a wet rip echoed beneath him.
Riiip.
Stitches unraveled. Flesh peeled back in gaping wounds, the edges bubbling as if something beneath hungered for escape. The seabed dissolved like meat in acid, yawning wider with every second. Theon recoiled, his pulse hammering against his ribs.
This wasn't right.
The soul sea was a reflection of one's talent, mind, and emotions—but Theon had always been calm. Unshakable. Even here, in this strange world of Serenera, where a single misstep meant death, he had navigated every trial with icy precision. No hesitation. No mistakes.
So why did his soul look like this?
'It shouldn't be possible.'
Forming a soul sea wasn't something one could do unconsciously. It was the manifestation of the self—every scar, every sin, every hidden fracture laid bare. And yet, Theon had no memory of shaping his.
'Maybe it has something to do with the Lu that I used while cultivating, after all I was accidentally cultivating with Lu from zombies, maybe it innately adopted similar properties.'
'But that shouldn't affect the soul. The sea is innate. Random.'
But little did Theon know that it was exactly inverse of what he thought.
It wasn't the Lu that twisted his soul sea.
It was the other way around.
His soul sea—this stitched, decaying landscape—existed in perpetual collapse. Like a punctured lung desperately gasping for air, it voraciously consumed any available Lu to prevent total dissolution. So naturally if it saw any available Lu, from a zombie or not, it would vacuum it as fast as it could to stabilize itself. Unless Theon took specified medicine for his soul, this was the only other remedy.
Pondering the strangeness of his soul sea, Theon decided to explore further. He waded through the water, which seemed to resist his movements at times, as if it had a will of its own. He soon realized that the water's resistance grew stronger whenever he tried to move towards the darkest areas of the sky above. There was something there, something that both the water and the sky seemed to want to keep him away from.
And there, flickering at the edge of his awareness, was a pull—a faint, insistent tug, like a hook lodged in his ribs.
His curiosity piqued, Theon pushed forward, fighting against the increasingly strong currents. He wanted to understand this realm that was supposedly a part of him. As he moved, the water began to pulse with light, each pulse synchronized with his heartbeat. The alternating warmth and cold intensified, becoming almost unbearable, but he pressed on.
Then, abruptly, his progress ended.
A barrier.
He couldn't advance further. It made no sense—how could he be locked out of his own soul?
Yet beyond the barrier and beneath the surface, Theon saw it. It appeared to be a small, glowing object embedded in the seabed. It was surrounded by a protective barrier, a shimmering dome of energy that pulsated with the same rhythm as the water.
The moment he reached for it, the world shattered.
The soul sea convulsed. Waves roared, the sky split, and Theon barely kept his footing as the very ground beneath him trembled—
—Then, darkness.
He blinked. The database's sterile interface filled his vision. He was back. Kicked out of his own damn soul.
And though having something inexplicable embedded in his own soul unnerved Theon a good measure, all he could do was take a deep breath and force the issue to the back of his mind. For now it was out of his reach, he had no way to solve it and anything he seemed to do only seemed to intensify the issue further.
Instead, he focused on what he could control.
The spatial rings. Finally, he would open them.