Chapter 543

Absolute darkness surrounded Jake. He couldn’t see or hear anything. At least, not at first. There was no up or down, no sound, no point of reference whatsoever. He felt like he was falling through an endless void at incredible speed. The sensation of free fall and utter weightlessness overwhelmed him.

It didn’t last long, though. Just a few seconds, if that. Then, as abruptly as it had come, the darkness dissipated, and the world returned all at once. He found himself lying on the hard, uneven ground.

Though he had felt like he’d been falling only moments before, he hadn’t experienced landing. There had been no impact at all. It was more as though he had simply awakened there, as if the endless fall had never happened at all.

For a moment, he remained where he was, staring upward. High above him stretched a strange sky. It shimmered with countless shades of purple, all blending together.

Even stranger was the enormous vortex swirling directly overhead. Every now and then, brilliant cyan flashes streaked across the purple expanse, briefly illuminating the rotating clouds before vanishing just as quickly.

The ground beneath him was brownish-red, hard and dry. The barren landscape was dotted with sparse vegetation, or at least what he assumed was vegetation. Rather than bushes or trees, the strange plants resembled clusters of thick tentacles protruding vertically from the ground. They swayed and undulated lazily in the still air like seaweed beneath the ocean, despite there being no wind Jake could feel.

Strangely enough, while the place he had found himself in looked undeniably alien, it also looked familiar. Very familiar. He had already been here. When he had first been pulled into the Dark Void as a human, this had been the place where he had arrived. The purple sky with a vortex, the weird plants, the endless barren terrain stretching toward the horizon, it was all exactly as he remembered it.

While, as a morphus, he didn’t actually need to breathe, from personal experience, he already knew there was no breathable air here, at least not for humans. Back then, he had nearly suffocated within moments of arriving.

Suddenly, his Feral Instincts alerted him to danger. He leaped to his feet and spun on his heel. He saw Owen barreling straight toward him across the barren ground, his massive fists swinging through the air as he closed the distance with frightening speed.

Here we go again, Jake thought.

He ducked as his counterpart threw a punch at him, the massive fist cutting through the space where his head had been a split second earlier. Jake immediately retaliated with a punch of his own, and unlike Owen’s, his blow connected squarely with his opponent’s torso. The impact hardly did any damage, though. Owen barely even reacted, continuing his assault as though he hadn’t been hit at all.

Jake wanted to retrieve his electrolarynx and tell his friend to snap out of it, but Owen refused to give him the opportunity. With frightening speed, long scythe blades erupted from his shoulders. Owen immediately swung them at Jake in wide, deadly arcs.

The blades never reached him, though. Just as they were about to strike, Jake suddenly felt as if some invisible force had seized him and violently yanked him off the ground. The alien landscape vanished in an instant, replaced once again by absolute darkness.

For the next several seconds, he was free-falling once more. Or at least, that was what it felt like. There was nothing around him but endless blackness, leaving him without the slightest point of reference. He couldn’t tell whether he was plummeting downward or was hurling upward. Perhaps he wasn’t even moving at all.

A moment later, the darkness dissipated once more. This time, Jake found himself deep underwater, slowly sinking even farther into the abyss. Immense pressure bore down on him from every direction, squeezing against his body. Still, his armored form seemed completely unaffected by the crushing force.

The visibility was almost nonexistent. Beyond a short distance, everything faded into an endless expanse of black water. All he could make out were countless jellyfish-like creatures drifting gracefully through the darkness. They all floated from the darkness below to the darkness above. They surrounded him on every side, moving with an eerie, hypnotic elegance, and for the briefest moment, Jake found himself watching them in awe.

Then he noticed another shape cutting through the water toward him. Unlike the peaceful jellyfish, this creature moved with speed and purpose. It was entirely black, blending almost perfectly into the surrounding darkness, save for its glowing cyan eyes. Jake immediately realized it wasn’t some monstrous sea predator at all. It was Owen.

And unlike Jake, Owen wasn’t simply sinking. He was gliding effortlessly through the water as though he had been born in it, weaving between the drifting jellyfish with smooth, fluid movements.

Owen already had the long scythe blades extending from his shoulders. He drew them back as he closed the distance, clearly preparing to strike the moment he got close enough. He didn’t seem to care that they were deep underwater at all. And he was clearly still completely focused on fighting him.

You gotta be kidding me, Jake thought.

But before Owen could reach him, darkness swallowed everything once more. Once again, the sensation of free fall followed.

A few seconds later, the darkness dissolved, revealing an entirely different place.

Jake found himself suspended inside some kind of transparent organic pod filled with greenish fluid. Beyond the translucent membrane, he could make out the vast interior of a cavern. His pod hung high above the uneven cave floor alongside countless others.

Most of the pods contained some kind of nightmarish creatures developing inside. The cavern walls and ceiling were covered in thick patches of luminescent organic growth, bathing everything in an eerie greenish glow.

Jake immediately remembered this place. He had been turned into a morphus in one of these pods. He wondered what was going to happen now. He was already a morphus, so what would happen? Perhaps he would become even more powerful than he already was.

Jake remembered that when he had found himself trapped in a similar pod as a human, he had completely freaked out. He had hammered on the inner walls with his fists, trying to get out, but the elastic walls had only stretched outward before immediately returning to their original shape. But now Jake wasn’t panicking at all. Instead, all he felt was curiosity.

A moment later, he noticed movement. Small, shapeless creatures drifted toward him from every direction, lazily floating through the greenish fluid outside the pod. There were dozens of them, perhaps even hundreds, all converging on his form.

Jake immediately remembered them. Creatures just like these had transformed him from a human into a morphus. He could still remember the horrifying sensation of them clinging to every inch of his skin, covering his body completely before beginning the agonizing transformation. It had easily been one of the most painful experiences of his life.

Within moments, the creatures reached him. This time, however, something entirely different happened. The shapeless forms pressed themselves against his armored body from every direction. Yet the instant they made contact, they recoiled. One after another, they bounced away and drifted backward through the fluid.

Jake waited several more seconds, watching closely to see if they would try again. But they kept their distance from him now. The strange creatures simply floated all around him now, aimlessly drifting through the fluid and completely ignoring him now.

That settled it. Apparently, now that he was already a morphus, there was nothing these strange creatures could do for him. So there was no reason to stay trapped.

He extended a blade from his wrist, and he plunged it into the wall of the elastic pod. The membrane offered only slight resistance before the blade pierced through it. He then drew the blade downward, carving a long vertical slit through the pod’s wall. The thick organic material immediately began trying to seal itself but not quickly enough. As soon as the opening became large enough, Jake pushed the flexible membrane apart with both hands and slipped through before it could close.

The moment he emerged, gravity reclaimed him. He dropped several feet to the cave floor as the pod’s greenish fluid splashed over the cave floor all around him. He landed on one knee to absorb the impact, one hand braced against the stone floor for balance.

He immediately rose to his feet and looked around, taking in the countless suspended pods and the eerie green glow filling the cavern. Then, a loud wet tearing sound echoed overhead. He looked up in time to see one of the nearby pods suddenly split open, spilling a torrent of greenish fluid onto the cave floor below. A large, familiar figure immediately dropped heavily onto the ground with a solid thud.

Sure enough, it was Owen. Jake wasted no time retrieving his electrolarynx. He brought the device to his throat and spoke. “Owen, I know you’re still somewhere in there. You need to fight off your feral instincts.”

His mechanical voice echoed throughout the cavern, bouncing off the rock walls and hanging pods. For the briefest instant, Owen froze. Then, he leaped to his feet and charged.

Come on, dude, Jake thought.

But before Owen could reach him, absolute darkness swallowed the cavern whole, and the now-familiar sensation of free fall overwhelmed Jake once more. As he drifted through the endless darkness, his thoughts raced.

The last time he had gone through all of this, after the Dark Void transformed him from a human into a morphus, it had simply disgorged him back into the real world. That had been the end of it.

But this time was different. He was sure Chen had deactivated the Dark Void in the tech lab as soon as he and Owen had been sucked into it. So what was going to happen next? Where were they going to end up this time?

He didn’t have to wait long for the answer. Once again, the darkness vanished, and Jake found himself lying on the hard ground, staring up at the same strange purple sky with the same enormous vortex slowly swirling overhead. For a moment, he simply stared upward, confused.

What the hell? Had he been teleported back to the first location? Was he going to be trapped here, endlessly cycling through the same three places over and over again? The thought was not exactly encouraging. If that was the case, this was going to get old very quickly.

However, as he pushed himself to his feet, he immediately realized something was different. At first glance, the landscape looked identical to the one he had seen before. The same brownish-red ground stretched beneath him, and the same alien sky loomed above. But the details didn’t match. Something about the surroundings felt different, and it only took Jake a moment to understand why.

This wasn’t exactly the same place. He looked around and realized he was actually standing on a floating island suspended in the vast emptiness. It was no more than thirty yards across, a small chunk of alien terrain completely isolated from everything else.

Jake could see there were no other floating islands, no distant pieces of land, nothing except the endless void surrounding him. He walked toward the edge and looked down. There was nothing below him either. Just an endless abyss stretching in every direction.

Jake also noticed something else. Hovering about a foot above the center of the island was what looked like a magical portal. It floated silently in midair. The portal was large and oval-shaped. Its surface constantly swirled and writhed like a vortex. The colors within it shifted and twisted constantly.

Other than the portal, there was nothing else. Not even those alien plants.

And there was no sign of Owen anywhere.

What the hell? Jake thought as he turned in a slow circle, scanning the area for any trace of his friend. Where was he?

Owen was nowhere to be seen. No indication that he had ever been there at all. Jake waited for several long minutes, hoping that his friend would eventually appear the same way he had. But his friend never came.

That settled it. Apparently, this time, they clearly hadn’t been teleported to the same place. Wherever Owen was, he wasn’t on this floating island with him, and there was no reason to believe he would suddenly appear here. It sucked, and Jake couldn’t help worrying about him, but there was nothing he could do about it.

He waited a few more minutes, still hoping Owen would somehow appear, but unsurprisingly, it didn’t happen. The floating alien island remained completely silent and empty, with nothing changing around him. The strange portal continued to swirl in the center of the island.

And this time, Jake wasn’t teleported anywhere else. No darkness swallowed him, and no strange sensation of falling pulled him away. Apparently, this was his final destination.

Eventually, he approached the portal. Its surface continued to twist and churn, revealing nothing about what waited on the other side. He had no idea where it led, what was beyond it, or why he had been brought here in the first place.

He knew he had no other choice but to step through the portal. Just as he got within a few steps of the portal, a piece of information suddenly appeared in his field of vision.

What the hell? he thought as he read the text and realized where the portal led.