Chapter 43: Dead body

Eren furrowed his brows. The smell of blood swamped his nose, making him keenly aware of death’s presence in this dark and bleak cavern. Even the lambent lights from the mushrooms could not brighten the grim scene in front of him.

"Oh my gods." Beside him, Celeste covered her mouth as she walked up to the body.

She kneeled beside it and carefully turned his body over, revealing the bloodied face of a young man.

He had straight black hair with bangs cut straight up until his eyebrows. Freckles inundated the upper bridge of his nose along with his cheeks. It used to be a light orange hue, but was now tainted with blood splattered from his mouth.

He couldn’t have been more than twenty.

"He’s dead," she muttered under her breath, biting her lower lip.

The blood was still warm, yet those eyes were completely devoid of life.

"I know him," Celeste said, frowning as her mind flashed with memory. "His name was Tristan. He really struggled to use the Primal Strike. We tried to invite him to our group so that he could practice with us, but he declined. I think he was just too shy."

Tristan looked like a boy who was quiet and reserved. He was short, thin, and lacked muscle mass. Barely even bigger than Eren during the first few days of his awakening.

No wonder. Tristan was wholly unprepared to face the tribulations of the License Exam.

Eren looked at Tristan’s soulless eyes. It lacked the glimmer of life and vitality.

This man was a reminder for Eren. A glaring warning for one of the grim destinies his life could have taken.

He’d seen this kind of thing too many times before. In a world full of apex cultivators, bloodshed was as cyclic as the turning of tides and the waning of moons.

"He must have landed on his head. Poor guy."

Eren looked up, towards the hole where they had just fallen. The roof of the gymnasium was barely a small patch of light in the gullet of the chasm.

No sign of Kaiser peering down at them. No sign of anyone to recover the dead body in front of them.

"Does this happen often?" he asked Celeste.

"There are emergency services on standby on every License Exam. But it looks like he... Tristan... died as soon as he landed. Nothing much that our Healers could do. Even Psions can’t fix a broken neck," she replied.

Eren turned silent. "Do you feel sorry for him?"

His question stunned Celeste for a moment. "...no," she eventually answered. "Everyone who signs up to the License Exams knows the risks they’re undertaking. After all, the horrors and the dangers that a real Awakener faces is multitudes times more dangerous than this. No one is required to enter it."

This License Exam was a culling. A test to determine who survives amongst the fittest.

Eren was accustomed to this. The path to the pinnacle involved leaving behind bloody footprints to the peak. He understood the need for savagery.

"We better go," Celeste said. "I don’t know where the others are, but I’m sure they’re already searching for the Concrete Blocks."

She kneeled down in front of Tristan and closed his eyes. "It’s the least modicum of respect he deserved for the bravery required in even trying out for the License Exam, despite knowing he was not up for the task."

As she bowed her head and muttered a small prayer for Tristan, Eren observed the situation around him. The cavern they had fallen into was a pit no larger than a classroom, with nothing but dark slabs of rough stone as its walls and flooring.

In front of them was a cavernous mouth of a tunnel, big enough for ten people to walk through side to side.

It was completely devoid of light. It had none of the illuminating mushrooms that had given their pit at least a semblance of lambent light.

The darkness seemed to lure them in, like a fiend inviting them into the depths of hell.

Eren turned his attention back to the pit. Towards the edges of the wall where the small, finger-sized incandescent mushrooms grew from the crevices.

Celeste had finished her prayer for Tristan at this point and joined him in taking a look at the only sources of light they’d get in the Subterranean Burrows.

"We’ll have to stock up on these," Celeste said as she began to pick some of the mushrooms on the ground.

Eren kneeled and plucked one out from the ground. The pale white stem was thin, only as thick and as tall as a finger with vertical striations along its vertical trunk. It was topped off with a red bulbous cap with the color and texture of fresh meat.

Right now, it exhibited only a tiny bit of light from its natural bioluminescence. Though, its luminance was dimmer than even a matchstick.

But Eren knew that if he broke off its stem, the bulbous cap would emit a bright light like that of a lamp. Its radiance would allow him to see a couple of meters ahead of him in a completely darkened room.

He used to call it a glowstick, though Amarantha and Athan never understood why he found that funny.

Sunspore...

As Celeste gathered the sunspores from the ground, he entered his Mind Palace and found himself back in the Immortal Library of Ræzoň.

He walked past the grand spire of cultivation manuals and entered the section for apothecaries.

Immediately, the smell of crushed willow entered his nose, evoking a sense of calm in his nerves. The worries of the License Exam washed away from his body, leaving as a relaxing spasm of the muscles in his disembodied self.

Memories flashed through his mind. He had spent hundreds of years here, studying, mixing chemicals, crushing herbs, dissecting cadavers... it was one of the most relaxing moments of his imprisonment here in the Immortal Library of Ræzoň.

He even remembered the first time he saw a dead body there.