This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange

A terror unlike any Kain had known before rooted him in place. Every fiber of his being screamed to run, to hide, to do anything but remain where he stood. But he did not move. Could not move.

After staring in his direction for what felt like an eternity, it turned its eyes back forward and continued on its way.

The Demigod being passed him.

‘Did it not see me?’

Kain remained frozen long after it was gone, his breath shallow, his body rigid. Then, slowly, he straightened from the rock he hid behind.

Could they not see him?

A realization settled over him. His presence here didn’t seem to be detected by the abyssal natives.

With this realization, his fear did not fade. But now, it warred with something else:

Curiosity.

Steeling himself, Kain stepped forward.

If they could not see him, then he would watch. And he would learn more about these creatures who hadn’t been seen in centuries.

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Kain followed at a measured pace, keeping his distance as he trailed behind the convoy. If there was any place worth seeing in this wretched place, surely it was wherever a Demigod was headed. After all, no matter where it was, Demigods represented the peak of power and status. How could they be bothered with completing trivial tasks?

The procession travelled from the abyssal town for a few hours to an area more densely populated with abyssal creatures and buildings. A city.

However, unlike the cities Kain was familiar with since being reborn from earth, this city had no walls—likely because it had never been at risk of being attacked by enemies or a beast tide before.

The convoy continued into the city, winding through streets paved with smooth, obsidian-like stone. Find more adventures on My Virtual Library Empire

Strange, towering structures flanked the roads—some appearing sculpted from bone, others pulsating as if alive, their surfaces shifting with a sickening organic rhythm.

Shadowy figures lurked within the buildings, their indistinct shapes pressing against warped windows, watching with hollow, lidless eyes as the convoy passed.

Kain felt no wind, no warmth or cold, just the unnatural stillness of a world unbound by natural laws. The only sounds were the shuffling feet of the prisoners, the guttural murmurs of abyssal creatures, and the occasional gut-wrenching scream ringing out in the distance.

Kain noted that the city was built in a ring. A massive, circular void stretched at its center and Kain could only barely see the city on the other side of it. The extremely wide pit was also seemingly bottomless and seemed to swallow all light.

At the edges of this pit were many of what Kain could only describe as “altars”.

They looked like obsidian spires rising along the pit. The structures pulsed with a deep, internal glow—violet, red, and gold light flickering in uneven intervals. Suspended above each altar were bodies, or at least what had once been bodies.

Humanoid figures hung high in midair, their limbs stretched unnaturally, as if something invisible was pulling them in multiple directions at once. They twitched sporadically, their mouths open as if to scream, but no sound came out. Their skin was fracturing, tiny pieces of it lifting into the air like dust was being brushed off of them and then carried away by an unseen current, dissolving into raw energy that funneled into the altar below.

On one altar, an elf with silver hair had its emaciated body drained beyond recognition—and after the absorption of its blood, gold and violet lights began to flicker on its body and then move to the alter below.

Kain looked at the innumerable altars that held up creatures all in different stages of decay, their bodies unwinding as their blood and souls were slowly, methodically harvested.

After a while, Kain noticed a pattern. Early on, as mostly blood and flesh were harvested by the altar, it flickered mostly with red light. When there was much less blood to absorb, golden lights seemed to be painfully yanked from the body—which Kain assumed to be their souls.

But what did the absorbed purple lights represent?

As Kain was watching and analyzing the altars, so too were the abyssal creatures—although for a different purpose.

They gathered at the edges, their red and gold eyes gleaming with grotesque fascination, their expressions twisted with something akin to reverence.

All of the lights seemed to funnel into the impossibly deep pit that the altars lined. Kain, at the first quick glance of the pit, didn’t notice anything unique about it besides its width and depth, but he decided to take a closer look.

Kain approached the edge cautiously, peering down into the darkness.

Nothing.

Not even the faintest glimmer of depth. It was as if the world simply ceased to exist beyond the pit’s threshold. His instincts recoiled, warning him of some fundamental wrongness, but curiosity overpowered caution.

He reached inward, drawing on his limited amount of spiritual power, pushing it into his eyes to enhance his vision once more.

And then, he saw it.

His breath caught in his throat.

The darkness wasn’t just an empty void. It had shape. It had form.

It was an eye.

A closed, massive eye.

Then, it opened.

A slow, deliberate motion, as if something ancient and unfathomable had been disturbed from an aeons-long rest.

A terrible, gut-wrenching wrongness slammed into Kain, freezing him in place as a pupil of impossible size revealed itself beneath the lid.

The eye was a deep, cosmic purple flecked with shifting specks of gold and red.

And it was staring right at him.

He should not have looked. Yet he had, despite all of his instincts screaming not to.

And now, that thing—whatever it was—was aware of him. Not just as a passing anomaly, not just as an unnoticed speck in its domain. It was looking at him. Studying him.

Kain stumbled backward, his heart hammering. The abyss, the city, the Demigod, the rituals—it all faded into background noise at the wake of the horror now staring back at him.