Balor Academy.
With the teachers and maids escorting the students to Crowsnest Town, the sprawling academy stood silent and deserted.
Streetlamps cast an orange glow, and the moonlight shone like molten silver. Above and below, a pervasive purple Phantom Light drifted through the air. The colors were chaotic yet beautiful, illuminating the tall, slender Gothic spires and reflecting off the bas-reliefs of the ancient buildings.
The soul felt as though it could shed its mortal coil, rising toward the heavens along with the bone-white, towering architecture and sharp vaulted ceilings.
Though the radiance appeared beautiful, it harbored a deadly secret.
A bird of prey flew over the academy, only to let out a piercing shriek before plummeting straight down. Its biological boundaries collapsed mid-air, dissolving into a sickening Cronenbergian mass of flesh—a mixture of organ fragments and hyperplastic polyps.
The mass slammed into the ground, shattered and gore-slicked. It wasn’t dead, yet it could hardly be called alive as it writhed pathetically.
Meanwhile, in the darkness of the sewers, a battle-scarred mother rat crouched in the filthy water. Its beady, grain-sized eyes emitted a sinister glint. The current flowed beneath its belly, where seven or eight lumps stretched its abdomen into an unnatural oval.
Kira was about to give birth.
On the day Kira had plummeted from the building, death should have been certain. Fortunately, the scent of blood had drawn several rats. Kira’s split soul had latched onto a male rat licking up its spilled brains, allowing them to hide in the sewers ever since.
When the Phantom Light appeared, Kira found a pregnant mother rat and cornered it in a dead-end pipe. Through a relentless assault of biting, threatening screeches, and the torture of mental induction, Kira forced the creature to devour its previous host from the head down.
Though the sensation of a rodent gnawing open one’s skull to lick at the brains was excruciatingly painful, Kira successfully hijacked the mother rat’s body.
Among the three who had infiltrated the academy, Kira was not the luckiest, but they were the most purposeful and the most ruthless.
A week ago, Kira had been searching for a way into the depths of the earth. They had observed the ripples in the sewer water, looking for crevices that leaked into the subterranean layers. There were many cracks, but none guaranteed a path to the bottom. Due to the constant moisture, the rocky fissures were slick; for a rat, it was undoubtedly a one-way trip to a watery grave.
Kira had no desire to be wedged deep within a crevice, starving to death in the despair of claustrophobia and immobility. Thus, they had hesitated to act.
Now, the opportunity had arrived.
The Phantom Light rising from beneath the earth penetrated the cracks, forming a beacon-like guide. By following the light, Kira could navigate the natural underground labyrinth.
However…
Kira tentatively extended the tip of their tail toward a beam of Phantom Light shooting from a crevice. Instantly, the activity of the cells in the tail’s tip skyrocketed by several orders of magnitude.
The tip of the tail swelled into a mass of pink polyps at a speed visible to the naked eye! Then, the polyps writhed and differentiated, sprouting insect-like segments, fine whiskers, and indistinguishable, microscopic organs.
“As expected, the Corona of a Taboo Name isn’t just Mental Pollution; it seems to carry ‘Structural Pollution’ as well. Is this a dead end? This isn’t a power humans are qualified to touch. Even secondary deities wouldn’t dare meddle with rule-based constructs… No wonder the Taboo Names became forbidden existences.”
After observing several cracks, Kira chose one and dove in.
There was no turning back. It was a path of certain death.
Kira charged headlong into the Phantom Light. Within seconds, their eyes failed. The rat’s elongated skull split into irregular, bright-red lobes of flesh. Teeth and bones shattered into gravel-like fragments, embedded within the mucus-coated meat.
The cells became highly activated, acting as if they had minds of their own. They underwent disordered division and differentiation, sprouting pleated flaps of flesh and layered keratin. In just a few seconds, the alienation spread to the shoulders and spine!
Ignoring the transformation, Kira rushed through the dozen-meter-long crevice at high speed, entering a stretch of slope devoid of Phantom Light. They kept charging.
Senses stripped, pain lost—Kira didn’t know if they were still alive or in what state they existed. It didn’t matter. Once exposed to the Phantom Light, death was a foregone conclusion.
Kira ran blindly, their forward momentum faster than a free-fall. Though they had no eyes, their sensory domain scanned the terrain, constantly correcting their direction as they charged toward another glowing fissure.
The light grew stronger. It sparkled with crystalline brilliance, as dazzling as genuine gems and crystals.
Kira could sense it. The Taboo Names were just ahead!
Show me! Show me the secrets of Balor Academy!
Kira screamed inwardly. There was one final stretch—a deep crack in the sedimentary rock about two or three meters long.
However, the mother rat serving as the soul’s vessel had completely alienated, turning into a rotting mixture of divergent organs. Finally, the rat’s limbs twisted and lengthened, turning into root-like mimicries that lost the ability to move.
It skidded a short distance due to inertia before coming to a halt.
There, upon a large mass of complex pink polyps, fragmented segments and fleshy whiskers twitched feebly with residual bio-currents.
Kira had long anticipated this outcome. The purpose of the pregnant rat was finally revealed. The carcass suddenly ruptured, and seven or eight pink little meatballs were ejected!
This was a miracle of birth, but also the sacrifice of a cruel conspiracy.
The nearly-formed pups bounced across the ground. Though the Phantom Light struck them and caused instant alienation, they managed to scramble forward. Within their clouded eyes, a singular, wondrous sight appeared—
A basin, whether carved by nature or by hand, lay before them. The rock walls were shaved flat, rising straight up and down, crisscrossed by heart-stopping vertical fissures. It looked like a cracked glass vessel that could shatter at any moment.
In the center of the basin was a blue lake that looked like a divine miracle—clear, pure, and radiating light. The deeper the lake went, the darker its color became. Looking toward the center, it was like a bottomless, pitch-black abyss, silent and profound.
Attached to the rugged underwater cliffs were seven giant fetuses, each over a hundred meters in diameter!
These soft, bizarre fetuses were cryptic, morbid, sacrilegious, defiant, hateful, and cruel… It was as if all the deformed thoughts of the world had aggregated into a single body. The evil aura they emitted misted into the air, curling into tentacle-like shapes.
Within a thick embryonic membrane webbed with dark-green veins, monsters curled—creatures with horns on their heads, bat wings on their backs, and whip-like tails.
They appeared not yet fully formed. Their heads, chests, and limbs possessed the proportions of larvae. Their nightmare-ugly limbs were tucked inward, and hideous mouthparts breathed out nauseating filth. Their bodies were covered in layers of ink-black keratin, slightly bloated from their soak in the amniotic fluid.
What cryptic horrors! Born of chaos, yet bearing the marks of artificial creation. Ancient and distant, yet fresh and new.
They were the spitting image of the demon depictions found in the murals and statues of Balor Academy.
Standing by the shore of the lake, closest to the deep fissure, was an indescribable horror.
It stood a hundred meters tall, its body flowing with an unknown substance that resembled both fresh blood and molten lava. Its head was a bulbous, fruit-like cluster of deep-red wax. From its blood-lava robes, it extended human-like hand structures—long, thin arms with fingers as sharp as nails, splayed out like a ghost.
Bright fragments constantly broke away from its body, streaking through the air like dazzling trails of light before finally turning into dust-like ash.
And there were three more monsters just like it standing around the blue lake.
This was the final image Kira saw. In the next moment, the rat pup vanished into ash.
