Luxerio found himself in a void beyond comprehension.

  There was nothing—no sound, no sight, no texture, yet somehow, he could still see, hear, and feel. The contradiction itself gnawed at his mind like an unsolvable puzzle.

  The space—or lack thereof—felt eerily familiar, like a forgotten dream lurking at the edges of his consciousness, teasing him with its familiarity while denying him any recollection.

  His thoughts drifted to what had just transpired. He had actually done it. He hadn't expected the prayer to work, but here he was, floating in the wake of its aftermath.

  It was a last-ditch effort, a desperate plea before death consumed him, something he barely understood himself. Yet, despite its absurdity, it had worked.

  A Mythgrave had been unleashed.

  Whatever happened to the city didn't concern him in the slightest—he held no love for it, nor for its people. If it was swallowed whole, he wouldn't shed a single tear. But those two debt collectors? They were certainly devoured, and that thought brought him a quiet sense of satisfaction.

  I hope whatever happened to them was painful

  But what exactly had he done?

  Avarleos had many rules about prayer. Luxerio had never been a religious person before arriving in this world, but he had come to learn the severity of improper worship.

  Praying to anything other than the Eight Above was forbidden. Even invoking one of the Eight in the domain of another was frowned upon, especially if they were rival deities. It was said that violating these rules could lead to disastrous consequences, the worst of which was the opening of a Mythgrave. And Luxerio had just done exactly that.

  Mythgraves were apocalyptic. Not merely deadly, but insidiously so. They did not simply kill—they consumed, rewrote, twisted. To those who witnessed their descent, they appeared as domes of shifting, impossible hues, their edges writhing like grasping tendrils of reality itself.

  They were the death of certainty, the unraveling of order. People who vanished within them were never seen again, at least not as they once were. The few who returned—if they could still be called people—were changed beyond recognition.

  It was through these phenomena that the supernatural warriors known as Loreborn emerged, but it was also through them that entire cities were erased as if they had never been.

  The Mythgraves were nature's cruelest correction, and now Luxerio had unleashed one. But even though he had meant to bring it, how he did it was something he couldn't get.

  He had planned to recite an old prayer from his original world, yet what had come out of his mouth had been something else entirely. Words foreign to him, yet spoken with certainty. Where had they come from? Who had he even prayed to?

  He didn't know and possibly, didn't want to know.

  Suddenly...

  There was a shift.

  He felt it—a gaze, vast yet minuscule, a thing too immense to perceive yet too focused to ignore. Something was watching him. His non-existent spine shivered under the weight of attention from something beyond mortal understanding.

  Then the world twisted. Every part of his being—his senses, his thoughts, his very existence—was wrenched, stretched, and compressed all at once. The sensation was indescribable, the kind of wrongness that seeped into the bones of reality itself.

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  Then, just as suddenly as it began, it ended.

  He found himself on the ground. But this ground was different. It was solid, rough against his fingertips, its texture unfamiliar yet unmistakable. He pressed his fingers deeper, feeling the grit beneath his nails. The scent that rose from the dirt sent a chill through him. It was thick, metallic.

  Blood.

  At first, he thought it was his own. He looked down, expecting to see the gaping hole in his chest, the mortal wound that had ended his life.

  But it wasn't there.

  His ribs still jutted from his malnourished frame, but there was no wound. No pain. No blood trickling from his skin. He was… whole.

  He exhaled sharply, turning his attention to the ground once more. He dug his fingers into the dirt, confirming the truth with his own touch. This was not the city. This was not the alley where he had collapsed. This was somewhere else entirely.

  Finally, he forced himself to look up.

  And what he saw shocked him to his core.

  Luxerio saw dead bodies. But these were not just dead bodies; they were corpses—mangled, torn apart, and strewn across the vast expanse of dirt and decay.

  The battlefield was a grotesque display of destruction, the air thick with the metallic scent of blood and something fouler, something rotten. The ground beneath him was not merely soil—it was a graveyard of flesh and bone, soaked in the remnants of those who had fallen.

  Limbs lay twisted at unnatural angles, torsos were cleaved open like hollowed-out husks, and heads—some still bearing expressions of terror, others vacant in eternal silence—rested atop jagged spikes like macabre trophies.

  There were bodies impaled on poles, their insides spilling out like torn sacks, left to rot in the open air. Some corpses bore deep claw marks, entire chunks of flesh gouged from their forms as if devoured by something ravenous.

  Others were scorched black, their skin flaking into ash, their faces frozen mid-scream. There were men, women, and even children among them—some human, others grotesquely inhuman.

  He saw furred creatures, their pelts matted with dried blood, scaleless beings with gaping wounds leaking ichor, and winged bodies whose delicate membranes were now tattered remnants of flight.

  Luxerio's breath came in short, uneasy gasps. His mind struggled to process what he was seeing. This many dead... this much carnage... it wasn't just war—it was something else. Something worse.

  "The hell is this...?" he whispered under his breath, though there was no one to answer.

  He took a step forward, his foot landing in something wet. The sickening squelch made him freeze. He looked down and saw that he had stepped into what remained of someone's midsection. The intestines had spilled out, writhing like bloated worms in the dark. Luxerio pulled back with a grimace, shaking his foot instinctively, though the sticky warmth of blood still clung to his skin.

  He had never seen this much death up close. In the city, there were bodies, sure—people starved, people were murdered, but nothing like this. This was war. No, this was beyond war.

  His gaze fell upon a young woman's body, her lifeless eyes staring up at the sky. Her arm was outstretched, fingers curled slightly as if she had been reaching for something. Her other arm was gone—torn off at the shoulder, leaving behind only a ragged, gory stump. There was no peace in her expression, only pain frozen in time.

  For a moment, he felt something stir in him—pity? Grief? But as his gaze drifted from her to the dozens, no, hundreds of others just like her, the emotion dulled. There were simply too many. Too many dead for him to care about just one.

  "Tch... What am I even doing?" he muttered, shaking his head as he pushed forward.

  Each step through the carnage made his stomach turn. The battlefield was endless, a landscape of ruin where the fallen had been left to rot. There were no banners, no insignias—no sign of who had fought or why. Only death remained.

  Then, he heard it.

  A clash of metal.

  His entire body tensed. The sound had come from deeper in the battlefield, its sharp ring echoing through the silence. He turned his head towards the source, and again, the sound rang out—louder this time, followed by a guttural roar.

  Someone was still alive in this place.

  Instinct screamed at him to leave. To run. Whatever had done this was still here. But something about that sound—it pulled at him. He had to see it.

  Moving carefully, he stepped over corpses, his breathing controlled, his heart pounding in his ears. The scent of iron grew stronger, thick enough to taste. The clash of weapons became more frequent, and now he could hear it—grunts, heavy breathing, the unmistakable sounds of combat.

  Then, through the haze of death, he saw them.

  Two figures locked in battle, their blades clashing with enough force to send sparks flying. One, towering and monstrous, a hulking thing covered in spiked armor, its face obscured by a horned helmet. The other, smaller but no less fierce, moving with speed and precision, striking again and again as if their life depended on it.

  And then, in the next instant, everything changed.