Wonderful Insane World-Chapter 112: Manifestation (2)

They moved forward in silence, fleeing the nascent light that now tinged the sky with a threatening pearly grey. The bamboo gave way to a rocky heath, bristling with strange black stone steles, similar to the ones near which they had fought the grey creature.

The air grew denser, thick with a cold, creeping mist that slithered across the ground like a living thing, clinging to their legs and obscuring anything beyond a few meters.

Ahead, a massive, indistinct shape, perhaps a statue or a sculpted rock, the "guardian" they had glimpsed earlier – emerged from the gloom, standing vigil over a field of rusted and broken swords driven into the soil like funerary markers. The atmosphere was heavy, charged with silence and old violence.

Dylan stumbled, his good hand clutching a cold stele to steady himself. The pain in his right arm was a purifying fire, but that wasn’t the worst of it. A crushing fatigue, deeper than mere physical exhaustion, had invaded him. It felt as though the mad act of tearing Elisa’s wound from her – that gaping, poisoned agony – had siphoned away something essential. His very essence.

His heart beat faintly, his vision flickered, and every breath was a monumental effort. Shame mixed with the suffering: he was slowing them down. He had become the weak link, the burden, at the most critical moment.

"Dylan?" Elisa’s voice, softer than usual, carried a concern he’d never heard from her before. She stepped closer, her gaze moving from her barely-scratched shoulder – a grotesque miracle – to his mutilated arm and ashen face.

"Can you keep going?" Maggie muttered, casting a nervous glance eastward where the grey sky turned to a milky white, heralding the imminent rise of the sun. She wasn’t looking at Dylan with horror, but with feverish impatience. Time was running out.

Without a word, Dylan fumbled in his pants pocket. His numb fingers touched the smooth, cold surface of a gem – one of those torn from the beasts they had fought, a small crystal of deep black veined with red, pulsing with a faint energy.

He clenched it in his left fist, closed his eyes, forcing his wavering mind to focus. Just like they always did after battles, to restore some essence, to catch a second wind.

The effect was immediate – and violent. A surge of cold, then heat, burst from the gem, coursing through his palm, up his arm, flooding his chest like a crashing wave.

It was a sensation both painful and euphoric, like pure water rushing through the scorched cracks of a desert. The raw, wild essence filled the horrible void he’d felt inside, sealing the fracture left by the wound’s transfer.

At last, a low groan escaped him, half agony, half relief.

And then, it happened. His right arm, inert and tormented until now, began to tremble violently. Not from pain this time, but from some frantic internal activity. Dylan’s eyes snapped open, horrified and mesmerized. Beneath the blood-soaked makeshift bandage, he felt intense heat, an electric prickling. Through the torn fabric of his sleeve and the bloody mesh, he saw the ragged edges of the three deep gashes... move.

The raw flesh pulsed, contracting. The black blood that oozed from it began to foam slightly, as if it were alive. And before their stunned eyes – Elisa and Maggie frozen in place – the wounds began to close. Slowly at first, then with visible, frightening speed. The torn muscles, the deep tissues, pulled together, knitting. The lacerated skin regenerated, stretching from the edges, forming new, pink, glistening flesh where there had only been ruin and death moments before.

"Holy shit..." murmured Maggie, taking a step back, her face twisted in primal fear at what she couldn’t comprehend.

Elisa raised a hand to her mouth, her gaze shifting from her nearly healed shoulder to Dylan’s arm, rebuilding itself before their eyes. The realization hit – cold and sharp: Dylan hadn’t just absorbed her wound. He had stolen it, taken it into himself. And now, fueled by the raw essence of the gem, his body was healing this stolen injury at an unnatural speed. The power wasn’t just to transfer pain, but to claim the wound itself – and regenerate it.

The gem in Dylan’s left hand cracked with a dry snap, then crumbled into fine gray dust, its energy entirely spent. The trembling in his arm ceased. What remained was a red, swollen, painful scar – a brutal reminder of Elisa’s wound – but the gaping, mortal injury was gone. Replaced by this strange mark and the lingering sensation of life force stolen, then restored by the gem’s fire.

Dylan raised his right arm, staring at it as if it belonged to someone else. The extreme weakness had receded, chased off by the flood of essence – but he knew it hadn’t come without a cost.

That passage through searing pain had left a hollow in him that not even essence could fill.

Maggie still stood frozen, eyes fixed on Dylan’s arm as if she were staring at some unknown beast. Her breath had caught, her jaw clenched, unable to put into words what she had just witnessed.

"What the fuck kind of power is that?" she finally whispered, more to herself than the others. There was no accusation, no awe in her voice. Just raw confusion, almost painful. Something had shifted beneath her feet – a truth too vast, too alien for her to keep pretending she understood.

Elisa didn’t answer right away. She stepped slowly toward Dylan, stopping just close enough to examine the scar. Her hand rose, hesitated, then gently touched the skin – still red and pulsing.

"It’s the Stigma," she said at last, with a tone that left no room for doubt. "It’s doing this. It’s like... it takes what it wants. And it decides what stays."

Her words lingered in the frozen air, strangely solemn, like a curse – or an ancient prayer.

Dylan lowered his eyes to the mark on his arm. The pain still throbbed, dull and insistent – but behind it, something had changed. As if something had awakened – or opened an eye.

He didn’t understand. Not really. But one thing was certain: this strange force that had nearly broken him... it wasn’t going to kill him. Not today.

He straightened slightly, firming his grip on his weapon. His gaze lifted, swept across the fog-choked heath, paused on the steles, the rusted swords, the slumbering shadows of the funerary field.

Questions could wait. Dawn was coming. And the Hunt – it wouldn’t wait for them.

"We’re going back," he said simply, his voice steadier than he’d expected. There was no bravado in his tone. Just raw certainty – the kind of clarity a man feels when he knows the next line he must cross is already etched into the ground before him.