The jungle held many dangers, many instances of where he couldn’t even fathom how far many people would have gone to get where he was. An unknown land further beyond anything anyone ever realized and here he was in the middle of it. A spear in one hand and his other gently pushing brush or animal aside. A giant snake watched him with beady eyes but made no move and he could feel the rumbling of other predators around him. But there was a strangeness to him that made them hesitate, made them fear him. The demi-god turned demon now felt unnatural to many beings.

The crackle of power on his breath, the way he strode. Every fiber of every part of his being seemed to scream out to them to stay away. Yet there were peaceful creatures that followed him as always even though he stank of the abyss. Stank of the void. A soft shimmering light permeated him always and it wasn’t by choice.

But a different kind of fear gripped the creatures behind him as he left the jungle, only to see a massive pit of bones in front of him. Miles deep if he had to guess and stacked what felt like just as high. His eyes took in the volume of the stink. His brows furrowed slowly and his spear butt set against the last of the dirt. It was a staggering amount of death needed for these bones and a staggering amount of power needed. It was something he never considered and there was something deep down morbidly curious about how this slaughter was commenced. Some of it needed to be false or perhaps many different dimensions had been pilfered at some point to get all of them.

What was strange is that he didn’t sense any mana or living beings in front of him, no souls at all which meant that they had departed from the realm already or were elsewhere. He’d slowly step onto the bones and find himself sink to his ankles at first and then all the way down to his knees before he stopped by simple weight alone. It’d be a frustrating trudge through this pit but there was nothing else he could do. He couldn’t fly with his own power yet and he was loathe to waste his abilities on something this simple. Maybe if he had become a little stronger he wouldn’t have to worry about it.

What felt like an hour quickly turned into two, then three. He could barely feel the amount of progress given with how distant the mountains looked. He already could feel where he needed to go which… was strange to him. His brows furrowed again and his eyes cast about; he could feel both echo and the vestige nearby. They had followed him it seemed; he couldn’t frown but there was concern on his features… Right until he felt a grip on his being. First on his arm, then on his waist. His head tilted down and he was gifted with the sight of a smattering of skeletal hands reaching up to try to drag him down further…

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A gentle hand wasn’t needed with the undead of a mass grave like this; his thoughts trailed to averie. There was no way that the people here were brought here of their own free will and there was no way that whoever did this to them asked permission of every single person here. He would be doing them a service if broke them apart; there was no killing them but he wasn’t going to let their remains be tarnished like this. Smashing one of the skulls in with the butt of his spear released his offhand which he used to yank another out of the pitt, it was a full sized man but they were like toys to him. Throwing them without much issue away from him. He was a gentle individual, a kind soul that had grown over the short amount of time on this earthland.

But it wasn’t fair to these people for him not to grant them peace and he set his mind into freeing their corpses from the grasp of this individual that used them so. But it would be many a night and day before he saw any major progress from near him. But as he could feel the tint of fatigue in his body he realized that there wasn’t any real proper way with dealing with this on his own. He needed a plan that could maybe turn this from a simple mindless slaughter of the already dead to a way of purifying them.

There was a small shimmer in his form and he felt the tug of something darker, was this really the time though? Was this really how he should handle it? To let someone else take the reins? No. It was his choice in this regard and he had to stick to it. There was something at play here that he could manipulate, he started to get the sensation of some kind of ritual that was letting them release these skeletons en masse. He could feel it deeper in. It was easy to see that the skeletons weren’t the actual threat here even though there was many. Brushing some of them off with ease it wasn’t until some of the larger ones came about that he had any sort of problem. Sighing to himself the demon simply used Sleeping dragon to smash them into bits. He could feel it as he grew closer; a ritual circle with a single crimson skull in the center of it on a rather tall portion of the mound. He almost felt a frown tug on his features but that wasn’t possible. Ever smiling. Ever forward…

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It was a senseless slaughter of beings that were already gone, he had his goal and it was clear in front of him. He knew how they were doing this and how to stop it. A simple blow to that skull would render the rest inert and hopefully over time the massive pile would dissipate or rot away to be back in the cycle of things. Growling softly to himself as he felt more skeletons pry at his body he couldn’t help but reflexively smash them apart. There was something awfully cathartic about this that he couldn’t explain. He was doing them a service and it felt good to let out some of his frustrations.

There was very little for him to be frustrated about; but they were frustrations none the less. As he moved through the mass of bones he felt a larger hand grip at his shoulder pulling him back. A larger being of bone, where it looked almost muscular in as ense… if skeletons could even have muscle. Really it just looked like whatever person that they were before was well taken care of. This was the first individual to properly stop him and with a concentrated blow he’d send it flying away from him.

These undead weren’t powerful on their own, but enough of them would give any form of adventurer a really rough issue. He’d grit his teeth as he could feel the dark magic swelling from the skull in front of him. He was so close to it that it could feel the danger it was in. He wasn’t about to let it get away either so it was trying to summon more skeletons. It must have some kind of period between summoning…

Well regardless of the truth saturn brought his spear up and the skull tilted slightly to follow it as though it was still a person watching him. As his spear crashed down on the skull he almost heard a wistful sigh and a chorus of voices cry out. But it was in his imagination he felt. He was now standing in the midst of what seemed to be a desert. A single broken skull sitting in front of him, the red paint and runes on it slowly fading away until the skull blew away with the wind leaving saturn questioning what he really had been doing and what he really had seen. Though when he glanced back he no longer saw the jungle at all.

How far had he come since stepping into that skulls ‘realm’?

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