Eldritch Horror Theatre

Left or right?

They said that when lacking evidence and logic, one should always trust their intuition.

And without a doubt, his intuition currently pointed to the left.

Soon enough, Fu Qian was standing at a fork in the road.

To his right was exactly what he had seen earlier: that incredibly classic long flight of stairs.

Straight and long, with an incline exceeding seventy degrees; even from the bottom, he couldn't see the top.

In the opposite direction was the Bliss Infusion Station he had seen last.

During the time it had taken him to walk over, it had remained completely inactive, as if quietly waiting for him.

At the same time, the absolute urge to go over there surged wildly as the distance closed.

Much like the platform he had just descended from, there wasn't even a path leading up to it.

The peculiar luster on its surface was cast by countless thin, hair-like tubes.

These thin tubes spiraled all the way up to the filling nozzle, their lower ends plunging deeply into the base of the Tower. It was as if a massive liquid storage tank sat inside—or rather, a massive liquid storage tank did sit inside.

Despite lacking any sort of X-ray vision, his "intuition" kicked in once again.

Gazing at the bizarre layers of texture on its surface, Fu Qian felt as if he could see a series of gland-like structures inside.

The liquid flowing through them was the concentrated essence of this place: Chemical Bliss Raw Slurry.

One sip of that would be catastrophic.

Of course, to be fair, it truly did bring bliss. Knowing the truth wasn't always a pleasant thing.

With a sigh, Fu Qian turned around and set foot on the long staircase to his right.

Intuition was certainly worth trusting, so could it possibly get any stronger?

...

The difficulty of the climb was genuinely high.

That was Fu Qian's immediate impression upon stepping onto those bizarrely colored stairs.

Although the treads on his soles slightly increased friction, the soft, greasy texture of the steps still made it difficult to stand firm—fortunately, there were other things to add friction.

Maintaining his center of gravity, Fu Qian continued upward without hesitation. By the time he took his third step, a sharp spike of agony shot up from the sole of his foot.

A canine-like spike had thrust out from inside the step, its tip nearly severing the third toe on his right foot.

And Fu Qian was absolutely certain it hadn't been there before he took the step.

In other words, this could perfectly well be understood as the long staircase's stress response to being stepped on...

Understood. The road to ascending the heavens was fraught with peril; suffering in mind and breaking in body was perfectly normal.

Observing closely, Fu Qian didn't let the excruciating pain in his toe affect his balance in the slightest as he took another step.

Halfway through this step, he abruptly changed direction, lightly planting his foot off to the side.

The reason was simple: this time, before his foot even landed, another spike had already thrust out from that spot.

Though it wasn't aimed quite as perfectly as the previous one, if his momentum had remained unchanged, it still would have been enough to leave a gash on his ankle.

This was where the importance of maintaining maximum balance revealed itself. Reacting on the fly, he still planted this step with absolute stability.

Of course, the road ahead was still very long.

Fu Qian looked up. In the blink of an eye, the steps higher up had transformed into a genuinely interlocking field of fangs, looking as if they were covered in bone-white daggers.

...

It wasn't as if it had left absolutely no path—as long as one had enough physical flexibility.

Having never expected a smooth journey, Fu Qian felt no particular emotion. With a single sweeping glance, he mapped out a viable path forward.

Without hesitating, he immediately continued upward along that route.

Naturally, it wasn't without resistance.

As he climbed higher step by step, the intuition that a prodigal son's return is worth more than gold grew ever stronger. The internal conflict tore at him, stirring a maddening desire to turn back.

His intuition really had gotten stronger.

Quite satisfied with this change, however, Fu Qian's reaction was to keep moving forward while feeling the resistance, fully experiencing the sensation of pressing on under a heavy burden.

Slice—

Unfortunately, whether a path was walkable was ultimately a relative concept, even if he pushed this body's balance to its absolute limit, and even if those fangs stopped growing once they reached a certain length.

In more than one spot, passing through was clearly just a matter of deciding how many wounds to take. It had become impossible to maintain a normal stair-climbing posture.

Of course, through rapid calculations, Fu Qian still managed to minimize his loss of mobility.

Amid the highly visceral sounds of tearing flesh, it soon became impossible to find any large patches of intact skin below his shoulders.

And at a certain moment, after half of one ear was sliced off, Fu Qian finally came to a halt.

...

In a narrow sense, he still retained some mobility, but in a broader sense, he had lost the ability to press on.

The reason was simple: although his legs could still move, the "intuition" growing wildly in his mind had become intense enough to border on schizophrenia. The resulting impact had finally spread to his motor nerves.

The agony of self-denial was frantically tearing at his willpower.

That was more like it.

Taking a light breath to ensure he wouldn't aggravate the gashes on his chest with large movements, Fu Qian felt even more satisfied in that moment.

The mistakes humans made were often not meaningless. For instance, they could make the correct path stand out even more clearly.

Look, wasn't he turning over a new leaf right now?

He had already climbed the height of two towers, yet the staircase ahead still showed no end in sight.

Fortunately, he was finally done violently fighting his intuition. Fu Qian truly turned around, looked down at his feet, and turned back from his misguided path.

Of course, before actually taking his first step down, his one relatively intact hand didn't forget to pinch the closest spike and yank with all his might.

To his comfort, rather than teeth growing from the flesh, they were more like thorns piercing into it.

After some effort, Fu Qian successfully pulled free this souvenir and gripped it in his hand, keeping it as a warning against youthful ignorance.

Carrying this resolve, the hazards on the path down seemed quite a bit more endearing.

At the same time, because his heart was returning like an arrow, it was inevitable that Fu Qian accumulated a bunch of new wounds on his body.

So much so that when he finally returned to his starting point, a single glance made him look like a fish prepped for the steamer.

But having returned to the correct path, he evidently didn't care about such details. Gripping the spike tightly in his hand, he stared at the Tower of Bliss and marched straight over, never glancing back once along the way.

It looked a bit more properly aligned than the previous ones. Was this what they meant by "the more advanced it is, the simpler it becomes"?

Finally arriving at his destination, Fu Qian stood beneath that Infusion Platform and immediately gave it a positive review.

It wasn't false praise. Although the general style was similar, compared to the earlier ones, the lines of the structure before him were clearly simpler and smoother, looking as if many unnecessary elements had been removed.

It had a sort of industrialized beauty—Screech!

Amid his admiration, Fu Qian reached out his hand, and the spike carved a massive gash directly across its surface.

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