Lord of The Mysterious Realms Chapter 1011

"Even if that door can temporarily shelter you in this basement," it jeered, "the darkness will still allow some... unpleasant things to cross the barrier. To survive here, you must have an adequate light source to fend off the malice in the shadows. Otherwise, the only thing awaiting you is a deadly end."

As the lights flickered, the alarm clock that had been knocked to the floor by the entrance spoke, its words punctuated by a malicious cackle. Follow current novᴇls on noveⅼfire.net

When Jenkins had stumbled through the door moments ago, the alarm clock in his hand had been flung from his grasp. He suspected that grabbing the clock in the first place was one of the reasons for his current miserable state. The clock itself was the expounder of this Mysterious Realm's rules, and normally, it was best to keep one's distance from such things.

"If I could move, I would have tried to fix that lamp, even knowing there was something strange about it," he thought.

He knew he couldn't rely on the unconscious professor or his cat to fix the light overhead. His body was injured, but his abilities and Bestowals were still usable. As the miner's lamp above began to flicker once more, a Bestowal candle burning with an Inexhaustible Fire and a gear-shaped miner's lamp imbued with Mechanical Light materialized around him.

Ever since acquiring his monocle, Jenkins had rarely used these items for illumination. But in his current predicament, the light they provided was far brighter than the miner's lamp overhead, so it wouldn't matter if it went out completely.

He heard Chocolate's cry again, but this time it wasn't the sound of a cat looking for affection, but a threatening hiss.

A sudden bang erupted overhead, and the flickering miner's lamp exploded. Fortunately, Jenkins was positioned slightly to its left; otherwise, the shattered glass might have scarred his face.

The true danger lay not in the debris from the shattered lamp, but in the warm, yellow flame that hovered where it had been. The flame was so small that Jenkins hadn't even noticed it at first, but he soon felt the temperature in the basement begin to climb. His eyes darted around, and he saw it—a flame radiating a black spiritual aura, steadily warping the space around it.

He struggled, wanting to get up and extinguish the thing, but his body was in such a state that he could barely move his fingers.

He called out the professor's name a few times. When no response came, he looked toward the swishing cat tail in his line of sight. But Chocolate couldn't do anything; it was just a cat.

"There's no other choice."

The flame from his candle flared up, shooting unstoppably toward the ceiling. In an instant, the Inexhaustible Fire enveloped the warm yellow flame. Being similar in nature, the two immediately began to grapple, following a principle of consumption.

However, Jenkins's Inexhaustible Fire was a C-class Bestowal, a Purification Candle fused with divine power, and more importantly, it was under his control. After wrestling with the flame from the Mysterious Object for a moment, it consumed it whole.

Jenkins would never have resorted to this if he'd had any other choice. After all, letting a Bestowal absorb a Mysterious Object came with the risk of corruption, just like what had happened to the Pirate King Femishue's Heart of the Ocean.

His luck held out. As the Inexhaustible Fire slowly receded back into the candle's wick, Jenkins saw no sign of a black aura. The problem of the basement's light source was solved, for now. And as that thought crossed his mind, the previously silent alarm clock piped up again:

"You have used your recklessness and brute force to solve one of the key problems for survival: the light source. The old flame has faded, and a new one shall protect the survivors of the apocalypse. This act has earned you a small amount of survival time. You may leave this place one hour earlier."

The sound of turning gears emanated from the alarm clock, and Jenkins assumed the hands on its face were fast-forwarding.

"The first event after coming in here was the light source," Jenkins mused. "If I had ignored it, the malice from the shadows would have flooded the basement once the light went out. Since I dealt with it—but by finding my own light source instead of fixing the lamp—I had to face that nasty flame. If I'd chosen to fix the lamp, I'm sure another problem would have appeared, but that path might have rewarded me with a B- or C-class item. Too bad I couldn't move... I think I'm starting to understand the choices here... And it mentioned leaving early..."

In contrast to the well-decorated floor above, the basement was little more than a hole dug out from under the house, with crudely flattened earth for the floor and walls, and no further finishing.

The space was cold and damp. While there were no suspicious little animals, it was certainly no place for a long stay. Jenkins wasn't sure if this Mysterious Realm was simulating an apocalypse or recreating a real historical event, but he knew one thing for certain: he couldn't survive here for twenty-four hours. Even if the professor regained consciousness, there was no way the two of them could handle one crisis after another in such an awful place.

This made the alarm clock's offer to "leave early" absolutely vital. However, it also meant that Jenkins would have to confront more problems now, just to be able to leave before even worse ones could emerge.

"Sounds like a vicious cycle."

Those were the first words he managed to speak.

It took ten minutes before Jenkins could prop himself up from the floor. He weakly reached out to stroke the obedient cat, and it immediately began nuzzling its head against his palm.

He wisely avoided picking up the alarm clock. The face on it was staring at him with undisguised malice, an expression reminiscent of Chocolate eyeing its dinner.

The clock hands were now moving counter-clockwise. They showed twenty-two hours and forty minutes remaining until all three hands converged on twelve. This meant that if they didn't actively handle these sudden events, Jenkins and the professor would be stuck in the basement for over twenty-two more hours.

Once he had recovered enough strength, Jenkins checked on the professor. There were no external injuries, but his brow was tightly furrowed, as if trapped in a nightmare. The professor was clutching a fire poker, an object Jenkins was certain he hadn't been holding before they entered the Mysterious Realm. It must have been what the professor found, at the cost of being knocked unconscious.

The items now in the basement, brought in by two men and one cat, were as follows: the statue of the armless woman, a black chess piece, an empty water glass, a fountain pen, a feather, a bracelet, a ring, and the fire poker.

The cat alone had brought in three items—more than the unconscious professor. Jenkins was curious as to how Chocolate had managed that, but he chalked it up to its incredible luck.

So this was the power of its earlier "meow."

Chocolate wore a smug expression for a moment before quickly hiding it, as if afraid the perceptive man would notice.