Chapter 2090: Chapter 2090

Jenkins nodded. He had a rough grasp of the situation, but he knew he'd need to find a body before he could answer his other questions. Fınd the newest release on N0veI.Fiɾe.net

He broke apart the wooden cross in his hands, using the thicker beam as a makeshift spade to dig into the earth. In a place , little more than a potter's field, it took less than ten minutes to strike something solid. With a bit more effort, he managed to unearth the body whole.

Though it was a corpse, exhumed from the dirt and still wrapped in a white shroud, it looked unnervingly like a living man in a deep sleep. Jenkins carefully checked the male body for warmth and breath, confirming that despite the lack of any wounds or signs of decay, it was, in fact, dead.

He still hadn't decided which side to take, so he silently dragged the body over to the obsidian table across from the bonfire.

Standing beside the stone table, he first felt like a surgeon at an operating table, but the feeling quickly morphed into that of a butcher in a slaughterhouse.

He noticed that both the rotting head in the darkness and the metal skeleton by the bonfire were watching him in silence. He pulled a sharp dinner knife from his pack, slipped on his gloves, and sliced open the corpse's faded white shirt. Then, he poised the blade over its chest—

The corpse's eyes snapped open.

Jenkins was so accustomed to this kind of trope that his expression didn't even flicker.

As its eyes opened, black smoke began to seep from every pore. The smoke wasn't thick, but in the otherwise clean air of this space, it was a particularly foul intrusion.

The body began to shudder violently. A finger twitched, then the entire hand. It reached out, trying to grab Jenkins's wrist, but he had encountered something similar in the floral Mysterious Realm and had already stepped back, well out of reach.

"What do you want to say?"

He cut straight to the point. The corpse didn't sit up; instead, its eyes swiveled in their sockets to fix on Jenkins at its side. The sudden wind died down.

"We don't want to die."

The voice was a chilling chorus of a thousand overlapping whispers. The wisps blown into the body had been souls, countless of them. They had attached themselves to the corpse in an orderly fashion, aligning with bone and muscle rather than just being trapped within.

"But you're already dead," Jenkins pointed out. "Fine. Tell me your story. I suppose I'm in for another tale."

The hundreds of souls had all lived fifty-three years ago. And, coincidentally, most of them had been farmers. Fifty-three years ago, the Steam Age was just moving past its initial phase. It was then that the trajectory of this world, of this civilization, had begun to subtly diverge from the one Jenkins knew.

The development of unique technologies based on steam power led to the rapid miniaturization of previously massive steam engines, which in turn sparked a revolution in the wool industry. The booming textile trade caused wool prices to skyrocket, making sheep farming incredibly profitable—but that required vast tracts of land. And so, the nobility and wealthy merchants drove the tenant farmers from the land they had worked for generations, enclosing the common fields to create massive sheep pastures.

These actions were, of course, entirely legal. Both the laws of the time and the documents that survive to this day attest to their legitimacy. But legal does not always mean just. For the farmers who lived through that era, it was a time when the nobility and the merchant class conspired to seize their allotments and the common lands, stripping them of their rights to use and own the soil they tilled. The seized land was fenced off, transformed into vast private pastures and farms.

It was what became known as the Enclosure Movement, and its form was much the same in this world as it had been in his own.

And these souls, who had died fifty-three years ago, were all victims of that era. Some, having lost their land, were forced into the cities to sell their labor, only to die in the factories. Others, unable to find a new path after being driven from their homes, simply starved or froze to death.

In short, they were all casualties of the steam revolution fifty-three years ago, the flesh-and-blood foundation upon which the glories of the 1860s—the era Jenkins had arrived in—were built.

"Our land was stolen from us before we died, our very lifeblood wrung dry," the chorus of voices lamented. "We don't want our bones and flesh to be carved up after death as well."

The overlapping voices of hundreds pleaded with Jenkins, their tone a collective wail:

"In life, we were fuel for others' progress. In death, we refuse to become fuel again."

This was different from the last Mysterious Realm. The three individuals there had also been tragic figures of their time, but they had their own hateful qualities. No matter how he had dealt with them, Jenkins wouldn't have felt he was in the wrong. But these hundreds of souls were truly pitiable. They had done nothing wrong and certainly didn't deserve to be tormented .

"Then do you know what this world is?"

He hoped to learn about this Mysterious Realm from these souls, just as he had in the last one. But they were fragmented, incomplete, most of them operating on pure instinct. Moreover, having been simple, common people in life, they could hardly describe their experiences here to Jenkins.

"If I don't want to skin this man and carve out his bones, what do I have to do?"

He asked the skeleton and the rotting head.

"If you do not wish for others to be the fuel, then you must become the fuel yourself. For the fire to continue burning, someone must be set alight to illuminate the way for others."

"If not another's flesh, then it must be your own," the skeleton added. "In this 'forest,' everyone wants a bite. To survive, if you don't want others to be bitten, you must sacrifice yourself."

The two creatures' answers were more or less the same, both tempting him to sacrifice himself.

Jenkins shook his head. So far, he hadn't sensed the power of a Beast of Calamity hidden within this Mysterious Realm. This ancient graveyard was far smaller than the sea of lava in the previous cavern; it seemed too small to hide a creature as massive as an Earthfire Worm.

"So, is this Mysterious Realm a choice of sacrifice?" he mused. "Sacrifice myself, or sacrifice others?"

That analysis had to be wrong. If a truly wicked person entered this place, they would sacrifice others without a second thought and leave completely unscathed. The Mysterious Realms tested three parts courage, three parts ability, and three parts wisdom—and ninety-one parts luck. They weren't a test of one's conscience.