With the two energy swords deep inside their foreheads, the two evil blasphemous Buddha statues started crumbling from the head down: the two energy swords with arcane symbols and ancient words written on their blades must have struck something important, something like a power core, and now the energy from inside the statues was leaking out, and thus the statues started losing their structural integrity altogether.

Dark smoke came from the giant cracks on the Buddhas’ bodies, the streams of dark red blood also got diverted by the cracks and started splashing everywhere. The suppression array created by Jianmen with his stone spikes coated with energy not only stopped the creatures from the inside of the pool of blood from coming out, but it also stopped the blood from dripping into the pool. But judging from the cracks on the energy wall formed by it, the situation would not last long.

Purple lightning started shooting out of Josephine Wong’s eyes and palms, as she triggered another burst of her energy right before the team of four reached the hole through which they fell down into this pit. The two energy swords became slightly smaller but more condensed under Josephine Wong’s control, and then they sliced down from the center of the foreheads to the left chests of the Buddhas, right through the positions of their hearts.

The two purple energy swords dissipated due to their losing the last drop of their energy. But they did their jobs: the two evil blasphemous Buddha statues exploded from the positions of their brains, hearts, stomachs and wrists, their mantra incantation stopped with the explosions. But on the other hand, more dark red blood poured out like from two broken water towers and onto the energy wall formed from Jianmen’s suppression array. This proved to have brought additional heavy pressure on the suppression array, and several holes appeared on the already half broken energy wall.

“Out we go!” Tze Cha laughed out loud because he could no longer hear the remote echoes of the evil mantras. And with a few more breaths of dark fire clearing the way, they were finally about to reach the hole on the ground.

When the two Buddhas stopped chanting, Nameless stopped his chanting as well. And with the help of the jade card placed on his back by Jianmen, he was able to recover a lot of his power, and when the team of four were about to go through the hole, he started chanting another mantra and conjured a golden energy shield hovering ahead of them.

Several creatures of malice leapt and rushed down from the other side of the hole and crashed against the golden energy shield, breaking their bodies up and splashing all over like giant bugs on a windshield. Despite these simple distractions, the team rushed through the hole.

But somehow, the team did not reach the hallway, which was where they were before they fell down. Instead, they found themselves somewhere inside of a broken, dirtied and messy room with a high ceiling, with metal walls all around, broken lights on the ceiling, and used up wooden dolls, metal dolls, dried up human and animal bodies scattered all around the floor. When they looked around, they could see that there were at least hundreds of dolls and bodies lying around on the floor, especially in the tall piles in the corners of the room.

“They tricked us into a portal.” Josephine Wong let out a frustrated exhale: “Fuck! Such a rookie mistake!”

“But at least we’re safe for now.” Jianmen lowered himself close to the ground: “For now I guess - I don’t see electronic doors with limited batteries around here we can close only when needed to to last us through the night.”

“Yeah I know that game, they should add a ‘eat the freaking dolls’ option.” Tze Cha sniffed the scent in the air: “There is some kind of weird energy around here, but it’s not malice, nor is it necromancy.”

“I think I know why that fucking painting sent us here.” Jianmen picked up the head of a metal doll on the ground, stared into its rolling eyes, the dark and spinning core at its center and said: “This is the ‘dream hub’ of the clustered malice.”

All other members of the team went silenced, having ample experience dealing with malice and especially clustered malice, all of them knew exactly what a “dream hub” was - the only thing was that it was mostly a theorized section buried deep inside the area in which clustered malice resided, there were very little proof and evidence that it actually existed - until now.

“We must leave now.” Josephine Wong started conjuring a portal right away, but though she was already trying her hardest, she could not make the portal take shape and become stable - everytime the energy vortex appeared in the air, some kind of force field came from the thin air and disrupted the flow of energy and made the portal collapsed on itself. Nameless chanted his mantra and tried as well, and his power seemed to be collapsing even faster.

“Let me try.” Tze Cha was cooperative for the first time: “Your powers - Xen magic and Light of Vajra do not jive well with the utter madness and insanity of this place. Because if Mr. Chopper and Broom here is right, utter madness and insanity is weaved into the very fabric of this place.”

A vortex of dark flames appeared in front of Tze Cha, it took Tze Cha some extra effort, but it did stabilize in the air. But when the space tunnel was about to open up from the center, some kind of energy wave came from two corners of the room and brushed through the vortex and the portal seemed to go into a state of chaos all of a sudden. Tze Cha cut off his energy output immediately, but the aftermath of a failed spell still hit him and pushed him back in the air away from the vortex.

“This is not good.” Tze Cha wiped the dark green blood off from the corner of his mouth: “The very fabric of reality is full of madness and chaos - anything resembling order and sanity is getting crushed and disrupted. That thing must have been very familiar with this place to be able to construct a portal like that.”

Jianmen sighed, then he raised his meat cleaver on his right hand and ran his left palm over the edge, letting his blood run all over the blade of the meat cleaver: “Alright, then there’s one last choice - that is to cut through the fabric of reality itself.”