It was a shame that he could only use soul force. The other two energies were present within him, flowing around his body and spirit, but they refused to function as he willed them to. He had even moved his blood essence around and done the same with his astral energy, only for nothing to happen, which technically made him a cripple as any child could do what he couldn't.

It was too strange that he could only use soul force. Dante suspected that it was caused by his unknown race, but the specifics eluded him at the moment. Somehow, turning into a primal had removed his ability to use blood essence and spiritual energy, only to increase his capacity of soul force many times over.

It had delayed his progress until now, but not anymore.

Once Dante was ready, he began to release his soul force as quickly as possible, creating a rainbow-tinted cloud around him that visibly grew with each passing second. Dante only stopped releasing energy when his surroundings were flooded with colourful mist, blocking off his line of sight. Most of his soul force had been pushed away by this point, diffusing into the atmosphere around him as he failed to keep it in place, but he did manage to hold onto a tenth of it before the entire cloud faded to nothing.

It was an incredibly wasteful method, but it was perfect for the current him. He had too much energy and not enough control, so why couldn't he sacrifice a bit of soul force to save time? Even though he could feel the pressure in his head lighten with each passing second, only to be overshadowed by a growing migraine that wouldn't stop until he released his hold over the cloud of soul force, Dante knew that it was his best option.

As Dante held onto the swirling mist drifting around him, he crouched down and folded himself into a foetal ball. With his knees tucked into his chest and his arms holding them in place, not without hearing Laurelai giggle at him from somewhere above his head, he began to tighten his control over the cloud until it was pressed against his skin as tightly as he could force it.

His control wasn't strong enough to form a neatly compressed layer of soul force around his skin, but even if it didn't look grand or appear skilful, it was the next best thing: Functional. The technique clicked into place, lightening the weight on his mind. He almost couldn't believe how easy it was to do it this way.

With a diffuse cloud of mist clinging to his skin, his body tucked into a ball, and a faint glow radiating from his energy, Dante felt like some kind of magical star. He must have looked strange because Laurelai was rolling on the floor, holding her sides as she laughed. Honestly, it looked a lot more impressive than how Laurelai described the proper technique, which was supposed to be a transparent film covering the body.

But did his variant technique even work?

Dante took a deep breath, still with his knees tucked in against his chest, and began to float into the air until he was a metre or so above the ground. A gentle wave of mist was shed from the outermost layer, providing the thrust needed for him to float. A surge of dopamine mixed with relief crashed through his system. He would be able to get out of the cavern now, extending his life by a few more days.

"I can't believe that worked," Laurelai said, standing up and taking to the air. "It barely qualifies as levitation, but it works."

"Who's an idiot now, huh?" Dante said, spinning around until he was looking at her upside down. "First man on the moon? Well, I'm the first man to fly."

"Well, you still kind of are. You would've figured out how to form the technique in its complete state if you weren't. Besides, this pale facsimile of the levitation skill doesn't really have any use outside of this cavern. Don't waste your time on changing techniques that already work so that you can avoid a little bit of hard work, okay?"

"Now, shall we go and explore that strange shadow hovering around the ceiling?"

The cloud of energy surrounding him was barely under control, making the surface of the cloud uneven. And with the cloud being slowly exhausted, often unevenly, Dante was forced to put the full weight of his mind into rising. He probably could have gotten away with less, but falling to his death, possibly even impaling himself on a sharp crystal, was all the motivation he needed to stay focused.

Dante eventually reached the cloud of rainbow mist that blanketed the cavern. He wasn't putting much thought into where he was going, leaving the directions to Laurelai as he followed closely behind her. He wouldn't have trusted anyone else to guide him since the cloud seemed to dampen all of his senses, but after a minute or two and a few concerning moments where his concentration slipped, they found an island floating in the mist.

The circular landmass was big enough to put a middle-class suburban home on, but it wasn't big enough to have a back or front yard. Not that he could build a house up here. Not only was it hundreds of metres in the air, floating without any obvious means of propulsion, the surface of the landmass wasn't even flat. Instead of the grey rock he expected to see, a circular hole dominated the space.

Oh, and it was filled with a surging whirlpool of blood.

Dante kept his distance while Laurelai floated closer, taking a look at something on the edges of the pool. There was a raised, metre-thick wall of rock around the outside of the island which kept the whirlpool from spilling out into the cavern. Compared to the rocky surface underneath the island, the pool's edge was smooth enough to look manufactured.

He didn't want to get too close since the smell wafting off the whirlpool burned his nostrils, filling them with the lingering scent of copper and rotten eggs. And that wasn't even taking into account the nauseating sounds made by the blood itself. The little bits of viscera and other fleshy material hidden in the blood, sloshing and gurgling around as it spun in endless circles… Suffice to say, Dante was struggling to stay in the air.

"I guess we know what the hawks were doing up here," Dante said, breathing through his mouth, "but the question of why they are doing it still remains. If we don't figure it out, the quest probably won't finish."

He expected to find some more obvious clues than just a pool of blood. For all he knew, the ritual could do anything from poison a city to create a delicious cocktail for the big boss of the hawks. Without his trusty fount of knowledge in the form of a Woodland Fairy, he would have to give up and choose to escape before the quest timer ran out. Although it pained him to give up magical treasures, not getting eaten alive was a much better alternative.

"So, got any ideas? Maybe the whirlpool feeds the mists lingering around the ceiling?"

"Ah, man," Laurelai muttered, covering her face with her hands. "Stupid. So damned stupid."

"Come on, it's the best I could come up with. How am I supposed to find the solution on my own?"

Laurelai sighed as she beckoned him closer to the rocky edge of the pool. "Not everything is about you, my little drama queen. Shrink that ego down a bit and take a look at this."

Dante came closer to find thousands of near-invisible lines carved into the stone itself. They were looping and graceful, layering over each other in a complicated mixture of extreme precision and artistic beauty. He didn't know what they were, but he really would be an idiot to think they weren't somehow related to the pool of blood or the ritual itself.

"So, what am I looking at?" Dante questioned, earning him a sideways glance. "What? How am I possibly supposed to know what those lines mean when it's the first time I've ever seen them?"

"They're runic markings, woven together into something known as an inscription. You can find them everywhere in the multiverse, whether it be on the streets of a city or fancy medicines concocted by an alchemist. In fact, almost every possession in the multiverse has an inscription embedded into it for self-repair."

"I… assume that this ritual is much more complicated than a self-repair rune?" Just glancing at the cascading set of lines made his eyes wander, forcing him to look away unless he wanted to lose focus and fall to his death. There was no way he could replicate a single line of something like this, let alone the hundreds of lines packed into just the area of his pinky nail.

"That's right. A regular inscription is like a word in your language, with runes making up the word's letters. Get a bunch of runes, fit them together like the pieces of a puzzle, then you have yourself an inscription."

"This," Laurelai declared, gesturing to the ritual markings, "is not an inscription. It's millions of inscriptions woven together by a master, creating a ritual fuelled by the blood of the hawks. As for what it does and why I called myself stupid? Well, do you see that rock in the centre of the whirlpool?"

Dante hovered closer than he wanted to, only coming to a stop when he spotted a strange object in the centre of the whirlpool. It was oval in shape and was covered in ridges, and strangely enough, it seemed to be warping the light around it. If Laurelai didn't point it out, he would have never seen it.

"That's an egg," Laurelai whispered, the dread in her voice sounding strange in contrast to the bland statement. "The egg of a beast with a potent and extremely pure bloodline. Once it's hatched…"

Dante stared at the strange oval in the blood pool. It was like a void that consumed the light around it, looking like a CGI wormhole. "That thing is an egg? How is that even possible? It looks like a black hole."

Laurelai shook her head, her voice still low. "Anything is possible in the endless multiverse, but that's not the important part. The ritual is purifying the blood so that the egg can absorb it later, but where do those unwanted impurities go? My guess is that it's getting pumped into the air for us to breathe."

"Wait, so are we being poisoned or something?" Dante began to subconsciously drift away from the pool of blood.

"Yes and no," Laurelai muttered, shaking her head. "Our minds are being poisoned, which is now quite obvious in hindsight, but it isn't really harmful."

"How so?" Dante was sceptical at best. Some things were the same all across the multiverse, and one of them was that poisons weren't good for your health.

Laurelai shrugged, looking a bit sheepish. "Well, haven't you noticed how aggressive we've been to each other? I just met you last week, yet I can't help but get annoyed every time you make the slightest misstep. It's totally unnatural for me, and I assume it's the same for you to be so combative and hostile. Despite that, we're also getting along quite well."

"Almost dying can have that effect on people, so I never put much thought into it," Dante said, scratching the back of his head. "Now that I think about it, I would never talk to you the way I have if you met me under normal circumstances."

"That's part of it, but there's more," Laurelai muttered, avoiding his eyes. "I can only guess the hawks of this particular genus are highly aggressive and very pack oriented, and we've been inhaling their bloodline for a whole week. Why else would both of our personalities change so much?"

Dante wasn't sure how to feel about getting poisoned. He didn't really care since it only made him a little bit more aggressive and irritable, but on the other hand he felt pretty bad about his behaviour over the last few days. Seeing Laurelai avoid his gaze just made him feel worse.

"So, um. What do we do now?" Dante said, glancing at the egg. "Should we take the beast egg, or is the blood the real prize?"

Laurelai's head snapped to the egg as she brightened, obviously glad to change the topic. "Take the egg and let's get out of here. There are three phases to the tutorial, so leaving the cavern should signal the end of the first phase."

Dante nodded and began to drift over the whirlpool, but once he was halfway there, he stopped as something tingled in the back of his mind. A distant echo pulsed through his very being. The egg was calling for him so that they could be reunited, almost like a severed hand begging to be reattached to its bloody stump.

It was connected to him somehow. It needed him, and he needed it. Dante always felt empty inside, like he was a hollowed-out shell of who he should be. And as he stared at the egg, feeling the ethereal bond linking their very existence together, he realised that this was what he had been missing.

Every cell in his body screamed at him to move.

Dante took a step towards the egg, only to fall into the whirlpool as the shroud of soul force fell apart. A wave of blood crashed into his side, knocking him over as the haze enveloping his mind thickened. Blood splashed into his mouth and nose, burning his lungs like saltwater, but he didn't react to the pain. It was hard to think now, with the egg so close.

He could only think about moving closer.

The waves of blood pulled him towards the egg like a raft on a strong current. Laurelai was shouting at him, but he couldn't process her words even if he wanted to. She sounded scared for some reason, making him pause for a moment before he continued moving.

Then he ignored her.

Wasn't it good that he was becoming whole again? The egg was the most important thing to him now. Dante had spent his entire life feeling inadequate, but now he didn't have to be.

He had to have it.

Dante reached out and touched the ceramic shell of the egg, allowing a stream of ice to flood into his arm. The feeling jolted him awake, but the ice only turned colder when he tried, and failed, to remove his hand. The ice kept sinking deeper and deeper into his body, holding him in place as it corrupted him from the inside.

After the ice finished sinking into his body, the egg began to vibrate, heating up as it continued to hold him in place. The heat was soothing as it warmed up the ice in his veins, but the embers quickly grew into a raging inferno within him. Molten fire turned his bones to liquid, made his blood boil inside his veins, and cooked his flesh like meat on a barbeque.

Dante screamed as he drowned in the churning waters, but no matter how much blood he swallowed, his body refused to die.