Chapter 408: The Guide and the God

Luke plunged into the portal heading back to Earth, and the transition swallowed him whole, like a living storm dragging him into its core. Bluish energy wrapped around him in a violent embrace, sparks snapping and coiling around his limbs. The pain hit instantly, deep and overwhelming, like something trying to crush him and rebuild him at the same time. His bones felt as if they were cracking and reforging; his blood surged and recoiled in his veins with a will of its own. Even his eyes felt ready to burst out of his skull.

After a few seconds that stretched into forever, everything was devoured by a black haze. Darkness flooded his vision, and silence smothered every sense. He recognized this. Rank evolution. From F to E. And even through the raw, tearing agony ripping through him, something inside him, instinctive and ancient, whispered that this was necessary. Good. The next step.

His consciousness drifted away from his body, as if he were floating far outside his own skin. The reconstruction continued, more intense with each passing heartbeat, every cell rewritten from scratch. Even in the absolute void, system notifications pulsed faintly at the edges of his mind, but the pain was too much. He forced the interface away just to endure the process.

Before he disappeared entirely, he focused what little awareness he had left on a single action: he pulled Angelica into his soul. He couldn’t risk her being teleported somewhere else or getting stuck in the tutorial. It was the last coherent decision he managed before everything finally went dark. When the agony stopped, the darkness cracked like broken glass. Light leaked through the fissures until the real world bled into view. Luke felt his body knitting itself back together in physical space; he was being rebuilt atom by atom and spit out of the teleport.

Home. I’m finally getting home!

The surge of emotion hit hard, but it didn’t last. The moment he tried to step forward, there was no floor. No ground. No support. Only a void. He plunged downward.

Wind tore past his face as he dropped at blistering speed, the night sky opening wide around him. Stars. Torn clouds. And a terrifying silence. Instinct told him to scream, but shock strangled the sound in his throat. Something had gone wrong. Horribly wrong.

He had been teleported into the sky. He tried to pull up the system, desperate for anything.

[Locked until your new Rank finishes processing!]

Luke cursed silently. He wanted to use the bat cloak, anything to glide, but the interface ignored him. Everything failed. Before he could even consider another option, the ground appeared through the clouds below him, rising like a gray titan rushing to meet him.

Except something was off. The ground was moving.

It rose like a massive elevator while he kept falling. The distorted perspective made his stomach flip. Then the acceleration cut out completely. Gravity vanished as suddenly as if someone had flipped a switch. His body went weightless.

When his feet touched solid earth, there was no impact. No pain. Nothing at all. The sense of falling vanished as though it had never existed.

“What the hell!”, he gasped, pressing a hand to his chest, trying to calm his racing heart. Even with boosted HP and all his new stats, there was no way he should have survived a drop like that.

He drew a slow breath and scanned the area. Towering trees, moonlit shadows stretching across twisted branches, a wild maze of forest. No buildings. No lights. No streets. Nothing that looked remotely like Earth.

Did the teleport throw me somewhere else entirely?

“Haha.”

The raspy laugh cut through the forest silence like a cold blade.

Luke spun around and froze.

A figure nearly three meters tall stood behind him. It wasn’t human; that truth hit him with the clarity of instinct, the kind that bypasses logic entirely. The creature wore a black cloak so deep it seemed to swallow the light around it. The hood hid everything, every feature, as if there were only void inside. One glance, and the silhouette called to mind the oldest image of Death.

“Do not fear, Luke Moon,” the figure said. “You are not dead, nor am I Death, though I was born from Her.”

A massive scythe materialized from the darkness beneath the hood, and skeletal hands, skin dry as parchment and rigid like it had been peeled from a centuries old corpse, reached out to grasp the weapon. The contrast between the living shadow of the cloak and those cadaverous hands sent a chill down Luke’s spine.

On reflex, he tried using Identify. Nothing. He reached for his inventory, willing any weapon into his grasp. No response. Even the necklace linked to his pocket dimension was silent, dead, useless.

Everything was locked.

“My name is Sigil,” the creature said, bowing in a slow, formal arc. The voice carried weight, a metallic undertone that didn’t just echo in the air but vibrated in Luke’s bones.

From what little Luke could see beneath the sleeves of the cloak, the being had a humanoid shape, but that was almost the only thing familiar about it. The skin looked dry and lifeless, like sun burned driftwood. No muscles, no warmth, no hint of vitality.

“Sigil?” Luke repeated, still trying to piece together what the hell was happening. Nothing in any tutorial theory mentioned anything like this.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Do not trouble yourself,” Sigil said, lifting one bony hand. “You are where you should be. I am a Guide for those who complete a tutorial. At this moment, every survivor from your tutorial is speaking with a Guide. I was assigned to you.”

That only made everything more confusing. From what Luke had learned, there was never any mention of a post tutorial Guide. This was entirely new information.

The creature drifted forward, gliding over the ground as if it had no legs at all, hovering just inches above the earth. Luke felt the urge to step back, but instinct warned him that running was pointless. The gap between them was too wide. Even if Luke sprinted to the edge of the world, Sigil would reach him effortlessly.

“You’re reasoning correctly,” Sigil commented.

“You can read my thoughts?” he asked. He already suspected the answer, but admitting it out loud made the idea of having zero mental privacy even more unnerving.

“A god can do many things,” Sigil replied simply. “But our time together is short. Let me begin by saying this: a Guide typically appears only in tutorials touched by a God. It is not common. And we request discretion. Do not speak to people of your world about your meeting with a Guide. Not even about our existence. Do we understand each other?”

Luke nodded.

“Good,” Sigil said, with a faint echo of satisfaction. “Let me explain. We are in an intermediary dimension. Soon, you will be sent back to your universe, to your planet. But first, we must settle a few matters. To begin, I congratulate you on completing the tutorial. Yours was a difficult one… in fact, the most difficult in your entire universe.”

Sigil stepped closer. Even the scythe it carried stood taller than Luke. Being near that thing felt like standing beside a living shadow that swallowed everything it touched. Beneath the hood, there was nothing. No face. No light. Only darkness layered upon more darkness.

“The System…” Sigil began, its voice dropping to a whisper so thin it barely existed. “In every universe, it likes to create a special tutorial. This one takes place in the remains of a universe that no longer exists.”