The very first thing Karma noticed when he stepped into the Deep Zone was the silence.
It wasn't the peaceful silence of an empty room or a quiet night. It was a heavy, predatory silence—the kind of dead quiet that exists right before a predator snaps the neck of its prey.
The air itself felt wrong. It was freezing cold, but it burned their lungs with every breath. Pale, gray ash fell from the pitch-black, purplish sky, covering the cracked obsidian ground like dirty snow. The dead, twisted trees around them didn't have leaves; their branches looked like elongated, agonizing human hands desperately reaching up to the sky.
"Everyone, listen to me and breathe slowly," Sambhab whispered. His usually composed face was pale, and a cold sweat beaded on his forehead. He held up a small, glowing Pran-stone, but its blue light could barely pierce the thick, suffocating darkness around them.
"What's wrong with the air?" Kanha gasped, clutching his chest. "I feel like a hundred-kilo weight is sitting on my lungs."
"The Pran pressure here is astronomically high," Sambhab explained, his voice tight with genuine fear. "The ambient energy of this dimension is crushing us. If you sprint or exert too much raw energy at once, your internal organs might rupture under the pressure."
Kanha cursed under his breath. He pulled out one of his wooden toothpicks and channeled his chaotic orange Chakra into it. Usually, he could turn it into a massive, thirty-foot log in a fraction of a second. But here, the wood trembled and violently resisted. It only grew to the size of a thick iron rod before stopping completely.
"Dammit," Kanha groaned, gripping the rod tightly. "The dimension's gravity is eating my ability. I can't make things more massive here. Karma, Sammy... I can't be the heavy hitter right now."
Hearing this, Daizy began to tremble. She wasn't shivering from the freezing air; she was shaking from the sheer, overwhelming terror radiating from the shadows. She felt incredibly small and vulnerable.
Karma noticed her shaking. Without a word, he shifted his grip on his dark wooden sword and reached out with his free hand, firmly holding Daizy's cold fingers.
The moment his skin touched hers, his dense, stabilized teal aura pulsed gently, wrapping around them both like a warm blanket. The suffocating pressure eased slightly. Daizy looked up at him, her dark eyes filled with gratitude. Karma gave her a single, reassuring nod. Lord Rudra's brutal training was paying off—Karma's body was slowly adapting to the crushing weight of the Deep Zone.
"We need to move, but we must stay quiet," Karma said, his eyes scanning the terrifying forest of dead trees. "If the portal coordinates were tampered with, other students might have been dropped here too."
Before anyone could take a step, a sound broke the dead silence.
Drip... Drip... Splash.
It wasn't water. It was thick, heavy, and wet.
Karma instantly raised his wooden sword, stepping in front of Daizy. He followed the sound, his enhanced 1st Chakra senses guiding him toward a cluster of particularly twisted black trees.
What they saw hanging from the thickest branch made their blood run cold.
"Oh, God..." Daizy choked out, covering her mouth with both hands. Tears instantly sprang to her eyes.
Hanging upside down from the tree was a student. He was wearing the same Vedas Heritage uniform as them, likely a second-year senior who had entered the portal before them. But he was dead.
The horrifying part was how he looked. His body wasn't just torn apart; it was completely hollowed out. His skin was gray and sunken, clinging to his bones like dry paper.
Sambhab forced himself to step closer, his eyes wide with horror as he inspected the corpse. "This... this is impossible. This senior was a 2nd Chakra Awakener. His body should have been tough enough to withstand physical attacks. But look at him... he hasn't just been killed."
"What did that to him?" Kanha asked, his voice shaking.
"His Pran core," Sambhab whispered, stepping back in pure terror. "Something ripped his Chakra core straight out of his chest and drank his life force entirely. The beasts here don't just hunt for meat. They feed on our souls."
Suddenly, the temperature dropped even further.
A sharp, agonizing ringing pierced their ears. But the sound wasn't coming from the forest. It was coming from inside their own heads.
"Hungry... so hungry..." A raspy, demonic whisper echoed directly into their minds. It felt like cold, wet fingers scraping against the inside of their skulls.
"Fresh Pran... ...., beating hearts... give it to us..."
"Get out of my head!" Kanha screamed, dropping to one knee and clutching his ears in agony. Sambhab staggered backward, his analytical mind completely overwhelmed by the psychic intrusion.
"Karma!" Daizy cried out, her healing barrier flickering as the whispers tore at her focus.
"Shut up!" Karma roared.
He didn't just yell it with his voice. Karma slammed the hilt of his wooden sword into the obsidian ground and unleashed a violent shockwave of his teal Pran Energy. The burst of pure, stabilized pran energy acted like an EMP, forcefully severing the psychic connection.
The whispers instantly vanished. But the true nightmare had finally revealed itself.
From the absolute darkness between the dead trees, tall, unnaturally thin figures began to step out. They were the Stalker Shadows.
They looked vaguely human, but their limbs were too long, their fingers ending in jagged, bone-white blades. They had no eyes, no noses, and no faces. Instead, their mouths were located entirely on their stomachs—massive, vertical jaws that split their torsos wide open, dripping with thick, black saliva and lined with hundreds of razor-sharp teeth.
They were surrounded. At least thirty of them had quietly encircled the Core Four.
"Kanha, Sambhab, get up!" Karma ordered, his voice carrying the absolute authority of a veteran warrior. "They are Mind-type beasts. They feed on your fear. If you panic, you're already dead."
Kanha gritted his teeth, forcing himself to stand up. He gripped his iron rod tightly, his orange aura flaring. "har har Mahadev" he muttered.(* 😊"har har mahadev" is a popular hindu phase dedicated to god shiva")
Karma took a deep breath, tightening his grip on his bokken. The storm inside him was perfectly calm.
"Sambhab, Kanha, you take the flanks. Distract them," Karma commanded, his eyes locked onto the largest Stalker Shadow in front of them. "Daizy, stay exactly one step behind me.
The beasts let out a synchronized, bone-chilling screech and lunged all at once.
As the monsters leaped through the air, their jagged bone-blades aiming to tear the students apart, Karma slowly exhaled.
He pushed his stabilized 1st Chakra past its normal limits. Deep inside his chest, his newly forged core spun rapidly.
Suddenly, the world around Karma changed. The terrifying, lightning-fast monsters seemed to freeze mid-air. The falling gray ash stopped completely, hanging suspended in the atmosphere.
Karma blinked. He wasn't just moving fast anymore. His brain was processing the world at an impossible speed. He could see the exact trajectory of every single blade, every single claw.
This was the true evolution of his 1st Chakra. Kinetic Vision. Karma raised his wooden sword. The storm was about to be unleashed.