The Hunter Monarch

The moment Lin Yu crossed the threshold, the world ceased to exist in any recognizable form.

Normal transit between a Door and a Layer was a brief, violent, but blessedly short affair. It was a plunge into a nauseating vortex of light and sound that lasted no more than a few heartbeats. This was not that. This was something else entirely. This was a descent into hell.

The first sensation was one of shearing force. It felt as if every molecule in his body was being pulled in a different direction, stretched thin like spun sugar over a vast, empty canvas. The familiar, disorienting kaleidoscope of colors was replaced by a churning, sickening abyss of bruised purples, gangrenous greens, and angry, blood-red streaks. It was the color palette of a dying universe.

His own scream was ripped from his lungs, but it made no sound. Sound did not exist here. There was only pressure, a crushing, immense weight that felt like an entire ocean was collapsing in on him from all sides. He was blind, deaf, and being systematically unmade.

Through the agony, a part of his mind, the analytical part that had devoured books and memorized encyclopedias, struggled to make sense of the impossible. This isn't right. Transit is chaotic but stable. This is… decaying. He tried to recall Su Wan's hand, the one tangible anchor he always had, but the memory was a distant, fading echo, drowned out by the sheer, overwhelming torment of the present.

Then, he saw it.

In the non-space of the dimensional tunnel, he could see faint, golden threads weaving through the chaos. He recognized them from an obscure text on dimensional theory: Ley-lines, the pathways that guided a traveler from the Door to the designated Layer. But his thread, the one that should have been pulling him towards a C-Rank destination, was flickering erratically.

And it was being attacked.

A creeping, insidious corruption, like a frost of pure void, was spreading along the golden line. He saw the source now: a jagged, ugly symbol of jagged, rust-colored lines that had affixed itself to his own spiritual form. The Transit Hex. It pulsed with a malevolent, anti-life energy, actively severing the connections to his intended destination. It was a parasite, eating the pathway, forcing his trajectory onto a new, unsanctioned course. The Ley-line for the C-Rank Layer snapped, its golden light extinguishing with a silent, finality.

His trajectory, now untethered, went wild. He was flung from the stable current into the raw, untamed wilderness of the dimensional void. If the tunnel had been a river, he had just been tossed over a waterfall into a sea of razor blades.

The pain intensified a hundredfold. He saw other Ley-lines now, massive, brilliant conduits of power, flashing past him like highways for gods. He saw an immense river of pure, crystalline blue energy—an S-Rank path, probably leading to a celestial realm. He saw a roiling torrent of black and crimson—a demonic plane. His corrupted path was careening through them all, a runaway train car hurtling across all the tracks in the station at once.

He could feel the raw energy of these pathways tearing at him. The celestial energy burned him with its purity, while the demonic energy tried to corrode his very essence. His body, already stretched to its breaking point, began to fray. He felt a tearing sensation along his arm, and to his horror, he saw it begin to pixelate, to dissolve into a cloud of glowing motes before being violently pulled back together by some fundamental law of his own existence.

System Kernel Integrity Compromised, his personal System screen, the one that was always so maddeningly placid and empty, flickered into life on its own. A cascade of fractured, red text scrolled violently across the normally dormant Status tab. He had never seen it do this before; it was always a screen he commanded, never one that reacted. This was a digital seizure.

[ERROR! UNKNOWN EXTERNAL VARIABLE DETECTED!]

[ERROR! TRANSIT PROTOCOL 7.3b CORRUPTED!]

[FATAL EXCEPTION! PATHWAY ANCHOR SEVERED!]

The Hex on his back pulsed again, stronger this time. It latched onto the nearest stable, high-energy Ley-line it could find. It was a thick, vibrant cable of primal green and brown energy, humming with the power of untamed, savage life. It felt ancient, powerful, and utterly indifferent to his suffering. The Hex locked on, and his out-of-control trajectory was suddenly wrenched onto this new, terrifying path.

He was being pulled towards a destination now, a final, horrifying terminus. The agony subsided slightly, replaced by an acceleration so violent it felt like he was being shot from a cannon. The green and brown energies of the Ley-line flooded his senses, filling his mind with images of colossal trees, of monstrous beasts with claws like scythes, of a world that had never been touched by the hand of man, a world that had been left to grow, wild and lethal, for millennia.

The last thing he saw before the transit ended was Su Wan's face, a perfect, crystal-clear memory that flashed in his mind amidst the pain. Her eyes, wide with horror. Her hand, outstretched and just out of reach. It was an image of failure, of a promise broken. It was the image he would carry with him into the abyss.

Then, with a final, bone-shattering lurch, the corrupted tunnel spat him out. He was violently ejected from the non-reality of the transit, his body slamming into something solid with enough force to crack ribs and steal the breath from his lungs. The world snapped back into existence with a vengeance. The smell of damp earth, chlorophyll, and blood—his blood—filled his nostrils. The sounds of a dense, alien jungle, of unseen things chittering and roaring, assaulted his ears.

He lay broken on a bed of strange, alien moss, his body screaming in a symphony of pain. He pushed himself up, his arms trembling, and looked at his surroundings. He was not in the expected C-Rank "Crystal Caves" or any other familiar Layer. He was in a suffocatingly dense, primordial jungle. Giant, twisted trees, thicker than any building he had ever seen, formed a canopy so dense that it blotted out the sun, casting the forest floor in a perpetual, emerald gloom. The air was thick, humid, and hummed with an immense, palpable power that screamed one word at him over and over again: danger.

A new system notification, its text sharp and terrifyingly clear, materialized in the air before him, overlaying the horrifying jungle landscape. It wasn't in a tab he had selected; it was a global alert, the first he had ever received. It was a single, terrifying line of text that confirmed his worst fears and sealed his fate.

[Welcome to Layer A-7: The Verdant Maw.]