He realized the truth I had spent two long years trying to uncover.
But unlike me, Father didn't despair.
Instead, he grew even more determined ..
more certain that he would eventually find us.
In his heart, he believed he wasn't the only one who had been given a second chance at life.
He believed that fate had distributed chances equally among all our family members.
And so… he pressed forward.
Then, at the moment he fully accepted the reality of the world he lived in ..
"A mission arrived from the system."
A final mission.
One that commanded him to enter the Eastern Nightmare Lands ..
and reach its very end.
"I knew immediately… this task was on a completely different level from anything I'd faced before."
At the time, the Nightmare Lands were ruled by four Nightmare Lords ..
not three, as in my era.
Each one was a monstrous entity whose strength exceeded the SS+ rank.
Not to mention the endless swarms of nightmare creatures that roamed the lands.
But none of that stopped Father.
He took only a single sword,
packed enough rations into a dimensional ring to survive a while,
and set off on his journey.
Unlike me .. who had been thrown directly into the Nightmare Lands ..
Father entered through the eastern Oclas Mountains,
and pushed forward in search of the truth.
…
…
…
The mission asked only that he reach the end of the Eastern Nightmare Lands ..
but it gave no further instructions.
Was he simply meant to cross the continent?
Or was there something specific he needed to accomplish?
Father had no way of knowing.
So he made the only logical choice:
he would explore the Nightmare Lands fully until he found the answer.
Days passed.
Then weeks.
"I wandered for a long time across the Nightmare Lands.
During my time there, I killed countless nightmare creatures…
and nearly died dozens of times myself."
He faced every imaginable monstrosity ..
from beasts with razor-sharp limbs, to humanoid abominations, to horrors that attacked the mind itself.
One particular battle caught my attention more than the others.
One day, a thick fog engulfed Father,
causing him to hallucinate violently.
From my perspective, I clearly saw the entity haunting him:
A massive figure draped in black robes ..
its brain exposed atop its head ..
empty, hollow sockets where eyes should have been .. and a mouth full of jagged teeth.
It circled Father like a predator ready to strike.
I shuddered when I realized ..
I had once faced this thing too.
Had I really survived something like that?
Father was seconds away from falling into its illusion, but his quick thinking saved him.
I watched, stunned, as he stabbed himself through the side with his own sword ..
using the intense pain to anchor his mind and resist the hallucination.
It was a brilliant move, especially since he hadn't discovered the easier method of simply closing his eyes.
Once free from the illusion,
Father unleashed his true power ..
eight blazing stars spinning violently around his heart.
A strength comparable to the Second Lord of the Starlight family at the time.
And with a single, devastating slash of his sword, he unleashed a wave of blinding light .. one that obliterated the Mist stalker in an instant.
Seeing the destruction he left behind as he stumbled back, panting heavily ..
I realized once again just how terrifyingly powerful my father truly was.
The journey continued.
I was merely a third-person observer,
drifting rapidly from scene to scene,
barely noticing the passage of time ..
until I caught sight of the thick, rugged beard growing on Father's face.
His voice soon confirmed it:
"Six months inside the Nightmare Lands...
Six months of blood, filth, and fighting the unknown .. and yet the mission still stands, just as it did on the first day."
In half a year, thanks to the fact that he had reached the SS rank and developed skills far beyond anyone his age,
Father had already explored most of the Eastern Nightmare Lands,
facing almost every type of creature lurking there.
All of them…
Except for one.
"I kept avoiding it... hoping I wouldn't have to confront it."
I watched from afar ..
as one of the worst nightmare creatures I'd ever seen revealed itself before me.
A monster I hadn't even written about...
A being even I knew nothing about.
The Nightmare Lords I had created numbered only three.
That's what I wrote.
That's what I believed.
But the thing that now stood before me was not one of them.
Its roar was unlike anything I'd ever heard ..
a scream of sorrow, rage, and hatred.
The sound alone made my throat dry up.
It was a hulking beast, its body covered in thick, black fur, with two horns sprouting from its skull like a twisted crown.
Its face ... or what should have been its face ..
was nothing but a hollow cavity where a mind should have been.
The creature clutched its head and screamed again .. a desperate, agonized cry that seemed to shake the very heavens.
It was almost as if it was pleading to all who heard it:
"Give me back my brain... Give me back what was stolen from me!"
That was the message I instinctively understood.
And it was the same realization that struck Father.
This creature was ..
"Amygdala... one of the Nightmare Lords."
Father whispered its name, his voice heavy, as he drew the battered, scarred sword that had accompanied him through countless battles.
"To be honest... I wondered if I could even kill it."
Father leapt high into the air, eight stars igniting fiercely around his heart.
The light of the stars flared brilliantly,
piercing through the eternal darkness of the Nightmare Lands.
"I didn't know if I could kill it .. but I knew I had no choice."
To move even a step closer to his goal ...he had to fight.
Even if it cost him his life.
The battle between Abraham Starlight and Amygdala was a catastrophe on every level.
The black behemoth let out a roar that shook the earth, spewing waves of black fire that consumed the sky itself.
A wave of darkness .. cleaved clean in half by Father's blade.
With a monstrous battle cry, Father hurled himself straight into the heart of hell,
crashing into Amigdala's overwhelming darkness.
This monster ..
this nightmare ..
scorched mountains, rivers, and forests with flames that could never be extinguished.
And still ..
the light of the stars shone defiantly within the endless blackness.
Father's blade tore into Amygdala's filthy flesh, but the creature's regenerative power was horrifying.
No matter how deep the wounds,
it kept fighting .. driven not by thought,
but by pure, mindless instinct.
It continued to spew black fire from every inch of its body.
I watched as Father cloaked himself in the aura of the stars, desperately struggling to survive.
A single white dot against a canvas of endless black.
They clashed over and over for what felt like eternity.
3 Days passed.
Their battle shook the very foundations of the world.
Amygdala wasn't an SS+ level monster for nothing.
I couldn't understand how Father survived that hellish onslaught.
Nor could I fathom how no one else noticed .. given the sheer scale of the aura disturbances they unleashed.
The battle was not in Father's favor.
Amygdala was a force of nature.
A walking cataclysm.
Those black flames didn't just erupt from its mouth .. they surged from its entire body, threatening to reduce everything to ash.
And in the middle of it all…
Father's light continued to shine.
Were it not for the fact that he had shattered his aura pathways and allowed his body to harness aura freely,che would have been vaporized long ago.
The fight reached a deadlock.
Amygdala, covered in thousands of wounds, refused to fall.
On the other side, after three straight days of brutal combat, Father had reached his absolute limit.
And so ..
gathering every last shred of strength he had left ..
he leapt high into the sky, unleashing one final, suicidal attack.
He gathered every ounce of Star Dust aura he could muster around his crumbling blade, and struck!
At the same time, Amygdala unleashed a tidal wave of black fire to meet him.
When white and black collided ..
the world turned dark.
Father's sword shattered .. but it pierced through Amygdala.
From the other side, he too fell into the flames, losing consciousness.
The battle ended in a way that left me wondering ..
Who had actually won?
A cold sweat drenched my back after witnessing the hellish battle I had just seen.
Was this... what it truly meant to face an SS+ ranked nightmare?
"Amygdala was far stronger than I had ever imagined,"
Father said,
"I had to drain every last ounce of my power just to survive... It was a close fight. Death brushed right past me."
Everything turned black as Father fell unconscious.
I waited patiently, anxiously hoping for him to wake up so I could finally see the result.
"After that battle, I don't even know what happened,"
his voice echoed again,
"My mind was a complete mess from the exhaustion and the wounds I'd suffered during the fight."
He drifted in and out of consciousness,
barely able to open his eyes before being pulled back into the darkness.
Normally, he should have died.
Even if he had succeeded in killing Amygdala, the Nightmare beasts would have surely devoured his body down to the bones.
But that didn't happen.
I watched in shock as Father's battered body was dragged away.
Among the ruins of death and destruction ..
where Amygdala's corpse now lay motionless after Father's final attack ..
they came.
"When I opened my eyes again... what greeted me was stranger than any dream."
There, lying atop the cold, hard ground of that ancient sect...
Dragged all the way to that black mountain—
The same mountain where I had once bled out and nearly died.
The place that still remained a mystery to me even now.
Abraham Starlight woke up...
Inside the Shadow Sect.