A Man Like None Other (Jared Chance) novel Chapter 6749

Jared spent three full days in the archive cavern, combing through mountains of bamboo slips and animal-hide scrolls for any mention of the fissure.

Most of the records agreed with what Elder Nether had told him.

The fissure had appeared 10,000 years ago. It demanded sacrifices, and every expedition sent to investigate it had vanished.

But on a tattered hide scroll that insects had eaten almost to pieces, he found a passage that contradicted all the other accounts.

It was written in an extremely ancient Ghost Clan script. The strokes were wild and hurried, as if the writer had carved them one by one while gripped by terror.

"The 12th abyss expedition sent seven into the fissure. Six were trapped within forever. One emerged three days later, his soul shattered and his mind lost... Nether energy flowed backward through his entire body, and every meridian was severed. He repeated only one phrase..."

The phrase had been traced over a dozen times until the overlapping strokes were almost illegible.

Jared leaned closer and made out two words beneath the tangled lines.

The words read, "Seven Nights."

"What is 'Seven Nights'?"

Jared's brow furrowed.

He had never heard of it.

No Ghost Clan member bore that name, and it belonged to no technique or god that Jared knew.

He repeated the words several times. Their cadence struck him as ancient, something that did not belong to this age.

He copied the full hide scroll by rubbing, carefully preserving even the blurred passage, and folded the copy away.

Back in his cavern, he sat beneath the muted red light and read the hide scroll's account again and again.

He considered every possibility. Seven Nights could be a name, a code... or what the thing inside the fissure calls itself.

"Level seven. That fissure. And 'Seven Nights'..."

Jared tapped a finger against the stone table as he murmured, "In Ghost Clan culture, the number seven represents reincarnation and death. Seven Nights... Does it mean seven actual nights, or some kind of cycle tied to the number seven?"

He had no answer yet, but at least he had found a direction to pursue.

Over the next few days, he secretly observed how the Ghost Clan chose those marked for sacrifice.

The selections were not random. Elder Nether chose one clan member each month, and every chosen person had the same thing in common: they were either nearing the end of their lifespan or suffering from an incurable wound.

In other words, the sacrifices were all people who supposedly had little time left anyway.

Elder Nether was trying to balance an unavoidable sacrifice against the pain it caused his people.

Yet the discovery only made Jared more uneasy.

If a living victim was truly what the entity within required, why feed it someone already on the brink of death?

What benefit did such victims offer it?

Or did it have some particular criterion for choosing its offerings?

He had no answer, but the suspicion coiled around his thoughts like a venomous snake and gnawed ceaselessly at his attention.

What finally made up his mind was discovering that the mad Ghost Clan cultivator had living descendants.

A young Ghost Clan woman named Elara was the mad cultivator's seventh-generation descendant. Cold-faced and taciturn, she lived in a secluded cavern at the edge of the seventh level.

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