Chapter 38

Beliak had already forgotten how he and Yuri started to slowly detach from reality and move toward destruction all because of a single idea. The only thing he remembered was that they eventually chose to strangle a tramp that they found on the side of the national highway. That man seemed to be mentally unstable and there was an indescribable smell all over his body.

They killed him like a dog and then took his organs, blood, and skin and processed them into offerings according to the ancient texts. Once that was done, they followed the priestess into the depths of the Himalayas.

The place was in a small valley, at the bottom of which was a deep, dry pool. They could tell that the pool’s water level was very high during the wet season but now it was completely dry. When they looked into the empty pool, they found that there was a strange hole at the bottom.

The shape of this hole wasn’t circular but looked more like an abstract figure, almost like a pretty woman dancing flirtatiously.

The priestess told them that this was the place where they offered sacrifices to the Dark Goddess. Any sacrifices offered in that cave would allow the Dark Goddess to appear and fulfill their wishes—if she was satisfied with their offering, of course.

The priestess performed a very complicated ceremony at the entrance of the cave. Yuri was very attentive and recorded the whole process with a video camera.

They threw the corpse’s processed skin, blood, and organs into the cave after the ceremony, and then the priestess told the two of them to sit on either side of the cave. At midnight, one of them would enter the cave and meet the goddess.

This was because the Dark Goddess would only choose one person.

They waited at the entrance of the cave in the cold Himalayan night while the video camera kept recording. Sometime after midnight, Beliak came back from going to the bathroom and saw Yuri standing at the entrance of the cave.

“What’s wrong?” Beliak asked him. “Did you hear the call?”

“I’m going in,” Yuri said. He then told Beliak that he suddenly saw at least seven very slender hands—much longer than normal people’s hands—stretching out from the depths of the cave just now.

The hands were covered in blood, had very long fingernails, and were all pointing at Yuri.

Beliak went over and checked the recording but found nothing. The camera didn’t capture anything that Yuri claimed to have seen.

But when he looked up, he found that Yuri had walked into the cave and disappeared in an instant.

Beliak walked over and shined his flashlight into the cave but found that there was nothing but a black abyss below and Yuri was nowhere to be seen.

Ordinary people would definitely fall to their death if they entered such a cave but Beliak felt strangely confident that Yuri was fine. At this time, his mind was completely blank because of the confusion between reality and the religious narrative that they were so focused on. As a result, he just sat down and waited.

He continued to wait at the entrance of the cave for three days.

On the third day, he was sitting there in a daze when he suddenly saw Yuri standing at the mouth of the cave. He was naked, covered in blood, and shivering all over but he had a strange smile on his face. Beliak quickly went over and gave him some clothes. “Did you see her?” He asked him.

“She’s everywhere.” As Yuri spoke, Beliak could already see that there was a madness in his eyes that he couldn’t match. “She’s all over the place. She’s everywhere.”

Beliak, of course, was confused. At first, he thought that the Dark Goddess wasn’t a singular entity but a group of people, but Yuri immediately fell into a deep sleep and didn’t give him an answer.

This kind of sleep was more like a coma so the only thing Beliak could do was take care of him. Yuri ended up sleeping for seven days. With the exception of those few times he woke up to drink water and go to the bathroom, he spent the rest of the time completely sound asleep.

Then, seven days later, Yuri woke up with a high fever and the priestess came to pick them up. After the two left that place, Yuri spent their remaining days in Nepal writing his first book on the occult, which was called “The Path of the Dark Goddess”.

It described in detail his understanding of the ancient god system and what he experienced after entering the cave.

The so-called ancient gods were the gods worshipped by primitive religions during the Neolithic Age. Yuri told Beliak that when the ancients created the gods, they didn’t personify them as rigidly as modern people have done. These ancient gods existed in various strange ways, such as mountains, smells, and sounds.

The Dark Goddess they offered sacrifices to existed in the form of living darkness. In other words, she was the body of the cave itself.

Yuri said that the cave entrance’s appearance made the darkness in the cave very uneven. As a result, the goddess was born from the darkness.

The content written in this book was basically similar to the hallucinations one would see after taking a psychedelic.

He described the goddess as a kind of moving darkness. Although she was just a faintly discernible gray color, he was certain that this moving darkness was definitely female.

The other party kept asking him—not out loud, but as a voice in his head—what he was willing to lose in exchange for its help.

<Chapter 37><Table of Contents><Chapter 39>