As it turned out, the unknown beyond mainly consisted of abandoned buildings, empty streets, a pervasive smell of blood and fear, and a whole lot of unanswered questions.

  It had been surprisingly easy to find the way out of the cave I'd awoken in, considering that the exit had been one-way and rather straightforward. Regardless, after ascending a set of marble stairs only a short road away from the cave's exit, I'd found myself inside what I could only call a pauper's palace, as strange as the title was.

  After all, how else could I call a place that was so clearly meant to show off wealth, and yet did so in one of the most absurd and somewhat hilarious ways possible?

  Much like the cave, this place too was filled to the brim with all sorts of fancy decorations such as art pieces ranging from statues of all types or paintings of all sorts, to chandeliers that glowed with ethereal light that hung from the ceiling, and hell, there was even gold, silver, and jade-plated furniture, all of which looked rather uncomfortable to actually use.

  And almost to a one, all of them were damaged or incomplete in one way or another.

  Walking through the palace had been... Off-putting, to say the least.

  Between the statues with subtle cracks running through them, furniture with poorly replaced legs or parts, paintings that had clearly been dropped one too many times, and shining marble floors that had suspiciously smelly and rust-colored patches that looked far too much like dried blood, the palace genuinely looked more like a mansion from some horror.

  All of that combined with the complete lack of any actual living necessities that would have made the palace an actually livable place instead of what I could only assume was the world's creepiest art showcase meant that by the time I finally found the exit and practically scurried out of the place, all of my various hairs were standing on end, my tails looking almost comically huge all fluffed out like that.

  Unfortunately for me, beyond the palace, things hadn't looked all that much better.

  The palace's entrance was perhaps even grander than its interior, with great marble pillars arranged in a semicircle around it and a grand fountain just a short distance in front.

  It was loudly and openly luxurious, and in my opinion, only made the shabbiness of the surrounding buildings and streets all the more apparent.

  While the palace was grand, majestic, and utterly unlived in, the surrounding buildings were all built for pure utility and function, with seemingly no attention paid to their appearance whatsoever.

  As I walked through the paved dirt streets, curiously wiggling my bare toes against the gravel and grass below them, I couldn't help but ponder the contrast as I walked past yet another wood and stone building that I think might've been either an inn or a restaurant of some sort, its door hanging wide open as if its inhabitants had left in a hurry.

  After peeking inside, I wasn't surprised to see that it was utterly empty, tables and counters still stacked with plates with food on them that had seemingly gone uneaten. It was hard to feel any surprise when this was at least the tenth abandoned building I'd checked out, after all.

  The entire town looked like it had been evacuated in a desperate hurry, and so far, I hadn't seen a single living thing around. Hell, forget seeing other people, there weren't even any bugs here.

  Sighing, I felt my shoulders slump as I pulled away from the door, ears drooping sadly on my head as I shuffled forward, feeling increasingly uncertain and uneasy about... Everything, honestly.

  I didn't know what had happened here. Why had I woken up with no memories? Where was I? Where was everyone? Why did this place look and feel so weird? Why did I constantly get a strange sense of disoriented deja vu?

  So many questions, none of which I had any answers to. It was an unfortunately familiar feeling by this point, and as I sat down on an abandoned bench next to what I could only assume was a small recreational area, I realized that this approach wasn't working.

  Pulling my legs up to my chest and hugging them with both my arms and tails, I frowned as I pondered the issue.

  There wasn't really a reason to hurry other than boredom and unease. Hunger and thirst weren't a problem, as far as I could instinctively tell, and for all that this place was utterly creepy, it wasn't really scary, per se. While I wasn't sure whether they were correct, my instincts were utterly assured that nothing here could be a threat to me even if it tried to, and so far, they hadn't led me astray.

  However, curiosity was a powerful driving force, and the more I explored, the more I wanted to know what was going on. I had so many questions I wanted answers to, and the best way to get said answers was to either ask someone or spend who knows how long investigating this place for clues.

  The latter solution didn't seem particularly reliable, especially considering my already present memory issues, and the problem with the former was, of course, that I'd yet to find anyone to actually question.

  I frowned harder, absentmindedly using one of my tails to brush a strand of hair away from my eyes as I mulled over the problem.

  It wasn't like I'd gone searching through every nook and cranny yet, so it wasn't like things were completely hopeless, but even when considering that this wasn't exactly the biggest town ever- a strange sentiment, considering this was the only town I'd yet seen in all of my few hours of active memory- it was still far too large to search... manually...

  And just as I thought that, a strange rush of memories bubbled up from the depths of my consciousness, as if I was remembering a half-forgotten dream.

  My eyes widened, and despite myself, I could feel an excited smile forming on my face as I sprang up from the bench, feeling more than eager to put these dream-given memories to the test.

  So, without any hesitation, my main focus shifted away from my physical form and over to my soul, a task that felt surprisingly smooth and effortless despite having only discovered I could do this maybe an hour ago at the very most.

  Regardless, once that was done, my soul-self's eyes opened, and with a push and a thought, my 'spiritual' senses expanded outward.

  It was like shining a great flashlight upon the world, one whose light allowed me to see, hear, smell, and just sense everything it touched in a way that the physical body could almost assuredly never properly replicate. It was like a combination of all senses and more besides, and despite the overwhelming informational feedback it granted, it was surprisingly easy to handle and digest.

  It was an extremely interesting experience, and as I played around with this new ability of mine, I was unsurprised to find myself getting used to it at a frankly unnatural speed, as if I had already known and had merely needed to remember it rather than outright learn it.

  I could focus it, spread it wide, turn it into a narrow beam, or otherwise shape it however else I desired. I could exclude things from my perception or focus on them, and while I eventually forced myself to focus on the task at hand instead of losing myself to the desire to play with my new toy, my gut insisted that I was only scratching the surface of what this could do.

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  But that was all for later. Taking a deep breath, I allowed my spiritual sense to surge out in a great omnidirectional wave, and the result was almost terrifying in its scale, for within mere moments, well over a hundred miles of land in every direction around me were suddenly revealed to me in nigh-perfect detail.

  Birds sang, plants swayed with the wind, and animals of all sizes and shapes stalked, some doing so with an almost uncanny level of intelligence to them, and some without. Strangely enough, almost all of the animals did this with a strange sense of caution to them, enough to almost be called outright hesitation.

  And yet, the moment my senses surged out, all of that stopped. Birds fell quiet as they shrank in on themselves, herbivores and carnivores alike set aside their differences as they rushed into whatever closest nest or burrow they could reach, and even the wind itself seemingly came to a standstill.

  But in the grand scope of things, it was hard for me to notice all of that, because the sheer scope of what I could sense was both incredible and honestly disorienting. For all that this new ability was surprisingly intuitive, this felt like trying to run a marathon before even mastering how to walk.

  So, after a short moment of regathering my bearings, I pulled back my senses to a more manageable scope. One thing at a time, I reminded myself as my spiritual sense shrank and shrank until only the town around me was encompassed by it. After all, the patient turtle wins the race with the distracted bunny and all of that.

  I blinked, taken aback by that strange quote that seemed to make no sense yet felt completely reasonable. Regardless, after a moment, I shook my head and pushed it away, jotting it down as yet another weird quirk of my messed-up memories.

  When looked at with the slightly bizarre sort of birds-eye-view that my spiritual sense granted me, the town looked even worse than before, to be honest. While it was at least somewhat well-hidden when looked at normally, with the perspective granted to me by my new senses, the sinister undertone of the tone was now fully revealed to me.

  Mass graveyards littered the town like barely covered cancers, filled to the brim with skeletons and bones of all types, some disturbingly humanoid and some not. Uncleaned bloodstains were practically everywhere they could realistically be, and the smell of misery and despair was seemingly ever-present.

  And yet, for as bad as the whole town looked and felt, almost none of it compared to what I could sense coming from one building in particular, and it really didn't take a genius to figure out what said building's purpose was.

  The prison, for what else could it be, didn't look that large at first glance. Gates and barbed fences surrounded it, with guard towers interspaced seemingly at random, all of them looking so comically evil that they looked more like decorations than actual defenses.

  Perhaps that was the case, considering that as I focused my senses on that location, the surprisingly large underground dungeon connected to the aboveground building revealed itself to me, and when it did, I couldn't help but frown in disgust.

  If the mass graveyards had been bad, then this place was outright hellish. Rotting corpses and aged skeletons lay uncared for in their cells, mold and worse covered the walls and ceilings, and there were even a few rooms filled to the brim with torture devices and tools of all kinds.

  And yet, against all of my expectations, as my spiritual sense swept over the hellish place, it was here that I found what I'd been looking for, because in one of those cells, a human boy that couldn't have been older than fifteen at the very most sat cross-legged on the ground, his shoulders tense and his face set in a firm, grim expression, one that looked remarkably like that of a prisoner awaiting execution.

  For several seconds, the 'sight' before me didn't truly register as the fraction of my attention responsible for that section of the prison just stared at the boy incomprehensibly, unable or perhaps more accurately unwilling to accept that a living being could ever truly be held in such a horrifying place.

  After all, seeing a living prisoner in a place of torture and death was far, far different than seeing rotten corpses and skeletons. After all, one of those was mere set dressing in a way, while the other was a real living person, and proof that those previous 'set dressings' had once been anything but.

  But register it eventually did, and as the entirety of my attention narrowed down on the boy, his back stiffened, his eyes widening for a moment before they closed tightly, his hands closing tightly enough to draw a sliver of blood from his palms.

  He looked resigned and yet grimly determined. It was a strange yet horrifying expression, one that should never be on the face of a child like him.

  As if that wasn't bad enough, what made it even worse was the frankly mind-numbing number of scars covering his body, some in places that sickened me by the mere implication.

  Previously, my concerns had been overwhelmingly selfish in nature, if understandably so. I'd wanted to find someone so I could hopefully get some answers and maybe directions to an actually populated city, or at least to be pointed in the right direction to find one.

  Now, however... All of that was set aside as my body blurred away, my mind so overwhelmingly focused with the task at hand that I hardly even noticed my own impossible speed and strength.

  In less than an eyeblink, my foot touched down at the prison's entrance, a snarled backhand casually obliterating the gates barring it so hard that they were flash-melted into a splash of molten iron and steel, and by the time the metaphorical eyeblink would've concluded, I'd already arrived at the door locking the boy in the cell.

  I came to an immediate halt there, and after a few seconds, my clothes rustled slightly as the slight breeze stirred by my passing finally reached me as I just stood there, staring at the door before me as I agonized over how I should go about this.

  I couldn't just barge in and rush the poor boy; what if he reacted badly? After all, who knows what sort of horrors he'd gone through, and considering the place he was being held in, I really didn't want to scare him any further.

  However, I also couldn't afford to wait. From what I'd sensed, the child had looked as thin as a stick, and considering the concerning number of scars and even the few open wounds on him, what if he'd gotten an infection from the sheer dirtiness of this horrifying place? Moreover, had he even been fed or watered at all, or had he just been left to rot?

  No, leaving him wasn't an option, but I also couldn't just barge in like a crazed bull. So, ultimately, there really was only one option left.

  Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to adopt as nonthreatening a posture and expression as I could and then just went for it, unwilling to waste any more time when the safety of a child was in question.

  With a swift chop of my hand, the door's locks fell to the floor with a muted thump. I'd retracted my spiritual senses, but even without them, my new hearing was sharp enough to easily pick up on the hitch in the boy's breathing, and I could also almost hear the way he tensed up even further.

  Gently pushing the now unlocked door open, I slowly and carefully walked through the door, doing my best to make sure I looked as nonthreatening as possible.

  Sadly, my efforts seemed to have mostly gone to waste as the boy's eyes locked onto me, and I could smell the terror radiating off of him, although said terror was also coupled with a surprising amount of what I could only call desperate determination.

  But... God, as my physical eyes met his own, I couldn't help but inwardly wince.

  For as miraculous as my spiritual sense was, there was just something about seeing with my own physical eyes a child as young as him that looked as if the devil itself had kept him locked up in its basement that made the experience feel so much more real.

  "Hello," I said, breaking the silence first as instincts and half-remembered knowledge from memories I no longer possessed gently guided me to lower myself to my knees so that I wouldn't tower over the sitting, traumatized boy before me.

  The boy just stared at me, saying nothing. That was ok, though. "Are you alright, dear?" I asked, immediately regretting the question as I realized that he obviously wasn't. Still, I hid my internal wince and powered on. "Does anything hurt? Are you hungry? Thirsty?" I continued asking.

  ?He just continued staring at me, his eyes hard and just as determined as before.

  I wilted a bit, deflating like a balloon as I realized I'd messed it up. Still, I refused to stop trying, so with as gentle a smile as I could, I indicated to the door behind me. "Well, um, how about we get out of here, no? This place is pretty gross, right?" I joked, and this time, I could spot the slightest crack in his expression as the slightest bit of confusion appeared on his face before quickly being smothered out.

  ?But regardless of that, he still didn't respond, merely continuing to sit there, tense as a spring, staring at me with those far too mature eyes and grim expression.

  I deflated even harder, because damn, I was so not qualified for this. I barely understood anything, and I still had no idea what was going on. How in the world was I supposed to help a child when I couldn't even help myself?

  But wishes were slippery fishes, and reality didn't care about my gripes. So, after hesitating for a moment, I decided to slowly lower myself to the ground, sitting with my legs under me and my hands resting on my knees.

  "I'm not here to hurt you, I promise," I said, keeping my voice as soft and gentle as I could. "I just want to help, sweetie. Will you allow me, please?" I practically pleaded, feeling my cheeks turn a bit red, more so out of embarrassment for how bad I was at this than anything else, but still pushing through anyway.

  Thankfully, that actually garnered a reaction as the boy's grim determination broke for an instant, replaced by bewildered confusion as he stared at me with almost comically wide eyes.

  Not quite the reaction I'd hoped for, but I'd take what I could get.