Honestly, Gengar had always thought its shadow abilities were pretty impressive. Phasing through walls as thick as this passage, pulling Kairos into the shadow realm alongside it — that was no small feat.
But standing here, looking at the creature before them, it felt thoroughly outclassed.
Just the ability to project power outward and hold a stable, sustained barrier — that alone put this thing on a completely different level. There was no comparison to be made.
Kairos patted Gengar on the head and motioned for it to pull back into the shadows for now.
The barrier had cut them off from the surrounding environment, but danger hadn't gone anywhere. If things went sideways, the shadow realm was the safer place to be.
Gengar rolled its eyes and melted back into the darkness, leaving only a pair of watchful eyes peering out from the black.
The group moved deeper into the passage.
The further they went, the worse it got.
Even inside Marshadow's barrier, Kairos could feel the oppressive energy pressing in around them, steadily building with every step.
The air had thickened into something almost liquid. The barrier held back whatever was lurking in it, but the psychological weight crushing down on his chest was a different problem entirely.
The walls had changed. The smooth stone was gone. Strange textures crept across every surface now, patterns like the veins of something living, faintly pulsing, giving off a dim violet glow.
Kairos stared at them and felt a chill crawl up the back of his neck.
There was a massive concentration of Soul-Eroding Mist here.
And not just that. The mist felt fundamentally different from what they'd encountered outside. It looked like ordinary fog to the naked eye, but Kairos could sense the truth of it. His perception was sharper than he expected: this was a high-density energy aggregate, laced with surging psychic and Ghost-type forces all knotted together.
No wonder Marshadow had been holding the line here.
The concentration in this passage was far beyond anything outside. Even a light source at Chandelure's level would struggle to make a dent against this.
Without Marshadow's barrier, anyone who stepped in here would be swallowed up within a few paces, reduced to a dried-out husk somewhere in the corridor's depths.
Kairos glanced over at Chandelure, floating at the front of the group. Its flame had dimmed noticeably. It had pulled the fire tighter, conserving every bit it could.
He exhaled quietly.
The depths of the Ghost World were every bit as brutal as the stories had always made them out to be.
He was still scanning their surroundings when something on the stone wall ahead caught his eye.
More mural fragments.
These were in far worse shape than the ones from before. Large sections had peeled away entirely, leaving only faint outlines and smears of color.
He moved closer, trying to make out what had been there.
Unlike the earlier murals, there was nothing here about Giratina. But the artistic style was unmistakably the same, that same ancient, archaic quality suggesting they'd come from the same hands.
The damage was so severe the images barely made sense. One section showed only a single eye. Another, half a wing. A third was nothing but a tangled mess of indecipherable lines.
Kairos stared at the fragments for a long moment and came away empty. Whatever they'd depicted, it didn't seem to connect in any obvious way to Giratina. He tried to piece something together and eventually gave up. The murals looked deliberately destroyed, and thoroughly at that, with almost nothing left to read.
Then a thought struck him.
He turned to look at Will, who was walking just behind him.
Will was scanning the surroundings with tightly focused attention, clearly on high alert. When he caught Kairos looking at him, he tensed up immediately.
"What is it, Kairos? Something wrong?"
Kairos shook his head and nodded toward the murals on the wall beside them.
"Do you know anything about the origin of this passage? You know so much about the Ghost World. You must have looked into this place at some point."
Will glanced at the mural and let out a quiet sigh.
"Its origin? Honestly, we're not entirely sure. According to what's been passed down through our Ghost World lineage, this passage wasn't built by us, and it wasn't carved out by ancient humans either. It was already here when the Ghost World came into being."
"So it formed naturally?" Kairos pressed.
"Not exactly."
Will shook his head, a note of uncertainty in his voice.
"It looks like a natural cavern, but those smooth walls, those murals, they've clearly been worked by something. We've always suspected this was left behind by something far older. Something that may have existed here before the Ghost World itself was born."
Kairos took that in quietly, turning the idea over in his mind.
After a moment, he asked another question.
"Do you know how the Ghost World came to exist in the first place? Why does this space exist at all?"
Will blinked, clearly caught off guard by the sheer scale of the question.
He gave a rueful smile and spread his hands.
"That I genuinely don't know. It's too far back. So far back that even the oldest legends have gone hazy. All we know is that one day the Ghost World was simply there. Like a bubble rising suddenly through water, it just materialized, as if from nothing."
"Just appeared?"
Kairos rubbed his chin, thoughts already starting to form.
That was a fascinating detail.
If it had appeared suddenly, the Ghost World wasn't a natural product of this world. It was more like an intruder, an alien dimension that had been forced into existence here.
It only reinforced what he'd already started to suspect.
The Ghost World might not belong to this world at all. It could be an independent space, or maybe a projection from some higher dimension. It was even possible it had some kind of connection to the parallel world where Marshadow had originated.
His mind moved fast, one thought chasing the next.
If the Ghost World truly was something from outside this world, then what about the entity sealed within it? Could that be from somewhere else too?
That train of thought pulled him back to the shattered murals he'd just been looking at.
He turned to Will again.
"Do you know anything about the murals in this passage? They're barely readable now, but your people must have investigated them at some point. Were there any records? Any theories?"
Will nodded slowly, his expression turning somber.
"We did investigate them. Even with how fragmented they were, we cross-referenced what remained against other surviving symbols. What we found suggested that the images in these murals very likely depict the entity sealed at the heart of the Ghost World."
Kairos felt his heart jolt.
"The murals show the thing that's sealed in here?"
"Yes." Will gave a firm nod. "We believe so. We couldn't make out the full picture, but based on the features we could identify, we're fairly confident."
Kairos stood still for a moment, letting that sink in.
He turned the implications over carefully.
If Will was right, things had just gotten considerably more complicated.
The mural fragments from earlier, even without a clear full image, had carried an unmistakable stylistic resemblance to the murals depicting Giratina.
If the sealed entity was truly the subject of those murals, then that would mean...
The hair on the back of Kairos's neck rose.
Please don't let it be what I'm thinking.
He gave himself exactly one second of silent prayer.
Please just be some ordinary Ghost-type. Even a powered-up Boulenvite would be fine.
Anything but that.
Because if it was the thing depicted in those murals, the smart move was probably to turn around, go home, and pretend none of this had ever happened.
Even those partial fragments had carried a crushing, suffocating weight, an aura so heavy it was hard to look at directly.
Kairos knew exactly what that aura pointed to.
Giratina.
The sovereign of the Distortion World. The legendary beast said to move through time and space, to bend the fabric of reality itself.
Its power put it in Arceus territory.
In the game world's lore, Giratina had always been a figure of profound mystery and danger. The Distortion World it commanded was a dimension mirroring the real world, governed by rules and forces no ordinary mind could wrap itself around.
In a world like this one, that power would be stronger, not weaker.
If Giratina had actually been sealed here and was on the verge of breaking free, Kairos didn't even know where to begin thinking about what came next.
Forget him. Even if you gathered every Champion in the region, every Gym Leader, every Elite Four member, and threw them all at it together, they still wouldn't land a meaningful hit on Giratina.
This wasn't a gap you could close with numbers. This was the kind of absolute, categorical difference that no amount of effort could bridge.
Kairos drew a slow breath and forced himself to calm down.
Still, his gut told him it probably wasn't Giratina.
Because if it were, Marshadow would have been long gone. It certainly wouldn't still be here, calmly negotiating terms with them.
And that earlier mural, the one actually depicting Giratina, had radiated an overwhelming presence, yes. An almost unbearable divine authority that made it difficult to hold the painted image's gaze.
But that feeling was closer to majesty. An elevated, god-like quality. Not raw, primal dread. There had been no sense of malice in it.
It had felt like a stern judge. Not a frenzied destroyer.
The entity sealed here, based on everything Marshadow had described, was clearly driven by destructive impulse and hostile intent, something more like those Paradox Pokemon from before.
The natures simply didn't match.
Of course, this was all just speculation on his part.
In a world this full of unknowns, anything was on the table.
Perhaps there was a possibility of Giratina becoming corrupted; it was hard to say.
Kairos shook his head and scattered the spiraling thoughts.
No use dwelling on it now. He'd only end up scaring himself.
Whatever lay ahead, they had to push forward regardless.
One step at a time.
He lifted his gaze to the passage still stretching out in front of them and wondered whether the Legends and Faith module would unlock in the next two weeks, and whether it would give him anything useful when it did.
"Come on. No point standing around."
He clapped Will on the shoulder and gestured for him to keep moving.
"Whatever's waiting up ahead, we need to go look. It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing. We might be watching history happen right now."
Will gave a pained smile, clearly not sharing Kairos's optimism in the slightest.
But he nodded, tightened his grip on the Poke Ball in his hand, and fell into step.
The two of them pressed deeper into the dark, one after the other, under the protection of Marshadow's barrier, moving toward whatever was waiting for them at the end.
The passage narrowed. The air around them grew colder.
It wasn't a temperature drop. It was the kind of cold that didn't come from the body at all. A chill that radiated from somewhere much deeper.
Something was watching them from the dark. Watching quietly, without moving.
Kairos felt it crawl up his spine. He didn't look back. He just kept walking, one step at a time.
Ahead, in the darkness, a faint red glow began to bleed through.
It was dim, barely a glimmer. But in the total blackness of the passage, it was stark and jarring, like a wound cut open in the dark.
Marshadow went still.
It floated there, staring at the red light. When it finally spoke, its voice had dropped to something unusually grave.
"We're almost there."
It exhaled slowly and turned to look at Kairos and Will.
"The area ahead is the core of the seal. The rules governing everything inside have been warped. Stay close to me at all times. Don't wander."
Kairos gave a single nod and pulled in a deep breath.
Will swallowed hard. The color had drained from his face.
The passage had reached its final stretch.
The deterioration around them had been worsening with every step, and now even the walls that had still been barely legible were eaten so far through that they were unrecognizable. The stone had been corroded into something lumpen and grotesque.
Will swept his eyes across the pitted, gouged surfaces, and his brow pulled tight.
The Soul-Eroding Mist concentration here was staggering, as if every last bit of mist in the region had been compressed into this single, confined space.
The rock that had once been solid now looked disturbingly like rotting flesh, sagging and crumbling, weeping slow black liquid from above.
Will stared at the scene and couldn't hold back the unease twisting through him. If he'd come here alone, he wouldn't have stood a chance against mist at this concentration. There would have been no question of going deeper.
His psychic power would have been shredded apart the moment he reached this point, leaving him nothing but a hollow shell still wearing a human face.
No wonder Marshadow had refused so absolutely to let him through before.
This place was a death trap.
The dread settled heavier in his chest. If the entrance to the passage already looked like this, what would the depths be like? Just how terrifying was the entity sealed inside?
The more he thought about it, the hollower he felt. His footsteps grew heavier without him meaning them to.
But beside him, Kairos wasn't paying the mist any attention at all.
His eyes were fixed entirely on the walls. More precisely, on the murals carved into them.
There were more here than before. Just as damaged, but unmistakably the same style. The same subject matter, it seemed.
What struck Kairos as strange was that the murals appeared completely immune to the mist's corruption.
Everything around them was rotting. Everything was crumbling. And yet the murals remained intact, untouched, still etched cleanly into the stone, faintly shimmering with a dim black radiance.