Searing pain in her abdomen made Mana wince. She did not wish to resist and she certainly had no need of touching those elongated, possibly hairy fingers of the warden of Jigoku – Kumobi Morino. A visual inspection of the scorching sensation revealed a blaze-colored glow still settling down on her belly. The seal was shaped like a kanji symbol but it did not make any sense or mean anything.
"This is the chakra suppression seal." Kumobi twisted his face once more in an eerie smile. "It is not like the more standard-issue seals. It does not prevent you from using chakra – it punishes you for doing so while shutting all of your grand ambition down."
The searing pain did not stop, in fact, it began expanding, like a mass of flames that threatened to incinerate Mana, however, actually being of fire may have been favorable to this because it made one seem mad for dealing with such an irrational sensation. Fire, while painful and devastating, made sense. This was just a meaningless, overwhelming sensation of pain that made Mana cry out and lean over, clutching at her middle section while she did her best not to collapse and bash her brains out on the wet, stone floor.
"Oh… It appears that your chakra sensory is setting off and conflicting with the seal. I suppose the only way to shut down your sensory is to shut down your chakra, which the seal does not quite do. I suppose these six months will not be just happy camping…" Kumobi locked his arms over his chest.
"P-Please…" Mana whimpered. She had thought that she would last longer. It took the sum of possibly eleven seconds for Jigoku to break her pride and make her beg for help. Before she could form a coherent sentence, begging to either kill her outright or remove the seal, edit it or place a more standard-issue seal, the young woman began screaming while the pain became too intense to take and wall-off.
Mana thought she could withstand a decent amount of pain but… The pain was brutal, blinding and dominating all senses. Shocking in its blazing nature, it was pure, likened only to being immortal and submerged into a lava flow.
"Yes. I suppose that won't do. I can't listen to that bothersome voice crying all the time. I'm running a tight prison here, can't have endless screaming in the hall…" Kumobi sighed.
One of the guards that did their best to conceal any signs of humanity in their shapes or appearance dashed in to Mana. With her abilities at her best, with her body healthy and unbent by pain the likes of which she had never experienced, Mana could have reacted in time. Now, even the thought of using chakra or enhancing her body made the young woman wish to puke her intestines out and choke on it just so she could be put out of her misery.
Air stopped. She couldn't breathe. The guard pulled out two of his fingers from somewhere in Mana's lower throat, the magician felt warm trickling running down but in a very tiny and controlled drip. She could not scream anymore! Only a muzzled huff let Mana's mouth when she tried and those attempts were more instinctual as the newest prisoner of Jigoku attempted to prioritize resetting her breathing.
"That's better." Kumobi nodded to himself. "Now, I think the official part's done. Don't worry, you're going to be put in Level 1. You'll be able to do whatever, the guards tend to not get involved all that much and they tend to get involved even less with the lower levels. Just a bit of warning, if you decide to tread all by yourself down into the deeper levels with the more… Colorful roster. Have in mind that there are absolutely no guards beyond Level 4. Not just because these watchmen cannot handle the prisoners down there, more so because the lower levels are too punishing to keep any guards down there. I doubt that any of the inhabitants of the Level 4 and below even still have their sanities intact…"
Kumobi stared at Mana for a handful of seconds before smacking his forehead.
"Oh, sorry, I suppose you're not listening to what I'm saying because of all the pain you're under. That's quite alright. I love meeting new people and showing them the ropes. I'm very helpful like that…" Kumobi stroke his chin before gesturing for the guards to take Mana to her cell.
The moment that the guards put their hands on Mana they felt the instinctual jerking of her body firsthand. They weren't going to have any of that so they bent and twisted whatever they could disable to control the newest prisoner and then lifted her off the floor. This place was many things but it did not pity anyone. Even when every moment drawing breath felt like her entire body was burning, the staff expected Mana to walk to her cell on her own.
The wall was comprised of some intense weave of silk. Layers on top of layers that when stacked together became too thick to see through while individually they would have been quite transparent. It seemed to Mana's plagued by pain and delirious mind that the whole prison was alive and conscious as when the guards approached, manhandling her and making dealing with pain infinitely worse, the wall dissolved before her very eyes revealing a fleshy corridor that reeked of the insides of somebody's stomach that was in the process of digesting something of the vegetable variety.
Coils that reminded of headless snakes and tentacles alike, adorned by a full set of a ribcage and a spine that streaked all across the vigorous wonder of life decorating the walls of Jigoku and clutching at the guards and at Mana as they walked past. Mana's jaw gaped open, a frightened and weary scream frozen in her paralyzed throat. The wonder of life had wrapped itself around her ankle and began wrapping up further.
The guards looked down and back after noticing that dragging Mana became much harder and noticed that. Justifying the merciless reputation of the place, they let go of their prisoner and let the headless, flayed body of a snake to wrap itself all around Mana's body and begin crushing her bones. It did not hurt nearly as bad as it should have, however, that was because of her own, very personal hell of pain that she'd be going through for the following six months, non-stop.
The fleshy tentacle kept moving up, wrapping over and over while it applied pressure, intending to squeeze Mana into a bloody puddle in its grasp. The very next sight that the magician saw was a flash of grey light covered with black static, a visual aftereffect similar to the visuals of a broken television set, spanning the entire miracle of life that had just wrapped around Mana and a little bit over the wall that gave birth to it.
Kumobi did not say anything. He did not need to. He just stood there with his hands behind his back and smiled at Mana's face as if he had just done something amusing by letting the tentacle nearly squeeze the life out of her before making it disappear like a bunch of bad TV static.
The guards picked Mana up without any additional requests or orders. They were tight and professional like clockwork. This was the rest of her life… For the first time in as long as she could remember, Mana had absolutely no idea how she would get through this. Most of the time she had a plan, an improbable plan, many of stupid plans or ill-founded ones. Plenty of times she did not care and just acted, considering that way to be the best way to react.
This time she struggled to imagine the six months to come and she's only now gotten through the prologue of the Jigoku tour. It will be a long six months…
A gurgling sound, a note of exposed, fleshy walls rubbing against each other picked up the attention of the guards. Mana observed as their heads twitched and turned in a jerky and predatory manner. The rubbery looking guards even moved around and reacted to unexpected stimuli from the inhospitable environment around them as if they truly were made of rubber in their entirety.
One of the guards detached from the flock and scrambled toward the wall on all fours. Arms and legs shifting like swinging hammers, twisting a full three-sixty as the haunting figure approached the uneasy wall and very nearly placed their hands to ease the suffering of what appeared to be a prison that was both alive and dead at the same time.
The fleshy wall rippled and spat out a handful of bodies. A pair of them were undamaged and, ignoring the fact they were clearly dead, did not look like they came from the insides of Jigoku itself. Some of them were absolutely trashed and made Mana feel somewhat glad that the general gloom and shade of the place made it difficult to pick specific details up.
Kumobi approached the prison wall and pet it, together with the guard, stroking it to ease its twitchy impulses.
"Prison, did you eat someone?" Kumobi inquired with a tone that would have more suitable to be used when speaking to a child one suspected of pranking someone rather than a possibly alive structure, manifesting all sorts of horrors within its innards.
A featureless protrusion with the general holes and ridges of a face appeared to the right of the man, the eyes turned outward, the slash in the meat that served as the mouth of the responding entity was waving and rippling as if implying that the thing responding to Kumobi's inquiry was nauseous.
"Oh, I see… Well, we can't have bodies laying around the place, makes new inmates form a bad first impression so… Chop chop." Kumobi stroke the wall beside the face adopting the tone of a caring mother that wanted its sole child to eat their vegetables.
Something unnatural was transpiring underneath the place where the bodies were thrown out. Fleshy strings extended and crawled up the pile like fungi, slowly pulling the entire bunch underneath the layer of flesh while an armored plate formed out of some sort of secretion that the prison let out from its very pores. When Kumobi stepped onto the plate on his way back, the plate let out a metallic clang.
"As you would imagine, deaths are a common occurrence in Jigoku. It would be regrettable if the village representative came all the way here to request a prisoner's release only to find out they're dead but… Hasn't happened yet." Kumobi chuckled into his own hand as if he was an old lady recalling the dashing adventures of her son.
The knowledge that if she ended up dead, her body would end up gobbled up and disposed of this way did not aid Mana with the pain and the prospects of her future that altogether did not make dealing with the flow of new impressions any easier. The guards returned to the main task at hand, moving Mana to the edge of the corridor where a handful of teeth opened up to reveal a hole that led only into a fall shrouded in shadows.
"I've always said that the best inmates are those you see twice: when they first show up and when they leave. That being said if your complaint does manage to reach me up here… I suppose I will be impressed enough to see what I can do." Kumobi chuckled again while the guards circled around the hole. Nobody did anything about putting Mana inside said hole but the magician sort of got the clue from their behavior and slid into it herself.
Despite the long fall and landing on her feet while finishing her plummet with a roll, it did not look like Mana had suffered any injuries, then again, in her agonizing state, a mere broken bone would be unlikely to even register. There was a way to shut the pain off but did she truly have enough peace and quiet here for meditation? If she was on Jigoku's Level One, the prison did not employ the system of cells and just let their prisoners loose to explore the horrors to their hearts' content.
It was a challenge, one that would have seemed like weakness from the prison's part by a lesser mind but even in her crippled and writhing state Mana saw it as a crushing declaration that the prison had accounted for every possibility of escape and weighed them all in as hopeless. It also challenged the prisoners to prove it wrong.
A macabre moan came from the dark. One mirroring Mana's own grunt of pain as if it was answering to it. From obscurity into vision came a faceless, gaunt figure in raggedy clothes. No eyes or nose, the head looked like a skin-colored burlap stuffed onto a mannequin with the only notable feature of the entity being an open mouth covering half of its featureless face.
The creature moaned again. Out of the darkness and closer to Mana, the moans almost sounded more like a hollow sound and the only thing that the curious entity could release. It did not attempt to breach Mana's personal space, it just stood there and let out its tired "Ah" noise over and over and over again with brief pauses.
Another call responded to the creepy visage, then another, out of the darkness more and more shapes creeped out, doing nothing but letting out their "Ahs" in a rhythmical and somewhat bored manner. With all of the additional company, the odd noises that these creatures let out sounded almost like the world's most nonchalant and bored laughter. Like someone who could only experience total apathy read the noises of laughter off of a script, having no clue to what they were reading about or how it was supposed to sound.
Mana would have been fine just lying on the ground and crying for six months with only these unnatural humanoids to keep her company. She should have known better. Jigoku cared not for what one was fine with. The magician closed her eyes. She had been tortured before, by her own volition even. Just concentrate on her own body, locate the source of pain and filter it out.
Pain made even the simplest tasks such as entering her Ego state of meditation, relaying everything about her own body, a tremendous task. It was tough calming one's mind and preparing for proper meditation when every pore felt like flames were being forcefully coursing in and out of them while every neuron in her system was lighting up with thousands of volts, all in her mind, unable of truly hurting her.
The first thing that relayed to Mana that she was in Ego was her heart crying red. With every pound, the core of the young woman released vibrant and bloody bursts all throughout the system, reaching out to the very end. Her heart was damaged by the magician suffering through so much pain for so long, a little bit more and she may have died by having her heart explode into a bloody pulp, bursting all over and leaking the bloodshake into places it was not meant to go.
Not that internal bleeding was a priority to a person whose heart just exploded…
Calm. Breathing. Rhythm. The pain came from the central Tenketsu in her central plexus. Had Mana been a medical ninja she might have known the name of the thing, other than that, recalling the names of over three hundred points she barely ever had contact with on day to day life felt so pointless. Through willpower and concentration, the magician created a mental cage of void around the cause of her pain and left it alone. The impulses no longer spread across her body and simply faded away in the mental black-zone she'd made.
It won't fix the problem but it should ease the damage to Mana's heart. It won't eliminate the threat completely, the body will still be under whatever threat the conflicting seal caused but it won't know that and it will not try to warn Mana about it by making every pain sensor in her system light up with the most intense streamers Mana had ever felt.
Something powerful was coming from the Tenketsu in her throat too. It was a precise strike that shut her voice down but not too precise. If Mana had to call it, she'd say the guard hit from memory and skill rather than Byakugan-like awareness. While it did show remarkable skill and training being present within the abilities of the Jigoku guards, it also relieved the young woman as it meant that her voice would recover sooner rather than later.
"What are you, dead?" a voice rung in the entire Universe of Ego. It was an outside stimulus. One that Mana had missed due to the intense concentration needed to work through such unfavorable conditions. "The Agors aren't dangerous, all they do is… Well… I don't really know. Judge you, I guess…"
Mana opened her eyes, her muscles still felt stiff but she felt strong enough to stand at the very least.
"Name's Anika," the prisoner in an orange jumpsuit that had remained on the woman for over a decade at the very least declared while pointing at herself with her thumb. The gesture and the rude tone implied her being the delinquent type. "I found you so you're mine."
Mana shook her head.
"They shut down your voice, I see. Means you were pretty noisy or a sharpshooter with your insults. Either way, unless you can be useful, neither of these two is worth my trouble. I don't care if you can speak or not but you better let me know if you can be useful! This place runs on people you own." Anika tried appearing imposing. By all means, she should have been. She was larger and taller than most men and her face looked like it would break a brick unscathed if the two collided hard enough.
Mana stepped aside and began her attempt at casually walking away from the woman. Her foot froze not because of Anika's attempts of punishing her but instead because she noticed what she had almost set it on – a hair-thin membrane of slimy skin that led to a plummet kilometers deep. The most peculiar detail about it was that while the darkness and the rot in the air made things immensely difficult to see, the magician could see every inch of the fall that she would have taken all the way to the flat, bone-like material at the bottom.
"Creepy, right? The air down there is really thick too, you'll fall for seven times the amount of time you'd normally fall this distance for. I've seen people die of a heart attack before they reach the ground, that's how I know!" Anika grinned with her eyes closed. It was only that the first inmate Mana met shut off her intense gaze that the magician had noticed a wide scar over the woman's throat. It was odd that she was willing to close her eyes with her very nearly being beheaded once.
Mana reached her hand out, wanting to press it against Anika's core body. The giant caught it faster than a lurking croc and flipped the magician over her shoulder, slamming her into the membrane and tearing it with a popping snap, exerting thousands of times more force than necessary to leave Mana hanging.
"If you're useless may as well die." Anika sighed. She did not let go. The woman was desperate for useful people she could own. That may have been the only reason Mana was alive. She was faster and stronger than Mana had thought, perhaps on the tier of stronger Sun Disc martial artists. For someone whose chakra system was shut down entirely, this woman was impressive.
"Whatcha got there?" a voice came from further back. Mana was in no position to see who was talking whatsoever.
"She's mine, I found her first!" Anika pulled on Mana and placed the magician down on the nearest safe surface.
"You're all alone here, none of your girls backing you up. I sense weakness." The slick noise of something sharp rubbing against cloth reminded Mana of the field again. It's been a while since she's heard that noise but the moment she did, the instincts went rushing back.
"Two for one price either way…" one of the men declared. Mana was not entirely sure what he meant by that.
"As if I'm letting you own me. Right back at you." Anika acted tough but she was not as nonchalant about the upcoming brawl as a confident person should have been. "For fuck's sake, I hope you can fight." She mumbled to Mana.
A hallow rasp came out from Mana's throat when the magician tried to speak. Anika just sighed and prepared for a brawl over the ownership of her own body. Even right at the very bottom, the fundamentals of human pride existed, death before subjugation. Mana may not have cared much about Anika's ambitions but the woman had the necessary information to survive this place and she at the very least had some respectable qualities about her.
Plus, the thought of someone owning someone else under Mana's watch just didn't rub off too well with the young woman.