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Chapter 289

“Another forest?”

“It’s not just any forest. Do you know about Eden, by any chance?”

She walked confidently through the dense woods.

“Eden. Yes, I know it’s the place where the God of Death and the God of Life once resided.”

“To be exact, it was like a sanctuary created by the Prime God for those two deities. Originally, Eden’s overseer was Raphael—also known as Luna Basilin. Her role was to watch over, protect, and monitor the two gods.”

Back then, Raphael was said to be as strict and precise as one of the Three Great Archangels should be.

“This place is one of the most strongly influenced among the distorted spaces. We’ll use it as our base of operations.”

“A base, huh.”

“No interferences, no threats. Through here, we’ll enter other twisted spaces. The first thing we need is… that master key.”

She pointed beyond the thicket to an unbelievably beautiful lake.

“That is the master key.”

Right as she said that, as if on cue, a small cluster of light began to rise from the center of the lake.

When she plucked the strings of her lyre, the light in the center began moving toward us as if it were alive.

“This space has its time, rules, and dimensions all jumbled up. In other words, if certain conditions are met, you can exert influence beyond normal reality here. Take it. If you hold that light, you’ll be able to release much greater power than usual in this space.”

I could guess why she gave this to me first.

“Those white blood cells or whatever—they’re that strong?”

“No harm in being cautious. And besides, if we get separated in this space, it’ll protect you.”

* * *

We had to stay in the forest for a few days, and of all people to be stuck with—it was Remiel, the archangel, Luna’s former colleague.

Or rather, Lispa Elde...

If Luna saw this, she might seriously get the wrong idea.

But I didn’t really dwell on that.

I set up a large tent on the flat land near the lake and started pulling out supplies to last us a few days.

“Geez, you’re really making a whole show of this.”

“Well, might as well stay comfortable.”

She gave a small, amused chuckle but didn’t say anything more.

In her hands, a small glowing orb was slowly being shaped from light.

“Is that what you’re looking for?”

“To be precise, it’s the place I was sealed—this is the space of that time. Normally, it would be impossible to see it, but in this space, you can witness past scenes.”

Her words reminded me of the site of my parents’ accident, but I quickly shook the thought away.

No matter what we did here, the present wouldn’t change, and we weren’t supposed to interfere anyway.

“It’s almost ready.”

She sat across from me by the campfire and carefully raised the glowing orb with both palms like a budding flower.

The twisted interior of the orb began to shift, eventually forming the image of a large temple.

As the orb floated higher into the air and glowed even brighter, she looked at me.

“The master key. Want to try unlocking it?”

I began to control the foreign power that had seeped into me.

It felt a bit awkward, but I’d handled all kinds of power before—so just wielding it wasn’t that difficult.

The moment I unlocked the door, we were suddenly transported to a new location.

“This kind of movement is something I’ll never get used to.”

“Of course not. Especially for magic users who can manipulate space—it’s even more disorienting.”

“When this space activates, the white blood cells will come out. Please take care of them. While you do that, I’ll observe what happened at the place where I was unsealed. Just so you know, the white blood cells can’t be killed—so just hold out for about ten minutes.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Looking around, I realized we were somewhere on the continent of Lazarus.

Likely the place where the archangel Remiel had been sealed.

Just as she said that, the surroundings began to change.

As if frozen time was resuming, life began to return to the area, and then—a circular tear opened in midair, and grotesque white beings started pouring out.

Snow-white bodies.

Varying numbers of arms.

Some crawling, some walking upright—but they all had one thing in common: white bodies streaked with red fire, long snouts filled with sharp teeth.

But then...

“…”

There are a lot of them?

“This seems a bit off, doesn’t it?”

I frowned at the wave of white creatures endlessly pouring in.

There were so many, they filled the entire area.

A flood of overwhelming numbers—an assault befitting the phrase “the violence of sheer volume.”

Then she turned her head, still in resonance with the space.

And said,

“What… is that…?”

Wait, you don’t know?

“Do they usually show up in droves like that?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Something’s definitely gone wrong…”

“Is this because of the clash between the power of the Outer God and the archangel?”

“That would explain the exposure of this space, but anything beyond that—even with an Outer God—is impossible.”

Whoever the culprit is, with them revealing themselves this openly, I might actually get a glimpse of what's hidden here.

“So, there's no merit in holding out for more than ten minutes?”

“Unfortunately, that’s the limit of what I can endure...”

“Then go do your thing.”

“Can you really stop them? You know, I was stripped of my rank as an archangel, so I’m a bit weaker.”

With that, I gathered mana in my hand, infused it with heat, and hurled it into the air.

“Sur—thermal dispersion.”

At the same time, the space around me shimmered, and a small, red chick-like figure appeared gently before me.

It proudly opened its small beak and roared.

KRAAAK!!!

A blazing fireball floated in the air, and its explosive heat—amplified by Sur’s power—spread in all directions, turning every white creature in the blast radius to ashes.

What’s the most efficient form of defense?

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Precision in intercepting targets one by one?

Or sheer firepower that obliterates everything it touches?

When the enemy is mindlessly charging in with overwhelming numbers, nothing beats blanketing the entire area.

Like a lone sun igniting in the darkness of space, illuminating countless planets, the fireball I unleashed was simply a mass of condensed, ultra-high-temperature mana.

By itself, it couldn’t discharge or spread—but its heat alone was so intense, it excluded all other options.

And I spread that heat everywhere through Sur.

Moreover, after devouring Ctugha’s Annihilation Flame and being reborn, Sur had absorbed some of the flame's properties.

Just a little, but enough to be significant.

The moment the pale-white beings entered the domain, they burned up and vanished before they could even take a few steps.

I wondered if my current actions were affecting the world itself, but just as it was said that nothing could interfere, not even the vegetation was affected by the flames.

There are aspects of this phenomenon that I still don’t fully understand.

But what does it matter?

The truth is, what I was doing consumed an immense amount of mana.

But that didn’t matter either.

After all, I had mana in abundance.

The creatures pushed into the area filled with extreme heat without hesitation and continued to burn up and evaporate.

They died, only to revive and move again.

Just like how I revived whenever I died in the Labyrinthos.

The difference was, back then I was desperately searching for a way to survive, while these things only cared about attacking until I wore down.

And amid that unending tug-of-war, Lispa Elde’s scream rang out.

"Why are there so many of them?! It shouldn't even be structurally possible for there to be this many!"

"Don’t worry about that—just focus on what you were doing."

Though I responded calmly, the area outside the flame domain was already swarming with countless white blood cell-like entities.

Far from decreasing, every one we killed seemed to be replaced by three more.

“At this rate, we have no choice! Grab my hand!”

Clutching a cluster of light in her arms, she urgently seized my hand.

SPANG!!!

In an instant, we were transported back to the camp we had set up earlier.

“Damn it. All I managed to do was record and copy what happened at that location just before we left. That makes proper investigation much harder...”

As she grumbled, I indifferently snatched the sphere of light from her hand.

“Ah! What are you doing?! That’s dangerous—put it down right now...!”

Her voice faded.

For a brief moment, the instant I touched that sphere of light, a surge of memories flooded into my mind.

A tranquil temple.

A strange energy mass enveloping that temple.

And finally, the temple collapsing with a massive explosion.

An odd discomfort filled me.

Not because of what I saw in the memory—but the strange sensation of those memories being forced into my head.

Yes.

This felt just like when I received the memories from the Heart of the Machine God or from the Labyrinthos.

PAK!!!

Just then, Lispa Elde forcefully snatched the orb from my hand with a sharp movement.

“Are you insane?! Receiving that much information at once without preparation would normally kill a person… Wait. Why are you fine?”

“Is there a problem?”

“No… There shouldn’t be...”

This much?

Honestly, whenever I absorb memories, I usually get way more than this in one go.

Having memories jammed into my head wasn’t something that burdened me anymore.

“You… are you even human?”

“Then what do I look like?”

“You look like a monster. No, seriously, how is this even possible?”

She looked at me suspiciously from various angles, then asked quietly:

“Any pain anywhere?”

“None. I’m fine. So let’s talk about this. Did we recover anything useful?”

At my question, she grinned.

“Of course~ Thanks to you, we got two things!”

With a wave of her hand in the air, two spheres of light floated up.

“One is a memory shard, and the other is a key fragment.”

“What do you use them for?”

She lined up the orbs and began explaining calmly.

“The key fragment is simple. It’s a special key that can open a space containing the item you want. If you used your Master Key to open it, it would take about a month. But if you gather all the specialized key fragments created for that specific purpose, you can open it in about three days.”

So that’s what she meant by shortening the time to three days.

“These key fragments aren’t hidden somewhere in the world—they’re summoned as I interfere with the environment. I can’t bring them all at once, but I can secure them as I collect or activate memory fragments.”

As for the memory shards—what she said next was a bit unexpected.

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