Once the chimera fell, Damien naturally devoured it before he went to the altar.
Through its memories, he learned a bit more about the mysterious man and the ruins this altar led to, but since the chimera remained outside the ruins its entire life, the information it had wasn't much.
'What a single-minded beast.'
The chimera had no real reason to remain a protector of the altar. The duty was assigned to it at birth, and it followed it mindlessly without a single question.
It was a bit of a pathetic existence, but that was that.
'I should focus on what needs to be done.'
The only real useful thing in the chimera's absorbed existence was the method to enter the ruin properly.
'The ruin is supposedly a relic from an ancient society. It's meant to have some sort of religious background belonging to a God from the past, and the person who clears it is meant to inherit his legacy.'
Of course, the ruin was now being used for something more nefarious, and that legacy was probably long rotted to the point where even the mysterious man who made this ruin his home didn't recognize its existence.
'Anyway, if I just…'
He approached the altar and stepped on a few weighted pressure plates.
The ground rumbled, and the ruin changed to its second form. Here, Damien used his mana to trace a specific pattern in the shape of a sword wrapped in lightning.
The pattern pushed deep into the ground and shone bright enough to light up the entire altar. Spatial fluctuations filled the air, and the ground opened up to reveal a staircase.
'Interesting.'
The mechanism did transport one to a new space, but it was a gradual transportation that happened while one took the stairs.
'Even the stairway is a test.'
Damien glanced around as he walked, the All-Seeing Eyes showing him through reality.
His body and soul were being scanned by various mechanisms. They were trying to determine his potential, his alignment, and many other things, but because of Damien's unique existence, it wasn't able to do much at all.
'I'll probably be deemed unworthy of the legacy, but as long as I'm not spit out, it's fine.'
The winding staircase was long. It extended more and more the farther Damien walked, as if it refused to let him into the ruin.
But he was already prepared for this.
'You expect to scare away a spatial practitioner with spatial tricks?'
The only reason he was following the ruins' will was because he wanted to go through the spatial displacement without setting off any alarms.
Since he was already technically within the ruin now, there was no need to keep doing things legally.
Damien put his hands forward and pushed them apart like he was prying open a set of elevator doors. Space tore with his movements, and as he stepped into the crack he created, he found himself in a new space.
'This should be something like purgatory, a space in between spaces, an intermediary.'
From here, Damien could take one of many paths that could take him through the plane he was currently in, and as he looked through them, he quickly found the one he wanted.
'I should observe for a bit first.' He thought.
He opened that space, expanded it, and allowed its light to pass through his eyes.
Like that, a scene was revealed.
The scene of a plot that had remained hidden for tens of millennia.
***
It looked similar to the inside of a church.
There were no pews, nor was there any religious imagery. All these things had been removed long ago.
In front of the stained glass windows that made up the space's rear wall, a man was chained in the air.
His arms were spread diagonally above his head and shackled to chains that came from the roof, while his legs were in a similar position chained to the floor.
His head hung low, strangely lulling from side to side as if the bones holding it up were twisted and broken.
In fact, many of the bones in his body were in the same state. His skin was covered in thick, pulsating black veins of unnatural birth, and overall, he wasn't in any condition to be considered alive.
Yet, he absolutely was.
In place of where believers once stood and worshipped their god was now a myriad of machinery used by the one who desecrated this space.
The readings showed the chained man's status, along with many unknown percentages and numbers that nobody but one man could understand.
But that man was currently not present in the room.
Instead, he was a bit further away, a few rooms down the hall in a damp storage space of his creation.
He stood by himself amidst a mountain of corpses.
Not a single one was natural. They were chimera-like fusions of various races with humans as the base. Some of them had angelic wings, while others had the features of dragons and beasts. Some seemed like homunculi, while others were more golem-like.
But they all had a single common point.
In the middle of their chests, they had cavities filled with a certain dark material. Their cores, the pinnacle of the man's research, but also, the very thing holding him back.
"Almost…"
He spoke to himself.
He held a syringe in his hand filled with an unknown solution.
"With this, I can accomplish it."
The light in his eyes was mad. His sanity had long left him as he sunk himself in degeneracy.
He was once human too, but that was his state no longer.
No, in a situation where he'd be exposed if he took too many victims, he was forced to experiment on himself just as much as he did others.
He was a twisted and gruesome sight to look at, perhaps even worse than the corpses he left in his wake.
But after so long, he finally did it.
Everyone who followed him was killed. In the lower universe, the majority of his research was burned and the scapegoats he prepared to cover him were slaughtered mercilessly.
The plans he had made to conquer the Nox Race broke down, and without any choice, he fled the lower universe and came to the Heavenly World.
He never knew this would be his salvation.
This world, so massive that a single existence was nothing, gave him the freedom and the opportunity to do whatever he wanted without restriction.
And the beings he found here…
'...compared to them, the Nox were mere toys.'
They became the source of his obsession.
He didn't want to join them.
No, he'd hardly made contact with them since his arrival.
But the goals he had when he was trying to create artificial Nox transferred over to them, and the intensity of his desire scaled to their power level.
He spent thousands of years on this.
Thousands of years to create his own version of those beings, so he could one day conquer their entire race for his own benefit.
He only knew trial and error, experiencing barely any progress in the time he spent working.
But, somehow, by some miracle, his life changed 100 years ago.
His stunted progress seemed like a work of imagination because of how fast he was making improvements, and finally, the moment came.
He found the perfect vessel.
And he found the perfect equation.
Nobody could stop him this time.
He was going to succeed no matter what!
