The inside of a dragon; what was it supposed to look like?
If one took a reasonable approach to this question, it would probably be dark, sticky, and filled with strange liquids that nobody would want to be slathered in.
It wasn't like it mattered in the first place. Before one was even given the chance to experience it, one would either have been killed by the dragon's jaws or melted down by its bodily fluids.
However, Damien didn't experience any of that.
Nor did he experience what it felt like to be inside a dragon.
The second he was swallowed, he found himself in a different space.
He fell through a winding tunnel of multicolored visions. It was a hallucinogenic experience, with countless memories from Damien's memories and the world's history floating around him and melding together with no sense of continuity whatsoever.
It was like a rabbit hole to another world. He looked all around himself and tried to make sense of the things in the passage, but there was nothing coherent enough to understand.
These scenes were too broken. They were too strangely intertwined and none of them remained what they used to be.
Damien fell without being able to do anything. Like he was on a slide to oblivion, he simply sat there and took in the experience without access to any sort of mana or energy.
Minutes passed, hours passed, and at some point, once Damien started to get bored of the confusion, he was spat out of the other side of the tunnel in a completely new area.
'It's here.'
He noticed immediately. The force he'd been searching for was somewhere in his vicinity.
'Of all things, I didn't expect it to happen like this.'
If he knew he could've just run into the dragon's mouth and found this place so easily, he wouldn't have gone through all the trouble of being covert.
Wasn't this so much easier?
Obviously, his mindset wasn't a normal one. No sane person would just jump into a dragon's mouth because they knew there was something mysterious waiting for them.
But since when was normal?
The experience was definitely odd. Several hundred more words could be used to describe it, but they were unnecessary, because Damien himself didn't place any relevance on it.
Therefore, when he arrived in the new space, he completely forgot about all things related to the dragon and focused back on his original goal.
The area was filled with it.
This place had no real form. It was a cave when Damien thought it was a cave, and it would turn into a great expanse the second he had that thought.
It wasn't an illusion, nor was it reality. It could be either depending on how it was viewed.
Because this place was filled with it.
The aura of Existence.
It was a mini world that acted as a manifestation of existence. As long as it was a concept under existence, this world could become a representation of it.
Damien walked through the plains as they narrowed into a valley and rose into mountains. He followed as the mountains crumbled into rivers and flowed into the sea before freezing over and becoming a snowy tundra.
He walked through all sorts of environments that turned into people, people who turned into energy, and energy that turned into the genesis of all things.
He didn't know where he was going, nor did he know what his purpose was.
He'd already reached this place. He already found what he was looking for. But what was he supposed to do with it?
There was no way for him to understand easily, so he continued to walk.
From the vastness of space to the tiniest quantum particle, from the tangibility of the human body to the esoteric workings of the consciousness, he ambled and strolled.
He sauntered and trudged. He plodded and hiked. He trekked and marched. He wandered and tread.
Until he eventually reached a place that seemed like the end of the path.
It was a skeleton sitting against the wall. The wall wasn't attached to anything, as if this place was isolated from the existence manifestation that was the space around it.
An oasis, or rather, an imperfection, within the perfect painting of reality.
Damien looked at the skeleton curiously.
There wasn't anything wrong with it even when he scanned it with his awareness. At least in the physical plane, this skeleton was truly nothing more than someone's decaying bones.
However, Existence had two sides.
When one thought of ethereal existence, the first thing that came to mind was energy.
Ethereal existence accounted for mana and all other possible energies that existed in the grand cosmos.
However, energy was only a single facet. Ethereal existence dug deeper than that.
The human mind. Consciousness, emotions, and complex thought.
These things that could be half explained through brain chemistry but otherwise remained mysterious due to their complexity were also included in the ethereal side of existence.
So Damien didn't sideline the skeleton just because he couldn't immediately see anything from it.
He put his hand out.
His hand turned ethereal and passed through the skeleton's skull.
He gathered mana, creating a small ball of light within the bone.
And using that energy as a medium, he accessed the vestiges left behind by the owner of the skeleton.
The world around him changed again.
Damien pulled his hand out of the skeleton's skull as it and the wall it rested against vanished.
In its place, no, roughly twenty feet in front of Damien, there now stood a man.
"So, eventually, there was someone."
The man spoke, both addressing Damien and speaking as if he wasn't present.
"Child, I cannot see you," he continued.
"However, I am aware of your existence."
It meant this wasn't a meeting with that man, but a recording Damien was watching.
"I do not know when you will come, for the future becomes blurry after eons of waiting. When you arrive, perhaps this world will not be the same one I left for you."
The words contained plenty of hidden meanings that Damien couldn't quite understand.
The man's eyes were open, but there was nothing there. Within his eye sockets were sclera made of white light with no sense of self behind them.
Damien couldn't tell if the man really existed.
'No, that's the whole point.'
At some point, the man was real. He was present within existence.
However, at some point, the line between existence and nonexistence blurred for him.
His fate was unknown, but he knew there was someone else who would appear, another person who understood Existence.
So he left his will here for that person who would eventually come.
"It is confusing, but even confusion is a matter of Existence. Rise above it, understand it, and learn to control it."
Damien listened as the man kept talking. Most of it was rambling, but within that nonsense, there was enough truth for Damien to grasp.
This was a lesson for him.
The man was telling him to truly see through reality and truly take hold of Existence.
Not just that, he was telling Damien how to do it.
This was the key he'd been looking for, the truth that would let him reach new heights in his stalling growth.
And Damien did not plan to waste this opportunity at all.
