The journey had been arduous.
Prince Sohan and the two princess nearly died once before reaching the roots of the World Tree.
Like everything else here, the roots weren't normal and didn't look normal.
Instead, each root, varying in color, silver, bronze, gold, red, black and green—looked like a giant road whose width surpassed a hundred suns put together.
Varian didn't dismiss them as just different colored roots. Instead, he used his extended senses and confirmed a hypothesis.
"Really now..."
There were eight roots, each pertaining to a path.
Life. Soul. Death.
Space. Gravity. Time.
Order. Chaos.
"I don't care about this anymore, but Maria said I can exit the 60th floor if I cross the roots."
Even when he raised a path to rank 6 and extended his senses to the limit, Varian couldn't sense the end of the roots.
"Hortus..." Varian bit his lip and the space around him distorted.
He moved forward by a great length but the end of the road still didn't come in sight. Instead, Varian found an aura slowly locking onto him.
It wasn't downright hostile. But it was telling him to back off. It came from afar, beyond where his senses extended. The aura had a touch of nature, like the world tree and its familiars—guardian elves.
"I don't want to fight those mobs." Varian cursed.n0VelUsB.C0m
His figure blinked forward, transversing astronomical distances with each teleportation.
After ten hours of unending teleportation which exhausted even him, the end of the road came to sight. And with it, also came the sight of a few familiar figures.
Varian was in stealth with an additional layer of the sliver's boost. So, he wasn't found. But if he did approach them, he'd be out in no time.
It was a dangerous situation, but Varian's mind wasn't on the former teammates or the old and new enemies.
It was the cosmic sight that stole his attention.
"W-Wait, what the hell is that?"
It looked like a small version of the milky way galaxy he saw during high school. A large disc-shaped cosmic body with dazzling stars.
But it was more. There were patches of darkness. There was as much darkness in this 'milky way' as there was light.
It was a spiral figure, of course. But in between each light spiral was a dark spiral, complementing it.
At the center, however, there was a fusion of dark and light—a violently fluctuating mix of two properties that shouldn't be possible but was an undeniable reality.
Varian held his breath at that marvel that transcended all human imagination. He didn't dare to let loose his extended perception and analyze the marvel.
It was too risky!
Because all the roots were connected to the edge of the spirals like they were holding the thing somehow.
Every once in a while, the black-and-white cosmic structure expanded a bit, but the roots hummed and an incredible amount of aura pulsed through them before they compressed the structure to its prior size.
It was not even a 0.1% improvement in area for the structure but it was enough to fit ten solar systems.
The scale was mind-boggling and if not for his Adept and Space powers, all that Varian could describe would be 'Very, very, very big.'
"You should give up already. Seeing you try so desperately, even when your chance of victory was near non-existent was commendable."
A heavy voice rang in the void, breaking Varian out of his thoughts and drawing his focus back onto the 'people' that looked less than ants in front of this grand spectacle.
Maria, Sohan, and Bella, injured, were clenching their weapons tight enough to bleed from their palms and glaring at the ones in front of them.
Reaper, Trihoud, and Numan were kneeling with absolute submission in front of two men.
One was tall, over eight feet, and in pure white robes without a speck of dust. But his eyes were dark red, his face sinister with two scars running from the edge of his lips to paint an unsightly smile, and his expression, impassive yet commanding.
The one next to him looked normal at first glance.
A brown-haired man in his early 30s with a very impressive physique. He wore a golden coat over a red shirt and trousers, smoking a cigar and exhaling white rings into the void.
But this guy gave Varian a bigger sense of crisis than the other. Not to say the first man was harmless.
Varian's senses were screaming at him to run away the moment he noticed the first guy. For the second man, his instincts nearly moved his body on their own.
'I can't kill them with my current strength and their current state.' That much was obvious.
Besides, even though they were kneeling like the lowest of servants, the trio of Reaper, Trihound, and Numan were not to be underestimated.
Even if he did use all the artifacts, Varian wasn't sure he could beat the three of them together.
The moment Varian thought 'artifacts', they started humming.
'No. Calm down!' He screamed inwardly and tried to suppress them. But they started to vibrate at a special frequency.
Varian couldn't understand what they were doing and why, but he could feel their emotions.
Joy. Nostalgia. Excitement.
'No, wait! You'll expose me!'
The vibration slowly grew. From a start where it's never going to be noticed to a point where Varian had to keep strengthening his stealth with order power continuously while keeping up the existing stealth to remain hidden.
But the situation was getting worse as the artifacts started to hum as if they were singing.
'Bastards! Listen to Daddy or I'll throw you all into a fucking furnace!'
"Take good care of them until we return. I want to show them the fruits of their failure." The white-robed man chuckled and jumped into the cosmic field.
The brown-haired man waited until his companion entered the spiral before saying. "Kill them."
And then he pointed a finger at Varian's hiding position. Aura exploded, crashing him to the ground and blowing his stealth. "Him too."
