Chapter 371: The Awakener (5)
A colossal palace floating on the lake.
The man, standing before that magnificent sight, turned to Lennok and smiled.
“My apologies, but that promise I made, about letting you meet Jindun first, it will have to be nullified.”
“……”
“It would be troublesome if you were to meet Jaigys and interfere with my great work.”
Was he wary of Lennok warning Jindun about his body being stolen?
The man, glancing back, stretched his lips into a long, distorted grin.
“If only you weren’t so unnecessarily perceptive, we could have both achieved our desires… Being too smart isn’t always a good thing, is it?”
The moment Lennok saw through the man’s hidden true intentions, their cooperation was over.
“As your elder, this is advice, so take it to heart and act wisely in the future. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go ahead.”
The man, who reached The Cradle dozens of meters ahead of Lennok, calmly declared victory.
He had forcibly moved dozens of meters by expending one of Jawoon’s powerful emotions, simultaneously flinging open the door to The Cradle. There was no longer any way for Lennok to hold him back.
He would block any attacks from behind with the remaining power of his Domain, and then simply enter The Cradle.
Just as the man thought so and turned to activate a gem spell.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Kwaaaaah!!
Along with Lennok’s words, a colossal wave rose directly behind the man.
The very wave he had just created with water-element magic to attack the man.
Lennok had changed the direction of that water flow, using it to carry himself forward.
“I never expected you to keep your promise from the start.”
“……!!”
The man, whose expression utterly changed at the sight of Lennok surging forward on the wave, expended a gem pillar and activated a spell.
His body floated into the air, beginning to fly at high speed.
Swoosh!!
Flight magic, which had abysmal efficiency without the aid of an artifact.
But the stronger the catalyst used for the spell, the higher its efficiency and greater its power.
A one-time spell, used by using Jawoon’s human emotions.
The man recklessly expended the power of the Domain, which was full of risks he would never have taken with his own body, to accelerate.
Though he considered Jawoon a partner, he was not a wizard so empathetic as to leave reserve power when his own goal was at stake.
Thump-thump-thump!!!
The two figures dashed across the low, lapping water. One rode the air, the other rode a self-generated wave, tumbling chaotically back and forth.
With little mana and stamina left for either of them. Their bodies, having narrowly vied for supremacy, simultaneously passed through an invisible barrier,
And landed concurrently inside The Cradle’s spacious palace.
The two wizards, who had fallen into the middle of the vast hall, groaned in pain as if on cue.
Thud!!
“Kuhak!!”
“Ugh…!!”
The man, unable to stop coughing, trembled all over, his face pale.
“Hmm…!! As expected, my body condition is…!!”
Even though he borrowed Jawoon’s body, this body itself was already exposed to the aftermath of losing the battle with Lennok.
Not only had most of its mana been depleted, but also muscles were damaged from Lennok’s torture, as mana not his own seeped into various parts of the body.
Furthermore, the original force of Jawoon’s resentment, which the man had taken over, was making blood circulation difficult as it surged from near the heart.
Lennok’s eyes glinted as he watched the man twitching, collapsed beside him.
“So that’s it…!!”
The reason the man had consistently feigned composure, focusing on defense instead of counterattacking Lennok.
It was because Jawoon’s body itself had already deteriorated to a state where it was on the verge of collapse, making it impossible to engage in combat.
Lennok was confident that he was second to none in terms of reaching rock bottom in stamina and durability, but in this situation, victory might not be entirely out of reach.
Crunch!
With trembling hands, he pulled out a painkiller from his pocket and chewed it.
At the same time, he took out a stamina recovery ampoule and injected it directly into his carotid artery.
It was a risky injection method that could lead to severe bleeding if done incorrectly, but its effect was excellent.
Lennok managed to regain some strength and was the first to get back on his feet.
“Hoo…!!”
Lennok checked on the man, who was still twitching on the ground, sighed, and composed himself.
“It was close, but I’ll be first. Just wait there quietly until I meet Jindun… di… ng…”
Lennok’s words, as he walked forward and raised his head, gradually broke off and then stopped completely.
This was because Lennok’s head, following his gaze up the stairs before him, continued to tilt straight up vertically without stopping.
“……”
Stairs stretching endlessly into the distance, incredibly vast and wide.
Thousands of thick pipes covered the palace walls and ceiling on both sides of the stairs.
Lennok, realizing belatedly that there were thousands of stairs, quietly swore.
“Damn it…”
Indeed, shouldn’t Evelyn have been here instead of Lennok?
He couldn’t be grateful enough for her consideration, but it was entirely possible that Lennok would die first from climbing these stairs, not an Ascendant.
“Huff, huff…!!”
“Guh, ugh…!!”
Hot beads of sweat incessantly dropped onto the stairs.
Clothes, discarded due to the overwhelming weight, lay scattered hundreds of meters below the stairs.
“Ughhh…!!”
“…You seem to be struggling a lot.”
Lennok, who had been crawling up the stairs with a blank expression, glanced back.
His eyes were sunken, and his cheeks were hollow from how much stamina he had expended.
A little behind Lennok, at the bottom of the stairs, the man, who was practically crawling on all fours, let out a weak laugh.
“Heh heh, is that even a question…?”
“……”
“Hey… if you have any… spare medicine, why don’t you throw some more down?”
The man looked up at Lennok with an exhausted expression, licking his lips.
“That ampoule… it tasted quite… good.”
“Get… lost…”
The reason the man, who barely had the strength to move, was following Lennok up the stairs was simple.
The man had picked up the ampoule bottle Lennok discarded, even breaking it open and licking clean all the contents inside.
He seemed to have regained a bit of strength just from licking the residue off the wall, and the man’s stubbornness in starting to climb the stairs again, refusing to be outdone, even made Lennok admire him.
“Did people from… back then… used to be so… pathetic?”
“Compared to… these young whippersnappers… nowadays, no…! Phew…!!”
“Heh heh…”
It was unbearable how ridiculous their current situation was, crawling up the stairs while bickering.
Although they were spitting sharp words at each other, they were actually focusing on climbing the stairs instead of fighting.
Both instinctively knew that, unlike outside The Cradle, mana would no longer recover within this enormous palace.
The mana flowing in this space was sucked into the pipes densely packed along the walls and ceiling on both sides of the stairs, before it could even settle in their bodies.
The pipe’s intake did not stop there, operating greedily as if scraping away even their depleted mana.
Lennok’s mana manipulation ability was barely enough to prevent his foundational mana, which sustained his body, from being taken away.
It was only natural that the man in Jawoon’s body couldn’t last long.
“Ugh…!!”
Lennok, realizing his trembling legs as he lay prostrate on the stairs, pulled out a new ampoule from his pocket.
Click!!
“Ohhh!!”
The man, watching from below, let out an enthusiastic cheer.
With the ampoule jabbed into his shoulder, Lennok looked down at the man with cold eyes.
“I don’t know why you’re happy. I’m not giving it to you.”
“But you’re… going to throw that bottle away… aren’t you?”
The man stuck out his tongue and replied.
“This body, its spellcasting talent isn’t great, but it responds quite well to medicine. Just leaving me the residue is enough.”
“……”
Such a pathetic remark, unbelievable for a high-ranking black wizard from hundreds of years ago.
But Lennok wasn’t without thought either.
Instead of discarding the used ampoule bottle at his feet, he flung it far down below.
“Ah…!!”
The man, looking utterly dejected as he watched the ampoule roll down the stairs, hung his head.
No matter how urgent the medicine was, going all the way down the stairs to pick up an ampoule was practically a waste.
Lennok had deliberately put him in a dilemma, preventing the man from benefiting whenever he took medicine.
Lennok watched the man with satisfaction, then turned and began to crawl up the stairs.
With his stamina and mana almost depleted, he was climbing in such a sorry state, but there was no time for a long rest.
‘Now that The Cradle has appeared, Maiya must have noticed the anomaly too.’
Neither Lennok nor the man had forgotten the existence of the third competitor who had entered The Cradle with them.
‘I need to wake Jindun before she finds this place and reaches the stairs.’
He didn’t know how much energy Maiya had left, but she was likely in relatively better condition compared to Lennok and Jawoon, who had been fighting outside The Cradle.
He couldn’t let her gain the advantage at the very end.
‘By the way, for a place where an Ascendant resides, the environment is quite peculiar.’
Even as Lennok gasped and crawled up the stairs, he tried to commit the surrounding scenery to memory.
The unknown pipes densely packed on both sides of The Cradle’s vast walls.
Were they for transportation, or a device to hear music from afar?
Perhaps the pipes themselves were meant to generate melodies.
The majestic mana swirling overhead, the elegant melodies, and the end of the staircase that was not far off.
He no longer had to crane his neck to see the end of the stairs.
Realizing that Maiya was still nowhere to be seen below, Lennok gritted his teeth, got up, and began to run.
“Ugh…!!”
The side effects of successive medications and addiction, depleted stamina, and hunger pushed to its limit caused gastric acid to stream from his mouth, but that wasn’t what was important.
‘Finally…!!’
Immediately after receiving Lapis’s call and joining the summons, breaking through the Hanghasa Labyrinth between canyons in the northern continent’s snowfield to reach its deepest part—that fruit of his labor was before Lennok’s eyes.
Finally, now, he could meet the Ascendant.
What should he ask first? What should he answer first?
Even though he had been thinking about this moment constantly, his head still felt like it would burst.
He kept contemplating an unanswerable question, unable to stop.
What kind of ending would the Transcendent, who had reached that answer before and higher than Lennok, be waiting for in this world with a predetermined end?
Hadn’t he burned everything to reach this point, thinking only of that, waiting only for that?
Thump!!
With that thought, Lennok leaped onto the stairs with all his might.
And stopped dead in his tracks at the sight before his eyes.
“……”
“Huff, huff…!!”
Immediately after, the man, catching up to Lennok with a face that looked about to collapse, fell at Lennok’s feet.
“I, I ended up picking it up… I couldn’t resist…”
The man, who had gone down after Lennok’s discarded ampoule bottle, taken the medicine, and climbed back up thanks to its effect, laboriously lifted his head.
“Jaigys…!! I, Ermon, will…”
The sight at the top of the stairs silenced even the man who was gasping, trying to call out Jindun’s name.
At the center of The Cradle.
In the middle of the vast, empty space above thousands of stairs, on a small chair, a man sat with his eyes closed.
“……”
Crinkling wrinkles around his eyes. A breath so faint it was barely perceptible.
He looked as if he was comfortably asleep, completely indifferent to the desperate struggle of the two men who had crawled their way up.
But what left Lennok and the man speechless was not the Ascendant’s much more humble appearance than expected.
Behind the small chair he sat on, thousands of pipes were densely lined up.
Every single pipe that filled the walls and ceiling of this palace was, without exception, densely inserted into Jindun’s back and waist.
And right in front of the old man’s chair, where he sat with his head bowed and eyes closed.
A complex magic circle was densely carved into the floor. Blood flowed down his elbow.
“Too late.”
Maiya, her hands covered in blood, placed them on the floor and smiled coldly.