Vincent Motsari dropped straight into the yawning abyss.
Above him, every other Noble and Royal Ranker of the expedition stayed firmly anchored to the surface. Seraphina had visibly wanted to plunge into the darkness alongside him, but Vincent had flatly refused her escort. He was entirely alone now.
He fell through the cold, rushing winds of the chasm for what felt like several consecutive hours. Yet, he knew the rules of this spatial anomaly perfectly: hours of descent down here equated to a mere few seconds on the surface world. A localized temporal dilation of this staggering magnitude was only possible if an entity—or an artifact—operating at a true Divine Rank was actively warping the physics of the subterranean layer.
The colossal, leviathan-sized leech he had just slaughtered on the surface had indeed been a Divine Ranker, but it was entirely mindless. To Vincent, that made it a rare, highly prized anomaly—a biological curiosity he would very much like to capture, dissect, and experiment upon later. For a creature with a fully developed soul to possess absolutely no sense of conceptual enlightenment upon reaching the Divine Rank was an anomaly rarely heard of in the historical annals of Eternia.
Unfortunately for the beast, it had crossed paths with the current sole wielder of the Core of Blood. Vincent's absolute authority over the blood element made the encounter fundamentally unfair; it was like a toddler who had just learned a few basic punches stepping into the ring with a world-champion professional boxer.
The leviathan was indisputably far older than Vincent and had possessed millennia more time to practice its elemental affinity. But because it lacked true, sentient intelligence, it had never actually trained its mind or attempted to deeply comprehend the underlying concepts of blood manipulation. In the end, its demise was forged entirely by its own profound ignorance, juxtaposed against the Sanguine Sword's unrivaled, terrifying talent.
As he plunged deeper, Vincent suddenly felt a fleeting, vibrant pulse of mana rising from the dark floor. Not more than a few minutes later, his feet touched solid ground as he drifted into a colossal, subterranean cave system. The cavern was a staggering contradiction: it was heavily packed with dense veins of raw Mythril ore that radiated a pristine Light mana, but tightly intertwined with that light was a suffocating, heavy concentration of Dead affinity and Rot affinity mana.
Vincent didn't hesitate. He blasted his high-tier sensory perception outward, casting a massive, sweeping wave of mana to map the entire cave network.
The structural readouts were mind-boggling—the tunnels stretched on for what felt like forever, weaving an endless labyrinth through the crust of the planet. However, his senses successfully locked onto a dense, throbbing epicenter located deep within the subterranean grid.
As he began to rapidly traverse the caverns, he found himself crossing paths with thousands of Noble and Royal-ranking beasts. Every single one of them was a gargantuan, nightmarish version of common parasitic organisms that typically survived on rotting carcasses, decay, and blood.
He moved past swarms of massive bats, skittering insects, bloated slugs, parasitic leeches, and microscopic lice—except, for comparison, these subterranean variants measured at least 200 meters in individual size. Vincent moved through them like a phantom, systematically slaughtering any monster that crossed his path and ruthlessly hoarding their cores.
For the highly classified, upcoming engineering experiment he was trying to manifest, he needed to accumulate every single Royal Rank core possible, regardless of whether they were soul-bearing or soulless variants. The required numbers were daunting. To complete the blueprint, he estimated he would need a few hundred thousand soulless cores, several thousand true soul cores, and a precise baseline of roughly ten distinct Divine Rank cores.
Worse still, the master blueprint demanded a Divine Rank Space Affinity Core—a legendary resource that was exceptionally difficult to acquire, even for a global juggernaut with the endless financial reserves of the mighty Motsari Corporation.
As he mapped the tunnels, Vincent realized that thousands upon thousands of these high-tier Royal Rank beasts were quietly lingering in the dark corners of the cave. A visible grimace crossed the Sanguine Sword's face as he mentally calculated the sheer horror of what would have happened if this monstrous subterranean army had suddenly mounted a synchronized surface breach on the city of Daro. All he could visualize was absolute, unmitigated bloodshed.
Even though the Royal-ranking director of the Adventurer Society branch in Daro was undeniably powerful, the man could realistically take on five average Royal Rank beasts at his absolute best—perhaps five more if he was backed by a highly coordinated team of elite, Noble-rank healers. But here, thousands of them wallowed in the deep. Each monster sat comfortably at the Middle Tier of the Royal Rank, and several signatures were dangerously close to breaking through into the Divine threshold.
The deeper Vincent pushed toward the central chamber, the more frequently his sensory radar picked up true, active Divine Rankers. Choosing discretion over pride, he subtly shifted his aura, smoothly sneaking away to bypass their immediate detection zones.
Finally, he approached the true heart of the abyss. The tunnels opened up into a jaw-dropping, gargantuan central cavern that expanded for thousands of kilometers in diameter. Peering through the dense, swirling atmospheric mana, Vincent's eyes traced the faint, titanic silhouettes of massive wings, razor-sharp claws, and towering horns—though the overwhelming distortion made it impossible to discern their true colors or species.
But just as his boot was about to cross the threshold into the main chamber, an oppressive, suffocating wave of presence slammed into his mind. Tens of distinct signatures flared to life inside the void—each one radiating a raw, absolute hostility targeted at anything other than themselves.
In that single, defining microsecond, the Sanguine Sword knew the truth. If he dared to take one more step into that central chamber, the raw, overlapping pressure of their combined Divine presences alone would violently rip his mortal frame apart before he could even manifest his armor.
The Sanguine Sword was a terrifying combatant, but he was by no means an idiot.
Vincent spun on his heel and engaged his mana channels at absolute maximum output, flying backward down the exit tunnel at jet-fighter speeds. He didn't even waste precious milliseconds attempting to sneak away or weave an invisibility spell; he focused entirely on raw, unadulterated velocity.
Suddenly, a catastrophic, animalistic roar echoed from the darkness behind him. Worse still, the sheer intent behind the shockwave was targeted precisely at his back.
Vincent pushed his core past its safe limits, driving himself faster as he violently manifested a pair of sweeping wings made of condensed, crystalline blood to force more propulsion out of the air currents. For the very first time in a hundred years of absolute combat dominance, the Sanguine Sword was running for his absolute life.
As he reached the narrow pit mouth that led back to the upper cave system, Vincent made a single, split-second instinctive decision. Swirling his blade in a massive, sweeping arc, he unleashed a flurry of highly concentrated crimson slashes, intentionally slicing through hundreds of massive structural stone pillars that were keeping the massive cavern roof from collapsing.
His calculated gamble paid off.
With a deafening, apocalyptic rumble, the entire cavern ceiling gave way, collapsing into millions of tons of solid rock and burying the exit pathway. The furious screams of the pursuing Divine Rank beasts echoed through the stone, but the sound was instantly muffled and cut off by the massive mountain of debris.
Vincent didn't receive any system kill notifications, nor had he expected one from a simple cave-in against entities of that caliber. He simply came to a halt in a safer tunnel, leaning against the damp rock as he took a moment to inspect his accumulated haul.
He had successfully gathered two thousand high-tier Royal Rank cores from his rapid sprint through the outer loops. Combined with the few hundred Royal Rank cores waiting to be harvested from the surface battleground and the massive corpse of the Divine Rank leviathan leech, his resource pile had grown significantly.
Yet, all he had truly gained from this brief excursion into the deep was a harsh, cold realization regarding the true limits of his own current power level, a lingering trace of primal fear regarding the ancient forces slumbering beneath the forest, and a few thousand cores to add to his massive personal vault.
"What exactly must a man do just to successfully build his dream vehicle?" Vincent asked himself quietly, a self-deprecating sigh escaping his lips as he stared at the mountain of rock.
'Everything,' a voice echoed with absolute, crystalline clarity from the depths of his soul space. It was his manifested Aura Beast, the conceptual entity Sanguine, speaking the absolute truth.
Vincent chuckled softly, shaking his head. "Spot on, like always."
With his composure fully restored and his targets secured, the Sanguine Sword readjusted his stance and began his long, steady journey back up the chasm toward the surface sky.
***