"Teacher, where are we going?"
Inside the bottomless tunnel, Ares followed the petite Hecate, treading carefully.
After Ares agreed to Hecate's terms, the Moon Goddess, without resting for a moment, immediately opened a portal and brought him to the stone temple within Tartarus.
Ares had been to this stone temple before. It contained only a statue of Hecate that she had sculpted herself to mislead others. In reality, the temple was her secret laboratory. Last time, Ares had also tested the black crystal, which called itself the "Multiverse Intelligent Navigation System," there.
However, what Ares didn't know was that there was another secret beneath this stone temple. After they arrived at the stone temple, Hecate cast a spell on her statue, and then, beneath the statue, the entrance to the tunnel they were currently in appeared.
In this era, the Underworld and Hell are physically connected to the earth. The most typical example is Sumer; one only needs to dig a hole in the ground to fall into the Underworld. The Greek Pantheon is no different.
However, unlike the earliest and simplest Sumer, Hades in greek mythology is a bit more restrained. He obscured the Underworld, preventing the possibility of entering it by simply digging a deep pit from the surface. Nevertheless, some caves in Greece that lead underground can still directly reach the River Styx.
And further down from the Underworld is the bottomless Tartarus. Theoretically, this should be the lowest level of the small world partitioned by the restraining force for the Greek Pantheon. However, Ares and Hecate are currently at the bottom of Tartarus. The tunnel before them is bottomless, and it is unknown where it leads. The darkness within the tunnel is also peculiar; it can even obscure Ares's divine eyes after he cultivated Magnetic Field Rotation.
After Ares asked this question, Hecate did not answer, only telling him to keep following her.
The teacher and student continued downward for an unknown duration until a massive magic reaction finally appeared in Ares's perception. At that instant, the darkness before him vanished without a trace. He and Hecate had, at some point, arrived in an imaginary space.
The world stretched endlessly, with only countless straight blue lines extending to the horizon. Those were the spirit particles pulsating within this imaginary space. In front of Ares and Hecate was a massive blue cube, roughly a thousand meters in length, width, and height.
Those blue spirit particle lines extended from within this cube, spreading throughout the entire imaginary space. The broken core he had retrieved from the Starship was also there, lying directly beneath this large blue cube.
"I call this thing Tartarus," Hecate told Ares. "During the Titan War, to avoid the conflict, I secretly used magic to sneak into the then-empty Tartarus. I found this thing in the deepest part of Tartarus's darkness. Instinctively, I felt it was very important, so I hid it in the depths of Tartarus using imaginary space. To this day, I am probably the only god in the entire world who knows about this thing."
After speaking, she even reached out and patted Ares's arm: "Disciple, don't sell me out. If Zeus really knew I was hiding something like this, he might just eat me directly, like Metis."
"If I sell you out, you'll definitely sell me out too. Then we might both end up being sliced up by Zeus as a teacher and student meal," Ares quipped, then looked at the blue cube and asked, "Teacher, what is this thing?"
"It is the core of Tartarus, or rather, it is Tartarus," Hecate smiled. "Of course, just like the conceptual gods like 'Uranus,' 'Chaos,' and 'Gaia,' Tartarus is not something from our Greek Pantheon at all. I suspect it might be an observation device left behind by some advanced life form that once visited Earth in ancient times. I don't have authorization for this thing, but after continuous research over the years, I have figured out some of its simple uses."
"You want to use it to analyze that Starship cube, don't you?" Ares understood.
"Yes, I see they are both cubes, so they might be from the same origin. But analysis is possible, the problem is…" Hecate frowned, a troubled expression on her beautiful face. "I don't have its authorization. I can only pile on magic to try and hack into its deepest core to gain its permission, but I failed. My power is not enough."
"You can't get in, and you expect me to?" Ares thought for a moment. "Oh, or rather, you brought me here to use me as a power bank, to replenish your magic when you run low?"
"Neither," Hecate shook her head. "After the last attempt, I realized that the core of this thing is not something we can enter right now. That light-year barrier, without analyzing its technology, is an infinite distance that cannot be broken through even after countless centuries. Moreover, there is an even sturdier eight-dimensional spirit particle barrier inside. Wasting more magic on it is meaningless."
"Then why did you bring me here?" Ares asked. "I can't help you with this thing."
"I just wanted you to try. Perhaps you don't even know it yourself, but shortly after you began your training, I helped you determine your 'Origin'."
Hecate said:
"Your Origin is extremely special, which is why I suggested you try. It might have an unexpected effect."
"I see," Ares suddenly understood. Although this setting seemed to have been discarded by the author of the previous world, according to previous works, Magic user families would determine the Origin of their offspring at birth. A person's Origin fundamentally determined the properties of their magic. For example, Matou Sakura's "Imaginary" allowed her to manipulate imaginary magic, and Shirou's "Sword" made him more adept at using projection magic to create swords.
Ares had been training for a long time, yet Hecate had never mentioned his Origin.
He had previously thought that divine-era magic didn't require understanding such things as Origins, as awakening one's Origin was also a bad thing. Although it could grant greater power, the personality would mostly be swallowed by the Origin. Someone like Shirou, he thought, would probably become a form where he "couldn't live without selling swords."
But he didn't expect Hecate to suddenly bring it up today, saying it was because his Origin was too special.
Hearing Hecate's words, Ares still felt a little anticipation. After all, in his opinion, Origins like "Sword" and "Imaginary" were already powerful enough, but in Hecate's eyes, such Origins were probably only considered acceptable. He just didn't know what his Origin truly was.
So he decisively asked, "Teacher, what is my Origin?"
"You have no Origin," Hecate replied. "Unlike the Origin of 'Void,' your Origin is directly nothingness, it is non-existence. It's as if you weren't born in this universe at all."