The palace hall soared over a hundred feet high, vast and eerily empty save for a single, colossal tree standing alone at its heart.
Its canopy spread like a magnificent parasol, nearly brushing the vaulted ceiling. The trunk gleamed as if forged from solid gold, while its leaves shimmered with the translucent green of finest jade.
And from its branches hung countless glowing red fruits, each radiating a soft, golden light.
Even from a distance, Silas's Stellar Rank vision allowed him to see every detail with crystal clarity.
Golden-Thread Blood Crystals?! And every one of them of the highest quality?!
Silas stood utterly stunned, rooted to the spot, his eyes locked on the impossible sight.
It was a long moment before he managed to speak, his voice barely a tremulous whisper without turning around: "Vincent... tell me we're... not dreaming..."
He waited.
Silence.
"Vincent?" He finally turned to look.
No one was there. The hall behind him was completely empty.
Silas: "!!!"
------
"Hey there, handsome~ Come play with us~"
A group of palace maidens in revealing, diaphanous gowns surrounded Rolly, their hands pulling and coaxing him with playful insistence.
The air filled with the scent of perfume and the swirl of colorful silks. Peaks and valleys of their figures hinted and shifted beneath the flowing fabric with every movement.
Rolly, both resisting and yielding at once—a trail of blood already dripping from his nose—was swept along by the giggling women straight into a lavish, cushioned palanquin.
Inside, everything was soft pink—the divan, the cushions. At each of the four directions sat a breathtaking beauty.
Each wore nothing but a single, snow-white fur stole draped from the neck down to the abdomen.
Half-concealing, half-revealing.
Pffft....
Rolly could hold back no longer. A fresh torrent of nose blood sprayed forth.
The palanquin filled with the sound of silvery, delighted laughter. "My sweet juicy…., what an adorable young master, teehee~"
"And so... full of vitality too, hehehe~" another purred.
As the group covered their mouths in mirth, one woman's fur stole, no longer held by her slender arm, began to slowly slip downward...
Amidst all the chirping, flirting, and his own spurting nosebleeds, Rolly failed to notice one crucial detail—he, too, was now completely alone.
------
"A dense forest inside a palace? Does this hall even have a roof?"
Puzzled, Jake looked upward. Instead of a ceiling, he found only a dense, swirling mist, too thick to penetrate with his sight.
When he lowered his gaze, his heart lurched—the path ahead was now empty, and a thick fog had silently risen around him, swallowing everything.
Alarm bells rang in his mind, but he didn't rush forward. Instead, he swiftly ducked behind a broad tree and activated his comms device.
A moment later, his expression turned cold. "No response at all."
He glanced back the way he came, now also shrouded in the encroaching mist. After a brief moment of hesitation, his eyes hardened with resolve, and he pressed onward.
About ten minutes later, he emerged from the misty woods onto the edge of a pond.
It wasn't large—perhaps twenty yards across—but its water glowed with a bright, jade-green radiance.
The color was both intensely rich and perfectly clear, shimmering with a faint, treasure-like light. It was utterly strange.
"What... is this...?"
Though Jake didn't know what made this pond special, he could instinctively feel it was no ordinary thing.
Just as he stared in wonder, the water at the center of the pond suddenly began to churn. Then, from the depths, a radiant lotus flower with petals of seven colors emerged into view.
The entire space was instantly flooded with a dazzling, multicolored radiance, so intense that Jake had to shield his eyes.
"The Celestial Saint's Seven-Treasure Lotus…"
Huh? Why does that name suddenly appear in my mind? What even is the 'Celestial Saint's Seven-Treasure Lotus'? A series of questions erupted unbidden in his thoughts.
"This is strange—something's off here." His instincts screamed caution.
Planting his feet firmly, Jake began carefully scanning his surroundings, every sense on high alert. Then, slowly and deliberately, he started edging closer toward the shimmering pond.
------
In a small clearing deep within the woods, Jake Nickelson and the rest of the team stood rigid and unmoving, their eyes tightly shut, faces frozen like statues arranged in a perfect line.
All except for Leon Keeper.
Gone was any trace of his usual hesitant demeanor. He now carried himself with the detached, superior air of a god inspecting his playthings.
"The souls of this world are indeed pitifully weak," he murmured, a cold smirk playing on his lips.
"So easily trapped in my Five Elements Six Desires Array. They're little better than Mundanes, or the so-called baseline human."
"Yet these outsiders... they've used some unknown art to refine their physical vessels to such a degree,"
he mused, his voice laced with intrigue and disdain. "They surpass even some demonic breeds in raw bodily strength."
"But cultivating the body while neglecting the soul? A fatal flaw for their kind." His eyes glinted with calculation.
"Yet from what I've observed these past few days, this realm is in the early stages of a spiritual resurgence—the very dawn of heaven and earth's transformation. The purest Ki-energy is descending to nurture this world. Not only will divine treasures emerge, but even the ordinary mortals here will produce the finest possible Magical-Spiritual Roots."
"No wonder these magic-ignorant fools can produce so-called 'superheroes' and 'awakened' through their crude technology. They're coasting on the tide of this world's rebirth."
A low, triumphant laugh escaped him. "This is my perfect opportunity. Entering this realm, I can not only use a superior magical root to resurrect myself... but if I find even a few of those natural treasures, breaking through to the Archmagus barrier will be trivial!!! Hahaha..."
Leon Keeper murmured to himself as he stepped in front of the motionless Silas Von, his eyes appraising the man like a finely crafted artifact.
"Even if I can't find the perfect spiritual-root vessel this time, this body of Silas Von already meets this ancestor's standards for refining a Corpse Puppet. Worth the risk of splitting my soul to travel to this alien world."
With that, he formed a strange, intricate hand seal and pointed toward the ground.
RUMBLE....
The earth shuddered and split apart, revealing the ominous entrance to an underground palace.
With a mere gesture from Leon, the other rigid figures followed him like zombies, shuffling mindlessly into the dark depths of the crypt.