Chapter 562: Looking at the End

The reason the Patriarch had not done anything for now was never because Rhaenar was incapable.

If he decided to go to the heart of the prison, probably none of the inner layers would be able to stop him for long.

But the entry of a Celestial into the deepest part of Verendal’s hidden structure was not something that could be kept secret under the current circumstances.

To open a path for him to enter, the oldest formations of the city would have to be activated at full power; systems that the world considered part of Verendal’s defense would reveal their true nature.

Worse than that, the reaction of the imprisoned creature itself could no longer be hidden.

Now, outside the city, several Overlords, a Celestial from the Primal Firmament, representatives of the Federation, and experts from almost all of the world’s greatest powers were present.

If Rhaenar was forced to enter the prison himself, there was a high chance that the several-hundred-year-old secret of the Pendragons would end that very day.

Everyone would find out.

The Demon of End had never been killed, and this would be the biggest damage to their reputation and could cause very serious damage to their name.

On top of that, no one knew how Kairos would react.

That was why the Patriarch was the last option.

The hidden path eventually brought them back to a place Lian had not expected.

The ceremony altar.

The same huge field where thousands of people had been sitting around it in the morning.

Now it was empty.

In the center of the field, the Dragon Mark was still floating three meters above the altar; an irregular black piece with golden lines running across its surface.

Lian looked around.

In the morning, this place had been a place for celebration, politics, and showing power, but now its silence even felt uncomfortable.

Isolde looked at Seris.

"Your hand."

Seris walked toward the altar, and when she was less than one meter away from the Dragon Mark, the Ancestral Mark on her hand lit up again.

This time, the pain did not return as strongly.

But Lian saw the muscles of her forearm become tense for a moment.

She raised her palm, and a golden light formed between her hand and the main mark.

Now it was the Matriarch’s turn to quietly start whispering several special sentences.

The first stone ring on the ground shook and then rose from the ground.

She took several steps back.

The ring stood vertically, then behind it came the second, then the third, and one after another, all six huge rings separated from the floor of the altar and positioned themselves inside each other in the air.

Each ring started rotating in a different direction, and thousands of golden symbols appeared on the surface of the stone.

A deep sound spread across the entire field, and then a crack appeared in the ground as if a part of space itself had been completely removed.

There was no depth that could be seen inside it, as if it had no end at all and there was only absolute darkness.

A few seconds later, a golden line appeared inside that darkness and began to expand.

And it turned into a narrow path that extended from the altar to a place much lower.

Lian looked toward its end.

"From here, you go."

Seris stepped onto the path without hesitation, her mark became brighter, there was no resistance, and she walked several steps into the darkness without any problem and then turned back.

Her eyes fell on Lian, as if she was telling him to come too.

It was his turn.

Lian took his first step, and at that exact moment, a golden network appeared in front of him.

Voom!

The barrier formed so quickly that it stopped only a few centimeters in front of his face.

He raised an eyebrow.

Behind him, Isolde became silent, and for a moment, even she seemed to think that Rhaenar had made a mistake.

But suddenly, something inside the body of the Young Vorhelm moved like a beating heart, and with a closer look, it became clear that it was the Eclipse Core.

Thump.

Lian looked down.

The Eclipse Essence began to flow for a moment without his direct command and moved through his hand.

A black line appeared under his skin, and the golden network reacted, its light became stronger, but it did not attack.

The Eclipse Essence moved close to the defensive layer, and for a fraction of a second, the golden and black energies came into contact.

Then the network moved back, but surprisingly, its structure was neither damaged nor disabled, instead, it opened by itself.

Lian looked at the opened path for several moments.

Then he looked at Isolde.

For the first time, the woman was looking at him completely without hiding it, not as one of the Vorhelms, but as if she was looking at an unknown creature.

An unknown creature that might be hiding very great secrets, perhaps even secrets greater than their own, and now she herself at least understood part of the reason Rhaenar had chosen him.

But she asked no questions, this was not the time.

"Come back safely, both of you," she only said.

Lian stepped inside, and the rings closed behind him.

The sound of the world disappeared.

For several seconds, he could only hear his own footsteps and Seris’s, while a golden path extended through the absolute darkness.

There were no walls on either side of them and no ceiling above them, as if they were in space, except that there was a staircase.

Sometimes huge mana rings could be seen at very far distances; they were so far away that their real size could not be understood.

Some were several hundred meters in diameter and perhaps even larger, and all of them were slowly rotating in the darkness.

The Young Vorhelm said nothing for several minutes, as if he was trying to analyze exactly what kind of place they were in.

Then he gave Seris a quick look.

"How much do you know about the Demon of End?"

"Little, except that they say it is called the Demon of End because it is the embodiment of the end of everything."

Lian nodded.

If they were talking about a creature that the ancestors of the Pendragons had supposedly killed to stop it, then it was obvious that they were not talking about an ordinary monster.

"Do your family’s reports mention anything about its power? Or at least its level?"

This time, Seris stayed silent a little longer.

"I don’t know."

He looked at her, and she did not take her eyes off the path.

"Apparently, many things I knew were lies." Her voice was still cold.

He could understand that the problem was not only a historical truth.

The Pendragons were something Seris was proud of, her ancestor, the generations before her, and the legends she had heard since childhood.

Now, a part of that same history had broken beneath her feet.

As for its power, all of humanity had to hope that even if it was released, its level would at least not be above 80, because if that happened, the fall of the European continent could be considered certain.

After some time, the golden path started becoming wider.

The darkness around them also changed, not because it became brighter, but because something in the distance started taking shape.

Seris slowed her steps first.

Lian noticed the reason one second later, the golden path had ended and the real prison was in front of them.

For several moments, his mind could not properly understand the size of what he was seeing.

The word "prison" brought the image of walls, gates, and chains to the mind.

This looked nothing like that, it was more like a world that had been created only to imprison one creature.

Above them was endless darkness, there was no ceiling and no sky.

Even if you looked thousands of kilometers away, there was still only dark space.

From a sea of red mist below, pillars rose up, each one large enough to compete with the huge towers of Verendal.

Hundreds of meters?

More?

It was difficult to tell.

Chains were stretched between the pillars.

At first, Lian thought the distance had made their rings look larger, but then he realized he was wrong.

Each ring really was several meters thick and dozens of meters long, the metal of the chains was black, but rivers of golden light flowed inside their grooves.

Every time the light moved from one ring to the next, thousands of symbols on its surface lit up.

Some chains disappeared into the darkness above, some sank into the red sea below, and some were connected to something at the center of this world.

He still could not see it completely.

Below them, the red mist slowly moved, a huge wave traveled from one side of the prison to the other.

A few seconds later, it repeated in the same pattern.

Lian frowned, this was not wind ... wind had no meaning here ... so was it breathing? Something inside the mist was breathing.

The darkness in front of them moved for a moment.

Or at least he thought it moved, and then part of a black surface rose and went down again.

His eyes slowly adjusted to the space of the prison.

First, he saw a scale.

The Young Vorhelm only looked at it for several seconds.

It was longer than his own height, then he realized there were dozens of other scales beside it, reaching hundreds and thousands.

The thing that had looked like a black wall in the distance a few moments ago was not a wall.

It was a body.

A huge neck had risen from the mist and was restrained by five golden rings, two chains as large as huge bridges were wrapped around it.

A little farther away, part of one of the wings could be seen; a wing with several huge pillars passing through its dark membrane and pinning it to the space of the prison.

Its end could not even be seen.

A broken horn came out from the head of the creature, it was as large as a damn tower, and at the center of its chest was something golden.

A huge spike that if you placed a multi-story building beside it, it would look small.

It had passed through the dragon’s chest, and hundreds of chains and lines of light were connected from its end to different points of the prison.

For several moments, Lian even slowed his breathing.

This was the Demon of End.

--------

( Scene visualization )