Chapter 324: Escape

Hearing Judas, Selene's entire body trembled with rage. She no longer cared about the difference in strength. She no longer cared whether she survived, and the only thing occupying her mind was killing the man before her. 

Gritting her teeth until blood seeped from her lips, she released her grip on the dagger altogether and instead tried to expand her Domain. Invisible spatial ripples immediately spread outward from her body, causing the surrounding space to distort faintly. 

Judas merely shook his head in mild disappointment. "You're only wasting our ti..." His voice stopped abruptly. For the first time since arriving in Thyrandel, genuine alarm flashed across his face. Judas' instincts screamed and he instinctively raised his hand to intercept the attack and a blinding beam of concentrated energy erupted from Selene’s ring finger without the slightest warning, moving so fast that even he barely managed to perceive it. 

There was no big explosion as the beam had more piercing attributes than destructive ones. It broke through his passive barrier and slammed into his palm with enough force to drive him several meters backward through empty space and the smell of burned flesh filled the air. When the light gradually faded, absolute silence descended upon the battlefield. 

Judas slowly lowered his arm and stared blankly at his own hand. The entire palm had been charred black while a deep wound stretched almost completely across it, so severe that another few centimeters would have severed the hand entirely. There was no blood as it evaporated due to the high temperature of the attack. 

He simply stared at the wound in stunned silence. "...What?" he whispered unconsciously. It wasn't pain that shocked him. With their vitality, Minor Gods could recover from such flesh injuries easily. What truly shook him was the impossible fact that an attack from a mere Transcended Rank had pierced his passive defenses. 

The realization instantly transformed the surprise on his face into naked fury. His head snapped toward Selene. "You insolent..." Before anyone could react, his fist shot toward her with overwhelming speed. 

The punch reached Selene before she could even perceive it. At the final instant, however, a brilliant golden barrier suddenly materialized around her body. Countless intricate runes flashed across its surface as it intercepted the incoming fist. 

CRACK! 

The barrier withstood most of the impact before countless fractures spread across its surface. An instant later it shattered into millions of golden fragments. Although greatly weakened by the barrier, the remaining force still struck Selene squarely on the side of her head. Blood erupted into the air as her body was hurled backward like a broken doll, crashing through the sky before finally disappearing into the distant ocean. 

She lost consciousness long before reaching the water. Judas' expression remained murderous as he prepared to pursue her and finish what he had started. 

"Judas." Lunette's calm voice suddenly interrupted him. He stopped mid step before turning toward her irritably. "What?" She looked toward where Selene dissappeared before calmly replying, "Don't let your emotions cloud your judgment. We still don't understand her connection between the creator of that barrier and her." Her gaze shifted briefly toward Avalon itself. "Until we know more, killing her would be foolish. More importantly..." She looked directly into Judas' eyes. "...we need her alive if we intend to capture Augustus." 

The anger gradually faded from Judas' face as reason finally reasserted itself. After several long seconds, he slowly exhaled before nodding once. "You're right." With a wave of his hand, Selene's unconscious body floated toward him before becoming imprisoned within another transparent barrier. 

Looking one final time toward the silent island of Avalon, Judas' expression turned cold once more. "Let's go, Augustus won't hide forever." The four gods vanished together, disappearing beyond the horizon while taking Selene with them. 

Silence once again settled over the sea and nearly six minutes passed. Then, several kilometers away from Avalon, space suddenly twisted into a spiral of blue light. A dimensional portal quietly opened in the empty sky before Arthur casually stepped through it. Stretching his shoulders, he let out a long yawn before glancing back at the slowly collapsing portal. 

"Haa..." he muttered to himself with a faint smile. "I should probably wait a few more days before going back there again." Completely unaware of everything that had transpired only minutes earlier, he lazily adjusted his clothes before flying straight toward Avalon.

…

A few minutes earlier in the Immortal Realm.

Nearly an entire day had passed since Arthur had been imprisoned inside the strange black prison, and during that time he had done exactly what he always did whenever he encountered something beyond his understanding. 

Rather than wasting time worrying about his situation, he devoted every waking moment to studying the formations surrounding him. The suppressive arrays carved into the pitch black walls, the metal bars sealing the front of the prison, even the faint fluctuations connecting every inscription together had all been analyzed repeatedly under the assistance of both his System and his own perception. 

Hour after hour, countless calculations flowed through his mind as he gradually dismantled the formation layer by layer. Although its complexity vastly surpassed anything he had encountered before, its structure was no longer a complete mystery to him. 

By the end of the day, he had successfully dissected every major component and was confident that, given sufficient materials and time, he could faithfully reproduce the entire suppressive formation himself. Unfortunately, reproducing it and modifying it were two completely different matters. 

Every attempt at tracing possible alterations inevitably revealed that even the slightest change would immediately disturb the balance of the arrays, something the terrifying old man would almost certainly notice the instant it happened. Arthur naturally had no intention of alerting such an existence while still imprisoned. 

Fortunately, he no longer needed to. A few moments earlier, while examining one of the suppressive nodes, he had quietly noticed something unusual. The suffocating pressure constantly suppressing his abilities had weakened to a degree that he could use his abilities freely. 

Reactive Evolution had once again silently accomplished what should have been impossible. The suppression affecting his Spatial Manipulation had gradually become less effective until it no longer prevented activation altogether. He slowly opened his eyes before a faint smile appeared across his face. 

‘Finally…’ he thought. Without wasting another second, spatial ripples quietly spread beneath his feet and he teleported the longest distance he could with his current capability as the prison remained perfectly silent.

The next instant he appeared unimaginably far away, standing alone amidst the endless darkness of outer space. Before him drifted a barren planet whose surface resembled an endless desert scarred by countless ancient craters. The world looked lifeless, reminding him strongly of Mars from his previous life. 

He merely glanced toward it before activating Spatial Manipulation once again. Space folded around him before he disappeared, only to reappear billions of kilometers away, then again. Every teleportation pushed him to the absolute limit of his current ability, each jump spanning incomprehensible distances across the galaxy. 

He deliberately refused to travel in a straight line, continuously altering his trajectory after every leap to make pursuit as difficult as possible. Entire planetary systems flashed past his senses before disappearing behind him. Massive gas giants larger than anything found within the Solar System drifted through the darkness while distant stars illuminated the endless void with countless colors. 

He paid none of them any attention. His sole objective remained creating as much distance as possible between himself and that terrifying old man. Nearly a minute passed with him teleporting continuously without pause. During that entire time, another process unfolded simultaneously inside his own body. 

The severed stump where his left arm had once been regenerated. Muscles intertwined with newly formed tendons while nerves rapidly connected themselves. Bone emerged from the stump before being covered by flesh and skin until, at last, his left arm had completely returned. 

Arthur flexed his fingers experimentally before quietly nodding. "About time." Yet what truly captured his attention wasn't the regenerated limb itself. It was something far smaller... a single cell hidden deep within the flesh of that arm. The cell which had once contained his Dimensional Storage was reconstructing itself. 

The instant the microscopic structure started reforming, Arthur immediately shifted a portion of his consciousness inward. The world around him continued blurring as he teleported again and again, but another parallel stream of thought now focused entirely upon observing that miraculous phenomenon. 

His consciousness shrank until he perceived the cell itself. Then... the universe before his eyes transformed. What should have been an unimaginably tiny biological structure was instead creating an enormous dimensional world hidden inside it. Countless layers of folded space intertwined within one another, forming a stable independent dimension whose volume rivaled that of Jupiter itself. 

Now that he was seeing the formation of the dimension he could see mountains of compressed spatial runes floated throughout the empty void like stars scattered across a miniature universe. Every rune connected to millions of others through incomprehensibly intricate pathways that continuously folded, inverted, expanded, and compressed space simultaneously. 

It resembled less a formation and more a living ecosystem of spatial laws, each microscopic alteration automatically influencing billions of interconnected structures throughout the entire dimensional world. Arthur watched countless crystalline spatial threads weaving themselves together into impossible geometries that human mathematics could never hope to describe. 

Entire sections appeared to exist in four, perhaps even five spatial dimensions simultaneously before collapsing back into ordinary three dimensional existence without disturbing the overall stability of the dimension. He could clearly observe every layer being reconstructed, every law reconnecting itself, every microscopic fluctuation responsible for maintaining a world larger than planets within something smaller than a grain of dust. 

Yet despite witnessing the entire reconstruction process directly, understanding refused to come. It was like watching someone solve the most complicated equation in existence while possessing only elementary arithmetic. His mind recorded every detail flawlessly, but true comprehension remained hopelessly out of reach. 

But by trying to heal that particular cell and recreate the dimension he lost more than eighty percent of his Aether reserves, he even feared his reserve would be insufficient. He could only conclude that the reconstruction wasn't truly being performed by his body at all. 

Instead, the mysterious golden energy sleeping within his Soul Origin continuously flowed into the microscopic dimension, silently creating Spatial law runes before rebuilding the impossible formation exactly as it had existed previously, thus bearing the majority of the pressure. He felt it was only natural as creating such a huge dimension was impossible with the amount of energy he currently possessed.

Even his own Reactive Evolution merely seemed to provide the biological foundation while that unknown golden energy accomplished the truly miraculous aspects. Arthur couldn't suppress a bitter smile. "So even after seeing everything... I still don't understand a single thing." 

Nevertheless, he carefully stored every memory for future study. One day, perhaps years or centuries from now, his understanding of Spatial Manipulation might finally reach a level where these observations became meaningful. Until then, they would remain among his greatest treasures. 

The one thing he understood was laws were most likely a combination of phenomenon, intent and runes. And maybe he had underestimated the capabilities of runes, from what he observed just now they were the source code of the universe written into the fabric of reality.

Once he finally judged that sufficient distance separated him from the prison, he immediately stopped teleporting. Without hesitation he summoned the Obelisk, the ancient artifact floated silently before him while familiar blue light spread across its surface. He quickly activated it and a dimensional portal slowly unfolded within the emptiness of space. 

He looked back only once toward the distance from where he came from before quietly muttering, "Let's hope I never meet that old monster again." Then, without another moment of hesitation, he stepped through the portal. The dimensional gateway closed behind him, leaving only silent stars to witness his escape.

***

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