Dimensional Keeper: All My Skills Are at Level 100

The fifth and final stage of the citadel was unlike anything Max had expected. It wasn’t vast or ornate like the other stages. Instead, it was a simple circular hall, dimly lit, and strangely quiet—almost like a sealed archive lost in time.

Shelves lined the curved walls, filled with old books, crumbling scrolls, ink-stained pens, and dusty artifacts. The scent of age and forgotten knowledge hung thick in the air. Yet none of that truly captured Max’s attention.

Two things stood out immediately, demanding his full focus.

At the very center of the hall, enclosed in a perfectly clear spherical vessel, hovered a single drop of crimson blood. It pulsed faintly with a rhythm that echoed like a heartbeat, casting an eerie red glow on the white marble floor beneath it.

Even without touching it, Max could feel its power. It wasn’t just blood—this was divine, filled with energy so dense it felt like it could collapse space around it.

Most importantly, Max felt his entire infernal energy tumbling up and down in the presence of this blood. It was reacting very violently to the drop of blood in front of him.

But what truly sent a shiver down his spine was the figure locked in a large rectangular chamber on the far side of the room. Tall and imposing, the figure was frozen inside a thick glass-like casing. Countless black wires and rusting tubes were coiled around it, connected to strange machines that hummed weakly, as though barely alive after all this time.

Max stepped closer, his eyes narrowing in disbelief.

The figure... its entire body was pitch black, a complete void of color, like it had been forged from shadow itself. Glowing red lines crisscrossed its body like veins of molten lava, pulsating softly beneath the surface. And on its head—two sharp, curving horns jutted out, giving it the unmistakable presence of something not born of this world.

It was humanoid. Almost. But wrong.

Its face was what truly made Max step back. It wasn’t a blank surface like the Nulls—those terrifying beings of destruction that devoured without mercy. This one had a face. A grotesque, demonic face. Twisted, scarred, snarling in frozen fury.

”This...!” Max’s voice caught in his throat. ”This isn’t just a Null. It’s... something else. Something far worse.”

Lost in thought, Max’s eyes slowly drifted away from the frozen figure and toward the numerous shelves that lined the edges of the circular hall. Dust clung thickly to the bindings, and many of the books looked worn with time, their pages yellowed and spines cracked.

But there was a strange pull to them, as if each one contained fragments of a forgotten era. Curiosity stirred within him. He stepped closer and began scanning the shelves, running his fingers across the titles etched in ancient ink.

There were volumes on countless topics—records of obscure power systems, deep theories on the three eternal paths of cultivation: the Soul, the Physique, and the Energy. Others discussed ancient techniques, long-lost bloodlines, and even cosmic laws that Max had never heard of.

The knowledge stored here was not just vast—it was sacred. Max simply stored all these books in his storage space.

Then his eyes landed on something different. ”A diary?” he murmured, pulling it out gently. It was thinner than the other books and bound in old leather, faded and soft with age. Unlike the rigid tomes, this felt personal.

He opened it, flipping past a few blank pages until handwritten entries began. As he read, the handwriting painted a picture of pain, madness, brilliance, and despair. It spoke of experiments with forbidden bloodlines, of an empire ruled through fear, and of a final project meant to defy death itself.

But what Max didn’t see—what escaped his attention in the eerie quiet—was the small, silent pool of blood that had begun to seep into the chamber. Like a living thing, it slithered across the floor with no sound, no warning. It reached the frozen pod and slowly began to flow into the cracks and mechanical gaps of the chamber, disappearing into its structure like water absorbed by dry earth.

Max closed the diary, his face solemn and disturbed. Whatever he had just read—it confirmed his fears.

The diary spoke of horrors—cold, clinical cruelty masked behind the ambition of a king. Max’s fingers tightened around the leather-bound pages as he read through the passages that outlined Divine King Atherion’s experiments on his own people, people who bore the Devil God Bloodline.

According to the records, those who inherited this unique bloodline were capable of entering a state called the Devil God Transformation—a partial transformation that altered only their bodies, granting them immense power while keeping their heads untouched. This transformation offered a boost in physical strength, energy output, and resilience, but it was still, in Atherion’s eyes, incomplete.

Dissatisfied with the half-baked power and convinced that the Devil God Bloodline was capable of much more, Atherion took it upon himself to unlock its full potential through gruesome experimentation.

Some subjects were forced to maintain the transformation state for years, never allowed to revert.

Others were denied it entirely, their bloodline suppressed through brutal means. And then there were those poor souls who were infused with concentrated blood essence—an attempt to artificially heighten the purity of their Devil God Bloodline.

It was during these twisted trials that Atherion finally unearthed a painful truth: the Devil God Bloodline, as it existed in humans, was inherently flawed. It was a fragmented inheritance, a diluted version of something far more powerful. True, complete Devil God Bloodline couldn’t be sustained by a human body; it would destroy the host from within. The power was simply too immense for a mortal vessel.

That, he theorized, was the reason why only partial transformation was possible—why the head, the core of consciousness, remained untouched. To transform it would invite madness... or death. And yet, that same bloodline brought with it an inescapable curse. Those who carried it often fell into bloodlust, violence, and demonic cultivation paths.

It wasn’t coincidence or choice—it was embedded into their very blood, their nature corrupted by the remnants of a god too cruel and ancient to be understood.

But even after uncovering the deadly truth, Divine King Atherion didn’t stop. If anything, the revelation only deepened his obsession. He became hellbent on unlocking the true potential of the Devil God Bloodline, no matter the cost. His mind, already twisted by ambition, began treading into realms of insanity as he pushed past the natural limits of human endurance and spiritual control.

And eventually, he succeeded—or so he believed. Through a forbidden fusion of alchemy, soul binding, and demonic rituals, he created the Complete Devil God Transformation—a terrifying state in which a human bearing the Devil God Bloodline could fully transform, head and body alike.

But the cost was catastrophic. The moment the transformation completed, the human within would cease to exist. The soul would be devoured, the mind erased, leaving behind only a husk—a demonic vessel ruled by the pure, unfiltered bloodline itself. These beings could no longer return to their original form.

Even in death, they remained twisted monsters, driven only by the instinctual madness of the bloodline. And that frozen figure in the rectangular chamber... that was one such abomination. Max now understood. That wasn’t just a failed experiment—that was the pinnacle of Atherion’s ambition.

A man who had fully undergone the Complete Devil God Transformation and in doing so, lost everything that made him human. His skin pitch black, red lines pulsing like veins of fire, horns curled like ancient demons, and yet a faint trace of sorrow clung to the form—as though, somewhere deep within, a ghost of the man who once was still screamed in silence.