Myths Reawakened

Wayne stepped into the silver space warship. The world spun around him as if he had entered a time-space tunnel, with a fantastical mixture of light and shadows dancing around him, alternating between blinding radiance and dim darkness.

All the while, space continuously stretched and distorted, sometimes vast and infinite, other times cramped and narrow. The overwhelming weightlessness left him feeling lost. It was as if he would be taken to an unknown world at any time.

Just like transmigration!

Wayne landed on both feet. The sense of weightlessness was gone, and when he opened his eyes, he saw a straight metal corridor with a clean expanse of metal walls. He did not see the entrance he had gone through.

Feeling around the wall, he made a decisive punch.

Bang!

His arm splattered into sludge.

His pupils contracted. His mana had been sealed, reminding him of his experience in an anti-magic domain. Anti-magic domains, however, could only restrict regular mages and were nothing but a joke to those with true power. Even with their mana locked away, they could still fight with their thoughts.

Wayne took a deep breath. His thoughts were still accessible and unrestricted. He took no time to locate Regina and reach out to her, “Stay there. I’ll be right with you.”

“Boss, you’ve finally come. I’ve been waiting for so long,” Regina complained. She had been exploring the white tunnel for two months. She would’ve starved to death if she could die again.

“Two months?”

“Yeah, you’ve abandoned me for two months... Something wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s called neglect play. Congratulations, you don’t have to be envious of Ottilia anymore. We’ve got our own private kink.” Wayne put aside his surprise, locating Regina as soon as he could.

There was a small octopus on Regina’s shoulder, which was how she had endured the past two months. When she saw Wayne, she rubbed the octopus and molded it into a mask, putting it on.

“Boss, it’s impossible to find the edge of this place. As for mana—”

“I know. Your memories told me.”

...Would you not flip through my memories without warning? An employee still deserves privacy.

“Special times, special measures. I won’t do it again.”

Wayne patted Regina’s head. The interior of the spaceship was an isolated space. It wasn’t so much a warship but a Philosopher’s Stone.

He had gotten his hands on two Philosopher’s Stones and fancied himself an expert, so he confidently led Regina through the well-connected white corridors.

Five minutes later, he stopped walking. Regina smothered a snicker by his side.

Boss is as bad at math as I am!

Thud!

Wayne knocked her on the head with a hand chop, cursing at the elusive way out. He wasn’t good at doing math problems, but he was good at doing those who were good at doing math. If any of his three luxury cars were with him, he would’ve gotten out without difficulty.

“Should we split up, Boss?” Regina asked, rubbing her head.

“No, we could have as many eyes as we need.”

Wayne narrowed his eyes, yanking a clump of white foam off his face and throwing it to the ground. It grew wildly as soon as it landed, extending pale tentacles to climb along the walls and ceilings. In no time, the tentacles vanished along the corridor.

The next second, the tentacles came up from behind, reaching Wayne’s feet.

“A circular corridor!” Wayne shook his head, eyes narrowed. “No, even if it’s a prison, there should be backdoors for the collection of the inmates’ bodies. There has to be a way out.”

More and more white foam rumbled along, filling the entire corridor. Regina pressed herself against Wayne, derisively eyeing a tentacle that was making a gesture of invitation at her.

Two minutes later, the expanding white foam identified an opening, burrowing through a seam in the corridor and entering another space.

Following the foam, Wayne went through the seam. He had thought that Regina would be trapped outside, but space itself warped and stretched along the seam. Regina became smaller as she approached and reverted to her original size as she moved away.

A worn corridor greeted Wayne, covered in exposed cables and tubes. The stark style was at odds with the spaceship’s extravagant exterior, which proved that aliens were not above vanity.

Wayne smelled grease in the air. Frowning, he patted Regina on the shoulder. “Careful. This is ringing a bell. Don’t let an alien life use you as a host.”

Startled, Regina reflexively grabbed Wayne’s arm.

He was used to driving stretch limousines, so it was quite enjoyable to drive a compact car once in a while. It felt fresh.

He extended his thoughts to scan the interior of the spaceship, drawing a 3D map in his head. It resembled a ten-story high-rise, which fit the spaceship’s straight, blade-like external shape.

“Let’s go!”

Looking at the core area on the map, Wayne rushed straight to the metal ladder.

“It’s fine for there not to be a portal, but not even an elevator...”

He made an insightful comment. The aliens’ tech tree was fully focused on Mechanical Augmentation. It was absurd that they didn’t even have an elevator on their ship.

He and Regina walked downstairs, soon reaching the heart of the vessel. The white square room was well illuminated, with the walls themselves being light sources. In the center of the room was a metal sphere. Electric cables extended from the bottom of the sphere to the rest of the vessel.

Wayne hurried up and moved a hand across the metal sphere. A screen of light that resembled a chessboard lit up, on which were strange sigils pulsing with light.

Should I unlock with a password?

Wayne thought for a moment before swinging his fist.

The screen exploded with a boom, and a large hole was put into the metal sphere. Wayne extracted his arm with a Philosopher’s Stone in his hand. Unlike the Philosopher’s Stones he had encountered, this stone was shaped like a transparent triangular prism, reflecting a colorful rainbow when placed in the path of light.

The Book of Greed roused, agitated.

Without hesitation, Wayne had the book take all the information contained inside.

Crack!

The prism shattered.

Wayne blinked in surprise. In his experience with other nature’s gifts, the information inside a Philosopher’s Stone should be infinitely replicable rather than exhausted after one use.

Since it concerned aliens, he didn’t dwell on the inconsistency. He took Regina to another room in the warship.

It looked like an archive. The Prussians had already translated the indecipherable text. After careful inspection, Wayne realized where Prussia’s seemingly endless supply of Philosopher’s Stone fragments came from.

First off, the stone fragments were the real deal. The previous Prussian government had acquired a Philosopher’s Stone of unknown origin, suspected to be from the Frozen Land. Linked to fortune-telling, the stone was archived and ended up in the possession of the current Prussian government.

It was later opened, allowing the space warship to emerge in this world.

“Frozen Land, fortune-telling...”

Wayne stroked his chin. He remembered the mysterious trading place in the Frozen Land, where each mage could only ever make one trade in their lifetime. He hadn’t used up his chance.

It seemed that a Prussian mage had bought the Philosopher’s Stone from an alien in their trade. Of course, it was a possibility that the Prussian government had picked up the stone from the body of some unlucky mage.

After acquiring the spaceship, Hidler ordered his people to explore it and study it for years, all in secret. They managed to find the right way to use the prism.

With the spaceship, they were able to endlessly stream the information in the prism into the volcano. Since the volcano itself was manifested by the Philosopher’s Stone, the cooled-down crystals became fragments of an incomplete Philosopher’s Stone, with information about Mechanical Augmentation that could corrupt a mage’s life essence and forge a new evolution path.

The information came from the now broken prism.

“This is a place no one is walking on, or rather the alien who walked on the path has become a Philosopher’s Stone...” Wayne quietly celebrated. Such was nature’s charm; there was always a surprise for those fated to encounter it.

It didn’t really matter to Wayne if there was someone else walking on the path. With the information now written in the Book of Greed, not even a predecessor could limit him.

“Let’s go. This place no longer matters to us.”

Wayne left with Regina. With the prism—the spaceship’s core—destroyed, the vessel would fall into the volcano soon.

This space would also fall apart, collapsing along with the Philosopher’s Stone that had lost its core.

***

Outside the spaceship, Gluttony and Wrath dove out with dark expressions.

“Did you find it?”

“No.”

“Damn it. You must have found it, or...”

“That mysterious angel has gained the key to the evolution!”

The two demon lords seethed. When they sensed Hestia’s and Derrida’s energy, they both vanished with a huff, returning to the projected Abyss in the orphanage.

Hestia and Derrida were right behind them, planning on giving the demon lords a decisive attack to erase the thoughts that had descended to the human world. Unfortunately, they were one step too late. The two demon lords had sealed the spatial pathway, preventing the angels from giving chase.

Inside the projected Abyss, Wrath and Gluttony grew ever more furious as they thought about what had happened. They snarled at each other before returning to the black main hall, casting aside their human vessels and sending their thoughts back to Hell.

Inspecting the prism in his hand, Gluttony’s eyes glinted with greed. “The key to an evolution no one has pursued is now mine. I’ll be the real god of Hell!”

The same thing was happening to Wrath. He had also acquired a prism.

Right before they vanished, they shattered the projection of the abyss as if they had agreed to do so, preventing Prussia from ever summoning them again.

For the foreseeable future, they would be busy. Once they comprehended the information, they would wage another round of wars in Hell. They had no time for trivial skirmishes in the human world.