Chapter 1002: Awakening Of Madness (4)

Noah Rithmast knew that he should turn back. Everything that was happening pointed to powers that were greater than what he could fathom at his level.

The danger here was palpable, and up close he would have sworn that this hole was the mouth of a gigantic beast, and the icy spikes were its teeth. He did not feel like he was looking down into the earth but into the gullet of a beast.

He shuddered but decided to move forward, no matter what happened he was an Explorer at the Deific Rank, and that meant something. He was someone who would delve into the unknown reaches of the void and seek truth within.

The continents in this world were endless, and it was the calling of every Explorer to search for the mysteries of creation, uncover great secrets, and battle Calamities. He would flee from this place if he saw dangers that he could not handle, but he would be a poor excuse for an Explorer if he never attempted to solve this mystery and the descent of whatever just ended an entire Continent.

The excitement in his heart at the discovery of something new was tempered by the solemn realization that new things in a world like theirs were often dangerous.

He began to fly upwards until he cleared the outer layers of the icy spikes, there were numerous bent spikes within that he had to carefully maneuver himself across so he could reach the gaping hole in the middle.

Noah Rithmast quickly noticed after he lost a hand that the Icy spikes surrounding the hole that led to the depths of the earth did not emanate any chill, even when you were a few feet away from them, but crossing a certain point, even by a millimeter would set off an ungodly chill that nearly killed him a Deific Ranked Explorer.

Only his danger intuition had saved him in time, and he sliced off his right hand when he noticed that the chill would have traveled down his body and froze him to death when only a millimeter of his right forefinger had crossed into the space surrounding one of the Ice Spikes. Noah's breathing became unsteady, this was one of the most dangerous places he had ever ventured into, and a single mistake would lead to his death. His green skin darkened to a shade of black and he rapidly regenerated his missing hand before descending into the hole. Even though he hoped this would be the last time he was going to heal himself from the verge of instant demise, he knew that such a thing was not possible.

Noah hated it when he turned out to be correct, especially in situations like these.

This was the first of the dangers he experienced and the weakest of them by far, he could easily avoid the spikes, and drop lower into the earth where he noticed at the bottom was a fading blue glow.

Then the winds came next, equally powerful and erratic, he had to be focused at all times or one unexpected gust could blow him against the spikes and end his life in an instant, the only problem being that every gust of wind was unexpected, but the wind was nothing next to the roving frost bolts.

As always the discovery of this new danger was frightening and almost killed him. An errant frost bolt had shot at him from out of nowhere as the space in this crater generated them out of thin air randomly.

Each bolt was smaller than two inches and traveling at nearly the speed of light, Noah could easily see the bolt because it was surrounded by a corona of frozen blue air.

He kept his focus and dodged a lot of them, but his luck ran out when one of them headed directly towards him and he had to zip to the side where he nearly collided with a frost bolt darting towards him from the side that he had missed because it had been born out of thin air where nothing was before, and he closed his eyes, accepting his death, but was unexpectedly saved from demise when another random frost bolt slammed against the bolt that was on a perfect home run towards his chest.

"This is insane!" Below him, he could see tens of thousands of these bolts roving around, and this was just near the top of the crater, what unknown danger would be found deeper? There was no way he was qualified to explore this place, an Ascended Explorer might be able to do it, but nothing was available for him here but death.

Turning around to leave, that was when Noah felt the breath of Aura descend like a storm. He gasped aloud and nearly screamed out in abject shock when a river, no, an ocean of Aura, both of the Ascension and Corruption Type, flooded the crater, seemingly without end.

Speechless Noah watched as an impossible amount of Aura grew in the crater below, drawn from the depths of the world and brought into reality in such thunderous volume, he thought he might be just hallucinating.

This was so much Aura it could not be explained by the destruction of all the inhabitants of a single continent. Even the death of every living thing in a thousand continents should not generate this amount of Aura. If his Deific senses might be mistaken, his Natal Treasure was screaming at his senses, and he had no option but to believe that what he was seeing was the truth.

Noah was a Deific Rank Explorer, a being that was worshiped as a god across ten thousand continents, yet he doubted he had used a thousandth of the Aura available below to reach his present height, from a mortal. He did not even think so much Aura could be in one place at

once.

Except the Continent of New Hope had ten thousand Deific Rank Explorers and another ten thousand Malefic Rank Calamities below their surface and had been killed off alongside the inhabitants of New Hope, then something very strange and terrifying was happening here. His mind whirled around in a feverish storm as the immensity of the Aura below held him in place. Noah tried to understand how something like this was possible.

Yet when he thought about it, the conclusion was pretty simple. Aura like this could only be generated when it was harvested from living beings who had perished, but the Aura from the newly dead, either from a Calamity, a mere mortal, or an Explorer was intensely chaotic and could not be absorbed.

The world itself took a hefty chunk of that chaotic Aura and rewarded the host with a purified Aura that they could safely absorb.

There were theories about how large the differences were between the chaotic Aura collected by the world and what it gave in return, and it was generally known that the divide was huge, but everyone took it as a fair exchange because no one could absorb chaotic Aura, all who had tried had died in agony or had mutated into an abomination that plagued both Explorers and

Calamities.

However no matter how Noah tried to rationalize what he was witnessing he could not deny that the twin ocean of Aura below him was purified!