Chapter 997: Threshold of Consciousness

Time lacked meaning for him but it was still everything in situations like this where every single second counted.

Rowan could feel the pressure mounting against him, being this helpless was not a pleasant feeling, and although he was falling behind, the most difficult part of the puzzle had already been solved, what was left for him to do was to accelerate.

Ignoring his impending demise, Rowan began stretching his consciousness powers to the limit, actively creating new and inventive methods to utilize the little he had to work with while solving the ginormous puzzle before him.

He did not want to just react to any new problems that came up, he also wanted to predict them whilst actively seeking new and inventive methods to finish the runic arrangement.

He created thousands of techniques he would never have bothered with before due to his consciousness power just to give him even a fractional edge in this deadly race, and slowly his speed of breaking the runes began to compound. Deciphering the Supreme Circle had given Rowan an edge when it came to situations like these, but he had never been so... diminished even while inside the Tenebris armor. He was working with barely five percent of the power of a single consciousness pillar.

This amount of consciousness power would make him equal to a god or an Archmage, but the puzzle he was actively solving would take countless millennia for a god to solve, and with the speed he was been devoured, he barely had a century.

He pushed ahead, disregarding the grueling work ahead, no single part of him was focused on doubts or fear, everything was being channeled into solving this puzzle and there was a small part of him that sensed his mounting doom and felt... thrilled.

At the precipice of death, everything became simpler. There were no dying mothers, no scheming kin, and no pursuit for power, there was only the work in front of you, and knowing that failure was the end.

Rowan squashed this part of himself who was enjoying this trial. Death was a release that he was not going to fall for. There was too much riding on his success. He had come too far to be taken out by a faceless blob at the bottom of the earth.

In another ten years, he had reached fifteen percent completion, yet the flesh swallowing him had devoured him by half, and Rowan began to sense a new side-effect when half his body had already been swallowed, his thought processes began to slow down.

Such an outcome was not truly unexpected, Rowan had anticipated that there could be a second, third, or fourth stage to this devouring process and he did not panic, he simply adjusted his mental calculation speed, using techniques he had been creating in advance for such an outcome, and so instead of slowing his speed of thought by nearly eighty percent he only lost thirty percent of his mental acuity still keeping him in the fight.

He continued with the process of deciphering the runes, pushing his progress up to forty percent in another ten more years, but nearly sixty percent of his body had been swallowed. This was both good and bad news, Rowan was catching up, but the problem was that he did not know even if he succeeded in breaking the runic language, if it would be enough to rescue him from this devouring. Whatever he had encountered was clearly not meant for anyone who had just arrived on this star.

He doubted if anyone was even supposed to have breached the earth to such an extent to be able to reach this existence hidden below the ground.

However, these were concerns for later because he had far more pressing needs, his thought process was becoming more sluggish the more of him was consumed, and he had nearly reached his limits on how he could block this attack. There were limited strategies he could use to fight against this invasion using the resources he had on hand.

His mental acuity had been reduced to nearly fifty percent, and before long, he would not be able to push ahead with deciphering the runes at an acceptable speed. Yet he had reached a point where he was almost depending on not just his consciousness power but instincts too.

Rowan had reached such a low point that he was fighting far past where his mental acuity could carry him. His instincts had begun to play a role in this.

At first, he had suppressed this unexpected part of him that arose due to the increasing suppression of his consciousness, but as time went by, he noticed that his instincts were most likely on the right path, and he allowed it to take more and more of the responsibility of deciphering the runes.

This grim and relatively silent race to survive on his path and to consume on the path of the flesh below continued inside the crater that once housed a continent where an unknown amount of living beings once lived.

The only thing that broke the monotony was the twin streams of energy that revolved furiously around the stone egg that was slowly disappearing into the pulsating flesh below.

Rowan barely had three percent of his consciousness power holding him at this point when he was finally swallowed by the pulsating flesh after fifty years. He had nearly deciphered ninety percent of the higher-order language but he was already too late.

His instincts were not enough, they could make leaps in arguments that were correct, but not a hundred percent of the time, and the mental attack on his consciousness had grown to such an extent it was all he could do to keep three percent of his consciousness active.

Deciding that reaching ninety percent of the higher-order language would have to do, he wanted to begin piecing together what the messages could mean so he could connect to the twin stream of energy above, calamity struck.

As it turned out, devouring him was the first move that granted him a chance to fight back, now inside the belly of the beast, he was helpless, and the power that bore on him was beyond what his shell and pitiful consciousness power could fight against.

Rowan heard a loud crack, or was it several? He could not tell, just placing a coherent thought together was almost more than he could bear.

Then the pain arrived, not a normal pain that was felt by a mortal or an immortal, it was a total wrenching pain that signified that everything of yourself was being broken down and consumed.

If Rowan had the means he would be screaming, but it was in silence that his body was slowly being crushed and assimilated for months.

A tiny part of him that held the faintest sense of awareness had never stopped interpreting the message from the nearly completed runes, and when the blinking notification reached his consciousness he was too far gone to understand. What remained of his instincts were screaming at him, to make a decision but he was incapable, just the thought of making a decision had fled from his present mental capabilities.

Then a loud crash that echoed so powerfully throughout what was left of him cleared the haze in his consciousness and he understood that he could finally make a choice, but then it had already become too late.

Rowan realized that this was the last flash before death, and the reaching hand for his salvation never touched the runes blinking before him.

He died.