Through Enoch's endlessly convenient Blink, I arrived once more at the pit of magic power.
But looking at it again now, this place…….
"It looks just like the site of a tree torn out by the roots."
Only its size was absurdly wide and deep.
Enough to make you wonder whether a tree that large could exist at all.
And astonishingly.
"There was."
"What?"
"Originally, this was a place where a tree stood."
Wait, there really was one?
"Was it a special tree, by any chance?"
"I do not recall well. It was not a space one could enter easily to begin with."
I'd have to look up the records on that part separately later.
"Anyway…… it's clearly no ordinary place, right?"
Just as the former Demon King's worried records had described, the whirlpool of magic power spread inside the pit was tangled so intricately there seemed to be no way to undo it.
"At this level it must be affecting the dungeon, greatly or slightly."
"Do you intend to go inside?"
"Yes. From out here the magic power is too dense to see anything, so I'll have to go in and check for myself."
"Is that so."
I was on the verge of asking whether there was any way to manage it.
Shff.
That is, in the single second it took to open my mouth.
To explain what happened before that second was even out.
Enoch drew his sword.
SLICE—
And cut.
Cut what?
……The whirlpool of magic power.
'Wow, Moses is standing right here.'
By the time I came to my senses, he had already sheathed the sword.
"Thirty minutes."
Grasping at once what that curt word meant, I smacked my forehead.
Space itself split along the path of his blade like the Red Sea, and the sight was a spectacle if ever there was one.
Thirty minutes must mean how long that state would hold.
The critical center still showed nothing at all, but at least I wouldn't be crushed to death by magic power the way I would have been before.
'To cut magic power of that density with a single stroke.'
Seeing that, a thought struck me anew.
'I drove a sword into the chest of a man like that?'
Seriously, how did you manage it?
Pre-regression me…….
***
And so I entered the precipice.
The emptiness beneath my feet lasted only a moment. A floating sensation wrapped my whole body, and I released magic power below me here and there to control my speed.
How far down did it go?
Even after a long descent, all I could see was darkness like an abyss.
'Now I see the space itself is warped. Not that someone did it deliberately……'
It had simply been twisted by magic power over a very long time.
I don't know whether it's an exact comparison, but think of a black hole, roughly?
With space itself bent, the time felt far longer than it was.
At the end of that long descent.
A point of pure white light began to show far below.
As I narrowed my eyes at the first change to appear.
I couldn't hide my disbelief.
"……No."
Because the light was none other than divine power.
"The Heavenly Realm, these lunatics. What the hell is this?"
At the same time I understood why this phenomenon had occurred here.
Of course it had.
With divine power, magic power's opposite, sitting here this openly, how could magic power not get tangled?
'……This isn't good.'
And another thought came with it.
Centuries.
That is how long the twisting of magic power had been in place.
And it was still going?
Divine power is efficient energy, true, but it isn't perpetual motion.
There was no way it could have lasted for centuries.
"You'd need at least something on the level of a holy relic……."
And why is it that bad guesses never miss?
Within a radiance that threatened to blind me.
Existence Analysis insisted strongly that something was inside it.
"God's Blood……?"
Inside the divine power that blazed even at this moment.
A red gem shaped like a droplet came into view.
The gem said to be made from a god's blood: God's Blood.
An item even the Holy Nation held only in minuscule quantity was here.
'But…….'
What Existence Analysis had been insisting on wasn't the God's Blood itself.
More precisely, it was something embedded inside the God's Blood.
Like a living thing trapped in amber, something was sealed in there.
And I felt something within me resonating with it.
The thing felt from deep in my soul was…….
Part of the dungeon's authority that Enoch had granted me.
It was churning.
And then I felt it instinctively.
That this situation would only settle once I pulled out whatever was trapped inside the God's Blood.
'I'll think about why God's Blood is here later.'
No need to say it.
It was surely the Heavenly Realm's handiwork, with a foot in everything everywhere.
'Destroying it is the only way.'
Say holy relic and it sounds like it would be immensely hard, but the relic itself carries no physical force.
Call it a lump of divine power, if you like.
'Which makes it break very easily. Just like a human body.'
-Please…… end it now.
Just then, a memory flashed past like lightning.
Damn it, now a bad memory had come up too.
Perhaps from that unpleasantness, the magic power gathering in both fists layered up.
And I threw a punch at the Heavenly Realm's relic, the God's Blood, as though venting rage.
The God's Blood itself vanished very simply.
Melting away like snow in midsummer, and what remained in its place was the darkness deep in the pit.
And the thing that had been trapped inside it.
"……A seed?"
The seed, thick with dense magic power, hopped up onto my hand with a PLOP, as though delighted to have woken from a deep sleep of centuries.
"What is this used for?"
Enoch had said a giant tree once stood here.
Was it that tree's seed?
Whatever it was, a thing sealed inside God's Blood wouldn't be ordinary.
"……Time to head up."
The time Enoch had given was running short, and more importantly, with the source of the twisting gone, the dense magic power was starting to surge back in.
Stay here and my whole body might burst like a log under a press.
The rest of the details I'd think about up top.
***
I escaped the pit, and fresh outside air greeted me once more.
And what I saw was Enoch watching me with an expressionless face.
"That was nearly dangerous."
"Right? The moment I solved the problem down there, the magic power came rushing in."
It wasn't Enoch's fault so much as a piece of natural phenomenon, like a typhoon or a tidal wave.
If anything, Enoch, who controls even natural phenomena, is the crazy one.
"And that?"
"I got it from inside. It was trapped in a Heavenly Realm relic."
"Hm."
Showing no interest whatsoever in the words "Heavenly Realm relic," Enoch looked at the seed with a subtle gaze.
Was he feeling something too, like me?
"You said a giant tree stood here, right? This looks like its seed. Should we plant it here?"
I said it as a joke; I hadn't meant to plant it right away.
I'd ask Zigwell first, in case he knew anything about it.
But.
SHUNK.
Enoch, who had dug the ground open before I could even register it, said.
"Plant it here."
"Uh…… okay."
Maybe Enoch is a man with no patience whatsoever.
In any case, one matter was settled.
It would be best to wait and see what happened once the tangled flow of magic power returned to normal.
For now it was time to drag my tired body back to the mansion and rest.
In one day I'd fought a giant turtle, found a lich's Life Vessel, resolved the twisting of magic power, and rescued a tree seed trapped inside a Heavenly Realm relic.
A schedule that was too much by any measure.
So I left the rest to tomorrow's me.
***
"A Divine Tree."
The next day, after resting well as planned.
It was a remark from Zigwell, still checking records in the library of the underground storeroom.
"A Divine Tree?"
"Yes. The name of the tree written in the records."
"And what did the tree do?"
At my question Zigwell answered with a serious face.
"Quite astonishingly…… it was the symbol of this dungeon."
Gasp, is that true!
……was not the reaction that came out.
And with good reason.
"And what's that?"
Because I didn't know what that was.
So I naturally turned my eyes to Enoch, who had followed us down here.
"I do not know."
Thus he declared.
The one left flustered was Zigwell.
He looked positively aggrieved, if anything.
"What are we to do if the dungeon's own masters do not know this?"
But say what he liked, we couldn't claim to know what we didn't.
"Haa……."
Since only the one scholar present could explain it, Zigwell began with a faint sigh.
"I explained it to you before. A Demon King and his dungeon. That a correlation exists between the two."
"Yeah, you did."
"Correct. But there is something wedged in between them."
"Going by the flow of this conversation, that would be the dungeon's symbol?"
"Yes. A dungeon's symbol possesses an 'origin' that accompanied the dungeon's birth. It is therefore closely tied to the time the dungeon has passed through."
Hearing that much, I asked to confirm whether I'd understood correctly.
"Meaning it's the dungeon's memory, so to speak?"
"You have understood precisely. When a dungeon's environment is destroyed or damaged, it naturally restores itself over time. That is possible thanks to this symbol of the dungeon."
"Ah, so that's why this dungeon, once thick with forest, stayed this desolate for so long."
"There are likely more complex reasons as well, but as you say, young master, it will have had a considerable effect."
Was that why Enoch planted the seed without a trace of doubt?
I looked at Enoch again in that light.
"It seemed that it had to be done."
The man truly lives on instinct.
"You did well. In all likelihood that seed was the root of the symbol lost during the Heaven-Demon War. Though I never imagined the Heavenly Realm had sealed it away and left it behind."
"So there's a chance the forest comes back, like in the records from five hundred years ago?"
"There is. Though no one knows how long it would take."
But belying those words of Zigwell's.
The time needed for an anomaly to appear in the dungeon was less than a week.
"……Something has changed."
Six days after resolving the twisting of magic power.
I was working on the divine power in Enoch's body, as usual.
"Yes?"
"The magic power moves more easily."
"Uh…… does it? One moment."
Concentrating harder on his magic power, the rate at which the divine power was being extinguished was clearly faster than usual.
A good sign, certainly.
But I couldn't simply welcome a phenomenon that even Enoch didn't understand.
Whatever happened, Enoch was going to occupy the core of my journey, so every change had to be managed with full attention.
"What's different from before?"
"The density has risen."
"Density…… ah."
Come to think of it, Zigwell had explained that resolving the twisting of magic power would raise its purity.
I wondered whether that was the effect.
"It seems we must check."
And then he abruptly laid a hand on my shoulder.
"Gah."
And teleported us in one go to the site where the magic power had been twisted.
"Come on……."
At least say something before you move!
……is what I was about to initiate with.
But at the sight spread before my eyes, I couldn't close my mouth.
"Holy hell."
Before me, green shade stretched on without end.