A bone-chilling dead air, accompanied by a faint, eerie crimson glare, pressed against the back of my neck.
It wasn’t the freezing wind sweeping through the lower realm, nor was it the familiar metallic clicking of those mindless Golem hulls wandering the valley.
Creak…
Crackle…
Standing directly behind me was a massive creature, built like a towering, two-legged wild boar.
Its heavy frame was clad in rough, iron-crusted stone armor, but the most horrifying anomaly lay right at its core.
The entire chest and abdomen were composed of a singular, translucent Ruby crystal—glowing with a deep, blood-red luminescence, contracting and expanding like a gigantic biological heart.
Inside that crimson stomach, a grotesque array of half-digested objects, twisted bone fragments, and crushed metal bits churned inside a pool of corrosive magic acid.
Unlike the mindless metal constructs I had encountered moments ago, this creature possessed all five sharp senses and a calculating, predatory intelligence.
Utilizing the optical refraction of its Ruby shell, it had rendered itself completely invisible within the dense gray mist, waiting for the precise second to flash a mesmerising spectrum of crimson light aimed straight at my eyes.
My vision blurred instantly.
The fog-covered valley dissolved into an illusion of a quiet, open sanctuary.
Lured by the phantom image, my body moved forward without my consent.
Thump.
My left hand pressed directly onto the clear surface of the Ruby abdomen.
The absolute rule of the Ruby monster triggered immediately.
The translucent crystal stomach contracted violently.
A terrifying, inescapable suction force, paired with the acidic digestive fluid, snapped around my wrist, pulling my left arm deep into its gut to grind it into slurry.
The blinding agony of tearing flesh snapped my mind back to reality.
Three agonizing years of crawling through the dark underworld had carved a cold, ruthless survival instinct into my bones.
Without a single second of hesitation, I drew the short trench blade from my hip with my right hand, gritted my teeth until they nearly shattered, and swung down with everything I had.
Slash!
Hot, crimson blood sprayed across the rusted stone floor.
I had severed my own left hand at the wrist.
The excruciating pain hit my brain like a bolt of lightning, turning my field of vision dark for a split second.
Rolling backward onto the jagged ore, I gripped my bleeding stump.
Channeling a thin stream of Holy energy, I forcefully constricted the severed blood vessels at my wrist to stop the hemorrhage.
I turned around and sprinted with every ounce of strength I had left, diving straight into the narrow rock crevices ahead.
Behind me, the two-legged Ruby boar let out a deafening, gut-wrenching roar.
Its crystalline stomach flared up, refracting the ambient light to split its form into three tangible physical clones, all fading in and out of invisibility as they pursued me with terrifying speed.
Mammon floated lazily beside me, his spectral lips curled into a mocking sneer.
His voice echoed directly inside my mind, cold and dry: “Failing at the very first gem entity you encounter…
forcing yourself to chop off your own flesh just to draw a breath…
Is your grand ambition of fallen grace, your desperate desire to bend the world to your knees, truly as shallow as this, fallen child?” Cold sweat mixed with blood poured down my face.
I squeezed my mangled wrist, keeping my eyes locked onto the jagged rocks ahead, my voice low and raspy: “Right now, I am not strong enough to even dare speak of my dreams!
Right now, my only duty is to survive.
Once I am strong enough, I will stand before you and tell you what my dream is myself!” Mammon fell silent for a heartbeat.
His deep-set, abyssal red eyes flickered with an unreadable light.
He spoke again, his tone impassive: “These Ruby beasts—Rubrum Vorax—manipulate light through crystal refraction.
They turn invisible, cast hypnosis, and project physical copies of themselves.
The more you rely on your eyes to navigate this mist, the faster you walk straight into their bellies.” Hearing his words, I closed my eyes completely.
With my sight shut off, I channeled my remaining Holy energy directly into my ears.
The soundscape of the valley instantly expanded in my mind: the sharp clicking of insect legs against hard ore, the whistling of cold wind through the narrow ravines, and above all, the distinct, wet creak…
squelch…
coming from the contraction of the true Ruby stomach.
When a taro-colored invisible clone lunged from the left, I held my breath and leaned back, dodging the sweeping claw by mere millimeters based purely on auditory cues.
The moment the real Ruby boar closed in to drive its heavy claws through my skull, I raised my remaining right hand, channeling my dark Mana to detonate a concentrated burst of Destruction Light right before its face.
Flash!
The blinding, volatile ray smashed straight into the reflective Ruby crystal.
The light scattered violently across its surface, overloading its optical senses and sending the beast reeling backward, momentarily stunned and disoriented.
Drawing from the information Mammon had provided earlier, I knew that the metallic Golems in this valley were incapable of identifying living beings through sight—they were mindless automatons that hunted strictly according to rigid chemical and magnetic rules triggered by metals.
The Ruby boar, however, was highly intelligent.
It possessed keen biological senses to distinguish friend from foe, and its instinct compelled it to relentlessly crush anything moving within its line of sight.
To force this cunning Ruby beast into a direct conflict with a Platinum Golem (Argentum Superbum), I needed to engineer a trap that exploited the fundamental blind spots of both creatures.
I recalled a technique Mammon had casually mentioned back in the underground caverns regarding explosive mana—forcing opposing streams of Mana and Holy energy to collide within a closed channel.
Back when I first fell from the heavens, I had accidentally fused these two conflicting powers, generating an unexpected, bizarre form of energy: a faint, hazy blue mana that defied standard magical categorization.
Without a moment’s delay, I condensed that strange, pale-blue mana into the palm of my right hand and slammed it directly into the brittle limestone walls around the ravine.
BOOM!
BOOM!
The fragile stone structure shattered instantly.
A thick, suffocating cloud of white dust and metallic ore powder erupted into the air, completely filling the narrow canyon.
This dust screen stripped the Ruby boar of its primary weapon—its sharp visual perception.
Trapped inside the dense cloud, it could no longer project illusions or pinpoint my position using light refraction.
Frustrated, the beast stomped its heavy hooves, roaring into the fog, relying solely on the sound of physical movement to track its prey.
At that exact moment, I swung my bleeding left stump violently, splashing droplets of iron-rich blood onto the Ruby boar’s hide and across the immediate rocky floor around it.
I calculated the blood loss with cold precision—keeping just enough iron inside my own body to remain conscious and mobile, while ensuring that the total amount of blood coating the Ruby boar (combined with my severed hand still churning inside its stomach) presented a significantly stronger iron signal than mine.
A short distance away, a towering Platinum Golem that had been slowly marching toward my original position suddenly froze.
To its primitive detection rules, my personal iron signature had faded to a faint whisper, whereas the Ruby boar had suddenly transformed into a massive, concentrated beacon of low-grade metal.
True to its nature, the Platinum Golem turned sharply, accelerating toward the stronger iron signal with heavy, thunderous footsteps.
Simultaneously, I wrapped my body in a paper-thin layer of Holy energy to suppress my breathing and cast a basic cloaking spell, slipping silently into a narrow crevice between two massive boulders.
As the colossal Platinum Golem charged through the blinding cloud of dust, its massive body completely blocked the line of sight between the Ruby boar and myself.
To the Ruby beast, constrained by the heavy dust and relying purely on spatial movement, the sudden emergence of a massive silhouette breaking through the cloud looked like me attempting a desperate counterattack.
Driven by its predatory intelligence and eagerness to finish the kill, the Ruby boar did not pause to analyze its surroundings—it lunged forward with full force, driving its heavy claws straight into the Platinum Golem.
The absolute rule of the Platinum Golem triggered the instant the low-grade iron coating the Ruby beast made physical contact with its armor.
The platinum plating across the Golem’s body flared up with a dazzling, brilliant light!
It did not detonate—for detonation was reserved only for metals of superior purity.
Instead, it unleashed an intense, blinding radiance designed to overpower, scorch, and crush lesser metallic existences under its divine glow.
However, the Ruby boar’s thick, iron-crusted stone hide was exceptionally durable.
Incensed by the searing heat and blinding glare burning through its skin, the boar let out a furious roar and began tearing into the Golem’s chest with its razor-sharp tusk and heavy claws.
The more violently the Ruby beast attacked, the more intense the Platinum Golem’s light became!
Guided by its unyielding rule of pride, the Golem continuously converted its energy core into an ever-escalating wave of incinerating light to suppress the aggressor.
A blinding sphere of platinum radiance expanded inside the canyon, scorching the rock walls, burning the dust into glass, and warping the humid air of the valley.
Taking advantage of the chaotic clash—where the intelligent beast was blinded by its own aggression and the mindless Golem was locked into its rigid rule—I held my bleeding arm tight, stepped quietly out of the crevice, and slipped past the edge of the gray mist, dropping down into the deeper, darker abyssal layer of the Ancient Metal Sanctuary.
The descent was far from gentle.
The terrain beneath the fog line gave way to a steep, treacherous slope littered with jagged basalt shelves and calcified mineral veins.
Unable to use my left arm to break the fall, I tumbled downward through the rising dust, my boots skittering across loose gravel until my back slammed hard against a jutting stone pillar.
The impact knocked the remaining air out of my lungs.
I lay there in the cold dark for several seconds, my chest heaving, staring up at the chaotic bursts of white light flickering far above through the ceiling of mist.
The muffled roars of the Ruby beast and the grinding sound of platinum armor echoed down the shaft like distant thunder, fading slowly as the distance between us grew.
I looked down at my left arm.
The stump was ugly, jagged, and caked in dark, coagulated blood mixed with gray dust.
The Holy energy I had used to cauterize the primary vessels was holding, but the surrounding muscle tissue pulsed with a deep, rhythmic agony that made my fingers on my remaining hand twitch involuntarily.
“You managed to survive a encounter with a higher-tier entity by turning its own environment against it,” Mammon’s voice drifted down from above, his shadowy form descending through the dust clouds like smoke settling over a tomb.
“Messy, crude, and absurdly costly…
but effective.” “I did what I had to,” I wheezed, pushing myself up against the stone pillar using my right elbow.
My legs trembled under the sudden shift in weight, but I forced my knees to lock.
“If I had tried to fight either of them directly with the meager power I have right now, I would be dissolving inside that boar’s stomach alongside my hand.” “Indeed,” Mammon replied, his crimson eyes gleaming with a faint, mocking amusement as he floated closer.
“That is the fundamental reality of the Lower Realm, Fallen.
It is not a place where righteous intent or dramatic resolves carry any weight.
The rules here do not care about your pain, nor do they bend for your tragic past.
They are cold, mathematical, and absolute.
Learn them, exploit them, or be consumed by them.” I didn’t answer him.
Reaching down with my right hand, I tore a long strip of tough leather from the hem of my monster-hide tunic.
Teeth clenched, I wrapped the strap tightly around my forearm just above the stump, pulling the knot taut with my teeth until the pressure dulled the sharp, throbbing nerves.
The air in this lower cavern was noticeably different from the upper valley.
The heavy, greasy moisture of the sương mù had thinned out, replaced by a dry, metallic chill that smelled strongly of ancient copper, sulphur, and dried blood.
The walls around us were no longer raw limestone, but smooth, polished basalt veins laced with thick ribbons of dark red ore that faintly hummed under the pressure of the earth above.
Looking around, I noticed that the ground was no longer littered with random scraps of rusted metal.
Instead, the floor was composed of smooth, interlocking hexagonal stone plates—man-made, or constructed by something that possessed structural discipline.
“Where are we?” I asked, my voice barely more than a whisper in the vast, hollow space.
“The true entrance to the inner sanctuary,” Mammon said, gesturing with his elongated, clawed finger toward the darkness ahead.
“The upper rim where you lost your hand was merely the hunting ground for the scavengers—the simple constructs that feed on the surface scraps.
Down here, the rules become more complex, and the entities that guard the paths no longer act on mere instinct.” As if responding to his words, a soft, pale blue light flickered into existence along the walls of the cavern ahead.
One by one, ancient runes carved deep into the basalt began to ignite, casting long, dancing shadows across the stone floor.
At the end of the illuminated passage stood a pair of massive, sealed doors made of a dense, pitch-black metal that seemed to absorb the blue light around it.
There were no keyholes, no handles, and no physical latches on the doors.
Only two large, circular indentations placed symmetrically at eye level—one glowing with a faint golden hue, the other etched with a pale, shimmering platinum border.
My eyes narrowed as I looked at the two sockets.
“The cores of an Aurum Vorago and an Argentum Superbum,” I said softly, the realization dawning on me.
“A simple lock designed by the ancient architects of this land,” Mammon sneered.
“To pass through the threshold without tearing the mountain down upon your head, one must present the refined essence of the two primary rules that govern the upper valley.
Wealth and Pride.
Purity and Radiance.” I looked down at my single remaining hand, then back up at the massive black doors.
“Which means,” I muttered, a cold smile touching my lips despite the exhaustion weighing down my limbs, “we aren’t done with those monsters up there after all.” Mammon let out a low, raspy laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping across a tombstone.
“No, Fallen.
You have merely delayed the inevitable.
To open the gate, you must harvest what you fled from.” I took a deep breath, feeling the dry, cold air fill my lungs, burning my throat with the taste of copper and dust.
The pain in my arm was still there, sharp and relentless, but my mind was clearer than it had ever been.
I turned my back on the sealed black doors and looked back up toward the steep, shadowy slope leading to the upper valley.
“Then let’s go back,” I said softly, gripping the hilt of my short blade with my right hand.
“I have a hand to settle for.”