Tower of Heaven

Atlas pulled back with widened eyes. He looked at the stump that was now his left arm, unable to truly understand what happened.

'It's gone.'

As both [Regeneration] and his wood qi were being used to balance his vitality, he couldn't heal it either.

'Dammit.'

He stared into those swirling black rivers. He felt his soul being sucked into a place it could never leave, a place where it would be trapped for an eternity if he allowed it.

'However, that feeling must be confronted. This is my answer, regardless of how perilous it is.'

This was the Hell Guardian's core. If he couldn't destroy it or at least unravel it, he would never win this battle.

'Right. Destroying it is impossible until I can understand that energy.'

However, if these tree roots were keeping that energy contained so it could power the guardian, then he could unravel the roots and free the energy, right?

If the energy were freely flowing and unwilling to follow the guardian's command, even if Atlas didn't immediately attain victory, he wouldn't be far from it.

'This is a test, isn't it?'

That was why the Hell Guardian confirmed that he understood what he was challenging.

He was fighting for the right to enter the underworld. He proved his combat sense through the battle outside, he proved his bravery by diving into the lava lake, and now, he had to prove his wits and precision.

Atlas closed his eyes and opened them again. When he did, all pain and fear were gone from within.

[Perfect Adaptability has activated.]

He was missing his left arm, but his right was his dominant arm anyway. He pressed it against the nearest root and tried to communicate with it.

In his mind, an array of green lines appeared. They were like the nerves of the human body, a tangled and complex web of systems that allowed for the roots to uphold their function.

'To unravel…'

Atlas pressed his energy forward and interacted with the lines.

'They are extremely delicate.'

He could feel that if he made too many mistakes, the entire structure would implode, killing him in the process.

"Khhh…!"

The moment he moved the first thread, he felt a jolt through his arm.

The vitality is connecting to me.'

Those were threads of vitality holding the tree roots together. This vitality was able to provide them with the strength to keep the other force contained.

Atlas thought that his vitality was being stolen so it could bolster the Hell Guardian, but he was wrong. The vitality he'd formed a cycle with was precisely the vitality of these roots.

He had become connected to their existence.

"Tsk!"
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Atlas clicked his tongue as he carefully maneuvered through them. They were tangled up in a complicated manner, but there weren't that many individual threads.

With every tangle he undid, he realized that the actual number of threads was only in the tens. However, their length was so disproportionate that they looked like thousands and thousands of threads bundled together.

He focused on a single one of those threads, weaving it through the rest. With the fine control he'd been practicing over the course of two lives, he was able to almost completely free the thread before he encountered a problem.

And it was no small issue.

A complicated knot involving four different threads stood in his way, forcing him to leave his current work unfinished and move on.

Still, he persevered. He felt the jolts in his bones with every movement. He felt the shock that occurred every time the threads made contact where they weren't meant to.

And when he finally did make a mistake, accidentally pulling a thread far too hard and almost tearing it…

"AAARGH!"

He roared in pain. It was as if his soul was thrown out of his body and tortured as he was forced to watch. The very vitality that kept him living was experiencing an unbelievable level of pain, and it could only be imagined how that translated for him.

His body snapped back, destroying the delicate control he had. Atlas barely managed to hold the threads steady while he froze and dealt with the agony.

But he had to keep going.

He had to keep untying these threads, because he could feel that if he didn't finish the task he'd started, even his own vitality would be completely depleted.

So, he kept on.

Even as he made mistakes, he kept on.

His body and soul felt pain beyond pain.

It was the feeling of thousands of needles pricking at Atlas' skin while his organs were gouged out of his body. It was like his fleshy parts melted away and his bones were corroded as his nerves remained intact to send him every instance of pain he felt.

At the same time, his soul was tortured, practically ripped apart by agony and pieced together over and over again.

Every time he failed, he provoked more failure. If he couldn't stand absolutely still as he coped with that agony, its intensity would only multiply.

How could one possibly persevere?

That was the question asked by this trial. It was the reason the Hell Guardian was one of the worst Underworld Guardians to challenge, and perhaps it was the reason why that Goddess told Atlas that he had to use this route:

If he was anyone else, he would have been destroyed. He would have been left as nothing more than vitality powering the Hell Guardian's core.

But Atlas was more than that.

Atlas was someone who knew how to treat pain like an enemy and vanquish it like everything else. Even if he himself didn't remember it, his body and soul remembered what it was like to be tortured for a millennia without pause.

Yes, he was in pain. Yes, he felt every bit of that agony just as anyone else would.

What set him apart was the fact that even through it all, he kept working towards his goal.

He kept untangling threads and unraveling knots. He controlled the vital energy in those green threads no matter how they treated him, and his efforts were eventually bound to pay off.

Only, by the time they did, Atlas' own body looked more like a husk than the vessel of a living being.

HONG!

Like an ancient bell had tolled.

HONG!

Cracks formed along the sides of the roots. In Atlas' eyes, he saw an array of green threads that existed individually and apart from each other, perfectly synchronizing within the Hell Guardian's form.

HONG!

Black threads flew around Atlas' body and then spread into the darkeness. They let out a great vacuum force that sucked in the darkness and returned all things into its grasp.

Atlas had no control over the process. Once he'd untangled the roots, everything happened on its own.

HONG!

A huge sound reverberated through the darkness. The ambient death qi was blasted away, finally allowing light to permeate the world inside the Hell Guardian.

There was a floor. Where its legs began, there was a solid surface. The entrance above was also blocked by the now-visible light of the lava pool.

The walls of the guardian's torso were made of bronze, which was very different from the rocky look of its exterior. As a matter of fact, there was nothing in this space other than that bronze color.

The core that operated the guardian existed here alone with no protections other than the ambient death qi it produced.

Realistically, it didn't need more protection than that, but now that it was gone…

Atlas watches as the roots snapped one after another.

The dark rivers in the guardian's core roared to life and entered the newly lit world. They danced with each other and made a great scene, forming beautiful patterns in the air.

It was almost as if they were speaking. They were communicating their intent, but it was an intent that Atlas could never understand.

Because even now, even after liberating it from its cage, he couldn't even begin to understand what that force was.

It wasn't qi and it wasn't any other kind of energy he was familiar with. It was far above them, but also far below. It didn't have anything like complexity, but that made it more complex than anything else.

This paradoxical energy danced with liveliness that seemed equally paradoxical, showing Atlas alone this sight.

Only after it danced for almost a minute did it all attention into a sphere on the other side of the guardian's chest.

The Hell Guardian's core was not broken, but it had been completely unraveled.

A great rumbling sounded from all around. Atlas felt like he had no connection to the outside world anymore, but his mind dreamdd of that scene.

The scene of the Hell Guardian falling to its knees.

And all it took was several real brushes with death to make it happen.

Really, Atlas only had a single question left.

Was this enough?

Or, was there an even more grueling battle awaiting him from here on out?