Chapter 996 Runic Arrangement

Chapter 996 Runic Arrangement

Rowan accessed his situation quickly, muting any eruption of panic in his heart. The portion of his rocky body that had been swallowed was still intact, although he found it particularly difficult for his perception to scan through it.

He appeared to be made from rock, but this was most likely not the case due to how dense he was and how he did not suffer a single scratch even after falling from orbit while also under the propulsion from the force Old Man Seed had used to launch him into this star.

His defensive properties in this form were most likely extreme given the drawbacks, and whatever would be eating him would have to spend a while chewing through this tough nut that was his present form, Rowan did not envy his devourer this task.

After analyzing the crisis, even though he was now aware of the truth, nothing about his situation had immediately changed. The only thing it did was give him the timeline on which his survival hinged. Without this knowledge, he would have perished without even understanding how he died.

Rowan was not afraid of dying, but he wanted a chance to fight for his life when the time came for him to go. He did not want to die without the knowledge of who or what was able to perform this feat.

The consumption of his body remained constant even after he had detected the mental intrusion, with the three most likely reasons being that the owner of the flesh could not detect that he had broken the perception lock over his memories or they knew and simply did not care, and the last reason being that he was a rather hefty meal to swallow, and they were hurrying up to devour him, but his constitution even in this form was not normal and they would have to struggle to finish the meal.

No matter how much Doom Star had sought to warp his flesh, there was a limit to it, his powers were simply unfathomable. Inside his body was a confluence of impossible powers, with the latest addition of the Nine Supreme Circle taking him to a brand new level of potential.

No matter how much Doom Star had suppressed him, all that potential could not simply be erased, and if Nemesis was also present in this world, it would be smiling for it had brought Rowan into quite a bind.

This task was difficult but with the lightning runes he had memorized, it was no longer impossible... barely.

He had the snapshot of what a completed rune would appear as, and even if each rune were formed in an incredibly complex configuration, he could slowly piece it together. The only issue was that he was under a time constraint.

"Fuck you Nemesis," Rowan growled again and set his mind to the task. A part of himself could not help but think if Nemesis truly existed, cursing him would likely make his situation worse.

Rowan separated his limited consciousness into many smaller parts, the largest of which became a sort of blank drawing board where he placed copies of all the pieces of the runes swirling around his consciousness, and like a gigantic puzzle made up of many billions of moving parts, he began to fit them together.

His consciousness dances between the completed runes and the shattered ones, noting outlines, dimensions, depths, color, sensations, and millions of other micro components that make up a higher-order language.

Rowan's innate talent in language comprehension made this task marginally easier because he had an uncanny ability to spot patterns and tease out fragments of meaning from the chaos.

He sank into this task and time slowly lost meaning, and when he came up for air, he discovered that nearly thirty percent of his body had been consumed and he had barely gone through two percent of the entire runic arrangement.

These two percent he was able to complete was the hardest part of the entire puzzle. With his diminished consciousness power, without his many quirks and sheer grit, it would have been impossible for him to succeed. Yet it was only the beginning and he was falling far behind.

Perhaps he was too deep underground and his perception was too weak but he could not detect the changes of the seasons in this place, but his internal clock following the rigid flow of time of reality outside this place informed him that he had spent a quarter of a century inside this crater since the moment of his descent.