Chapter 1386 First Piece [1]
The inside of a dragon; what was it supposed to look like?
If one took a reasonable approach to this question, it would probably be dark, sticky, and filled with strange liquids that nobody would want to be slathered in.
It wasn't like it mattered in the first place. Before one was even given the chance to experience it, one would either have been killed by the dragon's jaws or melted down by its bodily fluids.
However, Damien didn't experience any of that.
Nor did he experience what it felt like to be inside a dragon.
The second he was swallowed, he found himself in a different space.
He fell through a winding tunnel of multicolored visions. It was a hallucinogenic experience, with countless memories from Damien's memories and the world's history floating around him and melding together with no sense of continuity whatsoever.
It was like a rabbit hole to another world. He looked all around himself and tried to make sense of the things in the passage, but there was nothing coherent enough to understand.
These scenes were too broken. They were too strangely intertwined and none of them remained what they used to be.
Damien fell without being able to do anything. Like he was on a slide to oblivion, he simply sat there and took in the experience without access to any sort of mana or energy.
Minutes passed, hours passed, and at some point, once Damien started to get bored of the confusion, he was spat out of the other side of the tunnel in a completely new area.
'It's here.'
He noticed immediately. The force he'd been searching for was somewhere in his vicinity.
'Of all things, I didn't expect it to happen like this.'
If he knew he could've just run into the dragon's mouth and found this place so easily, he wouldn't have gone through all the trouble of being covert.
Wasn't this so much easier?
Obviously, his mindset wasn't a normal one. No sane person would just jump into a dragon's mouth because they knew there was something mysterious waiting for them.
But since when was normal?
The experience was definitely odd. Several hundred more words could be used to describe it, but they were unnecessary, because Damien himself didn't place any relevance on it.
Therefore, when he arrived in the new space, he completely forgot about all things related to the dragon and focused back on his original goal.
The area was filled with it.
This place had no real form. It was a cave when Damien thought it was a cave, and it would turn into a great expanse the second he had that thought.
It wasn't an illusion, nor was it reality. It could be either depending on how it was viewed.
And using that energy as a medium, he accessed the vestiges left behind by the owner of the skeleton.
The world around him changed again.
Damien pulled his hand out of the skeleton's skull as it and the wall it rested against vanished.
In its place, no, roughly twenty feet in front of Damien, there now stood a man.
"So, eventually, there was someone."
The man spoke, both addressing Damien and speaking as if he wasn't present.
"Child, I cannot see you," he continued.
"However, I am aware of your existence."
It meant this wasn't a meeting with that man, but a recording Damien was watching.
"I do not know when you will come, for the future becomes blurry after eons of waiting. When you arrive, perhaps this world will not be the same one I left for you."
The words contained plenty of hidden meanings that Damien couldn't quite understand.
The man's eyes were open, but there was nothing there. Within his eye sockets were sclera made of white light with no sense of self behind them.
Damien couldn't tell if the man really existed.
'No, that's the whole point.'
At some point, the man was real. He was present within existence.
However, at some point, the line between existence and nonexistence blurred for him.
His fate was unknown, but he knew there was someone else who would appear, another person who understood Existence.
So he left his will here for that person who would eventually come.
"It is confusing, but even confusion is a matter of Existence. Rise above it, understand it, and learn to control it."
Damien listened as the man kept talking. Most of it was rambling, but within that nonsense, there was enough truth for Damien to grasp.
This was a lesson for him.
The man was telling him to truly see through reality and truly take hold of Existence.
Not just that, he was telling Damien how to do it.
This was the key he'd been looking for, the truth that would let him reach new heights in his stalling growth.
And Damien did not plan to waste this opportunity at all.