"I need to find a way in..."
From afar, Rosen gazed at the skull-shaped ruin, contemplating a method.
Hiding near the Mysterious Study Room wasn't difficult—those Eternal Life avatars couldn't possibly detect its presence.
However, while the Mysterious Study Room was exceptional at concealing itself, not even a space-time boundary gate could forcibly bring him inside the ruins.
Unless the Mysterious Study Room fused with a Stone Realm Primordial Stone and used it to reinforce the entire structure with a layer of primordial-grade material—greatly enhancing its defensive capability—entry was impossible.
Yet Rosen had already confirmed that the Stone Realm Primordial Stone carried a unique risk.
Like the Blue Crystal, it was naturally susceptible to control by the same-source primordial power. The World Tree, empowered by a superior Stone Realm force, could effortlessly seize control of any Stone Realm Primordial Stone. Incorporating such a material into the Mysterious Study Room would inevitably lead to endless trouble.
Since the Stone Realm Primordial Stone was out of the question, his only remaining option was the Blue Crystal he had named the Spiritual Primal Core.
Using the Origin of Myriad Transformations, Rosen locked onto the Spiritual Primal Core that enveloped the Eternal Divinity and attempted to convert it into an insect.
Although the Spiritual Primal Core was at a primordial level, the Origin of Myriad Transformations originated from the Heart of the Universe.
Sure enough, the Eternal Divinity, along with the Spiritual Primal Core, slowly began transforming into a worm.
With time accelerated by a factor of a thousand, what took two years in the real world had completely transformed into an insect.
This insect was extremely unique—on the surface, it resembled a translucent butterfly composed of blue spiritual matter.
Because he was unwilling to permanently convert his Life Source and Divine Source, Rosen could only control a very weak amount of spiritual power.
But as the Spiritual Primal Core and the Eternal Divinity were both transformed into an insect by the Origin of Myriad Transformations, this butterfly naturally began fusing Life Source and Divine Source into spiritual power. Most remarkably, it could even reconvert spiritual power back into its source forms.
Two years ago, within the treasure space, Rosen had believed that primordial power was immutable—truly eternal and indestructible.
Now that belief was overturned. Even primordial power could not achieve true eternity.
Back then, he had mistaken his inability to reverse primordial power for its permanence.
This once again proved that nothing is absolute—where there is a spear, there must be a shield.
Using the Heart of the Universe, he had created the Origin of Myriad Transformations—essentially a shield that counters primordial power.
It made sense. The Heart of the Universe's core ability was absorption and transformation.
And the Origin of Myriad Transformations perfectly inherited that transformative capability.
Primordial power derived from primordial lifeforms couldn't be reversed by ordinary means—but the transformative power of the Heart of the Universe could.
Rosen had still underestimated the Origin of Myriad Transformations. This miraculous skill possessed unfathomable hidden power.
His Divine Source was at 195 points. When he first ascended as an Eternal God-Demon, his Life Source had been 189 points. However, over the years, he had continuously refined cosmic substances, which steadily merged into his immortal divine body. His Life Source had also reached 195 points.
Thus, he had merged 195 units of spiritual power—leaving him in an extremely weakened state.
Without Life Source, his immortal divine body was like a machine without an engine.
Without Divine Source, even his Eternal Will was difficult to sustain.
Fortunately, at this moment, the Ancient God Sacrificial Artifact activated, raising both of his now-depleted sources back up to 182 points.
This preserved his Eternal God-Demon strength, allowing Rosen to use his Eternal Will to control the Spirit Soul Butterfly.
The luminous blue Spirit Soul Butterfly unfurled its Creator Domain, enveloping Rosen's body within.
Then, powered by spiritual force, the Spirit Soul Butterfly began to phase into a more ethereal state. Because spiritual matter had extremely low mass—after all, even Eternal-level stars made of it could exist in the cosmos of the third stellar ring without collapsing—its mass was very low. And the lower the mass, the easier it was to shrink.
As a result, the Spirit Soul Butterfly, which could shrink almost infinitely, soon became so small that even the Eye of the Creator could barely observe it.
As the Spirit Soul Butterfly flew out of the Window of Space-Time, Rosen retracted the Mysterious Study Room back into his body, returning it to his sea of consciousness.
Just as he had expected, the Spirit Soul Butterfly attracted no attention and silently flitted toward the mouth-shaped entrance of the skull ruin.
Perhaps due to its same-source nature, the Spirit Soul Butterfly was unharmed.
On the contrary, as it passed through the entrance, it absorbed some unclaimed spiritual energy, expanding its own spiritual power limit.
With the miraculous Origin of Myriad Transformations, if he accumulated enough spiritual power, then reversed it into Divine Source and Life Source, he might be able to forcefully break the barrier and ascend to Eternity. The only question was how much spiritual power he could gather here.
After passing through the passage filled with endless blue light, the Spirit Soul Butterfly reached the interior of the skull-shaped ruin.
The World Tree had once been here and explored at least ninety percent of it.
Only the core section remained unexplored, while the rest had already been recorded into memory crystals as trade goods.
Rosen had studied those crystals and conducted countless dream-realm rehearsals of exploring the ruins.
However, after passing through the passage and seeing the interior of the ruins with his own eyes, Rosen discovered that the ruins before him had undergone drastic changes compared to what was recorded in the World Tree's memories.
In the World Tree's memory, what it saw back then in this ruin was a desolate remnant of a world.
All life had perished, and all buildings had crumbled into dust.
Only some extremely terrifying spiritual lifeforms roamed the interior of the ruins endlessly.
The World Tree had been blocked at the deepest part of the ruins by an Eternal-level spiritual lifeform, unable to continue its exploration.
But what Rosen saw now was not a desolate world remnant, but a thriving, vibrant world.
Using the power of the Time Source Seed, Rosen drove the growth of the Miracle Sequence to the Eternal level, becoming a historical recorder.
His eyes functioned like lenses, capturing the events of past time.
It turned out that such a dramatic change in the ruins was closely related to the continuous deaths of Origin Behemoths within it.
Origin Behemoths would avoid the Skull Ruins, but the Holy Temple could capture them and feed them to this ruin.
The Eternal beings of the Holy Temple, who wielded the power of the Primordial, had undoubtedly entered this ruin.
They must have discovered a secret even the World Tree hadn't noticed—that this world could consume life to slowly recover from desolation. That was why they captured Origin Behemoths to nourish the world within the ruins, gradually reviving what was once barren into a thriving world.
The Spiritual Soul Butterfly instantly retreated into the Mysterious Study Room, cautiously watching the outside world through the window of space-time.
Just as it disappeared, an Eternal being cloaked in a robe appeared nearby.
This Eternal being was carefully scanning the vast grasslands near the entrance with its spiritual power.
Rosen immediately realized that this ruin world could continuously generate spiritual power.
Of course, the efficiency was far lower than the Spiritual Core that encased his Eternal Divinity, but it was still enough for Eternal beings to establish a foothold here. That Eternal being just now had clearly come here to harvest and control spiritual power.
It was also because of this spiritual power that it sensed the near-infinitely shrunken Spiritual Soul Butterfly.
Thanks to foresight granted by time premonition, Rosen was able to immediately retreat into the Mysterious Study Room. Otherwise, he would've been intercepted on the spot. Escaping from this ruin world would not have been easy, as even space-time crossing gates could not exit this realm.
The unfamiliar Eternal being scouted for a long while before quietly departing after reinforcing its surveillance abilities.
However, although it left on the surface, it was still secretly monitoring the entrance.
Rosen tried several times to manipulate the Spiritual Soul Butterfly to leave the Mysterious Study Room, but each time, his time premonition warned him.
He was now trapped in the Mysterious Study Room—unable to leave, yet unwilling to flee back to the universe.
If the Eternal being outside monitored him for ten or twenty years, he could endure it. But if it had the patience to watch for a thousand or even two thousand years without moving, there was no way he could hold out that long.
So he had to find a way to escape. If nothing else worked, he would have to risk everything in a fight with the Eternal being.
Two years passed in the blink of an eye. Rosen still hadn't found a method, but the Immortal Coffin had already finished refining the corpse of the Plague Holy God.
Rosen was no longer willing to wait. He decided to deploy the Plague Holy God directly.
Opening the window of space-time, he revealed a beetle in his palm whose body resembled a coffin.
This was the Coffin Beetle, transformed by the Immortal Coffin using the Myriad-Form Root Source. It could fully manipulate the revived corpse of the Plague Holy God within it. As the Coffin Beetle spread its wings and flew through the space-time window, its carapace split open, spewing out endless waves of plague.
The Eternal being who had been secretly preparing immediately launched a spiritual attack upon the Coffin Beetle.
Rosen instinctively named this type of spiritual attack "Spirit Burn."
It simultaneously ignited both the essence and spirit within the target's body—burning the origin of life and the origin of divinity as fuel for the Spirit Burn. If the Spirit Burn couldn't be stopped, its effects would intensify due to the two sources acting as accelerants.
During this process, the caster could even absorb a small amount of spiritual power using the enemy's origins as nourishment.
The principle behind Spirit Burn was simple, but actually implementing it was extremely difficult.
That's because the origin of life and the origin of divinity were the core essence of any extraordinary being, and were always protected by the strongest defenses. Spirit Burn, however, could completely bypass all protection and ignite those origins directly—clearly a technique developed specifically by Eternal beings to target Primordial power.
What shocked Rosen even more was that Spirit Burn wasn't a fixed skill.
Skills—when broken down—are simply techniques and abilities, typically categorized as either fixed or non-fixed.
Almost all Sequence skills were fixed.
The reason was simple: fixed skills were more powerful and easier to control.
Non-fixed skills were flexible and versatile, but that flexibility came at the cost of lower power and more difficult control.
Take the most basic Sequence 9 Fireball Spell, for instance. A non-fixed version would require converting spirituality into fire elements, aligning the fire elements, compressing them, and then forming a stable burning fireball before launching it.
During this process, the caster had to carry out many unnecessary operations.
By contrast, the fixed version of Fireball Spell would have the alignment and compression of fire elements preconfigured within the extraordinary source material. The caster would only need to inject spirituality to activate the spell, instantly unleashing a fireball at maximum power.
In the heat of battle, there was no way a person could manually arrange and compress fire elements perfectly on the spot.
So in the earliest days of the universe, non-fixed skills had their moment of glory.
But once Eternal beings developed collective high intelligence, fixed skills became common knowledge in the extraordinary system of the universe.
Of course, fixed skills didn't mean they were immutable. The arrangement and compression of fire elements in Fireball Spell could be continuously optimized as the user's mastery over fire deepened—then permanently engraved into the extraordinary source material.
Therefore, unfixed skills were almost never used in actual combat—they were typically only employed during training to push the limits of skill development.
As for using them in a real battle, Rosen had never seen anyone do so, especially not using the unfixed form of a Primordial Force. The only possibilities he could think of were: first, that Mental Burn couldn't be fixed at all, or second, that fixing it would actually weaken its power.
If a true god were to use a Sequence 9 Fireball, then the unfixed version would definitely be stronger than the fixed one.
This was because fixed skills had a known upper limit to their power, while a true god could push even a Sequence 9 skill beyond its maximum threshold.
Although Mental Burn was an unfixed and freely cast skill, its destructive power was still terrifying.
However, the Sky Coffin Beetle—though a living creature—lacked a Life Origin and Divinity Origin in its body, so the damage it took from Mental Burn was greatly reduced. This gave it the opportunity to accelerate and escape.
Wherever it passed, it left behind a sweeping plague-filled poisonous mist, turning the once-vibrant ruins into a desolate deadland.
Seeing that even the strongest Mental Burn had no effect, the Eternal Life lurking in the shadows immediately revealed a person-height staff in hand. In an instant, a limitless surge of elemental energy formed an elemental domain. Then, thousands of immortal elemental skills rained down like a torrent of magic.
All of these were probing attacks, used to test how well the Sky Coffin Beetle resisted different types of power systems.
If even one system showed signs of being effective against the beetle, then skills from that system would follow in an endless onslaught until death.
"So it's the Elemental Holy Deity…"
Rosen felt a slight chill in his heart. A deity who could command all elemental forces was without a doubt among the top tier.
No wonder this being could control Primordial Force and was proficient in wielding unfixed skills.
The Elemental Source Seed's inclusiveness was extremely powerful. Although the Elemental Holy Deity might not be the strongest in any single element, they absolutely possessed the most diverse skillsets across power systems in the universe. The World Tree's evaluation of this deity was: "broad but not deep."
On the surface, "broad but not deep" didn't sound like a compliment.
But every transcendent system in the universe had its limits. For example, an Eternal Life who mastered the Flame Source Seed could only develop derivative powers once they reached the peak of the flame domain. Meanwhile, the Elemental Holy Deity, having pushed the power of fire to its limits, could then go on to develop other elements.
So in earlier years, the Elemental Holy Deity was, at most, a top-tier deity in potential, but second-tier in raw power.
Yet as long as the Elemental Holy Deity remained alive, "broad but not deep" would inevitably evolve into "versatile and specialized."
What Rosen was facing now was just such a deity—fully developed in all areas. Even the World Tree at its peak might not have been able to easily defeat them. Rosen had truly hit the jackpot in this Primordial Ruin—he had run straight into one of the universe's most powerful Eternal Lives.
There was no chance of winning a fight, but it wouldn't be easy for the Elemental Holy Deity to destroy the Sky Coffin Beetle either.
Transformed from an Eternal Relic, the Sky Coffin Beetle had incredibly powerful defenses. Paired with the Cycle of Spacetime, as long as Rosen's Eternal Spacetime Origin wasn't exhausted, the Elemental Holy Deity wouldn't even be able to inflict permanent damage—let alone kill it.
Cycle of Spacetime was just that overpowering when it came to survivability. Otherwise, Rosen wouldn't have been able to contend with an Immortal Star God.
The Sky Coffin Beetle charged straight through to the edge of the elemental domain, then opened a Spacetime Gate and escaped into the void.
The Spacetime Gate couldn't cross the barrier between the interior and exterior of the Primordial Ruins, but within the ruins themselves, opening one was easy. Creating a gateway that led deeper inside was not difficult either. Evading the Elemental Holy Deity's surveillance wasn't too hard.
But it was only easy to flee near the ruins' entrance. Once deeper inside, there would be no way to escape.
Rosen was certain that once the Spacetime Gate was detected, more than one Eternal Life would be stationed near the exit. By then, trying to flee would be no easy task—thus, he needed the Sky Coffin Beetle to act as the obvious intruder and lead the way forward.
Sure enough, the Elemental Holy Deity failed to bring down the Sky Coffin Beetle, and soon other Eternal Lives stepped in to intercept it.
The beetle endured a brutal beating, but like an undying cockroach, it pushed through every obstacle. Though it couldn't harm the Eternal Lives, it left a trail of plague and poisonous mist that continued to ravage the ruins.
In the end, the three Eternal Lives chasing it were forced to assign one of their number to suppress the plague.
It was clear that they didn't want the ruins they'd carefully cultivated to be destroyed.
As Rosen's Eternal Spacetime Origin—accumulated over many years—was nearly depleted, the Sky Coffin Beetle finally arrived at a barren area that Rosen recognized from the World Tree's memories. Upon reaching this spot, the Elemental Holy Deity immediately ceased pursuit.
Rosen realized at once that he had reached the deepest part of the ruins—where even the World Tree had been forced to retreat in the past.
This ruin wasn't vast in scope, but its space and matter were of such high grade that they surpassed eternity itself. Even the Elemental Holy Deity couldn't harm it at full strength, and even the World Tree could only enter or exit through a single gateway.
As the Sky Coffin Beetle flew onward, the world suddenly went dark—and it was swatted deep into the earth.
Instinctively, Rosen judged it had been smashed at least ten thousand miles underground.
With the ruin's material structure exceeding that of eternity, the Elemental Holy Deity's earlier full-powered assault had only penetrated around a thousand miles. Yet the Sky Coffin Beetle hadn't even seen its attacker and was already buried ten thousand miles down—no wonder the deity hadn't dared to follow.
Sensing the near-fatal wounds, Rosen immediately activated Cycle of Spacetime to recover.
But even then, he couldn't react in time. A terrifying mental force burrowed into the beetle's body and tore it apart.
Rosen understood in that instant—relying on Cycle of Spacetime alone, the Sky Coffin Beetle was doomed.
Without hesitation, he released a Spirit Soul Butterfly from his mouth as he reversed time.
Naturally, it wasn't the butterfly's true form, but a larval clone born from the Primordial Hive formed by the Spirit Soul Butterfly.
Since even the World Tree had failed here at its peak, Rosen clearly wasn't courting death by coming—he had a plan.
His trump cards were the Eternal Soul-Binding Horn and the Mental Core. These things had originated from this place, and now that they were refined and under his control, they might earn him some kind of favor.
After all, a child returning home might get a beating—or a warm welcome.
Sure enough, once the Spirit Soul Butterfly clone swallowed the Sky Coffin Beetle, the invisible, terrifying attacks vanished. The mental force that had descended from above ceased its assault and instead gently enveloped the butterfly, lifting it from the depths back to the surface.
(End of Chapter)