“There is only absolute silence, no sounds at all. There are not mites crawling, and the tree doesn’t even rustle. I could hear Gael’s body rotting, how his bloated body would explode in his tomb and they sounded like thunder.”

The man’s sharp voice reverberated in the quiet room. Like thunder, it caused Ovid to feel a stinging pain in his sensitive ears.

“But then his body became nothing more than dust, and that sound has stopped. The sounds that previously made you feel disgusted becomes the most wonderful things in your memory. Do you know this feeling?

“In the end, you can hear your blood flowing through your veins, your muscle losing water content. You can hear the sound of your organs in the eagle, dissolving in its stomach acids. It’s really interesting, isn’t it? If you listen for a long time, you definitely want to vomit. But the problem is, you can’t.

The sages’ eyes lost all its shine. He reminisced about the countless years of suffering like a stone tablet. He muttered, “I know that living like this is even crueller than death. I should have killed myself when I was defeated by Gael. Yet this fellow, although he seemed honest and daring, actually had a heart more insidious than the gods. He knew that I thought of living to preserve knowledge, so made it that I could never die.”

Even the toughest man might feel sympathy for the sage, looking at that old, cloudy eyes amidst that youthful face, listening to the heart-wrenching words and thinking how he had been imprisoned long enough for the seas to change, leading a life worse than death.

Ovid indeed felt such emotions. He looked at the young man and said, “That is indeed quite sad. But it does not justify your actions.”

The sage smiled and did not say anything else. The questions he had asked had already released much of the anger pent up over the past hundred thousand years. He had something more important to do now.

He lowered his head slowly and placed his dry lips on the person beneath his palm gently.

Ovid looked at the man coldly, no longer with the sympathy in his eyes. His body shivered slightly, as anyone would when they are about to be torn into shreds and eaten.

Abruptly, Ovid harrumphed, and stubbornness and a will to live glowed in his normally emotionless eyes.

He started to cough violently.

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His tattered stola suddenly lost all its colours together with his coughs. It turned a charred black as if all signs of life and blood had been charred.

His pale face instead became abnormally red. The whites of his eyes were as red as kermes and looked very strange. There were two streams of blood that flowed slowly like mercury from the corner of his mouth. His hair flowed behind him, dancing madly in the wind.

His body that had been seized by the sage had not returned to his control, yet through some unknown means, he had flooded the room with the aura, not unlike that of a saint! It was like a small tree growing from the floor of a jungle, finally able to take a glimpse at the sky.

Sage Glafx had studied much of the techniques of the world and could understand the fundamentals of the goals Ovid was attempting to achieve the moment his aura had changed.

In ancient times, practitioners could channel the mana of their constellation through their body in such quantities, that their body would essentially become a bomb in mere moments. The force behind this power was frightfully strong, as it was the explosion of the rawest of energy.

It was just that the price to pay for this was far too high. Even if one does not perish, they would have to abandon the state they have achieved, along with the capability of channelling mana ever again. To many, this was even worse than devoiding them of their lives and family.

Moreover, as time progressed, the mana one could channel from the constellation reduced as more people started to practice magic. Even if this ability was universal to all that can control mana, there wasn’t anyone willing, or able to use it.

Ovid was, however, not even in the stage of deacon and was facing a possibility worse than death. Since he had his own star and was thus able to use this ‘technique’, he showed no hesitation as he became burning down this own body.

The aura that burst out of his body was like the difference between a saint and an ordinary mortal. To Glafx, this was the foot that his palm was jarred away from Ovid’s head.

The thermonuclear like aura gathered near his body and the young man’s body trembled. His expression was calm and he looked at the figure in black with an absence of human emotions.

He did not think that someone as juvenile as Ovid was capable of such decisive decisions.

A curse was made from his withered lips and his withered arm was extended. A sacred glow emitted from his fingertips, as bright as candlelight beside a book. The aura that was created from mortality and immortality reached up the grove in mere seconds.

With the forceful suppression of this unnamed technique, the man’s palm made a reach to press down on Ovid’s head once more. Each millimetre of movement looked slow, yet its inertia could not be stopped.

Ovid bit his lips tightly and forced out the power contained in the star without any restraints in an attempt to stop the withering hand from descending.

His hands that were pressed against the ground trembled violently as if they are brittle sticks about to break at any moment. However, they supported his body stubbornly. His body was shaking violently too, and fresh spots of red would stain the old black blood that covered the surface of the trunk. He looked as if he might fall over any moment. However, he stayed stubbornly upright as well.

The blood within his body turned into steam, yet was compressed back to liquid form under the pressure of Tanin’s power.

Blood flowed from the pores of the delicate face before congealing into tiny pearls, before landing, it would turn into red mist mid-air.

Flames danced in his pupils as if they were stars leaving the sky domain.

The corners of Ovid’s velvet-like lips raised to form a smile that seemed almost bewitching. As the withered palm hovered not a hair over his head, he said weakly, “Sir… you lose.”

Ovid’s eyelids met, and when it was opened once more, it was clearer than the surface of a mirror.