The golden glow in Dreleon's eyes intensified as he pushed his spatial perception to its limit.
In his mind's eye, the world wasn't made of stone and shadows anymore; it was made of distances and mass,He scanned upward, expecting to find the roof of a cavern or the end of a serpent's tail.
Instead, he found a horizon.
The cave they had walked into wasn't a cave at all.
As his perception climbed higher, the horrifying truth surfaced.
The jagged obsidian walls were not rock; they were the ridges of a colossal, living plate.
The mountain above them wasn't anchored to the earth; it was resting on a spine.
The massive, snake-like head that had emerged from the dark was merely a limb—the neck of a creature so vast that a forest could grow upon its back.
"Hahahaha... Youth truly knows no bounds," a voice vibrated through the floorboards of the world. "To think someone would try to pry into my true form."
Dreleon froze.
The giant, serpentine head didn't open its mouth.
Instead, from another darkened tunnel in the living rock, a second, smaller snake head slithered out to speak face-to-face.
"So, what did you find, little one?" the head hissed, its eyes swirling nebulas of starlight.
Dreleon remained silent, his mind reeling. He was standing on the back of a god.
The weight of the realization made his own five-meter spatial bubble feel like a speck of dust in a hurricane.
He was still digesting the impossible scale of Elder Genbu when Princess Venesa broke the silence.
"Elder," she said, her voice sounding tiny in the vast chamber. "Now that I have done my work and brought him to you, when can I expect my guard to receive me?"
"Oh... Hehehe," Genbu's voice rumbled like a distant earthquake. "Our little princess is getting restless without her..." Before the Elder could finish the teasing thought, Venesa's face flushed.
She turned on her heel and bolted toward the exit, her royal dignity momentarily forgotten in her haste.
"Just send a message to my residence, Dreleon, when you are finished!" she called back, her voice echoing until the sound of her footsteps vanished into the distance.
The atmosphere in the grotto shifted instantly.
Without the Princess there to anchor the social grace of the room, the air grew heavy and cold.
The snake-head moved closer to Dreleon, its flickering tongue tasting the air around his face.
"Hmmm. Little one, you are not good," the Elder rumbled. "I see no emotion on your face.
Even when you smile, and it looks heartfelt to the world, in reality, you are just an emotionless shell."
Dreleon didn't flinch, He looked into the ancient eyes of the beast.
"If I had captured your whole race and treated you as my mounts, would you dare ask me why I don't smile?"
A small, cold smile touched Dreleon's lips—a expression that didn't reach his eyes.
"Hahahaha! True enough," Genbu laughed, a sound that shook the dust from the ceiling.
"When I saw your race scrambling here and there at the dawn of the era, I thought you were weak.
But when those weird creatures from space attacked, your race showed why they stood at the Pinnacle for ten thousand years.
But young one... why do you think your race is slave?"
Dreleon's brow furrowed.
The question felt like a trap.
"Am I not a slave? Are you telling me that I am standing here in a cage of my own free will?"
"Of course you are a slave," the Elder said, his voice dropping into a dissatisfied, gravelly tone.
"Otherwise, how could you have made a pact with the Princess? But your race is not enslaved. You see only this corner of the world. Just as we use you as slaves for work and entertainment here, your race on the other side of this planet does the same with ours."
Dreleon's heart skipped a beat. He stepped forward, his composure finally breaking.
"What?"
"I saw it with my own eyes," Genbu hissed, a hint of ancient resentment leaking out.
"Before the Primordial Era returned, your race used us as livestock. You used us as slaves to carry your burdens and feed your hunger. You were the masters of the old world."
The silence that followed was absolute.
Dreleon felt as if the ground—the actual turtle beneath his feet—had tilted.
The shock was visible in the widening of his eyes and the sudden tremor in his hands.
"You... You mean there are others?" Dreleon whispered, his voice cracking.
"You mean my race is not just a collection of pets? We are out there... using your kind as we are used here?"
The emotion on his face was raw, a mixture of horror and a sudden, dangerous hope.
Everything he knew about the hierarchy of the world had just been burned to ash.