Chapter 431: The Weight of Cosmic Knowledge (1)
— Frey Starlight’s Pov —
I could barely describe those few fleeting moments before I put the mask on once more.
They were some of the rare moments when emotions overlapped and tangled together inside me.
Fear of an ancient will slumbering within that metallic thing, and a slow-growing anxiety gnawing at my heart ..
Then came longing and hope, pushing me to act quickly, knowing now that the answer to saving Danzo lay within it.
And in that moment, under the watchful gaze of the Engineer .. who couldn’t stop himself from observing this step I had finally decided to take ..
I placed the Nameless mask on my face once again.
Gazing at the world through the cold slits of that mask...
At first, nothing changed. But before long, my entire perspective shifted.
"What... is this?!"
The words slipped from my lips unconsciously, and I stumbled back until my back hit the wall.
It was an indescribable feeling, as if all that information came flooding back into my mind one after another...
Like someone stabbing a giant needle into my back and injecting torrents of knowledge straight into my body.
It was exactly as that damned Engineer had said.
Thanks to the Shadow Adaptation, my mind could now withstand the mask.
I always knew the Shadow Adaptation allowed me to adapt to my enemies, and it had helped me in countless battles so far, but I had truly believed it was limited to martial arts .. nothing more, nothing less.
Who would have thought that the true scope of this ability extended far beyond the battlefield itself, adapting me to any phenomenon I might face in life?
"What a terrifying ability..."
I muttered without realizing it.
The Engineer said the Shadow Adaptation belonged to the path of the Law of Chaos, a tremendous power even by the standards of those who dwell in the heights.
Didn’t that mean it was the only way I could break free from my predetermined fate .. shattering this wheel of destiny that kept dragging me along in its current?
After all, the future foreseen by beings like the Engineer and Agaroth could only be broken by something like this... a power akin to their own.
Fully grasping that truth, the value of the shadow adaptation multiplied within my heart, and I finally understood its true worth.
I genuinely wanted to see what this ability could achieve when it reached the seventh level.
I couldn’t imagine it .. but I knew it would be something truly colossal.
Then, in those few moments of thought, detached from reality, I felt a strange saturation.
As if the mask had finished transmitting all its information into my mind.
And then, as if by magic, my consciousness was swept away ... completely severed from the real world.
Thrown into a sea of darkness...
The scene kept shifting until I suddenly found myself standing in a completely different place than where I had been just moments ago.
That’s when weakness overtook me, and I collapsed to my knees before the sight that unfolded before my eyes.
And after a few brief moments ..
Despair finally consumed me.
...
...
....
The moment he put on the mask, Frey froze in place, unable to move.
He looked like a soulless statue .. his black armor, the Nameless mask, and that white hair of his.
The Engineer found himself staring at him for some time, the faint blue light flickering within his cold eyes.
The Engineer had always hidden his face, revealing only his icy gaze.
Rarely did those eyes show any trace of emotion, no matter what circumstances he had endured through his long life.
But this... this was one of those rare moments that stirred even a man weathered by the passage of ages.
When he looked at him, it felt like he was witnessing the culmination of bitter struggles and relentless efforts that had torn his body apart, scattering his soul across countless places, leaving him with his fair share of suffering and despair—depths of pain that Frey could never even begin to imagine. What did the few short years of Frey’s struggle amount to, compared to the millennia the blue-eyed man had endured?
What weight did the fleeting struggles of a mere human carry against a battle that spanned thousands of years?
It wasn’t fair to the blue-eyed man. Perhaps no one else was insane enough to keep pursuing such a mad plan—one that he himself had drawn long ago.
But, cruelly enough...
Just seeing Frey wearing that mask made the Engineer feel satisfied—as if all he had done until now hadn’t been in vain.
After all, Frey had no idea just how much he resembled him now...
That nameless king who once lived in the forgotten ages, carving his name into the annals of legend.
And after staring for a while longer, the Engineer realized he had let his emotions carry him away. He pulled himself back to that familiar cold facade, just as another figure appeared beside him.
A towering dark statue with an angry face.
"Watch him. In case anything happens," the blue-eyed man said curtly, while Angry simply nodded, holding his massive double-headed scythe.
Then, in less than a second, the Engineer vanished, returning to what he had been doing from the start .. continuing to build the sect, which by now had grown to a terrifying size, nearly rivaling the imperial capital of Belgrad, and was on the verge of surpassing it.
No one knew what the Engineer was constructing in that place...
But one thing was certain—it was something dark beyond imagination.
...
...
...
— Back to Frey Starlight —
This time, Frey found himself plunging into a whole new kind of despair.
"What in the Creator of Hell is this?!"
The Nameless mask had already finished transferring all of its knowledge into Frey’s mind.
But fully comprehending that knowledge was simply impossible for him, so the mask visualized it in a way that allowed him to access it whenever he wished.
And this... is what led Frey to his current predicament.
Standing in the middle of a vast, illusory world, he found himself inside an enormous library .. its towering shelves pierced the sky above.
When Frey looked up toward the heavens, all he could see were endless books, blocking the sky entirely.
Then, taking a few hesitant steps forward and gazing downward...
He saw an abyss of books stretching below him, its depths unfathomable.
It was like standing inside a colossal skyscraper, with floors both above and below ground.
Except here, the floors were infinite in both directions—upward and downward.
This was what it meant to possess knowledge as vast as the universe itself.
"Am I seriously supposed to find the answer somewhere in this damned, endless sea of books?!"
The more he looked at this bizarre library...
The deeper despair took root in his heart, mixed with growing frustration at what he saw.
He had no clue where to start searching if he wanted to find the solution to save Danzo.
Perhaps the answer he sought was hidden inside one of those books.
But which one was it?
Was it close by?
Far away?
At the top?
At the bottom?
The longer he stared, the clearer it became just how hopeless this task truly was.
"This all depends entirely on luck..."
Among millions of books, he might find the one he sought on the very first shelf. Or... it could be buried at the very last.
Either way, he had only about twenty days left.
And that wasn’t nearly enough to cover even a tenth of this monstrous library.
His chances were painfully slim, and with every second that passed, his despair deepened.
But Frey didn’t sit idle. He immediately rushed forward, grabbing book after book, reading their contents as quickly as he could.