Dark Magus Returns

Chapter 1750  Who Is Idore?

If there was one person in the entirety of Alterian who could systematically break through a high-tier, hyper-complex magic circle that had been personally set up by the Grand Magus Idore, it was Raze.

There was obviously a staggering amount of preparation, resources, and paranoia that went into the construction of this floating palace. However, analyzing the runic structures from the inside, Raze realized a critical flaw in the architect's logic: the entire facility was mainly focused on trying its absolute best to disorient, trap, or utterly obliterate the person wandering inside. It was an offensive maze, not a secure vault.

Because of this supreme arrogance, there were parts of the internal security measures that weren't fully thought out. Idore had likely reasoned: How many intruders would even bother snooping around the administrative rooms of the building in the first place? Most would have been critically injured just trying to get out, or would have descended into raving madness due to the spatial manipulation and the strange, looping puzzle doors.

But Raze was different. He could buy himself a little bit of time. Although his heart ached with worry about his friends fighting desperately outside, he knew that charging out to face Idore using only his Qi and his Pagna martial arts powers, while his magic was completely drained from the breakthrough, would be an incredibly difficult, if not suicidal, task to complete.

Which was exactly why Raze was currently risking precious minutes, hoping to find something, anything, behind this sealed door that would help him in this dire situation.

Sweat beaded on his forehead as he carefully manipulated the raw energy. Eventually, with a sharp, resonant crack that echoed through the empty lab, the final layer of the glowing magic circle broke. The runes fizzled out, and the heavy locking mechanism disengaged.

'With this incredibly high amount of dedicated security isolating this single door, I'm really hoping it's a centralized storage room of some kind,' Raze thought, pushing his weight against the heavy metal to open it. 'Although, knowing Idore's greed, my guess is all of the absolute best items would have already been given out to his elite guards, or kept strictly for himself.'

Oddly, however, when Raze pushed the door open and stepped inside, the room wasn't what he was expecting at all.

There were no racks of glowing weapons, no shelves lined with rare beast crystals, and no pedestals holding cursed artifacts. Instead, he could see a large, meticulously organized polished mahogany desk and a high-backed leather chair. There were several mundane items, loose documents, and magical slates scattered around the workspace.

It was clearly a space used as a private office.

Raze stepped inside, his eyes scanning the room. 'With how many complex magic circles were layered outside that door, something incredibly important had to be kept in this specific room, right? Maybe it's Idore's personal office? If it is, then there should be a wealth of classified information here.'

The incredibly good thing for Raze was that he lived in a world that was mostly governed by the rigid laws of magic, rather than the fluid logic of modern technology. And due to the unique person he was, possessing knowledge from multiple lifetimes and an unparalleled understanding of runic structures, it was almost as if Raze was a world-class, elite hacker operating in a system of analog locks.

So, any magical device or runic terminal that was used to keep or encrypt information, he could access.

He approached the main crystalline console resting on the desk. It was the magical equivalent of a technological device like a computer. Raze placed his hands over the crystal. He couldn't use his dark mana, but his deep understanding of the pathways allowed him to use his Qi to forcefully bypass the security gates. Eventually, after meticulously breaking through enough magical encryptions and firewalls, Raze was able to access all of the localized information stored within the terminal.

The screen projected a massive, dizzying array of glowing text into the air. There was a monumental amount of data to go through, decades of records, so Raze needed to be efficient. He wanted to look for specific keywords. Most likely, a man as meticulous as Idore kept a detailed ledger or a list of all the magical items he had hoarded or created.

Raze typed in the runic query, and he was right.

'The information... the item index,' Raze thought, his eyes darting across the glowing text. 'Maybe he arrogantly wrote down the specific weaknesses of all the things he currently uses. Ah, there it is. I can even see the entry for the small golden orb he used to forcefully transport me here.'

It was incredibly good information to have before the final fight. Knowing the cooldowns, the limits, and the triggers of his enemy's arsenal was already a type of gold mine for him in a way.

However, his initial hope was dashed. He couldn't find any information or coordinates regarding a physical armory of sorts within the palace. From what he could read in the manifest, Idore possessed a master-crafted personal storage ring, an artifact of immense spatial capacity that could store a massive number of large items directly on his person.

So, everything of true worth would be personally sitting on Idore's finger, which was, annoyingly, to be expected.

Rather than just leaving it at that, though, Raze felt like he needed to dig deeper. He tried to look into the archives to see if there was any advanced research having to do with magical breakthroughs. He desperately needed to see if he could find a way to fix his current situation, a method to kickstart his mana regeneration before the natural cycle completed.

Although he didn't find anything direct regarding a 'cure' for a breakthrough's exhaustion phase, he did stumble upon a trove of heavily encrypted files. It was the dark, hidden information detailing multiple horrific experiments that Idore had been running in the shadows for years.

"This is… absolutely crazy," Raze muttered aloud, the glow of the projection illuminating his shocked features. "He was actively working with Gizin for a number of different, highly illegal things… I'm finding out a lot of dirty secrets here. And wait, what is this? Deep research on Time Magic?"

Raze leaned closer to the projection. "I was only able to find a few fragmented things regarding that element in the Central Academy with Ibarin, but there seems to be a massive, comprehensive database here."

As Raze continued to read on, sifting through the horrific logs and magical theories, he found a piece of information that was very important, a theoretical application that could actually help him out greatly right now. He quickly noted exactly what it had to say, committing the runic sequence to memory. Maybe, just maybe, he might have just solved his immediate power problem.

But as he was looking for more details to confirm the theory, he found something else entirely. The dates on the files were startling. Things were starting to line up perfectly in his mind, and he could see exactly how far back this specific, obsessive research had gone.

'Idore had been actively hunting and looking for all mages that had any type of affinity for time magic for hundreds of years…' Raze realized, a cold chill running down his spine. 'That perfectly explains how he's been able to live for so incredibly long without crumbling to dust. Which means it is far more likely that he really is the exact same person that used to visit the Underside all those centuries ago.'

Raze read the grim conclusion of the experiments.

'From the look of things, despite all his genius, he never actually figured out how to cast or use time magic himself. But he found a parasitic way to extract the raw magic from those who could, so it could at least help him forcefully de-age himself bit by bit. He's a vampire feeding on time.'

He looked at the blinking cursor on the magical interface.

'Is there anything else I should look up before I go?'

Searching through the whole database manually would take an incredible amount of time that he simply did not have. His friends were dying out there. And Raze had already gotten something that would help him survive, two major things, in fact: the item weaknesses and the magical theory to bypass his exhaustion.

He needed to leave. But just before he pulled his hands away from the console to sever the connection, he hesitated. He raised his hands and quickly typed in one final, heavy word into the search bar.

"Pagna."