Endirius was a mystery, even to those closest to him. He was proclaimed to be the first mage, the ruler of fire, but standing before him, there could not be found any demeanor of a great Magus, except for the fact that he resembled a mortal scholar, one who was slowly becoming old.
His voice was soft yet majestic. However, a magnificent voice and personality were easy to acquire after living for a long time and not going mad. No matter how dumb a person was, extreme age naturally leads to refinement in character.
Rowan’s essence, which had come to dwell inside Revah’s soul, observed the Supreme Magus. Of course, he did not do this directly; a being of Endirius’s power would instantly know when he was being observed. Instead, what Rowan did was read Revah Endirius’s memory and soul.
This was a technique that he had come to perfect after monitoring the entire lives of billions of his children over the span of a million years.
As powerful as this technique was, it had clear flaws. Every piece of information he received was second-hand, and so it was unconsciously influenced by the individual’s bias. For Rowan, whose perceptive ability was extremely potent, viewing Revah’s memory and soul was similar to staring through a blindfold.
When Rowan looked at Endirius through Revah’s Memory, including her present and her past memories of him, the image he saw was similar to what Endirius was showing to all who looked at him: a normal forty-year-old man with his head in the clouds.
When he looked at Endirius through Revah’s soul, it showed him something different.
The soul reveals the true nature of a person. Although Revah did not understand the nature of Endirius’s soul, a part of her could see the truth of him. Unfortunately, nearly all immortals in existence did not understand the nature of their souls, and they could not see the true nature of things that it showed them, but Rowan could see it. The soul, and Endirius was… a monster.
Rowan did not use that word lightly when he referred to a being; he was too old and had seen too much, and his experience had transformed, so the things he considered monstrous when he was a youth were now cute to him.
Endirius, even in the limited perceptive abilities of Revah’s soul, was not a man; the closest Rowan saw him as was a revenant.
His physical form did not change much in the soul’s sight of Revah; he still appeared to be the same man, except for the fact that he was not sitting on a throne made from white flames, but corpses.
His hair was bone white, and his skin sallow like spoiled milk. His eyes, which burned with a black flame, were set deep into his sockets, and he resembled an emaciated skeleton barely hanging on to life.
Nevertheless, Rowan had seen things that were much more grotesque than this, and this was not what made him refer to Endirius as a monster; that term emanated because of his eyes.
Inside the deep sockets of Endirius’s face were tens of thousands of burning black pupils, clustered so tightly together that at first his eyes resembled those of a monstrous fly.
These eyes looked upon all of Reality with a greed that would drive a lesser immortal insane. Every Mage sitting here had an eye trained on them, who looked upon them not as children or members of his assembly but as prey.
There was no love, pity, or consideration in those eyes, only a cold and calculating look that saw everything as food, and Rowan knew something else that had these eyes previously, and they were his Primordial Ouroboros Serpents.
His Will of Truth was triggered at this moment, and connections were made. With the addition of his enhanced state of being, a Truth came to Rowan—Endirius was a Primordial Beast!
This was unexpected, and of the many paths that Rowan had laid down in response to whatever happened inside this Realm when he began his operation, Endirius, being a Primordial Beast, was not one of them.
There were many reasons why this came as a shock to him when he had long concluded that every Primordial Beast had been killed and their remnants sealed away, they were far too dangerous to be let loose, but it would seem that the mysteries of the past were not so simple and the destruction of the Primordial Beasts had a deeper story behind it.
Plans began to change. Rowan had made a mistake, and now it was no longer a simple thing that was under his control. Andar and all the preparations he had made were not enough because a Primordial Beast was, at the least, a ninth-dimensional being!
Forget that Rowan was able to easily devour Divus with his serpents as a fourth-dimensional being, that the Primordial Beast had been sealed, and Rowan devoured only her Memory. Her soul and body had long been consumed; he only consumed a remnant.
Endirius was not a remnant of a Primordial Beast; perhaps he had been diminished in some ways, but Rowan still did not believe he could face it, at least not with the preparations he had made.
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