Chapter 185
The core of the laboratory.
The place where all research began had the number “001” written above the door.
The other sections he’d passed through all had different numbers, but this was the only one marked with a 1.
Naturally, what lay inside had to be special.
…Yet when he examined the interior, there were no traces of vivisection.
On the contrary, it was neatly organized.
It was completely empty.
‘So that’s the Transcender’s Artifact.’
Before arriving, Park Chanwoo had assumed the following:
An artifact that created such overwhelming Mana Interference—
It had to be some kind of wide-area defensive device.
Or perhaps armor or a shield.
But the only thing inside was a single book.
It was no ordinary book, though.
‘Mana is running wild.’
Crackle—
Crackling!
It floated in midair, radiating a storm of mana.
The concentration was so dense he could literally see it rampaging.
Unstable mana twisted together, spitting sparks.
Even outside the doorway, his skin tingled.
If he walked in carelessly, his entire body would burn.
Park Chanwoo opened the door and extended just one finger into the room.
Instantly—
“Ugh…!”
The exposed finger turned black.
Thud.
It crumbled to ash and dropped to the floor.
Super Regenaration immediately activated and restored it.
‘At this rate, I can’t even step inside.’
He stepped back and stroked his chin.
How had Ahetta entered this room to examine that book?
Something didn’t add up.
Ahetta, whom he’d faced directly as an Incarnation, was undoubtedly strong, but even he shouldn’t have been able to endure the mana pouring out of that Transcender’s book so easily.
The mana surging from the book was explosive.
The closer you got, the more it intensified, without limit.
So—
‘Ahetta could only endure it for a few seconds at most.’
At best, a few seconds.
Only Ahetta, the Master of the Moon, could have withstood it even that long.
He would have barely forced himself to turn a single page, glanced at what was written there, and then staggered back out half-dead.
Each attempt would have required dozens, maybe hundreds of days for his dying body to recover.
“…There was a reason he abandoned the lab.”
A laboratory he had painstakingly built.
Now, the reason he’d finally given up and walked away was clear.
There was no realistic way to continue the research.
The book was thick at a glance.
Easily over a thousand pages.
Which meant repeating that ordeal more than a thousand times, one page at a time.
Becoming half-dead, over a thousand times.
Even imagining it was insane.
For Ahetta, who treasured himself that much, it would have been even more impossible.
Each attempt would have meant months of lying on the brink of death.
Repeating a life-threatening act a thousand times over.
It was an undertaking beyond even so-called indomitable will.
You had to wonder if anyone like that could even exist.
“…Right.”
Park Chanwoo crouched down.
Because he had found a singular clue.
He stared at the finger that had burned away and fallen as ash.
It hadn’t burned like normal flesh.
If it were just fire, it should’ve shriveled as the moisture evaporated, but instead the finger had swollen.
On top of that—
‘Normally, it would disappear completely once it turned to ash.’
This was the Abyss.
When someone dies, they turn to ash and disappear.
His finger had already regenerated, so the severed finger should have vanished.
Yet it remained.
Retaining its shape.
Not only that.
There was the doubt he’d felt while passing through the laboratory.
A question that had grown louder the closer he drew to the core.
‘…The corpses stayed.’
Why hadn’t the corpses vanished?
Why were they still there?
He’d suspected the Transcender’s Artifact was the cause, but he hadn’t pinned down the mechanism.
The answer lay in the Transcender’s book itself.
The mana emitted by the book was preserving the corpses’ forms.
Or interfering with the very rules of the Abyss.
Either way, it was a fascinating phenomenon.
If it was the former, then Mana Interference was the cause.
‘The book’s mana is repelling the rules of the Abyss…’
If so—
If everything, even the space itself, was being pushed away by its overwhelming mana—
‘This isn’t Mana Interference. It’s Mana Repulsion.’
The swollen, burned finger.
The corpses that remained.
And—
‘Blood.’
Drip.
Blood belatedly trickled from the severed finger.
Only his blood hadn’t burned away or evaporated.
That, too, was strange.
Even when he’d been repairing the Golems, his blood hadn’t been affected by Mana Interference.
Only the mana permeating his blood had moved properly.
At first, he’d assumed that was simply what Mana Interference did.
He thought it couldn’t invade the pure mana residing in blood.
But Mana Interference only scatters mana; it doesn’t make the body swell or burn.
The swelling had happened because the mana had been repelled too violently.
The burning came from the same cause.
‘Coating myself in blood and going in might be one option.’
Of course, it wouldn’t be safe.
The slightest gap, and his entire body would burn and he’d die on the spot.
Even with meticulous preparation, it was hardly a method he could recommend to himself.
‘Why is my blood the only thing unaffected by mana repulsion?’
There was another inconsistency.
Park Chanwoo thought it through.
Ahetta must have wrestled with the same question.
The traces of vivisection behind him had clearly been attempts to enter this room and examine the book.
Killing and weaving different races into Chimeras, dissecting skulls—what had he been trying to achieve?
Why was Park Chanwoo’s blood alone free from mana repulsion?
The components that make up blood.
No—mana itself was pure.
Only the origin mana in the heart remained in the blood.
Park Chanwoo formed a hypothesis.
“The stronger the mana, the stronger the repulsion…”
Repulsion worked that way.
It reacted most violently to powerful mana.
By contrast, the mana dwelling in his blood wasn’t strong.
It couldn’t be.
‘Weakest. All basic stats are fixed at 1.’
The status abnormality carved into him: Weakest.
A curse that fixed every basic, pure stat at 1.
Naturally, his base mana in the blood was also just 1.
To be precise—
‘All impure mana in the blood has evaporated. Only pure mana remains.’
Only the mana that matched his 1-point pure stat had been preserved.
It was too weak to be repelled.
Ahetta had tried every method he could think of, but all had failed.
He created Undead, made Chimeras, removed organs—nothing worked the way he wanted.
Having a body meant having mana.
He could do nothing about the mana inherent in the body itself.
No matter how feeble a species’ body was, it could not be reduced to a single point of mana and still function.
And the moment Undead or Chimeras were affected by Ahetta’s own mana, an even stronger repulsion was inevitable.
Failure had been guaranteed from the start.
‘If my hypothesis is right, this lab is a place only I can enter.’
Park Chanwoo began turning his thoughts into action.
《’World Tree Staff’ has been unequipped.》
《’Star of Arrogance’ has been unequipped.》
《’Baal’s Sword’ has been unequipped.》
《’Baal’s Belt’ has been unequipped.》
《’Frost Han Helmet’ has been unequipped.》
…….
《’Mage’s Stone’ has been dropped. Additional mana options are no longer applied.》
《’Radiant Sage’s Stone’ has been dropped. Additional intelligence options are no longer applied.》
He forcibly unequipped everything he was wearing and disabled the tools he used.
But that still wasn’t enough.
《Title option application effects have been turned off.》
《All title option effects are no longer applied.》
Title effects could be toggled on and off.
That function existed because certain titles could interact in strange ways.
Soon—
‘All stats 1.’
…Park Chanwoo reverted to his starting state.
Sway—
He reeled for a moment, but shook his head and endured it.
All of his stats, including mana, had returned to 1.
‘I really was only staying alive thanks to bonus stats.’
His strength had come entirely from equipment and tools.
He had grown stronger purely off the stat options attached to them.
In other words, without the buffs from his equipment and tools, he was the weakest Weakest in the world.
He slowly extended his finger into the lab again.
Then—
“…No repulsion.”
He smiled faintly.
He’d never imagined that this primordial state would actually help him.
Just as he’d predicted.
Mana at 1 wasn’t repelled.
With all pure base stats fixed at 1—not just mana—the book’s repulsion didn’t trigger at all.
Right now, he was in worse shape than a terminal patient on the verge of death.
Even a newborn baby didn’t have all stats set at 1.
With that, every unanswered question fell into place.
Park Chanwoo walked calmly through the doorway.
Then, when he came to a stop right in front of the book—
Ting!
《’Transcendent Grimoire’ recognizes you.》
《Mana 1, the appearance of an existence that should not exist!》
《Checking your ‘Fame’.》
《’Transcendent Grimoire’ permits the ‘Honorable One’ to touch it.》
《’Transcendent Grimoire’ checks an additional ‘condition’.》
《All stats are 1.》
《…This can be called another meaning of ‘Transcender’.》
《You have met the release conditions for all ‘seals’ that should never be released.》
《The ‘hidden piece’ applied to ‘Transcendent Grimoire’ is activated.》
《’Ahetta’s Laboratory’ temporarily transforms into ‘Transcendent Abyss’.》
《’Transcender’ appears.》