[CH598+ Continued] Dungeon Diver: Stealing A Monster's Power

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, deep in the heart of the Association's Central Headquarters, a muscular man with bright red hair and a matching beard walks in circles in a large golden room.

His footsteps are light, almost like skips, and the air around him is full of silky yellow-white Divine Energy.

The room is hundreds of meters wide and dozens of meters high, yet it is extremely plain inside.

There is a single entrance and exit point, and on the other side of the room, there is a golden throne with a staircase leading up to it.

At its base, many tables and chairs lie empty, as though many speeches for a very important crowd have been spoken here in the past.

But now, the man walks in circles with a devious smile on his face at the opposite side of the room.

He mutters to himself as he thinks of grand plans, occasionally showing his mental breakthroughs in the form of massive displays of bright yellow flames emanating from his palms, tethered to their core with dense divine energy. Yet, once they hit the room's golden walls, the flames dissipate in an instant.

Even when the divine fireballs are thrown in seemingly random directions, headed toward the throne and stairs at the back of the room, they too are absorbed by the golden material, and the flames never disrupt the solid state of the room.

Deep below this golden coating, dense black stone lines the entire room and even makes up all of the artifacts within this tyrant's palace.

Not even the strongest flames of a True Core have any effect on the unique S-Grade shielding.

The man stops his pacing and pulls out an obsidian black cube with three bright yellow crystals on its face. He presses one of them, which burns the brightest.

"Shall I send out the scouts and prepare for a base to be built in the Dark Continent? The time is near..."

He smiles while pulling his finger from the crystal but holds the device in his palm as he continues to walk around the empty golden hall, leaving nothing but the light crackle of bright yellow flames that cover his body and the sound of his footsteps to fill the silence of the great room.

A few minutes go by, and the red-haired man gets back into a rhythmic display of walking in circles and thinking before another click sounds on the transmission device.

—

In a room coated in a dazzling silver lacquer, of a similar size to the last, there is another throne at its back with an identical staircase leading up to it.

However, everything below the first few steps is submerged in a super-cooled liquid that flows like water but has the white coloring and temperature of ice. Divine threads surge through the material, and they only manage to stay inside and not radiate out to the outside world because of the same dense black stone that lines this room.

Atop the throne, swirling the pool of divine energy beneath her, a woman sits with white hair buzz cut extremely short, and a muscular build that still holds the mystique of feminine curves. She wears nothing but a skin-tight glossy black material that covers portions of her body. It wriggles and moves to randomly expose areas of her striated muscles, feeding off the True Core's excess divine power.

It appears to be alive, made of originator stone, draining her divine core's essence as it wraps around her chest, legs, and shoulder to cover her vitals like armor.

The woman's white eyes stare at the black device on the arm of her throne that blares out the sound of the red-haired man's question.

She lets out a sigh and raises a finger in the air, and the immense pool of white liquid ice swirls faster and faster at the base of the room until it all flows back into her finger, disappearing as if it was never there.