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

The text covering the walls, floor, and ceiling continues to glow bright yellow even after the room falls back into silence while the ancient voice echoes through my mind.

I think carefully about the voice's words. It speaks in vague terms, but with its emotions streaming through me and a rough translation coursing through my mind with the full power of my true core backing it, many connections with past conversations—with Pluto the demon, the saint, Raven, Celia, and even Ember—all surface in my mind.

This wave it speaks of must be referring to the phenomena of the system connecting to this world.

Its repetition of the word *light* must mean some kind of power source, but I'm unsure if it's referring to divine energy, or mana, or something entirely different.

Though, the fact that it talks of there not being enough light for everyone to leave the physical world sounds extremely similar to the ascension of a demon lord.

Not wanting to ask too many questions at once, I respond out loud with a simple, open-ended question to see what kind of being I'm dealing with right now.

"Who—or... what... are you...?"

My index finger stays touching the artifact, and small amounts of threads continue to drain out of me, but in return, my mind perceives exactly where the threads are going.

They ripple through the walls of this room, spreading through the statue's skull, and moving throughout the enormous being lodged into the ocean's floor.

Its voice echoes back into my mind, this time sounding more coherent and natural rather than the animalistic metallic rhythmic noise from before.

"I am Atom."

This name echoes through my mind as I feel my own memories being sifted through, while I, too, see a fast-moving slideshow of this same statue, completely white, standing atop an ancient world, watching beams of light all over the globe flash and disappear.

I watch clouds fly by, and the yellow sun rotate above the sky hundreds, then thousands, and millions of times before I lose count.

The only thing I can see is the white statue's color fading, turning slightly darker, and the worlds around it shifting and changing.

As millennia pass, trees and wildlife build up sediment, and the feet of the statue are slowly covered in dirt. The plants and beings that grow around the statue often show stronger-than-average abilities, accidentally absorbing the trace amounts of white energy that seeped off the massive artifact.

On many other points around the globe, similar artifacts give off the same energy, and religions are born praising the larger-than-life giant that watched over them all.

As years pass, powers grow and fall, but no intelligent life ever matches the heights of what the Originators built.

The shifting of continents, volcanic activity, and heavy rainfall create an age of massive oceans on this world, covering the statue up to its knees.

The oceans freeze over, melt, evaporate, and more life grows in the dry plains around a dormant statue that watched an ancient race leave this planet for the stars millions of years ago.

The coloring of the statue begins to turn even darker—gray, in fact—and the speed at which the sun rises and falls moves too fast to comprehend and the memories become fuzzier.

Countless ice ages, floods, species, and world-ruling races rise and fall, and each time the statue grows darker, and the planet devours it slowly in more ways than one.

All that remains is the jet-black hand reaching out of the sea, with yet again, a society of the planet's ruling race congregating around it while the statue watches time sweep by.