Pioneer Relics and the True Face of the Old Continent

The Hunter Pioneer fell backward without a sound, his body twitching as his divine essence collapsed. Rosen didn't let his guard down. Instead, he raised his Dragon God's Wrath again, locking onto the corpse through the painting. The second shot fired, traveling through space once more and completely annihilating the remnants of the Hunter Pioneer's divine consciousness.

Only then did Rosen step out of the Mysterious Study Room. The battlefield was already silent. The Hunter Pioneer had spent the last of his strength capturing new pets, only to be executed before he could even make use of them. Even in death, his body remained standing like a withered tree, an eerie testament to his unnatural vitality. Rosen approached cautiously, scanning the corpse with his Divine Vision before extending a hand to retrieve the relics.

A black, tattered longbow, heavily eroded by time. A broken quiver, empty of arrows. And a finger bone wrapped in countless faded runes, radiating a strange sense of eternity. These were all the belongings of the Hunter Pioneer. Rosen examined them one by one, feeling the traces of history left behind.

The longbow was a Sequence 2 miracle artifact, Night Stalker's Grasp. It possessed the terrifying ability to fire arrows that ignored all defenses, bypassing barriers, armor, and even divine shields. However, its condition was poor, its divine inscriptions faded—perhaps due to the countless sacrifices the Hunter Pioneer had made over the years.

The broken quiver was nothing more than an ordinary relic, once capable of generating miracle arrows, but now devoid of power.

The finger bone was the most unusual. As soon as Rosen touched it, countless fragmented images flooded his mind—memories of the Old Continent, of forgotten battles, of gods who had long since vanished. It was a relic carrying the weight of history itself.

After some thought, Rosen activated the ability of the Secret Tome Chamber, extracting the remaining traces of divine essence from the artifacts and storing them within the Mysterious Study Room. He then took out his Miracle Palette, dipping his brush into god-tier pigment made from the Hunter Pioneer's divine remnants.

Soon, a new painting was complete—The Last Hunt. It depicted the Pioneer standing alone atop a mountain of slain beasts, his back facing an eternal sunset.

Rosen let out a breath. The hunt was over. But deep down, he knew—the Old Continent was far from done with him.

Even though it was just a single bullet, that bullet was a Judgment Bullet forged from the divine soul of the Goblin Deity. Coupled with the spiritual painting drawn through the Hand of God, which directly attacked the mindscape, the already weakened divine essence of the Hunter Pioneer was completely shattered by that shot. However, at that very moment, a fleeting light flashed across the Hunter Pioneer's body.

A moment ago, he had just died, but now, he had instantly resurrected at full strength.

The Hunter Pioneer didn't hesitate for even a second—he turned and bolted, frantically fleeing toward the depths of the Old Continent.

Rosen frowned slightly and immediately began painting a prophecy.

In fact, before he fired that shot, he had already attempted to paint a prophetic image. However, just like the previous one, he was unable to depict the Hunter Pioneer in the painting. That meant the Hunter Pioneer carried a formidable power that interfered with prophecy. Whether this power came from an external source or was his own ability remained unclear.

When the prophecy painting was completed, the Hunter Pioneer still did not appear in it. However, the scene depicted was a world devoid of ash—most likely a fragment of the Spirit Realm. So, was the Hunter Pioneer fleeing toward a Spirit Realm fragment?

That last Judgment Bullet had consumed the soul of a deity.

Rosen only had one more left—the bullet forged from Chinon's divine soul.

This was one of his most valuable trump cards. However, the Hunter Pioneer had no way of knowing how many such bullets Rosen possessed. In his mind, Rosen now posed a threat on par with a deity.

If the Hunter Pioneer was fleeing toward that Spirit Realm fragment, then whatever awaited there was at least dangerous enough to threaten a god.

"I can't let him reach that Spirit Realm fragment."

Rosen quickly weighed the pros and cons and reached his decision.

Letting the Hunter Pioneer escape would allow him to discover a new Spirit Realm fragment.

But if the dangers within that fragment exceeded his ability to handle, greed would only lead to disaster.

Rosen aimed Dragon God's Wrath at the Hunter Pioneer's portrait and fired multiple Judgment Bullets, each created from the souls of Sequence 1 Ashborn beings. Through the painting, using Death Judgment, he sent every bullet straight into the Hunter Pioneer's mindscape.

With the battle occurring directly in his mindscape, the Hunter Pioneer had no divine domain to defend himself. It was a completely one-sided assault, and he had almost no means of resistance.

Finally, after fleeing tens of thousands of miles, he collapsed at the edge of a desert.

Rosen activated Godslayer's Eye to lock onto the Hunter Pioneer, then used Void Eye to open a miniature wormhole. Through that wormhole, he sent his World Domain over, enveloping the severely wounded and near-dead Hunter Pioneer before bringing him back.

Using Mind Canvas to project his psyche, Mind Reading to scan his consciousness, and extracting memories from his blood and brain—Rosen used every method at his disposal to dig out all of the Hunter Pioneer's memories.

The Hunter Pioneer had no name. Even he didn't know his own name.

His memories were divided into two parts—the time after he became an Ashborn and the period when he regained his clarity.

He didn't know how he had turned into an Ashborn. All he knew was that after becoming one, he had wandered the Old Continent aimlessly.

Until one day, he accidentally consumed a fragment of a god's divinity.

That fragment belonged to the Wisdom Dragon God. With the power of that divine fragment, the Hunter Pioneer gradually regained his intelligence, though he never recovered his past memories.

From then on, he began searching for more fragments of the Wisdom Dragon God's divinity throughout the outer edges of the Old Continent.

And over the past ten thousand years, he had indeed managed to find a few more pieces.

Then, as his intelligence gradually recovered, fragmented memories of his past began to resurface bit by bit.

This time, the Hunter Pioneer had set his sights on Rosen not because he had been hunting many other pioneers, nor because he had slaughtered vast numbers of Ashborn beings, but because Rosen carried fragments of the Wisdom Dragon God's divinity. That was what had drawn the Hunter Pioneer's attention to him.

The Hunter Pioneer had regained his intelligence for over ten thousand years, and in that time, he had learned far too much.

Through capturing outsider demigods and piecing together his scattered memories, he had deduced that he was once a pioneer of the Hunter Sequence.

For the past ten thousand years, the Hunter Pioneer had repeatedly attempted to find other intelligent beings. But the only place he ever found them was within the fragments of the Spirit Realm.

The few intelligent beings that existed there never dared to leave.

Because the moment they left a Spirit Realm fragment, they would lose their intelligence.

In fact, because he was one of the few beings in the Old Continent capable of retaining intelligence, the Hunter Pioneer had suffered countless attacks from Spirit Realm creatures.

Over time, his paranoia grew, and he became increasingly distrustful of all other beings.

He had also studied the faceless snake-headed creatures—the pioneers of the Actor Sequence.

At first glance, these Actor Pioneers seemed intelligent.

But in reality, they had no true intelligence of their own.

The intelligence they exhibited actually came from the human transcendents whose heads had been grafted onto their necks.

So rather than calling it a case of parasitic control, it was more accurate to describe it as a mutual assimilation.

However, once assimilation was complete, the newly born consciousness and sense of self underwent an irreversible transformation.

After roughly piecing together the Hunter Pioneer's life, Rosen began meticulously sifting through his fragmented memories.

Through these memories, Rosen discovered that these Sequence Pioneers had not become pioneers of their own free will.

They were all created in laboratories controlled by deities.

He also realized that the outermost edges of the Old Continent housed only the pioneers of human Sequences.

But within the inner rings of the Old Continent, almost every race had its own Sequence Pioneers.

It was clear that not only human deities but deities of all races had conducted various experiments to derive the potion formulas for their respective Sequences.

After Viska's Alchemy Laboratory, this was the second dark secret of the World Government that Rosen had uncovered.

Or to be more precise, it was a dark secret shared by nearly all deities in the Main World.

It wasn't hard to imagine just how cold and indifferent these deities were.

But upon further thought, Rosen found this to be the most natural thing in the world.

Deities did not die of old age—none had ever been known to perish from time alone.

With near-infinite lifespans, many deities had lived through multiple civilizations, creating them with their own hands, only to later destroy them.

After enduring such vast stretches of time, they had likely long since stopped caring about the life and death of anything other than themselves.

The World Government's deities had never built human civilization for the sake of humanity.

The two thousand years of stability and prosperity existed solely because they benefited the deities.

Aside from gods, anyone below them was no more than an insect in their eyes.

Since mortals were destined to die sooner or later, why would it matter how they died? Or how much they suffered?

At that moment, Rosen finally understood how one should truly interact with deities.

Everything came down to profit.

Beyond that, nothing—no morals, no emotions, no bonds—held any meaning to them.

After stripping the Hunter Pioneer of everything valuable, Rosen finally granted him a swift death.

He hadn't even activated Vengeance Judgment, yet by sheer luck, a loot sphere still formed.

There were a total of five loot spheres. When crushed, they yielded a large fragment of the Wisdom Dragon God's divinity, the Hunter Pioneer's transcendent essence, a large amount of divine crystal shards, a Hunter Skill Crystal, and—unexpectedly—a miracle artifact.

Rosen picked up the miracle artifact. It appeared to be a beast-taming whip.

[Beast-Taming Whip: Miracle Artifact]

[Rank: Sequence 1]

[Miracle Attribute: Can forcibly increase the loyalty of tamed beasts through whipping]

[Miracle Traits: Beast-Taming Space, Nurturing, Wild Frenzy, Sole Existence, Eternal and Indestructible]

For a hunter, this was an incredibly practical transcendent artifact.

Its miracle attribute allowed one to tame transcendent creatures.

The Beast-Taming Space enabled the storage of tamed beasts.

The Nurturing trait accelerated the growth of tamed beasts.

And finally, the unique miracle trait Wild Frenzy allowed a beast to temporarily burn its own life force, instantly dispelling all negative effects and unleashing several times its normal combat strength.

Rosen naturally couldn't bear to use it on his own pets.

But for temporarily captured beasts? There was no reason to waste the opportunity.

After refining the whip, he looked inside the Beast-Taming Space and found that there were still nine Sequence 1 Ashborn creatures within it.

It seemed that this whip had likely formed when the Hunter Pioneer's core transcendent power, along with his beast-taming transcendent artifact and related skills, had merged together—fulfilling the conditions for a miracle artifact to be born.

At first, Rosen intended to keep it for himself.

But after some thought, he decided to send it to Fala via Data Transmission.

Fala was stationed in the Radiant Kingdom year-round, but the kingdom lacked a strong enough foundation.

At the very least, it did not possess a proper national treasure-tier transcendent artifact.

Now that Fala had the Beast-Taming Whip, even if a deity launched a surprise attack on the Radiant Kingdom, she could rely on the whip's nine Sequence 1 Ashborn creatures to hold the line until Rosen arrived.

Next, Rosen picked up the Hunter Crystal, and his eyes lit up.

Self-created skills were undoubtedly valuable.

But that didn't mean pre-existing skills were inferior.

And this skill had been developed and perfected by the Hunter Pioneer over ten thousand years.

He immediately stored it away, planning to integrate it into his transcendent essence when he advanced to Sequence 2.

Then, he took the large Wisdom Dragon God divinity fragment and brought out the smaller one he already possessed.

Combining the two, he realized that the fragments in his possession now amounted to over one-third of a complete divinity.

It seemed the Wisdom Dragon God had fallen in the Old Continent after all.

He had previously assumed it had perished in the Dragon God Continent.

But thinking about it now, if it had fallen there, then Holy Light Dragon God would have surely collected more fragments.

And in that case, there was no way Holy Light Dragon God would have willingly exchanged one of the fragments for the Dragon Binding Cord crafting method.

If he continued searching in the Old Continent, he might be able to find more fragments.

But considering that the Hunter Pioneer had spent ten thousand years searching and had only gathered one-third of the divinity, Rosen had no intention of wasting tens of thousands of years on this.

Besides, if Holy Light Dragon God had obtained a fragment—possibly from the Old Continent—then other gods and even true deities might have acquired pieces as well.

Perhaps there were no more fragments left in the Old Continent's outer regions, which was why the Hunter Pioneer had turned his attention to Rosen's.

Rosen continued examining the Hunter Pioneer's transcendent artifacts, only to find that their value was actually rather low.

The Hunter Pioneer had no skill in crafting transcendent artifacts.

He could only rely on his Hunting Authority to slay creatures and obtain loot.

Alternatively, he scavenged equipment from Hunter Sequence transcendents who had ventured into the Old Continent.

However, after encountering numerous powerful foes over the years, many of his artifacts had been damaged, leaving him with almost no intact high-quality transcendent gear.

Although the transcendent artifacts themselves were mediocre, the sheer volume of stored transcendent resources was astonishing.

After all, this was an accumulation spanning ten thousand years. Even though the Hunter Pioneer had been stuck at Sequence 1 and couldn't use many of these high-grade resources, he had still collected them as he went. The total value of this wealth easily rivaled that of an entire deity's fortune.

Finally, Rosen picked up one Sequence 0 and one Sequence 6 transcendent artifact.

The Sequence 0 artifact came from a deity—the Hunter Pioneer had once used Sacrificial Hunting to kill a Sequence 0 being inside a Spirit Realm Fragment. He had originally planned to use this kill to break through to Sequence 0, but after failing, all he had left was this artifact.

It was the Dwarven King's Warhammer, a miracle artifact capable of greatly increasing the chances of successfully forging transcendent artifacts.

In the hands of the Hunter Pioneer, this weapon had been utterly wasted.

Within the World Government, its value far surpassed that of ordinary Sequence 0 miracle artifacts.

Rosen was temporarily unable to refine the warhammer himself.

Otherwise, he would have already given it to Amy.

Amy, as a Mech Fantasy Sprite, had the profession of Mechanist. While this wasn't a perfect match for a blacksmithing tool, she could still utilize at least sixty to seventy percent of its potential.

Once Rosen reached Sequence 2, he would be able to forcibly refine it and hand it over to Amy for use.

Next, he examined the Sequence 6 miracle artifact.

Initially, he didn't think much of it—until his eyes suddenly lit up.

[Ashen Emblem: Miracle Artifact]

[Rank: Sequence 6]

[Miracle Attribute: The Ashen Emblem grants perfect concealment within the protection of doomsday ash.]

[Miracle Traits: Ashen Eye, Unique in Heaven and Earth, Eternal Indestructible]

This artifact was born within the Ashen Veil.

The Hunter Pioneer had likely relied on this very item to evade the foresight of Rosen's Prophetic Paintings.

Its sole miracle trait, Ashen Eye, allowed the user to see through the Ashen Veil without any obstruction.

With this Ashen Emblem, it was essentially like unlocking full-map vision in the Old Continent, removing the fog of war.

Whether it was searching for Spirit Realm Fragments, hunting for hidden resources, or avoiding danger, this artifact made moving through the Old Continent effortless.

Despite its relatively low Sequence rank, its practical value in this region was immense—so great that if it were made public, deities from all factions would likely fight to the death over it.

"Let's see what the Old Continent really looks like. Why is the Hunter Pioneer's memory limited only to the outer regions?"

Rosen deployed a divine projection of his Godslayer's Eye, sending it higher and higher in an attempt to get a full aerial view of the Old Continent.

After several hours, he activated Ashen Eye—and was greeted by a terrifying sight.

The entire Old Continent stretched in a long, narrow formation.

The Old-Day Outpost was merely located in a small corner at the very edge of the land.

The first third of the Old Continent—the area closest to the Old-Day Outpost—was littered with countless Ashborn creatures and ruins left behind by ancient civilizations.

The middle third of the Old Continent, however, contained something even more horrifying—an enormous corpse that stretched nearly across the entire landmass.

This corpse was bound to the earth by countless chains of ashen energy.

And in the deepest third of the Old Continent—far beyond the corpse—Rosen saw something he had never expected.

There were thriving civilizations.

Numerous nations.

Countless living beings.

The Ashen Veil was, in fact, a seal.

And its purpose was to suppress this massive corpse.

Given the sheer cost of maintaining such an enormous seal, there was an extremely high probability that this was the corpse of a Great True God.

And not just any corpse—one that refused to decay, one so dangerous that even the World Government had chosen to abandon the Old Continent entirely just to keep it locked away.

But that raised another question—where had these civilizations deep within the continent come from?

Did the World Government know that nations had formed beyond the sealed corpse?

Or… were these civilizations somehow connected to the corpse itself?