The Primordial Record novel Chapter 997

Chapter 997 Threshold of Consciousness

Time lacked meaning for him but it was still everything in situations like this where every single second counted.

Rowan could feel the pressure mounting against him, being this helpless was not a pleasant feeling, and although he was falling behind, the most difficult part of the puzzle had already been solved, what was left for him to do was to accelerate.

Ignoring his impending demise, Rowan began stretching his consciousness powers to the limit, actively creating new and inventive methods to utilize the little he had to work with while solving the ginormous puzzle before him.

He did not want to just react to any new problems that came up, he also wanted to predict them whilst actively seeking new and inventive methods to finish the runic arrangement.

He created thousands of techniques he would never have bothered with before due to his consciousness power just to give him even a fractional edge in this deadly race, and slowly his speed of breaking the runes began to compound. Deciphering the Supreme Circle had given Rowan an edge when it came to situations like these, but he had never been so… diminished even while inside the Tenebris armor. He was working with barely five percent of the power of a single consciousness pillar.

This amount of consciousness power would make him equal to a god or an Archmage, but the puzzle he was actively solving would take countless millennia for a god to solve, and with the speed he was been devoured, he barely had a century.

He pushed ahead, disregarding the grueling work ahead, no single part of him was focused on doubts or fear, everything was being channeled into solving this puzzle and there was a small part of him that sensed his mounting doom and felt… thrilled.

At the precipice of death, everything became simpler. There were no dying mothers, no scheming kin, and no pursuit for power, there was only the work in front of you, and knowing that failure was the end.

Rowan squashed this part of himself who was enjoying this trial. Death was a release that he was not going to fall for. There was too much riding on his success. He had come too far to be taken out by a faceless blob at the bottom of the earth.

In another ten years, he had reached fifteen percent completion, yet the flesh swallowing him had devoured him by half, and Rowan began to sense a new side-effect when half his body had already been swallowed, his thought processes began to slow down.

Such an outcome was not truly unexpected, Rowan had anticipated that there could be a second, third, or fourth stage to this devouring process and he did not panic, he simply adjusted his mental calculation speed, using techniques he had been creating in advance for such an outcome, and so instead of slowing his speed of thought by nearly eighty percent he only lost thirty percent of his mental acuity still keeping him in the fight.

He continued with the process of deciphering the runes, pushing his progress up to forty percent in another ten more years, but nearly sixty percent of his body had been swallowed. This was both good and bad news, Rowan was catching up, but the problem was that he did not know even if he succeeded in breaking the runic language, if it would be enough to rescue him from this devouring. Whatever he had encountered was clearly not meant for anyone who had just arrived on this star.

He doubted if anyone was even supposed to have breached the earth to such an extent to be able to reach this existence hidden below the ground.

However, these were concerns for later because he had far more pressing needs, his thought process was becoming more sluggish the more of him was consumed, and he had nearly reached his limits on how he could block this attack. There were limited strategies he could use to fight against this invasion using the resources he had on hand.