Even after merging with his older self's thousand years of accumulated knowledge, forbidden secrets, and deep understanding of Ian Prince's mysterious power, the young Saruman couldn't stop his face from going completely blank with shock and confusion.
The freezing turbulence of the void? He understood that.
His body trembling instinctively from the strain of the fusion and the tearing forces of space-time? That made sense, too.
But...
"Newcomer"?
"This batch"?
"Best physical condition"?
Put those phrases together with Ian Prince's deadpan expression and matter-of-fact tone, and Saruman was left facing a statement that defied every logical and linguistic framework available to him, whether as his younger self or as a wizard carrying a thousand years of experience.
He simply couldn't make sense of it.
A thousand years of wisdom spun into overdrive, desperately searching for some hidden meaning.
Was Ian mocking him?
Testing him?
Was this an ancient coded phrase Saruman had never encountered, or perhaps specialized terminology regarding the laws of space-time?
Nothing. He found absolutely nothing.
The literal meaning of Ian's words was almost childishly simple. Yet given the circumstances and the identity of the person saying them, they were so absurd that Saruman had no idea how to interpret them.
He opened his mouth to respond, then realized he had no idea what to say. Wearing a blank, slightly vacant expression, Saruman could only stare silently through the freezing, trembling void at the young Legendary standing before him.
It was a rather one-sided staring contest. Ian looked perfectly comfortable, while Saruman was experiencing a total breakdown of comprehension.
Then Ian looked at him more closely. "Haven't I seen you somewhere before?"
Two people from different eras. Two lives whose paths had once crossed long ago. Now, in this moment, they intersected once again. A tale that should have belonged solely to ancient history, to Saruman's distant past, had somehow reconnected with the story unfolding around Ian.
Such was the wonder of the magical world.
---
At this point, perhaps it was time to shift perspectives, and turn the clock back five minutes. Back to our actual protagonist.
Ahem.
The moment Ian stepped into the magic formation…
To Ian Prince, the one-sided "cleanup" in central R'lyeh City and his subsequent analysis of the magic formation hadn't been anything special.
The creatures blocking his path were merely noisy obstacles that needed removing, and analyzing the formation was just standard procedure to gather the information he needed.
The moment the final rune, infused with his will and magic, locked into the array core and forcibly activated the ancient teleportation mechanism, Ian knew he'd found the right place.
Violent torrents of energy. Tearing spatial rifts. Space-time storms capable of grinding ordinary matter down to its fundamental particles.
To a normal person, this would have meant certain death, and even most Legendary Wizards would have considered it hopeless. To Ian, it was merely a somewhat bumpy passage to his destination.
Unlike Saruman and his companions, Ian wasn't helplessly dragged into the turbulence or tossed around by spatial forces.
The instant the brilliant light erupted, his Domain unfolded around him, a realm of absolute self and absolute order, independent of any external laws. Like the hull of an indestructible submarine, it isolated him from the surrounding chaos.
Ian simply followed the path opened by the formation, descending deeper into the strange dimension at a steady, uninterrupted pace.
Before long, he came to a stop in a deeper layer of space, distorted by the combined influence of R'lyeh's madness and ancient magic. The place wasn't truly empty; it was more like amber formed by forcibly mixing reality with nightmare, order with chaos, and letting the result solidify.
Ian's vision filled with warped masses of color that defied conventional geometry. They slowly writhed, merged, and split, producing a low-frequency hum capable of driving a person insane.
Occasionally, fragments of scenes swept past like broken memories: the spires of a sunken city, the shadow of an impossibly colossal creature, stars arranged in blasphemous patterns.
There were many others, but every image was fleeting and blurred, disappearing as quickly as it appeared.
And the "air", assuming air was even a meaningful concept here, was saturated with an aura of madness far more intense and primal than anything Ian had encountered in R'lyeh City itself.
These were dream fragments unconsciously leaking from the sleeping ruler of the Great Old Ones, Cthulhu.
A single trace would have been enough to drive an ordinary wizard mad, but to Ian, it was little more than background noise to filter out. If anything, it offered useful data for analyzing Cthulhu's current condition.
"So this really is its lair."
Ian narrowed his eyes slightly. His immense mental power spread outward in every direction like a hyper-precise radar, scanning the structure of the realm for weak points, energy nodes, or perhaps traces left behind by other "visitors."
"It's far too obvious. Cthulhu's main body must be sleeping somewhere here."
Ian's objective was simple: locate the core where Cthulhu slept, then, while the stars were unfavorable and its power was suppressed to its lowest point, carry out what he considered just another item on his schedule.
As for the three little "tails" following behind him...
Ian had noticed them long ago. From the moment they hid outside R'lyeh City like frightened rabbits, to their attempt at discreetly tailing him through the wreckage of his battle, and finally to hiding behind a pillar while watching him decipher the magic formation, everything they did had been glaringly obvious within his vast mental perception.
He hadn't even bothered looking at them directly. While deciphering the array, a mere passing thought had sent a 'Psychic Blast', strong enough to crush ordinary mental defenses, silently sweeping over their three trembling souls.
Young Saruman's thirst for knowledge, anxiety, and carefully hidden pride. The warrior Kag's loyalty, despair, and determination to protect his comrades.
And the pain wracking the soul of the girl named Lina as deep-sea corruption slowly twisted her. Their memories, emotions, and intentions were like pages of an open book to him, and Ian had casually flipped through them.
'So they're an adventuring party that stumbled into the ruins by accident, got trapped in the Infinite Corridor, had a companion corrupted, and are now looking for an exit...'
Ian had quickly pieced the situation together.
'And they think I'm their best chance of escaping, or at least someone who knows the way.'
His interest had immediately faded.
Still, the fine virtues Hogwarts had instilled in him kept him from doing anything to stop them.
Besides, as long as they didn't interfere, he couldn't be bothered to drive them off. It was like walking down a path: you didn't go out of your way to step on every ant you passed, unless, of course, they started crawling up your shoes.
So when the formation reactivated and the three of them were swept into the space-time turbulence by the wild aftershocks, Ian hadn't particularly cared.
He had even shifted the edge of his Domain slightly, ensuring the stray energy leaking from it didn't accidentally vaporize them.
It wasn't because he considered senseless killing distasteful or anything of the sort. Ian was simply a very merciful person.
---
"They followed me in."
Sensing a slight disturbance at the teleportation coordinates he'd left behind, Ian realized something had entered through the passage he opened. He paused his scanning and turned toward the source.
Sure enough, three familiar figures were tumbling helplessly through the chaotic currents of energy like drowning swimmers: the young silver-robed wizard, the muscular warrior, and the barely conscious, corrupted girl on his back.
They looked utterly miserable, terrified, battered, and completely out of their depth.
The young wizard in particular wore a tangled mix of emotions: pain, relief at surviving, and unmistakable shock at seeing Ian again. For some reason, the sight stirred a nostalgic, almost instinctive streak of mischief in Ian.
He suddenly recalled something from a very long time ago, a memory from another life, buried so deep in the past it felt entirely detached from his current existence. There was an old opening line people used to love quoting.
Looking at this young wizard, who was clearly bewildered yet fighting to keep his composure, the line felt strangely fitting.
After all, Saruman really was the first to regain consciousness.
Indulging in a bit of the childish mischief that still surfaced within him on occasion, Ian waited until the silver-robed wizard steadied his mind and looked up, his silver eyes somehow appearing immeasurably older in an instant.
Ian spoke calmly, imprinting the playful words directly into Saruman's mind:
"Cold. Shivering... Looks like you're the one in the best physical condition among this batch of newcomers."
---
The reaction was even better than expected. Ian watched Saruman's face freeze instantly and saw the sheer confusion flashing through those silver eyes.
He could even sense the frantic churning within Saruman's soul as a thousand years of accumulated wisdom tried to analyze the hidden meaning behind his words, only to draw a complete blank.
The utterly baffled look on Saruman's face brought a subtle flicker of life to this dead, maddening interdimensional void.
"Haha."
His joke successfully delivered, Ian lost interest in watching Saruman struggle to decipher a line that was never meant to make sense. His attention shifted back to the three arrivals, more specifically, to the young wizard who had just undergone that bizarre soul fusion.
Saruman.
From Ian's perspective, Saruman's spiritual state was fascinating. Originally, the young man had been talented enough to touch the threshold of Legendary status, but his soul was fundamentally still mortal.
Yet during those brief moments in the temporal turbulence, something had changed.
His soul core seemed to have been forcibly injected with a massive spiritual essence, ancient, weathered, and bound by an almost unimaginable obsession. It wasn't possession; it was closer to a profound fusion and awakening. In an instant, both the scale and quality of Saruman's soul had jumped by several orders of magnitude.
And there was something else, something that didn't belong in this era. A strange weight of accumulated age, as though part of his soul had arrived from the distant future.
"The scent of time..." Ian's eyes narrowed slightly. "And a trace of the Raven?"
A faint ripple passed deep in his gaze. Ian was exceptionally sensitive to temporal disturbances, and he was familiar with certain ancient entities that wandered the boundaries of space-time.
Whatever had just happened to the young wizard's soul clearly involved high-level temporal interference.
It was a mild surprise. Apparently, these three little "tails" carried secrets even he hadn't anticipated.
Still, that was as far as it went. Whatever strange encounter Saruman had experienced, and whatever had merged with him, Ian still viewed their decision to enter this realm as recklessly foolish. They had no business being here.
Ian's gaze swept over the three of them. Saruman was trying his best to hold himself together; Kag looked tense and desperate, keeping Lina securely shielded on his back; and Lina's life force was fading by the second, the corruption on the verge of swallowing whatever remained of her humanity.
Finally, Ian's eyes settled back on Saruman. He easily picked up on the anxiety hidden in those silver eyes, along with a subtle trace of fear, the look of someone holding a secret they were never meant to learn.
Then Ian spoke, his calm voice echoing through the strange interdimensional space and projecting straight into their minds.
"You..." He paused, as if simply stating a matter of fact. "...really shouldn't have followed me in here."
---
Those words struck Saruman like an icy death sentence. Whatever composure he'd managed to piece together after the soul fusion instantly shattered.
From Saruman's perspective, this mysterious, terrifying young Legendary had first uttered something utterly baffling, then inexplicably laughed to himself. He couldn't read the man at all. And now Ian was telling them directly that they shouldn't have followed him.
Given the overwhelming power Ian had displayed earlier and his apparent coldness toward life, Saruman could interpret the statement in only one way.
It was a death sentence. Ian thought they were in the way, they had witnessed secrets they shouldn't have seen, and now, in an unknown Space-Time Rift where no one would ever discover the truth, he was going to casually erase three insignificant ants.
Memories inherited from a thousand years in the future flooded Saruman's mind: enemies effortlessly snuffed out by Legendary beings, lives rendered entirely meaningless in the presence of higher entities. Fear coiled around his heart like an icy serpent.
After all, he still wasn't the Saruman who had physically lived through those ten centuries. He possessed the memories, but lacked the battle-hardened instincts and judgment built from surviving them.
His face drained of all color, looking even worse than he had during the agony of the soul fusion. His lips trembled uncontrollably as he tried to explain, to plead, or at least to say something, but his throat locked tight.
All he could do was stare into Ian's cold, seemingly emotionless eyes and feel the shadow of death creeping over him.
"What happened?!"
Kag snapped back to consciousness right then. He didn't catch any deeper meaning behind Ian's statement, but he could clearly feel the raw terror surging from Saruman's soul, not ordinary fear, but an instinctive dread rising from the depths of his being.
"Don't worry! Legendary or not, if he wants to kill either of you, he has to go through me first! That's a warrior's oath!"
Kag growled, immediately pulling Lina behind him and raising the shattered remains of his greatsword. He knew full well the broken weapon was useless against the Legendary before them, but his warrior instincts compelled him to take one last stand anyway.
Or at least... what 'he' considered a stand.
For a moment, a despairing silence settled over the warped interdimensional space, broken only by the silent writhing of the indescribable colors in the distance. Saruman's heart pounded so hard it threatened to burst from his chest.
"...?????"
Ian stared at them.
Saruman looked like his entire family had just died and he expected to be turned into paste at any second, while Kag was striking a tragic, heroic last stand.
Ian was utterly baffled.
He had literally just stated a simple, objective fact. Why on earth were they looking at him like he had personally murdered their mothers?
He genuinely couldn't make sense of it. Then again, that was probably what happened when people viewed the exact same situation through completely different lenses.
Clearly... Saruman and the others had drastically misunderstood him.
(End Of This Chapter)
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