Left alone in the hollow silence of the sanctuary, Izayoi stood for another minute, listening to the void. The ghost had vanished, but the sensation of an alien presence—that divine mana—hadn't gone anywhere. It had soaked into the stones, into the air, into the very dust beneath his feet.
"Well then," he said aloud, rolling his neck. "The tour was educational, but it's time to get some fresh air."
He turned his back to the statue and headed in the direction where, according to architectural logic, the exit should be. The passage was long, dark, and led upward on a gentle slope. Izayoi walked confidently, his footsteps echoing off the walls, until the corridor hit a dead end.
Or rather, not a dead end, but a barrier.
Before him loomed a massive stone slab, about five meters high. Its entire surface was etched with a complex script of glowing blue runes. This wasn't just stone—it was a seal. A multi-layered magical defense created by humanity's greatest mage so that no one could enter... and, apparently, leave.
Izayoi walked up to the slab and knocked on it with a knuckle. The sound was dull, dense.
"'Visualization,' you say?" he muttered, recalling the mage's words. "So, if I imagine this thing is as brittle as a cookie..."
He didn't assume a combat stance. He didn't concentrate his qi or look for weak points in the spell's weave. He simply drew his right arm back.
For Izayoi Sakamaki, the world was divided into two categories: things that can be broken, and things that can be broken if you hit them a little harder.
"Sesame," he drawled lazily. "Open up."
Impact.
Fist met stone.
For a split second, the runes flared with blinding azure light, attempting to absorb the kinetic energy. The magic of an ancient era howled as it clashed with a physical anomaly—the indomitable power hidden in a teenager's body.
CRA-A-A-ACK!
The sound was as if the firmament itself had split. The barrier couldn't hold. It wasn't calculated for brute force of this magnitude. The three-meter-thick stone slab simply exploded from the inside.
Shards of granite, turned into shrapnel, shot outward, mowing down bushes and stripping bark from trees for a hundred meters ahead. A cloud of dust and magical sparks burst from the passage like a genie from a bottle.
Izayoi stepped into the opening, waving away the cloud of stone grit.
"Too much drama for one door," he commented, stepping out into the light.
Bright sunlight hit his eyes, making him squint for a moment. The air here was different—fresh, humid, filled with the scents of earth and greenery.
He found himself in the middle of a dense, wild forest. Giant trees, their crowns interlocking somewhere high in the sky, created a green twilight. Roots, thick as ship cables, entwined everything around.
Looking back, Izayoi whistled.
The tomb he had just exited wasn't a building. It was a hill, completely swallowed by the forest. The entrance had been buried under earth and roots centuries ago. If not for the hole he had just punched, no one would ever have guessed that humanity's legacy lay hidden beneath this mound.
"Not bad camouflage," he appraised. "Nature does its job better than any illusions."
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, switching his perception. Sight, hearing, touch—his senses expanded, scanning the surrounding space.
Quiet. Too quiet for a normal forest, but natural for a sacred place. Not a soul. No signs of human habitation, no sounds of battle or the presence of sentient beings. Only the rustle of leaves, the call of small birds, and the scuffling of rodents in the undergrowth.
But there was something else.
Izayoi felt it on his skin—a thin, barely perceptible vibration in the air.
"A barrier," he stated.
He sensed a perfectly shaped dome covering this place with a radius of about a hundred meters. It was the same energy that radiated from the Goddess statue—soft but unyielding. It wasn't hostile. Rather, it was a filter, diverting the eyes of outsiders. "There is nothing here, move along"—that was what this magic told anyone who approached.
For an ordinary mage or demon, this barrier would be invisible and intangible. But for Izayoi, whose perception was honed to find anomalies, it was as obvious as a glass wall.
"Foolproof and spy-proof," he nodded to himself. "Smart. Flamme knew her stuff."
He bent down and picked up a simple dry branch from the ground. Just a piece of wood fallen from an ancient oak.
"Well then," Izayoi twirled the branch in his fingers. "No map, no GPS signal, and the guide quit. That leaves the old-fashioned method."
He stood the branch vertically on a flat stone, holding it steady with a finger on top.
"Wherever it falls, there lies adventure," he smirked. "Don't let me down, navigator."
He removed his finger.
The branch swayed, froze for a split second, choosing a destiny, and fell smoothly, pointing its sharp end to the northeast, where the trees stood slightly less dense, letting in sunbeams.
"There, right??" Izayoi adjusted his blazer and strode confidently in the indicated direction, stepping over giant roots. "An excellent choice."
A couple of hours later, the sun began to dip toward sunset, painting the forest in alarming crimson tones.
Izayoi sat on a fallen tree trunk, lazily turning an improvised spit over a fire. The flames crackled merrily, licking at a huge chunk of meat dripping with fat. It smelled surprisingly appetizing—something between chicken and expensive fish.
"A bit tough," he muttered, tearing off a piece of roasted flesh with his teeth and chewing thoughtfully. "But for a first dinner in a new world, it'll do. The local fauna is nutritious, at least."
He glanced at what remained of the dinner's "source." The massive, coiled carcass of a snake, as thick as a barrel, lay in the bushes nearby. Its scales, shimmering with a metallic sheen, were mangled around the head area, as if a freight train had slammed into it.
Izayoi chuckled, recalling the encounter.
It happened almost immediately after he left the range of Flamme's barrier. The moment he stepped over the invisible line, the "silence" of the sacred place was replaced by a cacophony of life. His heightened senses, no longer held back by the magic filter, instantly picked up dozens of signals: heartbeats, rustling, growling, the smell of blood and musk. The forest that had seemed empty was actually teeming with predators.
Curiosity, as always, took over, and he headed toward the source of the loudest noise.
In a small clearing, he found a scene worthy of the Discovery Channel, if they broadcast monster battles. Two giants were dividing territory. On one side—the very snake whose meat he was currently finishing. On the other—a bear. But not an ordinary grizzly; a monster four meters tall, its hide covered not just in fur, but in strange crystalline growths pulsing with dim light.
"Whoa," Izayoi had appraised back then, stepping into the clearing without even trying to hide. "What do you have here, a radioactive waste leak? Or is this the local piercing trend?"
Both beasts froze. Four eyes—two yellow vertical pupils and two bloodshot bear eyes—stared at him.
They assessed him. Small. No fangs. No claws. No visible magical aura
The verdict was unanimous: "Not a threat."
The bear snorted, losing interest, and turned back to the snake, preparing to charge. The snake simply ignored the bipedal misunderstanding, focusing on the larger opponent.
They turned away. They just went ahead and crossed him out of the equation.
Something clicked inside Izayoi.
"Ignoring a guest? How rude. Guess nobody taught you manners."
He smiled. But there was no warmth in that smile.
For a split second, he let his essence "leak" out. He didn't attack. He simply released "bloodlust"—a pure, concentrated promise of violence. It was as if the temperature in the clearing instantly dropped to absolute zero, and the air became heavy as lead.
The reaction was instantaneous.
The Crystal Grizzly, being a mammal with a more developed brain, howled. Its instincts, honed by years of survival, screamed a single word: "RUN." It didn't check to see what was in front of it. It simply turned around and, snapping bushes like matchsticks, bolted away at a speed a sports car would envy.
"Oh, I'm so flattered," Izayoi praised. "Smart bear, he'll live long."
But the snake was less lucky. Its reptilian brain, driven only by hunger and aggression, interpreted the threat differently. It didn't run; it attacked.
The massive maw flew open, revealing fangs the size of daggers, and the snake lunged at him in a death strike.
"And you—are stupid," Izayoi stated, not even taking his hands out of his pockets.
When the monster's head was a meter away from him, he simply lifted his leg and, with lazy grace, brought his heel down on the creature's skull.
CRUNCH.
The strike was calculated. He didn't smear it across the ground, but the kinetic wave passed through the bone, turning the snake's brain into jelly before it even realized it had died. The carcass collapsed at his feet, twitching in a final convulsion.
"For that, you're becoming dinner," he had concluded then.
And now, sitting by the fire and finishing off the result of "natural selection," Izayoi stared into the flames.
"Monsters, magic..." he mused aloud, tossing a branch into the fire. "Flamme didn't lie. This world really does live by the laws of power. And that... is damn pleasing."