It was a box that, from the outside, could hardly be called ornate.
Inside the box was a long, twisted stone. Because its shape was so abstract, Gauss did not even realize at first that it might be a statue.
Only after Identification produced a result did he react.
"What exactly is this thing?"
Gauss blinked.
The result given by Identification was as follows:
"A strange statue. Perhaps you can use it to communicate with a certain great existence?"
The identification result was extremely simple, but also vague.
One had to understand that this kind of vague identification result, without a clear direction, was itself a kind of direction.
Because generally speaking, only special items would prevent Gauss from identifying clear, specific information.
But there was also a contradiction here.
Since this thing had been placed in the juvenile dragon nest as part of the dragonlings' hoard, if it were truly something good, Gauss did not believe it could have escaped the notice of the adult green dragon behind them—the one named Aesselas.
As an adult dragon, Aesselas could not possibly have no interest in treasures, artifacts, and similar items.
Even if the juvenile dragons had obtained it by chance, there was a very high probability the Green Dragon Queen would have confiscated it.
So rationally speaking, Gauss had never expected to find any truly high-value collection in their dragon nest.
His best expectation had only been to take some scraps and leftovers that the Green Dragon Queen looked down on and exchange them for a few gold coins.
He did not reach out to touch the statue in the box, whose form and shape were both extremely unclear, like something kneaded from clay by a child.
He was being so cautious for two reasons. First was the implication of the identification result. Second was the instinct he had developed after coming to this world. In a world with gods, Evil Gods, demons, and devils, it was best to be extremely careful when facing objects like this.
The unknown often represented danger.
Besides, if it were not something good, then it made sense for the Green Dragon Queen Aesselas to leave it in the juvenile dragon nest.
Either she intended to use this eerie statue to trick an outsider like him, or the Green Dragon Queen herself was wary of it but unwilling to abandon it, so she compromised by leaving it in the juvenile dragon nest. Or perhaps she had some other unknown intention.
Especially since she was a green dragon who liked to use her brain and scheme whenever she had nothing else to do, rather than a red dragon whose head was practically packed with dead muscle, the probability of there being something fishy behind this, in Gauss's eyes, was undoubtedly soaring.
The moment Gauss identified it, he wanted to stay far away.
But he quickly realized that even if he avoided it now, it was probably already too late.
Besides, many days had already passed since he obtained this item.
If it was a blessing, it was not a disaster. If it was a disaster, he could not avoid it. It would be better to calm down and think about how to deal with this statue.
First of all, he definitely did not want to communicate in any way with the "great existence" that might be connected to the statue. Therefore, not only could he not touch it with his hands, he also could not attach his spiritual power to it.
"Right. Eden, you need to be careful too."
Gauss specifically warned the intangible spirit beside him.
Most of the time, Eden was "asleep." Only when something interesting happened, or when Gauss woke it up, would it become active around him.
Just like now, it had been startled awake by the statue.
"All right. Gauss, you be careful too."
"It gives me an ominous feeling. Very dangerous."
Eden had lived for so long, reincarnating from a human into a Demon King species, so naturally it understood the principle of seeking benefit and avoiding harm.
"This is loot from the dragon nest?"
Eden asked curiously.
In truth, it roughly understood the situation, but it was confirming with Gauss.
"Yes."
"Then maybe it points to Tiamat," Eden made a reasonable guess.
After all, this was something looted from chromatic evil dragons. Surely it would not point to the Platinum Dragon God. The most direct association was naturally the god of chromatic dragons.
"But it's hard to say. Green dragons are sinister creatures. Maybe they also came into contact with some other strange powers."
Gauss actually had the same guess.
The greatest possibility was Tiamat. After that came unknown Evil Gods, demons, devils, and the like. There was only an extremely small possibility that it involved some orthodox god.
Communication was impossible. So should he abandon it, leave it alone, hand it over to someone else, or destroy it?
It seemed that only these four paths lay before Gauss.
Either he could treat it as nonexistent and bury it in some remote corner of a mountain, abandoning it. That probably would not cause too much impact.
When he became strong enough in the future and had more relevant information, he could dig it back out and investigate the secrets behind it.
If he worried that some other creature might dig it up and cause negative consequences, he could also store it in one of his storage bags. But carrying it around with him also carried unknowable risks.
Handing it over to someone else was easy to understand. He could submit it to the guild. The guild always had knowledgeable experts who might know the statue's true background. At worst, they would still be able to handle it much more safely than he could.
The only downside to this route was probably that any possible benefit the statue might bring would also be handed over.
As for the final path, that was destroying it himself.
Based on what Gauss knew, the higher-dimensional a power was, the harder it was for it to affect the material world. One could understand that simply by looking at the flowers, grass, trees, and the world around him.
This was already the world of life, not the world of gods.
If gods could interfere in the material world as they pleased, miracles in this world would not be as rare as they were now. Whether orthodox gods, Evil Gods, or demons and devils who tempted people's hearts, all of them would have descended to display miracles for followers and divine power, turning the earth into pastures and fighting over resources.
Therefore, destroying some creations that might point toward gods was not necessarily as difficult as imagined.
Perhaps the simplest physical destruction would be enough: smashing it, burning it, corroding it with acid. The exact method would depend on the material.
But in that case, he did not know whether it would involve some special causality. Perhaps he would be targeted by an Evil God again.
In the end, Gauss still decided to choose the safest third method: hand it over to the Adventurers' Guild for handling.
Handling it himself was too dangerous, and if he handled it improperly, it might also bring danger to others.
Just as he made up his mind and prepared to carefully put away the mysterious stone statue, intending to transfer it to Guild President Matthias Monroe in a few days, the flow of time around him suddenly seemed to slow.
Gauss was very familiar with this feeling.
It was the state he entered when activating Future Sight.
It was not that time had slowed or stopped, but that his spiritual world was thinking too quickly, making everything appear frozen.
What happened?
The incident came so suddenly that Gauss was also stunned.
He had not deliberately activated Future Sight.
He sensed carefully and soon discovered that his powerful brain had entered an abnormally excited state. Under its unconscious high-speed operation, the world he perceived had begun to fall still.
Tracing it to the source, Gauss quickly found the "culprit."
It was the white egg hidden deep inside his body, which had remained concealed for a long time and almost had no sense of presence.
Scenes of his contact with the white egg flashed through Gauss's mind one by one.
That pure white egg had flown toward him out of nowhere in a certain black forest and actively merged into his body.
The scene from that day was still vivid in Gauss's mind. The entire forest had fallen into a riot.
However, the white egg had entered slumber at the time. It only showed some signs of awakening again when he awakened the racial talent of the Ironscale bloodline.
Its next movement appeared when Gauss's team, together with the trio of the dwarves Solin, Elton, and Nancy, were carrying out a certain secret commission and passed through Rollingstone Village, which had been cursed by a demon. That time, after killing the demon's kin, the white egg also seemed to absorb a stream of energy.
"I wonder if that cursed village is doing all right now."
Gauss's thoughts could not help drifting away.
Although he had killed that demon's kin back then, he had not had the ability to resolve the deeply rooted curse entwined with the villagers' fate.
As long as time passed, the demon's kin would return to that land again.
Perhaps he could go back and check on its current state if he had the chance.
Gauss drew back his wandering thoughts and returned to the white egg.
Afterward, he and Solin's group of three entered some barren ruins. When facing the aura of the Evil God Laduguer, the white egg erupted with an intense hunger. Ultimately, while erasing the Evil God's aura, the white egg also devoured a vast amount of evil energy, and he and his teammates benefited greatly from it.
It was also that experience that made Gauss finally confirm that the white egg possessed some ability to promote biological evolution.
After that, the white egg helped him suppress Hephaestus, who at the time was still an enemy dragon-beast, and used unknown golden chains to establish a special link.
The most recent time was also the most subtle.
So subtle that even he could not confirm whether it had truly been the white egg's doing.
That was when his Intelligence broke through to 21 a few days ago and awakened the Future Sight ability. At first, a strange power from a higher dimension had surged from within his body, ultimately forming some kind of special reaction that allowed him to grasp this time-related ability under powerful spiritual stimulation.
In other words, without its enlightenment and help, even if Gauss's spiritual power had advanced greatly after breaking through 21 Intelligence, he might have mastered some other special ability instead, rather than this powerful ability involving time.
Was it you?
In truth, Gauss could not be sure. There were simply many secrets on his body.
The Adventurer's Manual, the blessings of the two gods—Lake God Moterra and Snow Mountain Spirit Esvel—the world rule fragment, Dragon King's Bloodline… Every power might involve higher-dimensional forces.
However, among the many possibilities, Gauss faintly felt that the connection with the white egg seemed strongest.
Until the scene before him.
Nine golden chain phantoms, which had once been used to bind the drake Hephaestus, pierced out from Gauss's abdomen.
The instant the chains thrust out, the time and space around Gauss seemed to freeze.
Gauss's pupils slowly widened. Perhaps because he was also a participant in this process, even if he was not the one leading it, he could still deeply feel the mysteries within.
This freezing was not the kind of stillness created by his accelerated thoughts. Compared to the frozen space-time before him, he had at most borrowed a superficial trace of that power.
He and the space around him seemed to have been forcibly extracted and separated from a vast world.
"Hephaestus, are you there? Eden?"
Whether Hephaestus, who had telepathy, or Eden, who could communicate spiritually, both had their connections to Gauss severed at this moment.
Inside was inside. Outside was outside. Two completely different spaces had formed.
No method from outside could affect the inside of the space, and the reverse was also true.
Gauss seemed independent of the world.
Clang, clang, clang—
Vaguely, Gauss heard the sound of impact beside his ears. It was the vibration of the golden chains.
The nine golden chains struck out together, then precisely bound the mysterious statue in front of Gauss like pythons.
Crack, crack, crack!
The golden chains continued wrapping around it, eventually tightening around the statue and binding it into a sealed golden chain sphere without a single gap.
Threads of energy were flowing backward along the chains, surging into Gauss's body.
Gauss first felt a chill, then sensed a familiar energy.
Divinity Factor!
Sure enough. He had known that the existence behind this most likely could not be separated from gods.
At the same time, beyond the world, in the outer domains, vast territories had long ago been transformed into dwellings by the gods above. In a certain divine kingdom, a majestic divine body slowly awakened.
For an existence like this, within Its own divine kingdom, time had already lost meaning.
Its vast divine consciousness seemed to sense something and cast its gaze toward a place outside the divine kingdom.
Within an extremely active giant bubble, It seemed to detect a power that caused Its heart to stir.
But in the next moment, It fell into rare confusion.
That trace of stirring lasted only an instant before vanishing without a trace.
It lifted a claw and seemed to lightly slice through the void before It. Time inside the divine kingdom began to reverse.
Within their own divine kingdoms, gods possessed nearly absolute authority. They could even easily reshape rules according to their will.
And naturally, this included control over time.
"Gone?"
Yet even after the god unleashed divine power and reversed the flow of time inside the divine kingdom, attempting to trace back that brief strange stirring, It still found nothing.
Was this because too much of the material world's source was involved, leaving divine power unable to act?
Or did it involve the power of those few beings?
Facing this rare situation, even a god would feel confused.
It was indeed difficult for It to exert too strong an influence on the material world. But this kind of almost barbaric deprivation of any related divine knowledge from It was something It had likely not experienced in millions of years, if measured according to material-world time.
But whichever it was, it clearly cut off any further pursuit.
The former was a forbidden zone for gods.
And if it was the latter, then among the beings It knew of, only a handful could accomplish something like this.
Every one of them, if named individually, was a supreme existence capable of dragging It out of Its divine kingdom and devouring It alive.
Thus, even though It realized that some important causality closely related to It must have occurred, It still had no choice but to suppress all thoughts about it.
Every thought related to this was completely stripped away from Its divine knowledge at that moment.
Whether in Its past, present, or future, not the slightest trace remained.