The Bloodline Crucible sat still on the pedestal inside the deepest chamber, massive tubes attached around it carrying a grey liquid unlike the red one that had been filling Project X, the grey mixture flowing steadily into the Crucible through the pipes connected along its sides.

Inside the Crucible was the ruin’s boss monster, and it looked nothing like an ordinary monster, two horns jutting from its forehead, its body so broad it occupied nearly every inch of space inside the Crucible, muscles layered over muscles with that deep red skin covering all of it, its current form already pushing the boundaries of what a living thing should look like.

But... that wasn’t the most surprising thing about it, the most notable thing was that it was floating in a curled position with its knees bent and its arms wrapped around them, compressed into the upper portion of the Crucible while the lower half remained empty except for the grey liquid pooling there.

That empty space was shrinking, because the monster was growing, its body slowly expanding as it absorbed the liquid through its skin, its legs beginning to extend downward and fill the space that had been empty moments before.

"Hehehe! Master Veyron was right! We have achieved a success in our experiment! Hahahaha!!"

A man standing a meter to the left of the Crucible broke into laughter, his eyes fixed on it as the sound of it filled the chamber, his expression carrying the kind of excitement that came from someone who had been waiting far too long for a result and had finally gotten it.

"Most of us were dead along the way to make this experiment a success but now...now after a century it has finally shown the result we wanted! Haha...hahahahah!!" He laughed again, dressed in the same kind of lab attire Veyron had been wearing back in the human continent laboratory.

He turned to his left where a floating Monocle sat a meter away, its size too large to be called an ordinary monocle but that was the closest word for it, inside it a reading had surfaced that he was looking at intently, a progress bar sitting there showing 60%.

He grinned at that and spoke again, "Huhuhu, the Boss monster is mutating really fast, I have to escape this place when it reaches 80%...tch, Master Veyron could have given me the control Relic at least."

He turned back to the Crucible, watching the monster’s red skin deepen further in colour and the muscles begin pushing outward even more than they already had, and he spoke with that same manic energy, "Hahahah! I hope the others in the other continents haven’t been found and are running their experiments properly! It would be a spectacle to see mutated Ruin Monsters unleashed across the whole world! Hahaha!"

The laughter echoed off the jagged stone walls of the chamber and came back at him from every direction.

He checked the Monocle again, 61%, and grinned, "Huhu, let’s organize everything and get out of here, hahaha! All those Angels on that route will be slaughtered by this now-S-rank monster! Hahaha!"

He moved with a frantic energy toward each of the tools arranged across the chamber floor, touching each one with a ring on his thumb finger, not a decorative ring, not one that looked particularly dangerous or impressive, just a large plain ring sitting on his thumb, but the moment it touched each tool the tool was sucked directly into it, disappearing entirely, the ring functioning as a storage relic, and not a common one either, a relic of that kind of storage capacity could only come from a Divine-rank Ruin, the kind of ruin that most people in the world didn’t even know existed yet.

Fifteen minutes passed as he went through every tool he had brought into the chamber, touching each one and watching it vanish into the ring, until only the Crucible and the pipes attached to it remained, the liquid no longer flowing into it because the tool that had been generating and pumping the grey mixture was now inside the ring.

The Crucible didn’t need more liquid anyway, because it was already filled to the brim and the Monocle was now showing 73%, the progress accelerating on its own from the amount already absorbed.

The white haired old man brought his face close to the Crucible’s surface, his skin lit from below by the still-active glow coming from inside it, and grinned, "Good good! Now just waiting remains!!"

He turned toward the Monocle next, didn’t touch it with the ring this time, instead tapped it once with his index finger and it shrank down to actual monocle size with a sound,

FWOOOOM, and he picked it up and fitted it over his right eye, checking the progress bar through it immediately, 78% and climbing fast.

"Haha! Knew it, that Special Dose would come in handy!" His voice filled the chamber again.

Then he turned toward the exit of the chamber and didn’t stop moving, he had lived long enough to know the exact point at which something catastrophic was about to stop being containable, and that point was close, so regardless of how excited he was he moved, because being inside the chamber when the Crucible broke was not something even he wanted to experience.

He exited the deepest chamber, walked through the ruin’s inner corridors, and came out of the ruin’s entrance into the forest outside, and the moment he was out he turned left instead of right, away from the visible route that stretched in the distance to the right, going directly into the dense forest instead.

He wasn’t here as a registered Explorer or through any official channel, he had no reason to use the public route, and more importantly the forest path to the left, even with the monsters that moved through it and the possibility of Angelic border guards at the far end, was safer than the route because it would let him travel without being seen, and it connected eventually to a path that would take him back to the Human Continent where he needed to report the success to Veyron.

He disappeared into the trees.

Inside the deepest chamber behind him, the Crucible began to shake, a tremor running through its structure as the grey liquid remaining inside it was suddenly drawn into the monster all at once, every last drop of it absorbing through the skin in one rapid pull.

The next moment the Crucible’s glass cracked, the fractures spreading outward from the center in every direction, and the pipes attached along its sides cracked open with them.