"Please tell me I'm hallucinating…" Magellan's voice trembled, caught somewhere between awe and disbelief, as his eyes struggled to comprehend the impossible vista before us.
We stood within the belly of Bonbori—and yet, nothing about this place resembled the grotesque, fleshy nightmare one would expect from the insides of a mythical beast. Instead, before us stretched the sediments of half-corroded landmasses, remnants of islands Bonbori had swallowed over the course of countless centuries. These weren't merely ruins entombed by time—they were survivors.
It was as though shattered islands from different eras had fused together, forming a vast, unnatural continent. Calling it survival would be an understatement. This land was alive. No—it was thriving.
An entire ecosystem had taken root here, evolving in isolation from the outside world. Towering ferns and twisted trees clung to mineral-rich rock, their roots burrowing deep into ancient stone and bone alike. We spotted creatures that should have been nothing more than fossilized legends—dinosaurs, their massive silhouettes prowling the terrain as if extinction had never touched them. These ancient monsters had adapted to Bonbori's merciless interior, becoming apex predators of a world forgotten by the sun.
The air itself felt heavy, dense with heat and minerals. Beneath our feet, the ground subtly pulsed, as though the land were breathing in sync with the beast that housed it.
In the distance, a vast inland sea churned—the diluted stomach acid, stretched across the cavern like an ominous ocean. It rose and fell with rhythmic tides. Whenever Bonbori swallowed water from the outside world, colossal waves surged through this acidic sea, reshaping coastlines and devouring anything foolish enough to linger near its shores.
And yet, life endured. Though no sunlight ever pierced this abyss, the cavern was far from dark. Colossal, vein-like bioluminescent organs lined the walls and ceiling, glowing in eerie hues of violet, amber, and sickly green. Their light flickered slowly, like a heartbeat, casting long, shifting shadows across the land. It felt less like standing inside a creature… and more like walking through a forgotten world sealed within a living god.
"You really think a human could survive in a place this harsh…?" Magellan turned toward me, his brow furrowed. He wanted to believe my words—I could see that much—but the idea itself bordered on madness. To imagine someone enduring this hellscape alone, not for days or years, but for over a century, was so illogical it defied reason.
"At first," I said slowly, "it was nothing more than a possibility." I paused, letting my gaze drift across the living continent before us. "A gamble. A faint chance I wasn't willing to dismiss."
Then I smiled. "But now that I've seen this place with my own eyes… I'm certain."
I raised my hand and pointed toward the distant plains, where a herd of dinosaurs moved as one—colossal silhouettes trudging through the glowing mist, their footsteps echoing like rolling thunder. To Magellan, the scene appeared ordinary by this world's standards: ancient beasts roaming an ancient land.
But to me, one of them was wrong. The creature walked with the herd, matched their pace, mimicked their posture. Its hide bore the same scars, the same layers of hardened scale stained by acidic tides and time. The disguise was almost flawless—so perfect it had fooled the dinosaurs themselves, creatures whose instincts had been sharpened over millions of years. They had accepted the imposter as one of their own, unaware that something alien walked among them.
I didn't need to say it out loud. Beneath that monstrous exterior was a human. The very one I had come searching for. A madman—or a legend—who had dared to venture into Bonbori's belly willingly, abandoning the outside world to survive in the gut of a living god. Magellan followed my gaze, his eyes widening ever so slightly.
"…You're telling me," he whispered, "that's not a dinosaur?" I lowered my hand, my voice steady.
"That," I said, "is the person we came here to rescue."
Without waiting for Magellan to speak, I stepped out into the open. I emerged from behind a towering slab of stone, its surface half-corroded by centuries of erosion and stomach acid, and began walking casually toward the dinosaur herd—as if this nightmarish world were nothing more than familiar ground.
The moment I crossed into the open plains, the land reacted. This foreign world had never known humans.
Creatures of every shape and size froze mid-motion. Smaller species scattered instantly, skittering away into the glowing undergrowth with panicked cries. Others—thick-skinned grazers feeding on bioluminescent ferns—shifted their massive bodies uneasily, muscles tensing beneath scarred hides. Some continued grazing, but every one of them kept a wary eye trained on me, instincts screaming that I did not belong.
I ignored them all. My steps never slowed as I moved closer to the dinosaur herd, their thunderous forms looming larger with every stride. They still hadn't noticed what truly threatened them. But it had noticed me.
From beyond the herd, where jagged stone met the acidic sea, something massive stirred.
A shadow rose—too large, too deliberate to be mistaken for part of the terrain. The predator stood upright, unfolding to its full, terrifying height.
Over thirty meters tall. Its body was a grotesque masterpiece of evolution—thick, armor-like scales layered with scars, spines jagged as broken spears lining its back. Its head alone was larger than a warship, crowned with bone ridges and eyes that burned with predatory intelligence. This was no ordinary dinosaur.
It was an apex tyrant of a forgotten time—an Indominus-like behemoth, perfected by centuries of survival inside Bonbori's belly. Moments ago, it had been stalking the herd with surgical patience. Every step calculated. Every breath controlled.
Then I appeared. The herd stirred, unnerved by my presence—and in that instant, they noticed the predator. The hunt was ruined. The colossal rex let out a deafening roar, the sound tearing through the cavern like thunder ripping the sky apart. Bioluminescent organs flickered violently in response, casting chaotic shadows across the land. Rage burned in the beast's eyes—not just hunger, but fury at its stolen kill.
Its gaze locked onto me. The ground shook as it charged. Each step shattered stone and sent shockwaves rippling through the plains. The herd scattered in blind panic, massive bodies colliding as they fled—but the predator ignored them now. Its jaws spread impossibly wide, revealing rows of teeth longer than spears, saliva and acidic mist pouring from its maw.
It wasn't hunting anymore. It was lashing out. Intent on erasing the insignificant creature that dared disrupt its domain. Magellan's distant shout was swallowed by the roar of the charging titan as the rex lunged, jaws descending, fully intent on swallowing me whole in a single bite. And yet— I didn't stop walking.
Thirty meters of perfected annihilation thundered toward me, jaws wide enough to swallow ships, fangs glistening with acidic saliva. The land cracked beneath its weight, shockwaves tearing through stone and bone alike.
And then—I stopped and simply exhaled. That was all. The world snapped. An invisible pressure detonated outward from me, a force not born of muscle or flesh but of something far older—dominion. The air warped, screaming as if crushed by an unseen god's hand. The bioluminescent organs lining the cavern flared violently, then dimmed, as though bowing in submission.
The rex's eyes widened. Not in rage. But in primal terror its species had never known until today. Mid-stride, its massive body betrayed it. Thirty meters of unstoppable momentum met an immovable will. Every instinct carved into its DNA—every predatory law etched by millions of years—screamed a single, impossible truth: Run.
Its muscles locked. Its heartbeat stuttered. The beast's killing intent shattered like glass, replaced by raw, primal fear. Legs meant to crush mountains buckled beneath it as the creature froze in place, momentum tearing it forward even as its mind begged for escape.
The titan slammed into the ground. Stone exploded outward as its body skidded helplessly across the plains, carving a trench through ancient rock. Claws scraped uselessly, trying—failing—to regain control. Its roar died in its throat, reduced to a broken, strangled whine.
The predator was no longer charging. It was falling toward me. I took one step forward. Casually, almost bored, I lifted my leg and placed my foot against its snout. The impact was gentle. Final. The rex stopped dead, its colossal frame shuddering beneath my foot. Thirty meters of apex supremacy brought to a halt by a single, unremarkable motion.
The beast did not resist. It couldn't. Sweat poured from its scales in thick rivulets, its entire body trembling violently. Its jaws quivered inches from my leg, teeth chattering as its breath came in panicked, uneven gasps. A sound escaped its throat—small, pitiful—a whimper. Like a scolded pup.
Every cell in its body screamed to flee, to burrow into the earth, to erase itself from the presence of the true monster standing before it. Yet it remained frozen, pinned not by strength… but by absolute fear. Around us, the world was silent.
The dinosaurs lay flattened against the ground, unconscious or trembling. Lesser creatures had collapsed outright, wills extinguished in an instant. Even Bonbori's cavern seemed to hold its breath. I looked down at the rex, unimpressed.
"…You should've stayed hidden," I said quietly. The beast whimpered again, eyes glazed, spirit utterly broken. Somewhere behind me, Magellan couldn't speak. Because he finally understood.
This wasn't dominance. This was sovereignty.
"Go on…" I said calmly, lifting my foot from the trembling snout beneath it. "Find some different prey to play with today."
The pressure lifted. The beast didn't wait for permission. With a broken cry, it scrambled to its feet, claws tearing into the ground as it fled—thirty meters of terror retreating into the glowing haze, vanishing without once daring to look back.
I turned toward where the herd had been. There was nothing. The plains were empty, the earth still scarred by panicked flight. Dust and bioluminescent spores drifted slowly through the air, settling like ash after a battle that had ended before it truly began.
All except for one. A small dinosaur stood alone at the far edge of the plain. It hadn't moved. Hadn't blinked. Frozen mid-step, as if time itself had forgotten it. But I could see it now—clearly. The posture was wrong. Too rigid. Too deliberate. Beneath the layered scales and hardened hide, something else stood upright. Something that did not belong to this world of claws and fangs.
A human. Myskina Acier.
Beneath the grotesque, masterfully crafted disguise, he stood motionless, his body locked, his mind struggling to process the impossible. A man who had survived more than a century inside the belly of a living god—long enough for solitude to carve deep fractures into even the sharpest intellect.
His brilliant mind—once capable of bending logic and invention to his will—now stalled, gears grinding uselessly as reality collapsed in on itself. His eyes trembled. Then he laughed.
"I must be hallucinating…!" he muttered, voice cracking as the sound rose higher. "Yep… yep… that's it. That's how it is." The laughter grew louder, echoing unnaturally across the empty plains.
"How could a human be here…?" he roared, clutching at his head as if trying to tear the thought free. "After all this time—after more than a century alone—of course this would happen!" His laughter broke into something jagged, unhinged.
"I must've finally gone insane! Hahaha! That's it—that has to be it!" He threw his head back and cackled into the glowing cavern, the sound carrying the weight of endless years spent talking only to beasts and shadows. A man who had adapted so completely to this monstrous world that the return of his own kind felt more unreal than the dinosaurs he walked among.
To him, the impossible wasn't surviving here anymore. The impossible… was us. And as his laughter echoed through Bonbori's living abyss, it was painfully clear—after a century in isolation, even truth now wore the face of madness.
Even after several long moments, the human before him did not vanish. I kept walking. Step after step, my boots echoed softly across the scarred plain, the sound steady—real. Acier's laughter faltered, then died entirely, leaving behind a hollow silence that pressed against his chest.
If this was a hallucination… Why wouldn't it end?
Doubt crept in. Slow. Relentless. By the time I stopped, we stood only a few feet apart. Close enough that he could hear my breathing. Close enough that the truth had nowhere left to hide. Then I spoke his name.
"Myskina Acier."
The sound of it struck him like a physical blow. His body jerked. The name echoed through his mind, reverberating across empty years—through centuries of solitude where even his own identity had begun to fade. There were nights when he couldn't remember it. Days when it felt like it belonged to someone else entirely. I called it again, firmer this time.
"Myskina Acier."
He didn't respond. He couldn't. He stood there, broken and trembling, desperately grasping for something solid—anything—to anchor himself back to reality.
"I've come a very long way to find you," I said gently. "And I'm truly glad you managed to survive this hell for more than a century, Professor."
Slowly, deliberately, I extended my hand. To Acier, the gesture felt strange—foreign—yet painfully familiar. A motion he had once known intimately. A symbol of greeting, of trust, of human connection. Something his world had been devoid of for far too long. His breath hitched.
After a few agonizing seconds, his hands rose to his head. With clumsy, trembling fingers, he unlatched the hardened seams of the dinosaur disguise and lifted it away. The mask fell to the ground with a dull thud. Revealed beneath was the man time had nearly erased.
Myskina Acier was plump, his body bloated not with indulgence but survival—shaped by a century of strange diets and adaptation to Bonbori's unnatural ecosystem. His clothes hung from him in tattered layers, patched and repatched with scales, sinew, and plant fibers—once fine garments, now little more than relics of another life.
His blonde hair, once neatly kept, had grown long and unkempt, falling in uneven strands around his face. A shaggy beard, streaked with gray and yellowed by time, framed lips that trembled as if unused to forming words meant for another human being.
His skin was weathered and scarred, marked by old burns, acid splashes, and countless close calls with extinction. Yet behind sunken eyes—eyes dulled by isolation but still unmistakably sharp—burned the faint glow of the man he once was. The heart of gold that had refused to die.
He stared at my outstretched hand, then up at my face. And for the first time in over a century… Myskina Acier did not look like a monster, a survivor, or a legend. He looked like a man who had finally been found.
"You… you know who I am…?" The words slipped out in a fractured whisper. Acier stared at me as if I were a mirage that refused to fade. His mind—still razor-sharp despite the centuries—scrambled desperately for logic, for any explanation that didn't shatter what little certainty he had left.
"But how…?" he muttered, half to himself. "Everyone who knew me… everyone from that time… they should all be long dead…"
The impossibility weighed on him like a crushing tide. Meeting another human here already bordered on insanity. But a human who knew his name—who spoke it with certainty—who even called him Professor?
That was beyond reason. He had lived in this abyss for close to two centuries. Outside, generations would have risen and fallen. Empires would have crumbled. Names like his should have faded into dust, reduced to footnotes—if remembered at all.
Yet here I stood. Alive. Knowing him. Acier's breathing grew shallow. His gaze sharpened suddenly, fear bleeding into suspicion as a thought surfaced—cold, familiar, and deeply hated.
Pure Gold.
His body moved before his mind caught up, feet retreating a single step as his hand twitched instinctively toward his chest, as though the secret itself were buried there.
"…Of course," he whispered hoarsely. Of course they were still searching. Even after centuries. Even after he vanished from the world.
That cursed invention—the miracle that defied age and death—had refused to be forgotten. He could almost hear the whispers again: kings, pirates, scholars, monsters in human skin, all clawing toward the same dream of eternal life. His laughter resurfaced briefly, thin and bitter.
"So that's it…" he said, eyes darkening. "Even after nearly two hundred years… they're still mad enough to chase it."
Mad enough to follow his trail into the belly of a mythical beast. Mad enough to tear the world apart for a single, golden promise. Acier's shoulders slumped, exhaustion washing over him. There was no pride in his voice—only weariness.
"Pure Gold," he murmured. "I thought burying myself here would end it… that if I disappeared, the madness would die with me." He looked at me again, searching my face, wary and wounded. "But it seems," he said quietly, "my greatest invention became my longest curse."
"You greedy bastards…!" The words tore from Acier's throat, raw and venomous. "What are you?" he spat, eyes burning as they darted over me. "A bounty hunter? A pirate? Or—" his lips twisted into a broken sneer, "—a lackey of those so-called gods sitting high above the world?"
He laughed bitterly, the sound hollow and cracked.
"After all, they were the ones who hunted me down with the greatest fervor. The ones who really wanted the secret of Pure Gold."
He rambled on without pause, no longer caring who I was or where my loyalties lay. That concern had died long ago, buried beneath decades of despair. Acier had already given up on himself—only the curse of longevity kept dragging his suffering forward, year after year, century after century.
There had been countless nights when he had wanted it all to end. But he had never been brave enough. The miracle he once created to save his beloved daughter had instead become the heaviest chain imaginable—binding him to an eternal life he no longer wanted. What was meant to preserve love had condemned him to live as a walking corpse, long after his heart had withered.
"Oh?" I said quietly, unable to stop myself. "So you're familiar with the Celestial Dragons…?"
I exhaled, not truly surprised. If there existed a way to grant ageless, eternal life, the "gods" above would have clawed at it without restraint. They would have claimed it, monopolized it, bled the world dry with it. Had Bonbori not swallowed Alchemi Island—had Acier not vanished into this living abyss—he would have been caged long ago, forced to create an endless supply of Pure Gold for their greed.
As the initial shock of meeting another human faded, something uglier replaced it. Disgust.
Self-loathing. Acier's shoulders sagged, the fire in his eyes guttering out. The brilliant mind that once changed the world now turned inward, devouring itself. A man who couldn't save his own daughter… a man cursed to live with that failure forever.
He didn't resist. Didn't threaten. Didn't run. He simply stood there, hollow.
"If you came here for the secret of Pure Gold…" he said at last, voice dull and exhausted, "…then you've wasted your journey." He gestured weakly at the endless land around us.
"I don't know what kind of madness drove you to willingly plunge into the belly of this beast," he muttered, "but let me make one thing clear." His gaze drifted upward, toward the glowing organs lining Bonbori's cavernous insides. "Once you're in… there is no way out."
"What you see around you," he continued, "is only a fragment of Bonbori's stomach. Just a fraction." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Even after more than a century, I haven't explored even a portion of it."
Silence followed. A silence filled not with menace, but with resignation. Before me stood no mad genius, no legendary alchemist. Only a man crushed by his own creation— a soul kept alive long after it had lost the will to live.
Acier turned away. He had no desire to spend another second looking at the faces of people whose greed had dragged them into this cursed abyss. He had seen that look before—too many times. Hope twisted into obsession. Curiosity rotting into hunger.
He took a step. Then another. And then—a single sentence cut through the cavern.
"Myskina Olga… is alive."
The world stopped. Acier's body locked mid-step, as though an unseen hand had seized his heart and refused to let it beat. The glow of Bonbori's inner organs flickered, shadows stretching unnaturally as silence crashed down upon the plains.
Alive…? The word echoed violently in his mind. His breath caught. His hands trembled. For a moment—just one terrifying moment—he couldn't breathe. That name. He hadn't heard it spoken by another living soul in nearly two centuries. His shoulders shook.