"Let's go over there!"
Roger's simple words put a lot of mental strain on anyone.
Walking forward over endless bodies and bones, most people would probably go mad just from seeing the scene.
It takes a lot of courage to do this, but he and Rayleigh are exactly the kind of men who have that courage.
They've reached this point after going through countless deaths. They've already put their own lives aside the moment they set out to sea, so how could they care about just some dead bodies?
"Following the rules like this isn't like you." Rayleigh couldn't help but smile. He took a step forward with Roger, stepping on either hard bones or soft flesh.
"Ah... after all, this might be a relic of a thousand-year-old civilization. We can't be too rough." Roger said this as he reached the end. He claimed not to care, but in reality, he didn't like walking over other people's bones.
The central area was also large. A huge altar took up most of the space, but there were some pillars standing around it. The place where Roger had arrived now looked more like an entrance, with two rows of pillars lined up neatly on both sides.
"Ascension Altar..."
At the end of the pillars, they saw a line of mysterious writing carved on what looked like a door structure. They couldn't read it, but Roger understood its meaning the moment he saw it.
"Altar?" Rayleigh said after hearing Roger. "This place doesn't look like an altar at all. It's more like a demon's lair."
That's right. There was no holy light here that an altar should have. If anything, it was the faint gold on the round disk, but that gold was very weak, far less than the blackness.
"Maybe something happened." Roger said, "We came to the right place. This should be connected to the power that burst from that dark depths. Let's explore here carefully. We might find some clues."
In his heart, he also felt a strong sense of urgency, since he didn't know what was happening in the distant source of darkness.
As he said this, he took a step forward, which just brought him inside the huge altar. Within the tall outer walls like city walls, there sat the massive round disk, with gold and black woven together, creating a strange beauty that was both holy and evil.
On the inner side of this outer wall, there were a lot of murals carved, connected into one piece, seeming to tell some story.
There were some words among them, but they couldn't read them, and they didn't come with automatic translation. They could only understand from the pictures, but luckily the pictures were very striking and moving.
The first picture showed a group of people offering sacrifices and praying to the sun. The second picture showed a messenger descending from the sun, seeming to say something to the people.
Roger and Rayleigh didn't rush to climb the altar. Instead, they walked around the inner side of the outer wall first, as if they wanted to finish looking at everything here before deciding.
In the third picture, the messenger from the sun seemed to be directing humans to build something.
In the fourth picture, there were no people, no sun messenger, just a huge altar. A golden round disk echoed with the sun above it.
The pictures after that connected. People kept climbing the altar and turning into a kind of 'monster.' These monsters all had animal features, like dogs, crocodiles, turtles, snakes...
Some people still kept a human form, though they were very different from before.
And most importantly, no matter if they had animal features or not, all these people were incredibly huge, like giants.
Giants with power...
Roger had seen countless such murals. Basically, in one picture, an old or terminally ill person would enter, and in the next, a tall giant would come out, cycling like that.
That huge round disk could be called the sun disk, because from the murals, it used the sun's energy. It was originally golden, but now it had turned black, like the devilish black outside...
Finally, they returned to the starting position, the picture of a group of weak people praying to the sun.
"It looks like a story of people praying to a god. The god answered their call and turned their dying ones into powerful warriors." Rayleigh said seriously after looking at all the murals.
"Does it have some connection to this country's demons?"
"Maybe these warriors are the demons." Roger said, "Their bodies changed in strange ways. It looks like they ate animal-type devil fruits. But among the monsters that appeared, the Nine-Tails fox and Kraken are also animal shapes. Maybe this change turned them into monsters."
Humans turning into monsters made Roger and Rayleigh think of Toguro. They had both fought him, especially Roger, who had heard his deep wish.
Toguro said human life is too fragile. Once you get old or sick, you lose your fighting ability, or it drops a lot. What he wanted was immortal monster life, so he could fight forever.
The ones entering in these murals were all the old, weak, and sick, which fit what Toguro said. So, this is the so-called 'monster transformation'?
Like Toguro, they weren't fully turned into monsters, so they still had clear human features, just part of them turned into monster forms.
Roger thought his theory was close to the truth, since this place was originally connected to so-called monsters and demons.
"If we go in, will we change like that too?" Roger touched his chin and said, his thoughts wandering.
"It's been abandoned for so many years. And if it still worked, do you think they'd let me come in here so easily?" Rayleigh teased. "That Zero's kin probably found this place too, but in the end, they just left a bunch of bodies and went away, right?"
"Maybe they got that change from here." Roger said. "We should still go in and look."
Maybe coming straight here was the right choice. This place holds the truth of things, the truth that could help them win on the unavoidable battlefield ahead...
When they actually stepped onto this Ascension Altar, Roger and Rayleigh suddenly felt a chill, like the black on the round disk was about to burst out.
Roger observed the huge standing round disk up close. It was probably over fifty meters in diameter, maybe even close to a hundred, a massive black disk. On one part of the disk, a fragment of the Shikon Jewel was embedded.
Roger jumped up, as if to touch that fragment of the Shikon Jewel that held magical power.
----
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