He twisted his body with all his strength, using every ounce of willpower to resist and barely managing to tilt his head by the slightest angle.
A blinding golden light shone from ahead.
The intense brightness caused piercing pain throughout his body, even scorching his eyes.
Under that glaring light, he could only vaguely make out a dark silhouette.
It seemed… like the back of a chair?
Along with the light came an immensely powerful sense of pressure.
It was precisely this pressure that rendered him completely unable to move.
The overwhelming force seemed to make the air in the room itself become thick and viscous.
This power made him feel smaller than he had ever felt before, like a motionless mosquito or ant that could be crushed effortlessly by the other party.
He instinctively narrowed his eyes.
If there had been a mirror, he would have seen that his pitch-black eyes contained not a trace of white and the entirely black pupils resembling two bottomless voids.
He was no longer human.
It was impossible to tell whether this was death or rebirth.
After crawling out of that abyss, the instincts of a demon began to surface in his mind.
He knew that he was a newly born demon.
A voice suddenly came from ahead.
It's tone seeming both teasing and disdainful while carrying a hint of lazy unruliness.
"Interesting, You climbed back up not long after being sent down. Astarion, how long did the previous fastest one take?"
Astarion? Isn't that the name of the fallen angel on the legend?
Woo Manyeo heard another voice come from behind to his left, but he couldn't turn his head to look.
He could only tell that the voice was low, restrained, and respectful to the extreme.
"Replying to my lord, six years."
"And the longest?"
"Approximately a hundred years. The rest were either used up… or dissipated."
A faint and almost imperceptible chuckle came from directly ahead. "Go on, my special child."
As those words ended, the force pressing down on him vanished in an instant.
He somewhat awkwardly climbed up from the ground.
The golden light had not disappeared; he still could not see the figure at its center.
The only thing he could make out was the man standing at the doorway waiting for him.
The one that was called Astarion.
Under the illumination of the golden light, Astarion's skin appeared almost translucent in its pale whiteness with even a faint halo visible along its edges.
Beneath his high-bridged nose were a pair of light golden eyes.
Unlike a human's, his pupils seemed to be square-shaped, resembling… those of a goat.
The golden armor on his body was tattered and worn, and his rather long white hair was loosely tied behind his head, giving him an unkempt appearance.
This look clashed sharply with his classically sculpted and perfectly proportioned face.
A battle-damaged goat guy?
As Woo Manyeo was secretly making snide remarks in his mind, Astarion's lips parted slightly.
Those perfectly shaped thin lips uttered cold words, "Do not look directly at me."