"With what’s happening in recent times, it might actually be a good thing if we get to have a new strong person to share the burden with us..."

"I hope that the next generation will grow up faster and let us old folks retire early..."

Riku shook his head in exhaustion as he thought about the recent things that were happening in the world.

"Well, until the next generation replaces us, we need to keep things as stable as we can..."

"So, tell me all about this ’Sortilega’ race that you were mentioning earlier..."

Hearing those words, Riku nodded his head.

"Indeed, we still have a long way to go before we can rest peacefully..."

Riku smiled as he led Ashtel through the thick forest and arrived at an abandoned temple that was located in a very remote location.

The temple was hidden by tall hills from all sides, and thus it was difficult to notice it from afar, and even though it looked quite like an ancient temple, it was in proper condition.

"As you might know, we beast kin believe in strength and bloodlines a lot; some of our people even pray to powerful beings like the great illusory holy beast and consider them a deity on earth..."

"This temple was made to pay respects to the great snake that protected our nation from the endless tides of demon armies with his powerful illusion magic..."

"It has existed for more than a thousand years and is maintained by a group of believers even to this date..."

Standing atop one of the hills, Riku explained everything in detail from the start.

"Sortilega was a race of humanoid beings that seemed to resemble humans a lot... and by a lot, I mean they were almost an exact copy of humans..."

"The only difference between them and humans was that they had four arms and a unique racial bloodline ability that gave them some kind of ’prediction’-related ability..."

"These people were born ’fortune-tellers’ that could read the flow of the ’laws’ of the ’world’ to predict the future to small, varying extents..."

The more Ashtel heard about their abilities, the more confused he felt.

"Such beings existed?... How come I have never heard about them?"

"There’s no mention of them even among the races that became extinct during the thousand-year demon extinction war!"

The words ’prediction,’ ’fortune-telling,’ and ’fate’ reminded Ashtel of Lia, who had recently gained immense powers and control related to the strings of destiny.

’No way... that kid Lia, she’s clearly a human; she’s likely not related to this...’

Riku took out a strange old metallic carving from his space ring and handed it over to Ashtel.

On the big slab of adamantium metal, there were various scenes carved out like detailed records of a forgotten history.

In one of the scenes, there were many humanlike people who seemed to have four arms, and they were all peacefully farming and living their normal lives.

In another scene, the Sortilegans were depicted singing around and enjoying festivals with smiles on their faces.

There were scenes of them reading stars and doing fortune-telling.

But the scene that stood out the most to Ashtel was hundreds of Sortilegans praying to a man who had a ’crown’ on his head and was holding a ’Lyre’ in his hand.

The shape and depiction of that ’Lyre’ seemed extremely similar to what Rio had described when he mentioned the mysterious person called ’Raika, The Master of The Holy Lyre of Heavenly Faith.’

"This is?..."

Seeing the shocked look on Ashtel’s face, Riku nodded his head.

"Yes, I had my researchers test the age of this adamantium slab by measuring how old these carvings were..."

"And through various chemical and other tests, we have determined that this ’carving’ made on the adamantium slab is... more than 4000 years old!"

At that declaration, Ashtel’s eyes widened in shock!

"Bullsh*t!" 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

"Even mana and miasma didn’t used to exist in the universe at that time, and our universe was just an ordinary universe!"

"Humans weren’t even a proper modern civilization back then!"

"How could there be beings with such magical abilities back then! It would have been impossible for them to predict the future without having mana or any other supernatural power!"

Hearing those words, Riku nodded his head.

"Usually, it would be impossible, but look at the back side of this slab..."

Ashtel hurriedly turned the slab and looked at its backside only to notice a massive mathematical equation carved out on the back of the slab with a very detailed star map.

"Languages that we have no knowledge of and have no relation to our world’s languages are difficult to decode, but math is always the same in every place of the universe..."

"The people who made this slab carved these equations behind it, and after we solved it, we realized that the result we got was a ’World Coordinate’..."

Saying that, Riku looked towards the sky in a particular direction that Ashtel was quite familiar with.

"And those world coordinates point to a place that now falls inside the dominion of the Endless Sea of Miasma..."

Those words cleared many of Ashtel’s doubts as he realized that the ’Sortilega’ race was likely an alien race that had existed in the universe a long time ago before it got wiped out by the sea of miasma 2000 years ago.

"H-how did something from such an ancient past... end up here? And how come the world alliance doesn’t know anything about this..."

At Ashtel’s questions, Riku smiled as he started heading towards the temple after saying,

"It’s not just this slab... I have something that would baffle you even more than this..."

"I don’t know if some wormhole threw it out or if some random dungeon mimicking the past opened and someone brought it out and didn’t tell us but..."

Riku’s eyes became solemn as he spoke out in a very serious tone.

"We have an intact corpse of a Sortilegan!"

"And there’s something even more odd about it that I can’t seem to understand..."