While Hugart and his lackeys had already left the ruins to execute their plans, Lucius had spent a few more days exploring the inner region. He had even chanced upon a cave that held tier 2 resources inside it which were in a space ring which was attached to the finger of a dilapidated skeleton. It seemed like the skeleton had been there for a few centuries and when Lucius touched the bones, they immediately disintegrated into fine dust that was blown away by the slight breeze of the entranceway. It was in similar caves that Jack and the ancestor of the Gold royal family had found their various treasures. The body didn't hold a particularly special cultivation technique like the yin devouring technique but it did have various tier 2 beast parts and even a tier 2 fire core. There was also more flame lick ore as well.
Lucius was done with the inner region after finding that loot so he made his way to the core region. The core region was a wall of flames that were yellow at the circumference and light blue at the centre. Showing the different intensities and temperatures clearly. As previously mentioned, most spirit condensers couldn't make it past 200 metres, which was the deep red stage of the flame which was just before the blue stage. Everyone that had forced their way into the blue stage had never returned again. Nowadays most didn't even travel to the red stage as it was a meaningless endeavour and since no one in Bakre cultivated body refining to a good enough stage, no one would attempt to use it to temper their bodies. Lucius of course wasn't privy to these notions. He was able to not only utilise it to temper his body further, he could also use it to enhance the primordial fire rune and enlarge the fire island within his core. The core region which was hell for others, was a prime opportunity to progress his cultivation for Lucius!
To begin with, at the yellow circumference, it wasn't even hot enough to temper his body and the energy he could gather from within the flames was too little to make a difference in his cultivation, unless he was willing to stay here for a long long time just to absorb it bit by bit. Lucius quickly progressed to the orange layer and began to feel the heat so he began to circulate a method he found within the Cosmological Body Refining arts that helped use extreme heats to temper the muscles and insides. This method wasn't that helpful when it came to refining the bones but Lucius could use the body refining treasure, Golden Apples, to fix this later. The Cosmological Body Refining arts held various pill and elixir recipes that used body refining treasures as the basis.
Once he had reached the light red layer he began to absorb the flame elements within the air into his core and began solidifying the primordial fire rune, enhancing the fire island and progressing his cultivation. To progress in his spirit cultivation, Lucius would have to enhance the primordial runes and the consequent islands equally to the stage of countries for Spirit Refining and then continents for Spirit Condensing. Once he evolved the land masses into their own elemental planets he would have broken through to the elemental ascension stage. He would become a tier 2 expert. Currently Lucius' islands were around 250,000 square miles. To become country sized they would have to increase to 4 million square miles in size. For the continent sized they would need to reach a whopping 10 million square miles in size. Relative to Lucius' inner world that is, since the elemental islands would have to be within the size of Lucius' core itself in the end. After 5 days of slowly travelling through the layers and reaching the blue layer, Lucius had increased the size of the flame island to 3 million square miles already. In other words he already had the strength of a rank 8 Spirit Gatherer, and this was only with his flame cultivation!. Once Lucius reached the same rank with the other elements he would already have however many elements he trained in as the number of times his power would be greater than regular people. Since for now he was training in the 5 core elements he would be 5 times as strong as a regular Spirit Gatherer. This was the vast difference in cultivation techniques and this only shows the tip of the gigantic ice burg that is the Cosmological Art. When Lucius begins to gather and train in other elements, his strength would increase exponentially. Especially since higher elements would give much more power, if adding 5 regular elements gives you 5 times the power then adding 5 higher elements gives 25 times the power!
This, of course, came with the detriment of being a time consuming endeavour as Lucius would have to cultivate 5 times and such more than regular people. He would have to cultivate each element to the Spirit Condensing stage instead of just one. This was normally mitigated by the Basilians rich treasury but since Lucius didn't have access to it, he would have to come up with it in other ways. Just like now when he used this formation left by that mysterious expert to temper his body and increase his flame element cultivation.
Lucius began to realise that there wasn't much time left until the ruins would be closing so he sped up his speed instead of spending time in the blue layer to cultivate as he would have liked to do. The blue layer was the smallest region within the ruins and it took Lucius only two hours to run through it. Once he reached the end he came upon a barrier that presumably lead to the core of the core region, the site of the inheritance of that mysterious expert. Lucius had studied formations with his mother and was already a peak tier 1 formations master. One of the other books on the bottom shelf of the formation room within the Creation room was a book called 'Effective ways to break a formation' and it was able to teach Lucius about focal points and points of interference and such that could be used to exploit a formation. Since this was at most a low level tier 2 formation, Lucius wouldn't have much difficulty breaking through it. He could tell it was only a tier 2 formation based on the luminance of the barrier and the size and colour grading. The higher the grading of a barrier the deeper the colour would be. This barrier was a bluish pale white so it was obviously a weak barrier. Tier 1 barriers were usually white in colour, tier 2 were bluish white, tier 3 were light blue, tier 4 were azure blue, tier 5 were dark blue and then tier 6 were light purple and so on. The luminance of the barrier decided whether it was low, mid, high or peak grade within the tiers. This barrier was quite dim and thus a low tier barrier. Even then Lucius was only a peak tier 1 master so it took him half a day to find the points where the barriers energy nodes overlapped and he overloaded them all with energy at the same time, making the barrier collapse from within itself from an energy overload.
After breaking in, Lucius first noticed a giant statue that stood guarding a palace. The statue was of an old man and his pose was domineering and arrogant. Lucius didn't spend much time on the statue of a long forgotten old man and slipped right past and entered the palace. As he walked through the wide open doors and entered the main hall he was immediately met with a giant stele. He began to read the stele and began to understand the situation of the ruins. It read:
"Welcome warrior! You have successfully passed through the trials I have left here and therefore have the right to inherit my treasures and cultivation technique. Be grateful for this life changing opportunity, work hard and maybe you can reach the same level as I have!"
Lucius understood now that the rumours of the core inheritance being here were probably passed down from the people who were told to enter and attempt it by the expert himself! The expert most likely did not have any kin to pass these things onto so he left it to anyone that could pass his tests.
Behind the big stele that was at the forefront of the room the rest of the hall was filled with various treasures. There were ores, beast parts, beast cores, gold, silver, jewels and gems. All of these were at least tier 1 mid grade and most were tier 2! There were even some tier 3 ores and beast cores. There were also glass cases that housed equipment. They were arranged in a 6, 3 on each side while there was one extra case in the middle that housed a old and tattered book. The pedestal that had the glass cases on them described the various objects and Lucius skimmed over the equipment first. There was a sword, a shield, a bow, a robe, a necklace and a pair of rings. The sword was blood red and so was the shield and bow. The robe was black with red patterns stitched in. The necklace was gold with a big red gem and the rings were gold too but one had a red gem and the other a black gem. They were all tier 3 low grade equipment so this greatly confused Lucius. This was meant to be a tier 1 low grade world so the maximum strength should have been low grade elemental ascension right? Then where did all this tier 3 equipment come from and did this mean that the expert who made this place was a tier 3 expert?
Lucius dismissed his questions from his mind and moved forward to check the cultivation technique first. He took the book out of the case and read off the cover, 'Blood Refining Arts'. Reading this Lucius immediately understood what was happening. The mysterious expert had reached his stage by refining countless lives into his cultivation! Lucius flipped through the book and found methods to refine ores and artifacts using the blood and flesh of others! Everything within this room had come from such disgusting and dishonourable acts!
Although Lucius was disgusted and didn't plan on using any of these things he still decided to take it away so no one else could use it in the future. Since he had broken the inner barrier and absorbed most of the flames in the core region, he was sure someone could have reached this palace in the future. He also thought it would be apt to burn down the palace and destroy the formation completely to desecrate the vile mans life work. He wanted to dishonour him in revenge for all of the lives of those he had took for his personal gain.
Since there was so much treasures and resources left here Lucius didn't have enough space within his ring so he forged a few space crates that were used to store resources. He stored the herbs in one, the ores in another, the currency in another and the weapons in the last one. He was then able to craft a tier 2 space ring with the materials he had found and successfully became a low grade tier 2 blacksmith. He was able to put all the crates into this space ring and he decided to make more crates in case he needed them in the future.
Lucius no longer cared about when the barrier would close as he could easily break through it if it did and he was at the core of the formation in the first place so once he burned down the palace and destroyed the core formation, the barrier would come down itself. However, before breaking down the barrier, he decided to absorb the rest of the flames since once he broke the formation the flames would spread out and disperse. Lucius spent the next two weeks absorbing all of the flames completely, only leaving the yellow region alone since it would take months to absorb and Lucius had already reached the peak of Spirit Gathering with his flame cultivation, rank 9. After burning down the palace, Lucius left the statue there but he carved out a pile of shit from a stone and left that on the top of the statue. Now if anyone came to the core region they would find a burned down palace and a statue with a pile of shit on its head!
Lucius knew that he had probably missed the wedding by now but he didn't really care since it was the wedding between the prince he had beaten silly and the girl who threw snarky and belligerent glances at him constantly. He didn't like either of them and thus prioritised his cultivation over their meaningless marriage. Lucius had more important things to do.