At this point in the absorption process Alexander was in, further increasing the spin of his core would widen the range of absorption.
After 2 hours of absorbing everything in the area, nothing remained.
A three-kilometer large crater could be seen where once a forest stood high and mighty.
But Alexander was not done. He was close, but far away at the same time.
The threshold that was the last percent of maturity was large.
Even after so much that he absorbed, nothing changed.
He theorized that he had reached the legendary bottleneck. It was a common concept in cultivation type fiction that one needed to overcome something to break through to the next rank.
Alexander did not think of that at first because it was rather uncommon in a world of mana to even have the concept of bottlenecks.
Though, after thinking for a while, Alexander found that his path had more in common with cultivation than with magic.
The path of cultivation, at some point incorporated the soul.
Higher cultivators were called immortals because they had broke through to such a high degree that age did not matter anymore for them.
Only competition from other cultivators or natural enemies could mean their end.
Alexander was glad that it was this way. The stories that came out of the cultivation corner of the world was filled with unreasonable assholes that thought they were everything.
Alongside such people existed a system of respecting others that meant everything to the people.
Higher ranked cultivators were idolized and even if you were one rank lower than the norm, you would be scrutinized or treated like trash by everyone.
If Alexander ever went to such a world, he would just snatch a few treasures, maybe an island or two as a toll and then fuck off, off that world.
As a rather antisocial person, Alexander could not stand this bullshit.
Thinking that he had enough for now, he stopped the absorption and looked at what he had done.
If the first forest looked bad, this was the extreme of what he had done before.
Looking as if a large meteor had crashed here a thousand years ago and killed everything in its path, the crater stretched far and mostly deep.
Three kilometers down was a considerable amount of earth that Alexander absorbed.
Everything that was in the earth such as metals or even mana crystals were sucked in mercilessly.
Thinking of all the metals he ate, a sudden thought ran through his brain.
If he were ever to find a mana crystal vine that was mostly untouched.
He would surely take even the last crystal he could get his hands on from there.
His initial goal of coming here was accomplished now.
He felt sorry for the goddess of creation of this world.
This would be the second time he just came into the world just to absorb something and after that immediately logging off.
He would have to make that up by killing more evil things.
It took him less time than he initially thought.
He planned in three days, but he was already done after only one.
This increase in speed was mostly due to the different method he used.
The first one lacked the speed aspect and just sucked in mana.
That was inefficient because the mana in the area would be depleted fast and needed to regenerate slowly.
Instead by converting literally everything into pure essence proved to be better.
The lack of air created an unbalance that needed to be filled with air again.
As such, the air in the area Alexander was not absorbing came rushing in with more and more particles of mana.
For him this was a win-win situation. The planet however suffered a little bit for him.
He had to apologize for it some other time to the goddess for it.
With everything done, he logged off and quickly descended towards earth again.
He came back to the same are he was in last time.
Some desert in the middle east. Why exactly this spot correlated to the position of the main temple he did not know.
Maybe it had something to do with the ley lines that were still a little bit present even to this day.
It was still heavily suspicious why enemies were hiding near this exact spot.
Alexander did not know how much the gods had influence over information, but not doing anything was clearly not intended by them.
Alexander flew towards the red markers on the map in his ethereal form.
Even if the enemies had some sort of detection system, it would likely prove useless against his ethereal form.
It had neither warmth, nor a clear shape or mass.
Just as he had expected no detection was set of by him coming near the base.
Even as he flew right above the targets, they did not move a meter from where they stood.
They were guarding something. That was a fact for Alexander.
Just what was the question.
Sneakily he descended through the sand.
Looking at the map he was expecting the underground complex to show up on it.
He wanted to lash out at the goddess of creation right now because the only thing he saw on his map was a big question mark on the screen.
'Why did she make this skill so useless most of the time?'
After he descended into a room that was fairly high with a height of over seven meters he looked around for the enemies.
His map clearly showed that there were at least five enemies in this room.
But he was shocked by what he saw. No enemies were visible.
Not even the aura that even lowly orcs possessed was there.
Another thing that shocked Alexander was that it looked clean in here.
Too clean for a ruin like structure. He even recognized the style of the structures here.
A column filled to the brim with blue liquid stood in the center of the room.
Surrounding that were in a circular formation smaller columns that were filled in a similar manner with green liquid.
Alexander had absolutely no clue about what he was seeing here.
Was this some kind of laboratory?
The only thing that he could tell was the time frame this facility was built in.
One of the earliest time zones near the main temple of heaven had similar columns.
So this was clearly a man-made structure. But what for exactly was this here?
To mindlessly destroy this place would be wrong, but still, why did the system tell him that there were enemies here?
Walking towards one enemy that was supposedly in one of the green columns, Alexander was even more confused than before.
This green liquid itself was the supposed enemy that he searched for.
Just why the hell was this even here?
What made the liquid so dangerous in the eyes of the system.
After pondering for a while why Alexander was even seeing them as enemies he slapped himself in the face.
He even disabled the ethereal form for that.
Alexander could not believe himself for what he did not get for solid five minutes.
The first thing he did after guessing the answer was internally screaming Äfuck' as loud as he could.
They were slimes. So lowly in fact that they did not even have mana in them anymore.
In Alexanders mind, slimes were cute little blobs with a small core inside of them.
These slimes here had also a core, but it was tiny compared to what he expected.
This raised even more questions than he had before. Clearly the old civilization had monsters roaming around in the world. But to keep slimes in a research facility?
When he found ruins he expected an evil dragon or some other stuff.
But he did only find this place scary because his map skill was totally garbage.
It had no distinction between the power level of enemies.
He just saw red dots that moved periodically through these tanks here.
Most likely so that the slime would not solidify or maybe even clean this place a little bit.
Alexander just wasted a lot of thought on slimes while also destroying a good chunk of forest just to get strong enough to go in here.
Furious and salty was the state of his mind.
"I swear to god if this blue column is also just a slime in blue I will raze this entire facility to the ground. Hell, I even gladly take in the surrounding sand as well. I am in a desert, who cares?"
Loudly declaring something like that felt good. He just had to vent his frustration a little bit.
But not to his liking, not even screaming triggered some kind of defense mechanism.
Either this place is so protected from the outside that the creator just believed in the shell of this building, or he just was too lazy to create a defense system.
Walking towards the columns also did not trigger anything.
This entire facility was playing his feelings dirty.
Just as he was expecting nothing to happen as he touched to column. Nothing happened.
"Just what the fuck is this place?"
Alexander screamed as he hit the column with his fists.
It shattered, and the blue liquid flowed outside unhinderedly.
The liquid seemed stickier as he initially thought it to be.
Still, not a single alarm was popping off as he shattered the column.
"Did the fucking engineers of yester years did not know what a god damn alarm is?"
Alex was shouting and stomping in rage while not caring anymore what the hell the blue liquid on the ground was doing.
"I could just fly into here unhindered. This place was only not discovered until now because no one would dig a damn 50 meter hole into the ground of a desert."
The complex was only this circular room. There were not even doorways to this room.
All Alexander wanted to do right now was to fulfill his oath he had done just a minute ago.
His divine aura filled the room as he was preparing another round of his black hole business.
[God detected.]
Alexander looked around with a "Huh?" while looking menacingly at the blue liquid.
"What the fuck did you just say !?!"
[A god capable of walking on earth was detected just after the cryo-sleep phase ended.
I am awaiting orders my God.]
"Crap. I ran into a troublesome companion."
[…]
The slime that was supposedly in cryo-sleep the whole time really did take on the form of a blob now.
Shit, I will just play along for the time being. In a sense I was never a proper angel. I just got told that I skipped a rank in life or something.
If someone else asks I am just like a janitor that cleans up the trash the gods made.
"You are right little slime. I am the God Alexander. Although I do not have any orders for you now except for telling me of what you are capable of."
Alexander looked high and mighty in his angel clothes that let his divine aura seep out.
He had never even tried to conceal his own aura. Until now it was never necessary, and he was not even realizing it himself that he had no control over his aura.
[Acknowledged new master, Alexander.]