Only a few minutes later Ray was standing in front of a burning body. Brudos, which was the name of Pig, was truly the personification of bending to the strong and standing to the weak.
In front of those stronger, richer or more popular than he was, he was the nicest, kindest, and most caring person. When they came to his home he would provide them with the most expensive food and drink of his collection and when they left he gave them the most valuable gifts.
But in front of the weak and poor, he was the devil incarnate.
He would use them however he saw fit in the pursuit of wealth. Slavery, trafficking, getting them addicted to his drugs, forcing them to make his drugs, forced prostitution, public executions, child labor.
If it could get him money and power he did it.
Not even his own family was spared. Back then he killed his father in a fit of rage, but the others didn't get off that easily. His mother was sold to an underground cannibal cult who tortured and ate here alive and his 5 year old sister was gifted to a wealthy pedophile who raped her to death and then raped her dead body until it started to smell.
And to gain favor with both of them he sat there and watched with no emotion in his eyes while he witnessed his mother and baby sister experience the worst things that could possibly happen to them, all the while disappointed in himself for not keeping his father alive so he could be sold off as a labor slave.
Yet with such a ruthless attitude, he was a weak man. Ray didn't even have the time to ask him a question when he bursted into tears, confessing his sins and begging for forgiveness.
After listening to his story and determining that nothing that he knew was valuable, Ray decided to end his disgusting life. But he wasn't going to end easily.
The burning body in front of him was very much still alive. With a combination of the heart flame divine method as well as the breath of life technique, Ray gave him the cruelest punishment that he could think of.
His body, mind and soul were constantly on fire, but with the breath of life technique all 3 were being regenerated ever so slightly slower than they were being burned.
Unless someone came here and put out the fire for him, he would stay here for the next few hundred thousand years burning away, since the breath of life technique would keep him alive and awake, until he finally passed away.
But not even then would he be free, his soul would then be banished to impell and he would be forced to walk the frozen plains or climb the blazing mountain for the rest of eternity.
No one knew who it was that determined whether one would go to impell or not, but based on the very, very few that could climb their way out, people generally knew that those who lived a life of evil would be thrown in.
But it wasn't that simple, otherwise no one would be able to get out and no one would be doing such heinous acts. Firstly most people weren't aware of it in the first place, and secondly one could technically leave.
While those who were evil would go there upon death, if one was strong enough they could climb to the top of the blazing mountain or walk to the end of the frozen plains and find a giant hole that went from impell all the way to the new world.
If they could climb the distance while being affected by the blade-like winds of impell trying to drag them back down, then they had a chance of returning and claiming or re-growing a new body.
In reality there were many sects and clans situated all around the hole whose sole purpose was to kill those who managed to make it out. If they were killed like that then they would be sent back, but this time with a chain wrapped around their soul.
This chain would magnify the pain that they received as well as weighed them down, if one somehow managed to almost succeed but fail 5 times then they would be locked in impell forever.
This was the basis of the curse [Chains of Impell], but that all that wouldn't matter to Brudos. He was too weak, mentally and physically, to even make an attempt.
In impell, those who moved faster experienced worse pain than those who didn't, almost as if to coax them into staying.
With the trash handled he shifted his attention to James, under the effects of breath of life his wounds had closed but he was still unconscious. When he was shoved to the ground by Brudos, he hit his temple on a loose mana crystal and was instantly knocked out.
The later levels of Breath of Life could certainly help Ray wake him up, and he was very much capable of getting to that point now, but he could tell that this boy needed to rest.
Additionally, he looked very… familiar. He couldn't put his finger on it but when he looked at the boy, especially his face, he couldn't help but feel like he recognized him.
But that didn't make any sense, other than the boy also being a brown skinned human male they should have no similarities. He was born in the old world whereas the boy was born in the new world.
Ray would have no chance to ever interact with someone from here, especially when it is so far away from any human settlement. After going through his own memories he figured out that the closest human settlement, and coincidentally the most populated, was in a mountain range just outside the Aurelian Kingdom, but it was on the opposite side from him.
Such a distance wasn't short and it served to show just how far away being forced into the new world can throw you.
Though they both had that special mole just below their left eye.
It disappeared after the first transformation for Ray, but for the boy that star shaped mole was right there for all to witness. Seeing this he felt like he should have kept his and with a single thought it reappeared, after reaching the grandmaster tier something as trivial as re-growing a mole was nothing, but unsurprisingly it appeared gold.
After refining his entire body his hair, irises, fingernails, blood and even teeth were gold, though he didn't like how those looked so he made them appear white.
Any and all natural markings or features on his body would appear golden unless he decided otherwise.
The familiar feeling that he got from the boy was somewhat uncomfortable, as if he should know him but his memory failed him, but he could deal with that later. For now he had something else to do.
Coming from the other end of the cave, hundreds of sun eaters were running towards him. They were the young ones that were mad that their meal was suddenly cut short, as well as a few older ones that went with them for protection.
The highest level was only master tier, so even though he made no progress in increasing his stats for the last year and a half he was still able to instantly knock them out and throw them into the subspace.
He could have killed them, but he figured that the subspace was much too barren, so along with all of the non medical herbs that he collected from the forest he was going to rearrange the first continent and turn it into a proper one.
Naturally that meant that he wasn't just going to use these sun-eaters to do so, but he had to start from somewhere.
He calmly walked throughout the ruins as he incapacitated the sun eaters with beast pressure and collected them, after his massacre a few years ago they had yet to grow back up to full capacity so the strongest there were only at the late stages of the master tier.
After refining his genes, along with the behemoth physique, any and all under the grandmaster tier wouldn't be able to move under his beast pressure. And it would be all those under the saint tier if he wasn't suppressing his body.
Just like when he first reached 100 in all of his stats, when they all reached 10,000 he would go under another transformation. It wouldn't be as severe as the first one but he would still be vulnerable.
There was no shot that he was going to do so while not in the subspace, but there was something here that he wanted.
For the past year he wasn't just sitting around refining his body, with his wisdom he could split his attention 7 ways and maintain peak cognizance. So even though he was focusing on refining his body and maintaining his safety, he still had 5 more lines of thought that were not doing anything.
One of them he was using to practice 'one with mana', he used 2 to properly study Itroth's soul and file the information accurately, another to run some simulations of the 7 professions that he chose to study, turning this knowledge and experience into his own, and the last one was exploring the caves.
Every nook and cranny of this place was already mapped in his head so he knew that until he reached the foot of the mountain, none of the chima could rival him.
This was because the Sun eater queen was in the temple at the top, and while not very strong herself, there was a lot of security.
Even the guards at the very bottom were at the early stages of the grandmaster tier, with their strength slowly increasing until there was only one that was in the temple who was at the peak of the grandmaster tier.
With his mana sense he could easily collect all of the mana crystals in a heartbeat, so normally he wouldn't have even bothered to deal with all of them, but there was something in the temple that he wanted but couldn't draw into the subspace no matter how hard he tried.
This peaked his interest so after collecting all of the normal sun-eaters he started to climb the mountain.