"Hey, Julius right? Sorry about earlier. I didn't mean to be rude but where I come from beasts like you can't speak or are anywhere near as intelligent, so I was a bit surprised when you could communicate so well." Ray and Julius were now moving up the ant hill and Ray thought that he should try to clear up any misunderstandings while they had the time.
They were moving at a rather slow pace, and he could tell that they would spend another hour and a half traveling. He didn't know why they were moving so slow, but he just assumed that it was a customary thing, their queen lives on this hill after all.
'He didn't respond, guess he is still mad. He seems to have a lot of influence on these sun eaters so it would be a shame if he got in the way.'
'HOW THE F*CK IS THIS WEAKLING SO FAST' While this speed was nothing to Ray even before becoming a saint, Julius was running as fast as he possibly could to try to keep up.
At first he thought. 'I don't know how he managed to kill so many of my brothers and convince the queen to speak with her, but I will show her that this intruder is nothing but a liar and a weakling.', so he sprinted up the hill intending to leave Ray behind.
Instead of Ray struggling to follow like he thought, not only was he keeping up, he could clearly go faster as he had the energy to speak with him. Julius was too exhausted to even hear what he was saying but he would bet his life that Ray was mocking him.
'Must be another one of his tricks, there is no other way he could move this fast.' he comforted himself.
"You can go on ahead. As the grand general of the queen's guards I still have other tasks I need to attend to, I've brought you this far so you can figure out the rest." Julius stopped running and managed to huff out an excuse.
He may try to hide it, but Ray could very easily see through the exhaustion plastered all over his face. "And what might those tasks be? I'd love to help you, as a way of expressing my apology to you and your nest." He said with a concerned expression.
Since Julius was trying to play dumb, he would play dumber.
And as expected, Julius was left dumbfounded. 'Is he stupid or just acting like it. I knew I was good at acting but I didn't know I was that good. I need to quickly think of something.'
"Uh… I uh… Right! I need to ensure that there are no other intruders hiding around this place. Either way you are not in the position to question me, get going and don't make the queen wait any longer!"
'Brilliant, a technical truth and shifting the blame onto me. I should learn how to lie out of my ass like that someday.'
"Well if that's the case then I will leave it to you Sir. Julius." He stood at attention and did a little fake salute. Before Julius could respond Ray vanished from where he was.
Naturally he didn't know any teleportation spells and stealth would no longer work with his high vitality, he was just moving so fast that Julius couldn't see him. And with the use of mana he had little to no wind resistance so he couldn't hear him.
And because Ray was walking on mana platforms not even the ground was affected, he still didn't have the time to perfect his method of flying and while he could technically do it now if he messed it up then the mana in his body would rush out and explode.
He wouldn't be able to imagine what so much mana exploding all at once would look like, just the mana in his blood and not counting any of it that was stored via ichor in the rest of his body would be more than half of all the mana crystals in this cavern after all; with everything included it would be many times over.
This was the reason that he still needed to seek the Divine Devouring physique even though his output was more than enough, he was thanking the heavens that he didn't rush things earlier as without a proper regulator he wouldn't even know how he died.
In an instant, Ray appeared at the foot of a massive flight of stairs that led up to a palace that stood at the top of the mountain. The queen lived here and he could feel it.
Ever since coming to the new world he never put much trust in his innate sixth sense, but he couldn't deny it any longer. The life signature coming from this palace was so large that it seemed like the entire thing was alive.
That either meant that the queen was an exceptionally powerful saint, as he wouldn't be able to detect a similar sized extremity, or she was so massive that it felt like it. Such large beasts have innate strength that can not be compared to other beasts of the same rank.
The equation for force is mass times acceleration and while high strength and speed stats can get your fist moving fast and keep it moving when it hits something, there is not much you can do when the enemy is so much larger than you.
All other things being equal the heavier object always wins, and the easiest way to get heavier for such an advantage was to gain mass. That's why an average grandmaster tier human could never go head-to-head with a grandmaster tier beast.
The beast would be so much larger on average that trying to compete in pure strength would be a fool's goal for even the strongest of body cultivators. Not even they who pour their hearts and souls into refining their bodies to the very peak could compare to the natural body any random beast of the same tier was given at birth.
The stats might be the same, but the weight difference could not be ignored.
Others might be intimidated by such a large being, but Ray couldn't have cared less. Its immense life signature came from its size, not its power. It appeared to be a peak saint tier beast, but it clearly wasn't. After a bit more inspection it should be a grandmaster tier with the power of a saint tier.
Similar to himself but simply inferior. His saint tier power came from everywhere in his body, not just his vitality, but this queen just had a large body. Just the weight of his body was so great that a mountain in the old world would collapse under him. If things went south, he could very easily kill such a beast with his ghost flame palm, even if it had fire resistance.
Plus the thing that he couldn't detect with his mana sense was there, and since he was determined to figure out what it was then he had no reason to laze around any longer. He had already spent too much time in this ant hill.
As he is now a saint, Itz'tal as a grandmaster mage wouldn't be a threat to him any longer even with his spatial magic but at this point he was more curious than anything else. He didn't tell him much, but Ray could pick up a few details from their brief conversation.
He and whoever his master was was clearly not in a good situation, as there was no other reason to seek out an artifact that was so heavily cursed, but they were clearly extremely powerful as even a dignified grandmaster tier kejin spatial mage was happy to declare himself a servant.
Every single one of those titles could let him lead many. While nothing in his eyes there were less than 10,000 grandmasters in this kingdom, which sounds like a lot but there were a few hundred trillion residents and tens of trillions of them were either cultivators or mages.
Not only was he a powerful mage, but he was a spatial one at that. There are a few things that can allow a grandmaster to compete against a saint and space-time related things was one of them.
While they are differentiated strictly speaking, the space and time elements were so closely related that even in a low-level dimension like the one where earth was, the relatively weak spatial energy around a black hole could affect time in such a significant way.
And even after all that he was a natural born kejin, a race with the same infinite potential as humans. Most races had an innate cap to their power than they achieve after fully maturing, but high humans, humans and kejin had no such things.
This innate cap dictated how far they could go and anything further than that would be extremely difficult. But the thing that made him being a kejin even more serious was that this kingdom was ruled by the veyrunn and the majority of the people there were veyrunnian, another humanoid race on the same level as hobgoblins.
If even such a powerful individual was willing to be a mere servant, then his master must be much more powerful and that made him curious.
How did someone with so much power get to such a stage that they put so many resources into obtaining a random cursed object that they didn't even know what it sealed; if they knew that it was the soul of Itroth the Calamity then they would not have let him take it so easily.
"Well either way all of that is in the future, for the time being I should focus on what is in front of me." And with that he started to climb the staircase.