Chapter 211: Venom
By imposing his Domain of Death over a portion of the Void energy surrounding Earth, Silas sealed every path of entry into and escape from the world.
The Supreme of the Abyss had already fled, but the other Abyss Gods had not.
They were imprisoned on Earth and subsequently sealed within the separate dimension where Evan had sent the rest of the Abyss Gods.
But things did not go smoothly.
By that point, Seraphine had been overwhelmed by the Abyss Gods, to the point that one of them managed to bypass her soul’s defenses and infiltrate it, corrupting her directly at the root.
No matter how far an existence ascended into divinity, the soul remained its most vulnerable point.
And that point had been compromised.
When Silas eliminated all the others, he found her in that state.
She asked him to kill her.
She would rather die than become one of them.
But Silas decided to take a different approach.
He severed the part of Seraphine’s heart that contained her Concept Core, along with the portion of her soul that had not yet been corrupted.
Then, using the remainder of his power, he sealed the corruption inside Seraphine’s body, using his sword, which was imbued with his Law of Death at its peak.
Seraphine never understood why Silas had gone to such lengths to keep her from dying.
It was only later, when her heart was found among the remains of her Tree of Life, that she understood why.
With that settled, he needed to start preparing for what would come next.
The war against the Abyss had been devastating, as it always was. But unlike every time before, this time they won, though barely.
The world was not stripped of every form of life.
Despite the enormous losses, life still remained.
Every race had suffered immense damage, with several races in particular being completely wiped out, including the Elementals.
Silas spent the following years cleansing the world of every remaining trace of void energy, eliminating the Hollows still wandering it, fixing what he could, and eliminating what he couldn’t.
He could have simply waited for the next cycle to begin, but more than anyone, he understood that the cycles themselves were coming to an end. He wasn’t even sure anymore whether there would be another cycle at all. That fear turned out to be justified. The world’s core told him a full reset was no longer possible, only a partial one, and Silas accepted that.
This time, they had managed to limit the damage, making the aftermath far easier to deal with. In Silas’s view, this was for the best. The world had already suffered a devastating blow from the Abyss, and the survivors would carry the scars of that defeat with them. They would be more cautious in the future and, hopefully, stronger for it, better prepared for the inevitable attacks that would come.
One part of the continent was saved.
Another, however, was lost.
The damage inflicted upon The White Dread’s Concept Core ultimately caused him to succumb to an eternal sleep.
And with no one left to control his powers, they poured out into the world.
Thus was born the curtain of dense clouds that continuously released snow resembling ash over the Fallen Lands, at the center of which stood the capital of the kingdom of the dead, or rather, what remained of it. The entire territory was now steeped in the corruption of Void energy.
Silas understood he couldn’t purge the corruption entirely, but he could seal it. He used the capital to do just that, and to keep it from being compromised in the future, he used his dominion over void energy to relocate the entire capital into a region of the Abyss close to Earth, so he could better manage any future leakage of the void energy sealed within it, while also limiting the damage it could do to the world.
All of this required an enormous amount of energy, energy he spent entirely.
He felt his soul growing more and more exhausted from all of it, and understood he couldn’t remain awake in this world much longer.
He knew he needed to take one final step, and before doing so, he couldn’t afford to rest, not when they were already this close to completing everything they’d planned for the future.
With that in mind, he made his way to the Earth’s core and entrusted the divinities cultivated over the course of the previous cycle to Bruce, before submerging himself into the cycle of reincarnation once more.
This process was necessary. He had already reached the absolute limit of what his current physical body could achieve, and there was no way for him to progress any further. He therefore had to start over once again, but this time from a much higher starting point.
With Bruce’s help, he made sure of this by using both the divinity he had personally cultivated and the divinity he had gathered by killing the gods of this cycle.
These divinities proved to be far more useful than he could have ever imagined, despite having never been part of his original plan.
The Calamity Dragon, drained from channeling her powers on such a scale, ended up exhausted and fell into a long sleep, not eternal like the other Calamity, but long all the same.
The third Calamity also entered a long sleep.
Before Silas entered the cycle of reincarnation, however, he decided to move her somewhere else, somewhere where she might prove useful in the future.
A future that had now arrived.
The sound of footsteps echoed through the hall, disturbing the silence that had reigned over this place for an unknown amount of time.
It was Elena’s group.
Or rather, what remained of it.
Seraphine walked at the front. Behind her came the three survivors of Elena’s group, Elena herself, the young woman, and the boy, their faces tight with fear and wariness as they moved through that shadowed place, at the center of a city that, until just a short while ago, they wouldn’t have been able to enter without dying.
Seraphine, by contrast, walked with perfect calm.
She paid no mind to any of it, neither the hall itself, half in ruins, nor the traces of its former splendor that still lingered here and there. Her gaze remained fixed ahead as she walked deeper into the vast chamber.
At the far end, she soon spotted a throne. Empty, yet still carrying a strange majesty despite the passage of time.
Floating before it was a knot of light, roughly three meters tall, pulsing steadily with a faint violet glow. Thin threads of energy curled around its surface, unmistakably carrying the energy of death.
She continued forward without slowing.
Only when she reached the center of the hall did she finally stop.
For a moment, she said nothing.
Then her gaze slowly lifted toward the great dome above.
A faint smile touched her lips.
Something immense was coiled across the ceiling, its dark violet form blending into the shadows of the dome. For a moment, it remained perfectly still.
Then two violet eyes opened.
They slowly turned downward, locking onto Seraphine.
Her smile widened.
"Good to see you again, Venom."