Chapter 210: Dominion Over the Void
The appearance of a Quasi-Supreme was beyond anyone’s expectations, even Silas’s, who by this point was finally beginning to recover fragments of memories from before they’d been sealed away by the cycle of reincarnation.
They came as fragments, fragments of a life he didn’t remember, fragments of an intent to accomplish something that had once been unknown to him but which he came to understand over time, and that understanding led him to grasp what he needed to do to secure victory against the Abyss.
He, too, had tried to make use of the emergence of other divinities for his cause, but they proved to be far more of a problem than anyone could have anticipated.
He would have preferred to reason with them, but power corrupted them the same way it once corrupted him and Seraphine, the difference was that the two of them had obtained their powers at different times, giving them time to adjust and prevent their newfound strength from going to their heads.
That wasn’t the case for these individuals, born into a world that was already chaotic from the start, individuals who understood almost nothing about the true state of things.
Once the point where reason was still possible had been crossed, force became the only option.
And fate dictated that they would perish beneath his blade.
He understood they were more useful dead than alive.
He used his Law of Death to seize their fragments of divinity, and used those fragments to strengthen both himself and his allies.
The dragon race in this cycle was weak, not for lack of talent or strength, but because no one in this cycle had united them. They wore each other down in constant infighting, giving the other races time to grow strong and eventually suppress them.
Although he had no personal ties to them in this cycle, he had preserved his sense of self from the previous one, and driven by that, he decided to give them a chance.
He combed through the entire dragon race and, from it, gathered three latent talents he judged fit to inherit the power of the dead gods he’d collected.
He cultivated them, and in under a decade, these three beings became the three pillars of the dragon race, beings whose fame spread far and wide.
They became known as the Three Calamities.
It was during this period that Seraphine attempted to ascend to supremacy, and failed miserably.
It had taken Evan nearly a decade, along with a level of comprehension of the concepts governing the world several times greater than Seraphine’s, merely to touch the threshold of Supremacy.
There was no way she should have been able to succeed.
And yet, she almost did.
To Silas’s surprise, she came astonishingly close to reaching Quasi-Supreme rank, but she never got the chance to actually achieve it, because the Abyss struck again, this time harder than ever.
It was only later that Silas realized that the Abyss had poured all of its strength into this assault.
Several Abyss Gods descended, and with them came the one who commanded them, the Supreme of the Abyss.
However, the damage Evan had inflicted upon the Abyss during the previous cycles, tearing away numerous Abyss Gods, appeared to have cost the Supreme part of its power.
Silas discovered that the Supreme was directly connected to the Abyss. Every time an Abyss God was created, a portion of the Supreme’s power was taken and used to give birth to that god.
He also realized that, throughout the countless cycles since the beginning of everything, dozens of Abyss Gods had been created in this way.
Each of them had been born by taking a portion of the Supreme’s power, and yet, even after losing so much of its strength, the Supreme had only fallen from the level of a Supreme to that of a Quasi-Supreme.
He was still an existence that stood above all ordinary deities, yet remained just beneath the Supreme Rank.
That alone was enough to show Silas just how terrifyingly powerful a true Supreme had to be.
The battle this time was far more brutal and devastating.
Seraphine had stopped collaborating with Silas and launched her own attack independently. Her powers, though they hadn’t reached Quasi-Supreme rank, had already grown to be vastly superior to those of ordinary gods, which let her eliminate several of them, but in the end, she too was overwhelmed.
One of the Abyss Gods copied her concept and twisted it into a corrupted version, giving rise to a Tree of Life centered on corruption through void energy. That Abyss God, together with several others, tried to eliminate her, and very nearly succeeded.
Silas didn’t take part directly in the battle against them, not because he didn’t want to, but because he found himself facing the strongest one from the very start.
His current strength wasn’t enough, and that much was clear immediately.
He needed to surpass his current power, something he couldn’t do quickly through ordinary means.
That was where the Three Calamities came in.
They represented three secondary concepts directly tied to the concept of Death.
The White Dread wielded ice steeped in the essence of death, making it far more than simple ice, revealing it as something far more terrifying and unnatural.
The Crawling Plague controlled the very essence of poison, from the weakest to the most lethal, likewise steeped in the energy of death, which made every aspect of it even more lethal than before.
And finally, The Calamity Dragon, the future queen of the dragons, commanded the personification of darkness itself, steeped not only in the energy of death but also in void energy.
Because of her unique nature, this had nearly transformed her into a Hollow, but Silas had saved her, granting her the blessing of death, which turned her into a half-Hollow and, through the powers this granted her, gave her traits belonging to both death and the void.
Since their concepts were so closely aligned with that of death, there existed a genuine possibility of forcibly pushing someone to supremacy.
That was the idea the three of them had in mind when they proposed the plan to Silas, but he refused. If anyone understood how the true process toward supremacy worked, it was him, and he understood that this approach wouldn’t work, or at least, not entirely.
There was one thing they could do, though: temporarily grant him the ability to reach Quasi-Supreme rank for this purpose.
They would act as conduits for their own core concepts, linking them to Silas’s core and channeling their power through him, so that he wouldn’t have to bear the weight of all their core concepts himself, and could simply draw on their power directly.
It worked, though not without some repercussions, ones that ended up damaging the core concept of The White Dread, the strongest of the three at the time.
Silas used his newfound strength to fight the Quasi-Supreme, who didn’t die but was driven back.
He didn’t stop at simply repelling it, though, he used his Law of Death over the Earth to overpower that of the void.
He couldn’t hope to do this on a large scale, not at his current level, but he understood he could do it within a narrow, contained area.
So he chose to impose his dominion over the pocket of void surrounding the Earth, placing the dominion of death above that of the void within that region.