Chapter 157: The War Between Man and God Has Always Been a Battle to the Death
The Nether Abyss roared, and wind and tide rose and fell.
Waves surged on the dim, yellow sea, rising into mountainous swells as if great peaks were collapsing.
Rast stood atop the high tower, gazing down at the Phantom Ocean beneath the cliff. He watched for a very long time.
Only when the silhouette of the girl who bore both human and Divine Bloodline was no longer visible amid the veil-like night and the rising waves did he finally turn around slowly, withdrawing his gaze from the Nether Abyss.
Then, Rast shifted his eyes back to the top of the Sky-Piercing Tower, to the undulating Bounty Sequence domain and the grotesquely twisted branches and leaves.
"The heroine of the fairy tale has already returned to the Present World."
"Then, what I must do next—"
"Is nothing more than... the final conclusion."
His voice and expression remained calm, like an unchanging, ancient deep pond.
However—
At the same time—
Within the root of Rast’s soul, in the Spiritual World manifested by his mental image, a completely different scene was unfolding.
The world once belonging solely to Rast’s mental image was now tainted by a stain of pitch-black filth.
It was an abyssal darkness that devoured all light, enshrouding Rast’s Spiritual World entirely… and then, that darkness slowly eroded from the outside, corrupting everything, attempting to corrode Rast’s soul barrier, invading his Spiritual World with the utmost darkness.
Just like the nightmare once dreamed by Akxia when she slumbered in the Ice Coffin—an eternally dark sky, and the extreme cold of a Snowstorm Night...
And when the snowstorm entirely engulfed the Spark’s dim glow… Rast’s personality and entire self would be erased altogether.
This was corruption from the Death God, an erosion launched by the Remnant of the Death God—an inevitable outcome Rast had to face.
When he used the method of "Castling" to rescue the imprisoned queen from certain death, helping her escape the Nightworld and return to the Present World—a price of equal exchange had already been paid.
And the price of that equivalent exchange… was for Rast, as the "Rook", to bear all the karma the "King" was supposed to face.
As the half-blood of man and god, the Perfect Vessel, Akxia had already vanished from this world. Thus, Rast became the last lifeline of the Remnant of the Death God…
Other than seizing the body of this human before him, turning Rast into a new vessel, it had no other choice left.
Boom—
Within the Spiritual World, the remnant of the ancient god became a pitch-black tidal wave, constantly crashing against the boy’s soul barrier, burning one void hole after another.
From the very beginning, this was destined to be an unfair duel...
After all, this was the Divine Soul of the Death God. Even after a long slumber and decline over the ages, even if it was but a broken remnant soul, it was far from something an ordinary human could contend with.
It was a supreme ancient god, once ascending to the clouds in the distant Age of Gods, gazing down upon the mortal world for tens of thousands of years. In those times, humans were nothing more than livestock penned in a pasture in their eyes.
Before the grand will forged by tens of thousands of years of vast life, a human’s mere decades of memories and willpower were as insignificant as dust.
Like those tainted by plague, retaining all their memories yet losing their humanity… reduced to beasts living only to torment others, like the lapdogs of Evil Gods, the Iron Cross Clan.
The corruption of an ancient god could erode a human soul as easily as a steamroller crushing gravel.
The scales of victory and defeat had already tilted completely toward the gods even before the gamble began—
And the only remaining fairness lay in the fact that both sides wagered equal stakes—total loss upon failure, whether god or human.
Crack—
Crack—
In the Spiritual World, cracking sounds echoed.
They were the fractures left behind on Rast’s soul barrier after enduring the long erosion and taint of the Remnant of the Death God.
The process of invading the mental image world of this unfamiliar human youth had been so long that it even exceeded the expectations of the Remnant of the Death God.
As a former ancient god, it had once spread faith among humans, had used corruption to develop its followers… yet had never encountered such fierce resistance.
Ordinary human soul barriers, before the Divine Soul of a god, were supposed to be as fragile as paper, broken at a flick.
Only those who had undergone the transformation of life’s essence and ascended the Legendary Realm… their once-ephemeral mental power could be fully sublimated and materialize into a spiritual sea, allowing them to gaze upon their soul and mind from a higher dimension.
Generally speaking, only Legendary experts possessed the brief possibility of resisting a god’s soul without being instantly tainted and corrupted—if transcendent beings below the Legendary Realm were nothing but ants before gods, then the Legendary rank meant they were no longer flicked away like ants, but had the qualification to stand before the gods.
However, at this very moment, the vessel into which the Remnant of the Death God had invaded… aside from the Divine Authority it had stolen, its actual level was merely Fourth or Fifth Tier.
Clearly not Legendary, and yet the process of invading the soul was extraordinarily difficult. His mental power was no longer an ethereal presence—it had manifested into a true spiritual sea, a concrete mental world like that of a Legendary being.
However—
Even so, the erosion had ultimately been completed.
Once the soul barrier was breached… it could invade the mental world directly, interfering with his memories and mind.
As long as it was human, there would always be weaknesses in their humanity, flaws in their heart—this applied even to those in the Legendary Realm.
Thus, although the process proved to be more difficult than expected… once the invasion was complete, all it needed to do was exploit these weaknesses to gradually erode the opponent's sense of self.
Just as in the nightmare Akxia had experienced not long ago, that dreamscape had been the very process by which the Death God had slowly eroded her identity.
Such thoughts flashed momentarily through the remnant of the ancient god.
Immediately after, the soul barrier of the human youth was finally and fully breached.
The barrier of the world let out a fragile groan, then shattered, scattering into countless specks of light.
The Remnant of the Death God finally broke through and entered Rast’s mental world.
However, what followed—
Within the Divine Consciousness, the ripples of thought… abruptly came to a halt.
As an ancient god from the Age of Gods, the master of death, the king of countless souls in the Netherrealm—the Old Death God had witnessed countless Spiritual Worlds and mental landscapes.
Those mental worlds belonged to hosts of many races, of varying strength—some of them even true Legendary minds.
But never had the Death God seen such a sight as this one before it.
What kind of mental world was this—
The ground split with deep fissures, buildings in collapse, hot wind carrying scorched dust, and metal pipes twisting under high heat.
It was a desolate ruin—a town named "Canaan" reduced to wreckage.
On the distant horizon, flames danced.
Above in the darkened sky loomed countless colossal gears that blocked out the heavens, interlocking and slowly turning.
This was a world like a steel mill.
Aside from the ruins of that small town on the red wasteland, and the immense gears rotating slowly at the end of the darkened sky… there was nothing else.
The Remnant of the Death God suddenly ceased its advance… its preset plan to seek out the human flaws within Rast’s mental world, to corrupt and erode his will, was now frozen at the starting line, unable to progress.
Normally, all sentient humans had various desires.
For men, their desires often boiled down to a few things—wealth as vast as a nation, dominion over the world, power to stand above all, or beauties who could topple kingdoms.
For women, it was the same. The wish to become beautiful, to retain youth forever, to find true and blissful love…
These were the common traits of humanity. Even those who had ascended to the Legendary Realm could not escape such desires.
Of course, most people learned how to hide these desires from others, keeping their greed and wants veiled beneath the surface.
However, in the Spiritual World, within the landscape that manifested the very source of one's soul… those deeply hidden desires would be revealed in full, becoming vividly concrete objects.
Likewise, these concretized manifestations of emotion and desire—were precisely the weaknesses of humanity, the flaws that the Remnant of the Death God sought to exploit.
Yet within Rast’s mental world, no such things existed.
Other than that desolate ruin upon the red wasteland, there was nothing else in his Spiritual World.
He had abandoned human desire and lost all understanding of worldly emotion—
Only the colossal gears at the edge of the dark sky remained, interlocked across the heavens, turning slowly.
This was the mental world Rast had long carried—the landscape forged during his three hundred years in Deep Blue Port.
The gears of the mind turned slowly, and his soul burned like the furnace core of a steel mill—
Driven by the linkage of gears and furnace core, this hollow shell and the life named Rast moved like machinery. All for the preset objective named "Shoreguards".
Beyond that, his soul held nothing.
Thus, the Old Death God naturally could not erase Rast’s will as it had done with Akxia, exploiting human flaws.
A mechanical mind driven by gears, a world containing nothing but ruins… how could such a soul reveal any human weakness?
【Heart of Steel Forging】
【Category: Inherent Skill】
【An endless Same Day Time Loop, the repetition of time, is not a blessing for humanity—but the cruelest of curses. No matter how sincere the emotion or how fervent the ideals, they eventually decay, degenerate, and crumble into dust in the face of endless time.】
【A spirit that turns like gears is a heart of mocking steel.】
【So then, what is it that truly drives this broken body forward…?】
【Skill Effect: Your soul resistance increases by 50%. All corruption, erosion, bewitchment, mind control, hypnosis, and mind-reading abilities targeting you are greatly weakened, and inflict backlash on the user.】
This Inherent Skill granted to the youth by the Nightworld, rather than being a mission reward…
It was more accurately a reflection of his innermost world.
The pitch-black Divine Soul of the Death God stood upon the red wasteland, yet—extremely rarely—it stalled.
It had expended a vast amount of Divine Consciousness just to break into Rast’s Spiritual World, only to find no vulnerability at all.
"Surprising, isn't it?"
Amid the sound of rotating gears, the boy’s voice echoed from the end of the dark sky, resounding across the red wasteland.
"To think that a human mental world could be so barren and incomplete, it’s almost no different from a vegetative state..."
"But precisely because it’s broken to the point of emptiness… there’s nothing to grab hold of. You can’t overrun this vessel as you intended, can’t use it as your means of revival."
The boy sighed softly. "Honestly, having a mental world broken like this—I do feel a bit helpless myself."
"If you want someone to blame, then go blame that colleague of yours from the Age of Gods—the one who unleashed the Iron Cross plague upon the continent."
"That Evil God revered by the Iron Cross Clan is the reason my Spiritual World turned into this half-human, half-ghost mess."
"Iron Cross..."
In a rare moment, the Remnant of the Death God responded.
A supreme deity would never converse with ants. The only reason it replied… was that, in this fragment of Divine Consciousness, Rast was no longer seen as a mere extraordinary mortal—but as someone akin to a Legendary, worthy of discourse.
The voice of the ancient god rang like clashing bronze, "The Bound One?"
"Did you have dealings with It?"
Though it had perished across several eras, through the contingencies it had left behind in the Nether Abyss and Paradise, the Remnant of the Death God was still able to grasp the general happenings of the continent.
And the true culprit behind the Iron Cross plague was the ancient god known as "The Bound One."
In the First Era, that distant Age of Gods, both the Bound One and the Death God had ascended to the Divine Seat as great existences.
But time had passed, the Age of Gods faded, and the age of the deities came to an end… The Death God chose self-annihilation, seeking to reincarnate in human form, while the Bound One hid upon the Threshold of Seraphim to prolong Its own existence.
"The Evil God who created the Iron Cross plague was called ‘The Bound One’?"
Rast’s words paused slightly—this was indeed a secret he had not known before.
As expected, these beings who had survived since the Age of Gods were living repositories of knowledge. Even a casual leak revealed a forbidden secret of future generations.
"Yeah, that damned thing killed me tens of thousands of times… and as for how many times I was infected by the Iron Cross plague or had my soul eroded by the Evil God’s will, it’s beyond count."
"That thing corrupted me too many times—so many that I had no choice but to reshape my mental image and Spiritual World into this ruined form just to resist it."
"Because only by doing so could I preserve my mind under the infection of the Iron Cross and retain my complete self."
"So if you want someone to blame, blame your colleague."
"That god drilled the process of soul erosion into me so many times that I’ve basically developed immunity… or call it medicinal resistance, if you prefer."
Rast’s voice remained calm. "Although I’d like to chat a little longer, it seems Noah’s incarnation is even stronger than I thought. Looks like he’s about to suppress his own Flesh Blooming."
"So, in order for me to finish this final task—"
"Old Death God… it’s about time you got ready to die."
Hearing the boy’s indifferent voice, the Remnant of the Death God suddenly hesitated in the Mental World.
Then, it heard the grinding of interlocking gears.
The world barrier of the mental image—the dim firmament where the Death God’s remnant had broken in and corroded—quietly healed and drew shut.
Then—
Boom—
A righteous gust slashed across the ground.
It was a blade forged from the soul, arriving with the gales that swept the wasteland.
As a human youth marked as prey by a deity, chosen as the vessel of the Remnant, Rast at that moment had forged his soul and entire mental image into a tempered blade, and struck toward the ancient god’s remnant.
The Death God suddenly understood.
A qualified hunter always appears in the form of prey.
It wasn’t just that It saw Rast as Its prey—from the beginning, Rast had also been calculating against this remnant of the Death God.
Both the Death God’s Star Cup and the Sacrosanct Grail had been returned to Akxia and vanished from this world...
And without the support of the Death God's power, Rast’s actual rank—merely Fourth or Fifth Tier—would have no way to contend against Noah once he had shed his Flesh Blooming and broken free.
Thus, Rast had to devour the Death God’s remnant soul—only then could he regain control of the Nether Abyss, making the entire abyss and the Death God's Divine Husk his domain.
And with the power of the entire Nether Abyss, he could confront and restrain the freed Noah.
The cracks on Rast’s soul barrier were not eroded open by the Remnant…
They were his own doing—a trap inviting the god in.
His goal was to lure the Death God's remnant into his Spiritual World, into his mental image.
Cutting off the Death God's retreat—and his own.
A severing of retreat, a perilous gamble.
They were beasts locked in a cage, with no way back and no room for regret.
For either side, all that remained was to fight—to swing their blades at one another with every ounce of strength, until they tore the enemy’s throat apart.
The victor would claim everything from both sides, and the loser would become the residue in the winner’s mouth, not even a corpse left behind.
The war between man and god…
Has always been a battle to the death.