In return, the river of death embraced him wholeheartedly. The embrace wasn’t tight, but it was suffocating.
He didn’t have lungs and he didn’t to breathe, but he felt that he was drowning. The black water of the river of death felt soft and welcoming to him, but it was so cold, it burned him.
The black water chilled him to the extent that his body shivered. This was another anomaly that a divine being shouldn’t experience, but not only did his body shiver, his soul also shivered for warmth.
The previous time he did something like this, the river of death ripped lifespan and law fragments from his Cave Heaven through. He expected the experience to be a little bit different now that he was a rank 9 divine being. But he was wrong.
The river of death didn’t seem to care that he was a rank 9 divine being with a Divine Metac. The mysterious force of the river of death plunged into his body and west straight into the Cave Heaven, where it tried to snuff out the life within him.
Nothing he could do could stop the power of the river of death. It stripped him of his law fragments and drained him of his lifespan, all in a bid to kill him. So the experience was as bad as it was the first time.
As soon as he touched the river of death, he remembered exactly why he swore never to touch the river of death again. In fact, he also swore, saying, "If this doesn’t turn out well, I’m killing Money Body."
The possibility of a great secret hiding just beneath the river of death and the pleasure of inflicting his current suffering on another being helped keep him determined to continue sinking into the embrace of death despite all of his instincts telling him to run away right now.
Actually, his instincts were screaming at him to run. Every means of judgement and discernment that he possessed was roaring in his ears that he was dying.
As someone who had killed so many people and had died many times over his years of cultivation, he understood that what his instincts were telling him was right. Yet, he refused to go up.
After he entered the river of death, the whole world became silent, and every form of light disappeared. In fact, the entire world had disappeared completely. He felt as if he were the only thing in existence.
He also felt that he would soon be the last thing in existence because he was dying. The feeling of the river of death draining everything within him gave him the certainty that while the time of his death was uncertain, it was certain that he would die.
He gritted his teeth as he thought, ’If this goes on, I will surely die.’
The feeling of the certainty of death was overwhelming. It was especially bad since it was the only thing he could feel, see, hear, touch, or taste.
Common sense dictated that he should give up. But he had over 110 million worth of lifespan, so he believed that he should be fine for a while.
Besides, he also had the Power Identification Ability to rely on. Since he could use it to monitor his situation, he would be able to determine when he was truly in danger of dying.
When he used the Power Identification Ability to check his status, he saw that he had consumed 12 thousand years of lifespan. Since he had spent 12 seconds in the river of death, the rate of dying was easy to determine.
After making the short calculation, he said, "So I’m dying at a rate of 1,000 years per second. That’s very bad."
"I can endure this level of consumption for a while before I croak, but 1,000 years of lifespan gone in a second is widely unreasonable. Anyway, if I don’t see anything by the time I lose half of my lifespan, I will give up and return immediately."
At the end of the day, it was the fact that he could monitor how much lifespan he was losing in real time and determine when he had had enough that was the main reason he could continue enduring the feeling of death.
He needed the certainty of being able to escape because he had lost the motivation for a potential secret or the motivation of the possibility of inflicting pain on a certain rank 8 money cultivator, a few seconds into this unpleasant experience.
It wasn’t that he had given up on punishing Money Body for misleading. It was just that all the pleasure he could gain from punishing Money Body was no longer enough to justify putting himself through something this dangerous.
But he was still hell-bent on beating Money Body and was going to do so even if this venture went well. In fact, he decided to think about all the things he would do to Money Body now to distract himself from the suffocating feeling of death.
He was thinking about this when the river of death suddenly disappeared. The unyielding darkness of death yielded to something other than death. Like a man drowning, Loki grabbed onto this slice of existence without any care for what it was.
In that short moment, he didn’t care about why there was something down here under the river of death, and he didn’t even bother to see what it was before grabbing onto it. He was just glad that there was finally something other than his existence.
He could have ignored this slice of reality and continued sinking into the depths of the river of death. But he allowed himself to sink into it.
This object was like mud. It was thick, yet it allowed him to sink into it. When he finally entered the object, he looked around to see what it was.
What he saw was a large continent. The continent was full of life and people. They lived their lives in peace as if they were not living under the river of death, but in the real world.