Chapter 349: Su Mu's Fastest Time

Su Mu frowned at the Pope's still-warm corpse, wondering if a dead body could even use Supreme Heaven.

He activated Severed Thoughts in Sealed Dust. His materialized mental power surged outward, transforming into tens of thousands of invisible threads that anchored into the Pope's corpse.

Under his control, the Pope slowly stood. The corpse flexed its hands; aside from its blank expression, it looked exactly like a living person.

Su Mu pulled out a priceless treasure and handed it over. The Pope took it and attempted to activate Supreme Heaven, but... nothing happened.

"I figured it would require a living person. You're useless, then."

Su Mu pulled Supreme Heaven off and slipped it onto his own hand, letting the Pope's corpse crumple to the floor.

Unable to channel Supreme Heaven, the body was worthless. The artifact had hollowed the Pope out, leaving his physical form weaker than an ordinary person's.

Its only remaining value would be bringing it back to King Chi to trade for a decent noble title, but Su Mu had no need for that.

He stepped forward to leave the nightmare, but a violent headache struck him instantly. Countless disjointed memory fragments slammed through his mind, scrambling his thoughts.

The Pope's suicide attack had failed to overwrite Su Mu, but it had still left an impact. Suddenly bearing over a century of memories, he only managed to remain conscious thanks to his formidable mental power.

In a daze, he "saw" himself in the Primal Divine Cult, devoutly preaching to a million believers. Then he "saw" himself standing in an empty hall, gazing fanatically up at the Primal Divine Statue.

The chaotic perspectives violently shifted back and forth, making it nearly impossible to think straight.

It took a long while to push through the haze and recover his clarity.

Su Mu knew his best option was to hypnotize himself and wipe the Pope's memories completely. It would solve the problem once and for all, but he chose not to.

The Pope's memories were far too precious. As a peerless powerhouse who had surpassed the Gold King tier, his mind held top-tier combat experience, vast knowledge of the Nightmare World, thousands of Primal Divine Magics, and his own comprehension of Primal Divinity.

These memories were worth more than the entire Blood Moon Treasury combined!

There was no way he was going to just throw them all away. He needed to surgically extract the useless memories and preserve the essence, but doing that would require a tremendous amount of time. He would have to pick through the fragments piece by piece, and he didn't have that kind of time to waste right now.

Armed with the Pope's insight, Su Mu was now a walking encyclopedia of the Nightmare World. He finally understood exactly what tier of powerhouse the Pope had been at his peak.

Saint Grade!

The power hierarchy of the Nightmare World was no different from the Real World's. It was also divided into Bronze, Silver, and Gold. After all, the Nightmare World was the one place where one could most directly touch the Law.

And above the Gold Law existed another path—the Saint Law!

A Gold King was an existence situated between the Gold Grade and the Saint Grade. That meant a Saint Grade powerhouse was even stronger than a Gold King!

Being a Gold King was not actually a true realm, but rather a transitional phase toward the Saint Grade. At their core, a Gold King and an ordinary Gold expert were the same—both were connected to the Gold Law.

So why did a Gold King possess strength that so vastly eclipsed an ordinary Gold powerhouse?

Su Mu found the answer in the Pope's memories: bloodlines!

A Gold King was simply a Gold powerhouse who had devoured the essence blood of a Saint Grade Nightmare Creature to trigger an evolution.

Take King Chi's Phoenix and the Undead King's Blood Angel, for instance. Their overwhelming might came from their ability to wield a fraction of Saint Grade power, allowing them to completely crush ordinary Gold experts.

Su Mu suspected that the current generation of Gold Kings relied almost entirely on the legacy of their ancestors to achieve their current heights.

The original Seven Kings had acquired the essence blood of Saint Grade Nightmare Creatures and ascended to become Gold Kings. After they died, that Saint Grade essence blood was passed down through their bloodlines, generation after generation.

After calming the churning memories in his mind, Su Mu fell deep into thought.

An imminent problem now lay before him. He had obtained Supreme Heaven, but how was he supposed to leave the Abyss?

Retracing his steps was impossible. The Abyss possessed infinite space; as time flowed, one would only sink deeper. The only way to go back the way he came would be to turn back time.

Back then, the First Red King had only made it out alive because the Pope used his Primal divine power and Saint Grade strength to forcefully tear open space. Of course, the primary reason was that they hadn't ventured too deeply into the Abyss in the first place.

Su Mu lacked the Pope's overwhelming strength, and he had plunged far deeper into the Abyss. Logically speaking, escaping was impossible.

This sparked another question in Su Mu's mind. The real First Red King had tricked him into entering the Abyss for the sole purpose of retrieving Supreme Heaven.

After all, anyone who had wielded Supreme Heaven could attest to its power; it truly was omnipotent.

But how did the First Red King know for sure that he could retrieve the artifact and safely bring it back?

Even Su Mu himself had no idea how to leave the Abyss right now.

Perhaps he would get his answers when he finally confronted the First Red King. Right now, escaping took priority.

Shaking off his thoughts, Su Mu began his first attempt. He tried to open a Two Worlds Passage right here within the nightmare, intending to cross to the Real World and then transit over to Holy Brilliance City.

He failed instantly. The Two Worlds Passage simply wouldn't open.

This was within his expectations. As the sealing ground of the evil gods, if the Abyss could be so easily breached, they would have escaped long ago.

"Then I'll just have to try the standard method used by Nightmare Apostles."

Su Mu vanished in a flash. When he reappeared, he was standing inside a Mirror Museum, surrounded by a dizzying array of mirrors.

"According to the Pope's memories, the nightmare origin is hiding in here."

He ignored the terrain, phasing straight through walls until he arrived at a long corridor. The walls on both sides were inlaid with countless mirrors of every shape imaginable: some were perfectly round like a full moon, others rectangular like coffins, and some were jagged and asymmetrical.

Su Mu strode down the hall, his reflection flashing across the glass panels until he stopped before a bronze mirror at the very end of the corridor.

Staring into the faintly rusted bronze mirror, he ruthlessly forced his overwhelming mental power straight into the glass.

A split second later, a shrill, bloodcurdling scream erupted from within the mirror, and fresh blood began to seep directly out of the bronze surface.

The bronze mirror trembled violently, and then... Bang!

It shattered.

The nightmare origin was destroyed!

This was, without a doubt, Su Mu's fastest clear. He had the Pope's memories to thank for pointing him directly to the nightmare origin's true body, backed by the Pope's vast experience in slaughtering Nightmare Creatures.