Chapter 1237: {Rot in Your LUST}

{Rot in your LUST!}

A fathomless voice descended through the absolute emptiness that had swallowed Anarctica, although no air remained for those words to travel through and no ordinary space survived to carry sound. The voice was everywhere at once: inside thought, soul and the primordial depths of instinct that had learned fear long before cultivators invented a name for it.

Every remaining World Transcendent heard the voice with perfect clarity while possessing no idea where it had come from.

Direction had disappeared along with Anarctica. The Coffer could no longer be perceived, the dead winter vanished beneath the same all-consuming absence, and glaciers and heavens had been effaced so thoroughly that the Chained could not determine whether they were standing, floating or falling through infinity.

Their cultivation remained within them, immense and useless. The power that had stained winter, petrified glaciers and burdened the world with oceanic pressure refused to answer. Every attempt to release spiritual perception drowned inside an emptiness without distance, boundary or end.

For beings who had spent ages standing above worlds, there was something exquisitely horrifying about being left with nothing except consciousness.

Especially when even that no longer felt safe.

Two completely white eyes had opened within the darkness.

Their brilliance resembled primordial lightning trapped inside a living gaze, yet they illuminated nothing. No face emerged around them and body offered scale to give the mind anything merciful enough to understand.

Those lambent eyes existed alone within the Void, and they were staring directly at the Ancient Naga; only he could see them.

The enormous serpent felt their attention pass through everything that had once made him formidable. His cultivation, bloodline, power and third eye capable of perceiving what ordinary beings could not see became decorative achievements beneath that gaze, little more than ornaments worn by prey to make its corpse memorable.

Moments earlier, the Naga had driven a dagger through Phei’s heart and raised another towards the Young Dragon’s throat. He had obeyed an allegiance to Jörmungandr buried so deeply within his blood that slavery, resentment and centuries of punishment had failed to erase it.

Now he could no longer feel the dagger.

He could no longer feel his hand or his colossal serpentine body that had carried him through the heavens. The white eyes became the only certainty left in his existence, their implacable attention sinking deeper until every concealed hunger, strangled ambition, ancient resentment and shameful desire lay naked before them.

The Naga finally understood prey.

The presence regarded his revelation with enough contempt to deny him even the dignity of fully experiencing it.

Something moved within the darkness:

A single finger appeared before the Naga’s forehead, carrying no ostentatious power, weight or tempest of overwhelming essence. It touched him with the dismissive gentleness and contempt one might use to brush dust from a sleeve, and the fathomless voice uttered one word:

{Rot!}

The Naga’s soul disappeared before the command finished passing through the Void.

Lust Reality swallowed him whole.

But the ability had become something far more rapacious than the fearsome but restrained ability Phei had only recently awakened. The Lust Reality known to Phei enclosed a soul inside a complete world woven from its deepest desires, imprisoning it for a minimum period before cultivation, will and soul strength could even begin contesting the false existence.

Whatever had seized the Ancient Naga offered no such mercy.

His deepest cravings became the architecture of eternity.

Power came first.

The Naga rose beyond World Transcendent and touched heights that had tormented his imagination throughout captivity. His chains broke. Danton knelt. Jörmungandr’s ancestral authority ceased pressing upon his marrow, and the serpent races that had once looked down upon him prostrated themselves beneath his throne.

For one glorious age, he possessed everything...

...The possession sharpened the hunger.

Power demanded supremacy. Supremacy required worship. Worship became tedious without fear, and fear felt meaningless while a single enemy remained capable of hatred. The Naga conquered worlds, slaughtered rivals, devoured bloodlines and made them his own and avenged every humiliation he had stored across centuries.

He sat at the pinnacle other it all; all the existence bowed to their absolute Primordial; him!

Each fulfilled desire birthed another before satisfaction could settle. Every new craving arrived more voracious than the last until pleasure curdled into starvation without a bottom.

Freedom became another prison.

Worship became noise.

Supremacy became insufficiency.

The Naga consumed everything his soul had ever wanted and discovered that abundance could starve more cruelly than deprivation. Subjective years passed, followed by decades, and eventually more than a century. His lust kept growing until desire itself became the mouth eating him alive.

It gnawed through memory first. Pride followed, identity vanished beneath appetites that no longer remembered why they existed, and only when almost nothing remained capable of wanting did death finally take mercy upon him eons later after ruling everything!

In Anarctica, scarcely a second had passed before the Ancient Naga’s body died.

[Ding—]

The System notification barely appeared before a hand moved somewhere inside the darkness and waved it away with casual irritation, as though even the System had chosen an embarrassingly inappropriate moment to speak.

The white eyes shifted towards Cassian.

The second male demon began trembling before he could stop himself. The shaking started within his soul and spread inward until an ancient predator who had endured captivity, torture and enough violence to unmake ordinary minds retreated three blind steps through the Void.

Cassian expected to collide with something. Another soul, invisible ground or even the boundaries of the dominion holding them would have been welcome.

The Void only deepened around him.

His last awareness of the other Chained disappeared, followed by his sense of the Coffer, his body and even the hated restraints fastened to his existence for longer than he cared to remember. For one terrible interval, Cassian became the final creature in creation, stranded inside a nothingness so complete that solitude acquired hunger.

The white eyes appeared directly before him.

They were close enough for his soul to recoil independently of his body, and the fathomless voice asked with cold amusement:

{What do you desire little demon?}

Cassian opened his mouth; perhaps he meant to answer or perhaps he intended to plead for enough time to understand what was happening.

His soul vanished before he managed either.

Lust Reality closed around him with the same merciless completeness that had devoured the Naga. Before the World Transcendent’s ancient mind could assemble its first defence, subjective years of hunger had already begun passing within the prison.

Reality granted him another second.

Then his body died.

A second [Ding—] surfaced and was dismissed by the same impatient gesture. Faint amusement entered the voice as it returned to the darkness:

{It wasn’t a question, Vampire.}

Every surviving Chained heard the sentence, and the Void allowed them enough shared awareness to know that another among them had disappeared.

They could neither see nor reach one another, but each death left behind a peculiar absence. The uncertainty became worse than witnessing an execution. These were beings who had survived attacks capable of erasing cities and punishments that crushed lesser souls. Their existence had been built upon awareness of power and the confidence that even when a stronger enemy appeared, they would at least understand what was threatening them.

Inside the Void, that foundation had been stripped away.

Essence sat uselessly within their meridians, their bloodlines had become mute, spiritual senses remained blind and even the reassurance of feeling one’s own body grew increasingly unreliable.

Strangely, the only burden to vanish completely was the one they had hated most.

The chains were gone.

For the first time in ages, none of the Chained could feel the suppressions Danton’s people had fastened around their bodies, souls and cultivation, several realised with bitter disbelief that absolute freedom had finally arrived inside a place that made imprisonment feel safe.

Sight returned to one of them next.

The male immediately regretted receiving it.

The white eyes watched him from the fathomless dark, already moving through his memories with an intimacy that made physical nakedness seem modest. Wars, slaughter, cruelties and profane appetites accumulated across a monstrous life opened beneath that gaze without permission.

The voice soon carried unmistakable amusement:

{How wicked... and how very, very sinful. You desire her?}

Another figure became visible several metres away.

The female Demon abruptly regained sight and found herself facing him. Confusion hardened into anger once she realised why the Void had allowed them to see one another.

What the white eyes had uncovered inside the male’s soul went far beyond some fleeting attraction. Obsession festered there, joined by possessive fantasies cultivated through years of shared captivity. Some were carnal, others were violent.

Most humiliating of all for an existence that had spent ages presenting itself as merciless, several were almost tender.

The female Demon’s expression soured as the implications became obvious.

The male nearly wished the Void would blind him again before she understood more.

The white eyes moved towards him, and the same irresistible force that had taken the Naga and Cassian began drawing his soul out of his body. Lust Reality opened behind him like the mouth of an endless dream.

His consciousness approached its threshold; the pressure vanished:

His soul slammed back into place so violently that the man staggered, while the voice adopted a magnanimous tone generous enough to become suspicious.

{You can have her...}

The male Demon stared in astonished disbelief.

An amused pause murdered the hope before it could breathe.

{In your dreams.}

His existence ended.

The female Demon had enough time to feel his soul disappear before the fathomless voice returned, considerably more entertained now.

{The fantasy would be different anyway. She’s kind of mine now. We can’t have the same woman now, can we?}