Chapter 477 476-

As soon as the second star was destroyed, a part of the heavenly vine suddenly exploded with a loud bang. Pieces of woody vine and hardened bark flew in every direction, shattering as they scattered across the sky. Yet instead of watching the vine's insides churn and fly apart as expected, they saw something far more disturbing... rotten internal organs, already decaying, tumbled out and rained down around them, leaking putrid black substances that hissed as they struck the ground.

A bloody, sickly smell wafted out from all directions, mingling with the thick, unmistakable stench of decay. It clung to the back of the throat and refused to leave. The moment this change occurred, the bizarre being that had transformed from a single drop of compressed blood suddenly stopped moving and turned to look at them.

Its gaze was eerie beyond words, and a wave of dread washed over Grey, who had only just returned, and over Violet, who was hurriedly retrieving the oil painting canvas from the sky above her.

They retreated together, running down along a stretch of the heavenly vine's massive trunk. Shock was plain in both their eyes. But where Violet's held only alarm, Grey's narrowed with a cold, calculating glint.

The strange existence had finally taken notice of them. Rather than continuing toward the distorting crack in the sky, it turned and came for them instead, spitting out a thick stream of bloody red substance as it moved.

"Dammit! Let's retreat, little Grey!" Violet's voice rang out, equal parts surprise and delight, but when she glanced over her shoulder to check on him, she found he had already begun running before she'd even finished speaking.

"Shit," Violet muttered under her breath as the sky above them was suddenly blotted out by a dark red veil. The veil stretched across more than a hundred meters and kept spreading, unfurling like a curtain being drawn across the heavens.

Once it passed that hundred-meter mark, the sky itself seemed to churn, and blood-red blades, each easily ten meters long, forged from nothing but condensed blood, began to fall like crimson rain. They plummeted toward Grey and Violet, who were already sprinting as fast as their bodies would allow, and within moments the falling blades had thickened into a relentless torrent.

Grey was naturally swift, and after calling on the power granted to him as the Wind Monarch, he wove between the countless descending blades with ease, his path a blur of controlled motion.

Violet was not nearly as fast, but she had her own methods of evasion and managed to slip through the barrage mostly unscathed, twisting and sidestepping with practiced precision.

"Wait — why am I even bothering to dodge these things?" she said suddenly, slowing her pace. "Aren't we both saturated with divinity from the heavenly vine? These blades shouldn't be able to touch us at all." To prove her point, she held out her hand and let one of the smaller, sharper shards fall directly onto her arm.

The instant it landed, the shard sliced straight through her hand without the faintest resistance, as though her flesh were nothing more than water. Violet's breath caught, growing heavy in her chest. She hadn't expected the blade to cut through her so cleanly, without so much as slowing down. And just as she reached to pull it free, the blood blade dissolved into liquid crimson and seeped directly into her bloodstream.

Barely a second later, her hand exploded outward in a burst of blood and rotting flesh. Maggots writhed among the scattered pieces, and the sight was grotesque enough to turn the stomach wet, wriggling, and utterly wrong.

Violet sucked in a sharp breath and cast a wary glance up at the sky. She fumbled a medicinal pill from her robes, one that gave off a strong, bitter scent, and swallowed it without hesitation.

Almost immediately, her face darkened to a sickly, pitch-black hue, and she doubled over, spitting out a thick mouthful of black blood along with clumps of putrid flesh. The taste alone was enough to make her gag.

Moments later, whatever blood had managed to seep into her body was violently expelled, forced back out through the torn skin of her hand. As it burst free, a strange, warped cry echoed from within it, and the blood twisted and curdled into something else entirely, rotting black water.

That black water reared up and reshaped itself into a strange, malevolent creature, lunging at Violet with clear intent to kill. But Violet had already begun running the moment the black blood left her mouth, her instincts faster than her thoughts.

Watching the creature give chase, jumping erratically as it closed the distance, Violet couldn't stop the shiver that ran through her. She glanced toward Grey, still sprinting ahead at full speed, never once looking back to check on her.

"Tsk. He doesn't even care whether his senior sister lives or dies. If I die out here, this whole mission might as well be over," Violet said with a scoff, but there was no real bitterness in her voice, only a faint, grudging admiration.

Grey's second strike had, without question, drawn the bizarre being's full attention. That alone confirmed something important: his sword Dao truly was capable of harming the heavenly vine and inflicting real, lasting damage upon it.

With two of the segments sustaining its life now destroyed, the entity's overall strength would inevitably begin to wane. If they could seize this opening properly, they stood a real chance of completing their objective for this mission with minimal losses.

These were the thoughts running through Violet's mind as she raced down along the trunk of the Heavenly Vine, blood blades still whistling past her ears.

"If I had known it would come to this, I would have brought my main body instead," she murmured under her breath, low enough that only she could hear. "But this body is the only one capable of holding the existence sealed within me for any real length of time. And that being is slowly stirring from its slumber, it will wake hungry. I need to feed it soon. It hardly matters which body I use to do that."

"Little Grey, slow down!" she called out, raising her voice so it would carry. "You need to destroy the remaining segments. Our chances of completing this mission successfully will only rise the more of them you bring down."

Her voice cut through the chaos and reached Grey's ears just as another blade grazed past his shoulder. He instinctively dodged as the blade narrowly missed him and plunged into the ground behind him with a loud, echoing crack.

Grey turned the Captain's words over in his mind and found himself agreeing with her inwardly, even as he kept moving. Now that its attention had been drawn toward them, the divinity that was about to erupt from the fusion between the two illustrious beings had been put on hold, at least for the time being.

Moreover, after destroying the second star, Grey realized something else, the divinity that had been fighting for dominance against the shadow was now at a clear disadvantage. Sensing the opening, the shadow immediately seized the moment and greedily began devouring the blood-red divinity, consuming it piece by piece with an almost savage hunger.

Its eyes were tinged a deep red, and a raw, consuming desire to devour the divinity entirely filled it completely. At the very same time, the signs of an imminent breakthrough within the shadow reached their peak. It was clear the shadow was steadily approaching the threshold where it would break through and emerge stronger than before.

Yet because of the overwhelming pressure exerted by the divinity, the shadow was forced to pause its own breakthrough and instead pour its focus into the struggle for power and dominance.

Grey could sense, with unnerving clarity, that the shadow was growing rapidly stronger by the second. But instead of feeling any relief or satisfaction at this development, he felt only a deepening sense of wariness settle over him. He knew all too well what the shadow was capable of the moment it found an opening. Given the chance, it would use its newfound strength to turn on him, betray him outright, and attempt to devour him whole in order to seize control of his body.

It had tried this before, more than once, and each time Grey had brutally suppressed it, forcing it back into submission through sheer will. But that didn't mean it had given up, far from it. There remained a very real, very high possibility that the shadow would try again the moment circumstances favored it, and that it would absolutely attempt to betray him without hesitation.

'But I can't stop it from absorbing the divinity,' Grey thought grimly, his jaw tightening. 'If I try to interfere now, I'll end up putting myself in just as much danger. And I can't stop its advancement either, that would be far too rash, too impulsive a decision to make in the middle of all this. Honestly, there's hardly anything I can do about it at this exact moment.'

In the end, Grey realized he had only one real choice left to him: finish this confrontation with the Heavenly Vine and complete the objective they had come here to accomplish. That remained, by far, the fastest and most direct path forward.

With a low grunt of effort, Grey abruptly twisted his body midair, dodging a fairly large blood spike that had been aimed squarely at his chest. He used the momentum of the turn to pivot and face Violet directly, his expression unreadable. His eyes shone with a strange, calculating glint the instant he saw Violet draw back and throw the oil painting canvas toward him once again, her motion swift and practiced.

The moment it left her hand, the small canvas expanded with startling speed, unfurling into a vast veil that swept outward and blanketed most of the sky above them. Rendered across its surface was an achingly realistic oil painting of the cosmos, swirling stars, distant galaxies, and endless folds of deep, star-flecked darkness, all captured with an artistry that felt almost alive.