Chapter 478 - 477-

As soon as the fleece appeared, Grey readied himself and once again gripped the purple sword tightly in his hands. A strong intent filled his entire body, and purple light poured outward from his skin like liquid flame given shape. With a single slash, Grey found himself pulled into the oil painting once more, the world around him dissolving into brushstrokes of stars.

This time, however, the countless clusters of stars were breaking apart, exploding into blinding supernovas that impeded his progress toward the third star. At the same moment, many of the planets were destroyed, their fragments scattering into dust that glittered like falling snow, and the entire galaxy seemed to be rewriting itself right in front of his eyes.

The visage of the cosmos gradually shifted in Grey’s vision, colors bleeding into one another, distances folding and unfolding as though the universe itself were breathing. For a fleeting second, the urge to strike at the star was completely revoked. The instinct to destroy was erased from his mind entirely, and Grey lost all thought of finishing what he had come here to do.

Although all of this seemed, in the telling, to stretch across a long span of time, in reality barely a few breaths had passed. In Grey’s eyes, he no longer saw the painting of the cosmos before him — he felt as though he were truly adrift in space, weightless and small beneath the churning light.

Unnoticed, the third star began to shift. Its bright, white radiance darkened into a deep red, thick with malevolence, as if something ancient and hungry had opened an eye behind it. This subtle change went unnoticed by Grey, who remained caught in the awe of the cosmos unfolding before him.

However — had this happened before he entered the Corroded Zone, Grey would certainly have found it difficult to break free from the illusion’s snare. But now, having witnessed true divinity and understood exactly what was at stake, he shook off his stupor only seconds later, his mind clearing like fog burned away by sunlight.

When he did, his gaze turned calm and sharp, filled with unshakable intention.

If this had been the true world before the descent of God, then perhaps it would have been fine to simply stand and stare at the cosmos in wonder. But this was the brutal life they lived now, one that offered no such mercy. To survive in it, even the smallest mistake had to be avoided at all costs. This was one of the guiding principles carved into Grey’s mind, forged through countless hard-won experiences and closer calls than he cared to remember.

With a long, decisive purple slash, the third star was obliterated. Its radiance burst apart in an instant, the star detonating into an illusion of blinding supernova light so overwhelming it could hold anyone captive in silent awe.

In the real world, most of the withered sections of the Heavenly Vine broke down and collapsed at once, crashing to the ground with a loud, splintering bang. The transparent sword lodged deep in the side of the Heavenly Vine trembled violently, its edge humming with residual force.

A low, gentle buzz rose from the blade, and for a moment, Violet entertained the thought of stepping forward to retrieve it herself. While this played out, the blood rain paused mid-fall, suspended as though time itself had stumbled, as the strange divine being shuddered. For an instant, its form distorted and contorted violently, as though the destruction of the third section had struck something vital deep within it.

The being’s six eyes went utterly blank for a heartbeat, every trace of intelligence behind them vanishing completely, leaving only a hollow, animal stare.

This outcome was inevitable, bound to happen the moment Grey committed to destroying every section of the Heavenly Vine. The divinity within it had never been whole to begin with, and the Vine had only barely scraped together sentience and the faintest sliver of intelligence.

Stripped of divinity to instinctively guide its actions, the Heavenly Vine was reduced to nothing more than an overgrown, mutated plant native to the Corroded Zone — dangerous, perhaps, but no longer something that could think or plan.

Back within the oil painting’s canvas, as Grey advanced toward the fourth star, he watched his own body begin to contort and distort. Small granules of flesh rose across his face and skin like something stirring beneath the surface, and his entire form started to unravel and fall apart piece by piece.

Yet instead of feeling revulsion or fear at the sight, Grey felt strangely nonchalant about the change happening to his own body — a reaction that instantly made him question himself. In fact, some deep, unfamiliar part of him felt grateful for it, as though he wanted, of his own free will, to change and become something more fitting for what lay ahead.

"This is the divinity within me speaking," he thought, the realization arriving fully formed, unbidden. "The reason divine entities and gods are so often described as cold and heartless is because they don’t feel emotions the way mortals do. Divinity smothers thought, and whatever makes them human is suppressed down to almost nothing. Their forms and shapes no longer matter to them, and they simply take on whatever size or shape they instinctively desire in the moment."

"That’s why we sometimes see gods and foreign entities depicted with strange, inhuman body parts and unsettling physical features." A quiet sense of understanding settled over Grey’s mind, an understanding of gods and divinity as a whole that he had never possessed before this moment.

Even so, with his flesh and blood twisting into something wholly different beneath him, Grey ignored the transformation entirely and pressed forward with the singular goal fixed in his mind: destroy all six stars and escape this oil canvas, whatever the cost.

His unwavering determination and refusal to be distracted carried him instantly to the foot of the fourth star, which loomed in the cosmos like an ancient, primordial entity older than thought itself. For a brief second, Grey found himself recalling his experience within the inner world of the Dead Soul Ascendancy realm cultivator.

Back then, when they had been trapped with no path forward, he had mastered the laws governing that world and forcibly seized ownership of them for a few fleeting seconds, bending them just long enough to let everyone slip through to safety.

The scene before him now bore an eerie resemblance to that memory. But what he had done then, and what he was about to do now, were fundamentally different in every way that mattered.

However, when he attempted to get close to the fourth star, a strange feeling washed over him, as if he were standing several thousand miles away from it. No matter how hard he tried to close the distance, he only ended up drifting farther away, the star retreating just as fast as he advanced.

The phenomenon was deeply strange, and it took several moments before Grey processed that it was the fourth star itself causing this effect. Each of the six stars had displayed its own bizarre qualities and peculiarities so far, and Grey had come to view them as six special parts of the Heavenly Vine’s body. Fragments of something far greater than a mere plant.

From everything he had witnessed, a clearer picture of the true nature of the Heavenly Vine began forming in his mind. At its core, the Heavenly Vine was still just a vine. However, after countless mutations and unforeseen circumstances, among them the invasive aura of God, a spark of divinity had begun to take root within it.

It had already been a peculiar item to begin with. With the emergence of divinity, however, its peculiarity had only deepened further. Grey assumed that the crack in the sky was the true form of the Heavenly Vine’s Divinity. But then he couldn’t understand which divinity the single drop of blood belonged to.

Which one was the true divinity of the Heavenly Vine, and why were the two attempting to merge at this exact moment? Grey found it far too coincidental that the Heavenly Vine would only attempt this merger now, right as they had arrived. It seemed highly likely that some change had occurred, and that whatever requirement was needed for the two divinities to merge had only just arisen.

Yet that still didn’t explain why their presence specifically had triggered the effect. As he mulled this over, Grey found himself recalling the moment Violet had appeared and mentioned the strange peculiarity stirring in the depths of the Corroded Zone.

Grey himself had been unable to sense it. Only the shadow and Violet had noticed anything at all. He could believe that the shadow might sense it, it carried the bizarreness common to the usual inhabitants of the Corroded Zone, despite not having originally been one of them.

But he couldn’t understand how the captain had sensed it. The only reasonable explanation was that she had already known about the change beforehand and perhaps had even set it into motion herself. She had then enlisted Grey’s help, and here they were now.

Grey found it more than a little unsettling how thoroughly she had prepared, countering nearly every problem too massive for them to confront head-on.

’If she’s this prepared, if she’s gone to such lengths to ready herself, then it’s unlikely she’s unaware of the peculiarities surrounding the six stars and even less likely that she hasn’t already devised some method to destroy them,’ he thought. Even if the stars gave off strange effects that made them impossible to strike down directly, the captain would surely offer some form of help when the moment called for it.

And just as Grey thought this, only a few seconds after he had entered the oil painting, the captain drew out a dagger shaped like an enormous, elongated tooth.

It curved sharply, and a powerful corrosive intent radiated from its edge. Without a second’s hesitation, Violet plunged the dagger into the floating fleece, driving it straight toward the fourth star that Grey was still struggling to approach.