Ruuumble—
—How many times has it been already?
The thunderous roar from outside showed no sign of stopping.
‘What on earth is happening right now?’
Biting her lip, Jegal Hyemi looked out the window again.
But outside, as if a black curtain had been drawn over everything, only dense darkness shimmered, and nothing at all entered her sight.
It was an abnormal phenomenon that had occurred not long after the sky had been covered by the sudden surge of dark clouds.
‘It has to be related to those clouds. That absolutely wasn’t a natural occurrence. The most likely possibility is that a battle has broken out… But who is the opponent? Could it be that a rescue force has come…!’
Because she could not grasp the situation clearly, all sorts of distracting thoughts filled her mind.
At the faint possibility, the hope that had withered within her lifted its head again and began to swell with expectation—but.
‘…No, no matter how I think about it, our side doesn’t have the leeway to launch an assault of this scale so quickly. Then could it be another faction? Surely they aren’t planning to use us however they please too, are they?’
Rather than hope, the anxiety that had settled in one corner of her heart grew even faster.
Considering everything she had experienced so far, it was only natural.
It could not be helped that her thoughts leaned in a negative direction.
‘Or maybe it isn’t a battle at all. It’s a bit loud, but it could be part of the process before the full-scale ritual begins.’
Pessimistic thoughts slowly began to swell.
But even amid her confusion, Jegal Hyemi forced her trembling heart to calm and sprang up from her seat.
She did not know exactly what was happening, but if it was true that some variable had occurred, she could not simply sit still like this.
If she was going to try anything at all, now was her only chance.
‘Even if I fail, what more can happen besides becoming a sacrifice anyway? In that case, I’d be better off trying something.’
Slowly opening the door of the cabin, she cautiously took one step forward.
***
Woooooo—
—A wave of death surged in without end.
In the aftermath, the land, already so drained of qi that it was no different from a wasteland, had long since been completely covered in clinging death.
Naturally, the one who faced that raging torrent head-on could not possibly remain unharmed.
‘This won’t do. I have to find something… some way…!’
There was a limit to simply enduring like this.
The Six-Headed Dragon constantly ground his teeth as he busily sought a way out.
But despite trying various methods, nothing in particular changed.
As time passed, the situation only continued to worsen.
The defenses protecting his body gradually thinned, wounds opened across his massive flesh, and fresh blood sprayed into the air.
Another problem was that the energy of death, which burrowed into his body and rotted his blood and flesh in an instant, had reduced his regenerative power to less than half of half its usual strength.
‘If only I had just a little more time, just a little!’
If he had only had a few more days… no, even just one more day, he would not have been made so helpless.
Had he known it would come to this, he would have hurried the ritual more…
Who could have known that his efforts to make the most efficient possible use of a limited number of sacrifices would return to him in the form of this worst-case scenario!
And in the end, the predetermined catastrophe began to stride toward him.
Slaaash—!
Thud!
One of his six heads was severed.
The red head, sliced cleanly off by the enormous abyssal great scythe, crashed into the ground.
The horrid energy clinging stickily to the cut surface continued to gnaw away at his vitality, tenaciously preventing the head from regenerating.
[Graaaah! You bastard! You filthy intruder! If not for you, everything would have been perfect…! Why did you have to appear now, of all times!]
His balance collapsed, and the divinity that had barely been maintaining its form in an incomplete state began to tremble.
The enraged dragon’s roar spread in every direction, but the force contained within it was incomparable to the majesty he had displayed at the start.
Fwoosh—!
Another head fell.
As the six heads became four, his rank shook beyond control, and the energy within his body lost its direction and collided with itself.
It was a side effect born from having surpassed his limits through imperfect means.
‘This is absurd! After everything I endured to get this far!’
Contrary to his rampaging body thrashing violently, his mind gradually grew hazy.
Just like on that day, when he had fought his final battle while escaping Geumodo.
After clashing fiercely with many dragons and escaping the Illusory Realm with an injured body, the place he chose to recuperate after regaining consciousness in a battered state was the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult, which was already infamous at the time.
In both disposition and conditions, it was an excellent sanctuary that could be called the perfect match for him.
However, after disguising himself as a human and taking refuge there to recover, he soon instinctively sensed one unpleasant truth.
At the fleeting moment when he completed all five dragon heads through predation, he had undoubtedly touched the realm of apotheosis.
In terms of martial artists, it was the legendary realm known as the Divine Transcendent Realm.
Although he had been forced to retreat after suffering considerable damage while fighting powerful foes before he had even fully grasped his abilities, he had thought that once he recovered from his injuries and regained his strength, he would be more than capable of taking revenge.
But growth achieved abnormally by violating a taboo was bound to come with side effects befitting it.
‘…I can’t recover my realm?’
Strictly speaking, he could recover it.
However, to do so, he needed an absolutely enormous amount of karma in addition.
Exactly as many times over as the number of dragons he had devoured to elevate his rank.
To begin with, for a single being to reach divinity, an immense amount of karma was indispensable.
And yet he needed six times that… no, he had to include every number he had devoured in the battle that followed as well.
If that was not impossible, then what was?
‘It might be possible if I destroy the entire world… No, perhaps even that wouldn’t be enough.’
In effect, his growth had been completely blocked.
He had certainly become far stronger than before, but he was in an ambiguous state—neither here nor there—insufficient to be called apotheosis, yet above what he had been.
If he revealed himself in that state, he would likely be brought down by the forces of Geumodo before he could destroy the world.
‘What kind of damned situation is this!’
He could no longer grow.
Driven by endless greed, he had even committed a taboo in pursuit of greater heights, and because of that, his possibilities had been completely sealed off!
After that, while acting as a member of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult, there was nothing he did not try.
He delved into all manner of forbidden incantations and secret arts, things strictly controlled even among the demonic cultists, and repeatedly carried out evil great arts and bloody experiments that defied human morality.
The epithet he earned in that process was none other than Heaven-Deceiving Demonic Immortal.
A demonic immortal who deceived the heavens.
And those countless efforts, accompanied by the sacrifice of innumerable lives, finally bore fruit.
The way to break through the situation he was in was…
‘Yes, I just need to think differently. Instead of achieving divinity through predation, if I can devour someone else who has achieved complete divinity and make it my own…!’
Ironically, it was the same method as what he had done before.
Devouring others and stealing what they possessed.
As he searched for a candidate, one otherworlder entered his sight.
An otherworlder who not only possessed a special ability, but whose fundamental growth speed was itself unparalleled—and among them, a being with the power known as the Heavenly Slaughter Star, making him grow overwhelmingly faster than others.
‘Excellent.’
And so time passed.
As he had predicted, that otherworlder soon abandoned his own name and became the Heavenly Demon, gave up on returning, and settled down in this world, steadily continuing to grow.
All the way to the final edge of the Profound Realm, the stage immediately before the Divine Transcendent Realm.
‘Just a little, just a little more…’
A genius talent that had caught up to just beneath the chin of him, who had cultivated for thousands of years, with only a few decades of training.
If he aimed for the moment when such a being finally sprouted a brilliant light.
If he could devour that karma, that rank, those possibilities and that future wholesale, and make them his own…!
“Hmm, have you come back to your senses now? You suddenly became quiet. No, is it about time you gave up?”
[…Ah?]
The jeering voice that seemed to pierce his brain cut off his thoughts.
As his hazy mind slowly returned, reality began to properly enter Yaryul Hwan’s gaze again.
The first thing he saw was his surroundings, which had at some point become completely dark.
It was not a phenomenon caused simply by the dark clouds of demonic qi and the land of death, but the scenery of a deep night that had fully arrived.
The battle that had begun in broad daylight had, before he knew it, continued for close to half a day.
‘This is…’
Then, as Yaryul Hwan tried to turn his head toward the direction of the voice, he finally realized that he was collapsed on the ground.
Most likely, as an aftereffect of his unstable rank shaking, he had briefly lost his reason and gone berserk midway through.
Though judging by appearances, the result had not been particularly good.
Throb.
—At the pain that now felt almost familiar, Yaryul Hwan’s gaze turned toward its source.
Standing atop his body, whose many heads had all been severed and which was rotting in various places, the Heavenly Demon had driven a pitch-black sword into the nape of the one remaining green head.
[…Hah, how absurd. I did suspect that we would fight someday, but I never imagined it would be in this form.]
A hollow laugh slipped from his mouth.
A story that had been steadily heightening tension and rushing toward its climax had suddenly been thrown into rapid developments by the intervention of a third party, and in the end, one side had become a jiangshi and was driving a sword into the other’s neck.
If a storyteller had spun such a plot without any proper beginning, development, turn, or conclusion, he would have ripped out their tongue for babbling nonsense.
‘If the Heavenly Demon is here… that must mean the others have all been dealt with.’
Even with a rough look around, there was no place where the sounds of battle could still be heard.
It meant that those who had resisted to the end had all been executed, and only those who had ultimately chosen submission remained.
Not only had he occupied the main headquarters of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult alone with only jiangshi under his command, he had even subdued all the elite troops who had been dispatched outside in the end.
‘Truly… this is a disaster itself.’
Yaryul Hwan’s gaze turned toward the root cause that had ruined his plans.
A middle-aged man who was examining his body here and there with an interested expression, as if admiring a specimen displayed in a laboratory.
He wore skin that seemed alive and imitated the living, but he was unquestionably a dead man whose life had been severed long ago.
And at the same time.
He was also one who, in such a body, had sprouted the divinity Yaryul Hwan had ultimately failed to grasp.
[Kuhuhuhu… What a pity. If I had eaten you, not only would I have recovered my rank, but with that otherworldly secret art, I could have swept away the bastards of Geumodo as well.]
“Pfft— That is an amusing thing to say. I wonder? If you had, I doubt it would have ended with a simple stomachache.”
[Ah, that is certainly a problem. I feel as though I’m finally getting a little better, so it would be troublesome to eat an even worse poison here.]
“Getting a little better, you say…”
At Yaryul Hwan’s glib words, Demon King Hans tilted his head slightly.
Of course, quite some time had passed, so it would not have been strange if the effect had weakened.
However…
‘In that state, he should be worse than before, if anything. There’s no way he’s improved.’
All of his heads except the central one had been cut off, and not only that, undead were attached one by one to each severed surface, hacking away so he could not even regenerate while continuously driving the abyss into him in real time.
And was that all?
His enormous body was so tattered there was hardly a single intact spot, and the chains of the abyss and shadow thorns binding it to the ground were constantly pouring in the energy of death, gnawing away at his vitality.
In truth, if not for his lofty rank, he should have died long ago.
And yet if he felt he was getting better…
‘He’ll die soon. His senses are completely shot. Well, the fact that he lasted until now is impressive in itself.’
He had endured for over ten hours against that Hans.
And that was despite Hans having deployed not only himself, but also numerous undead.
Considering that a considerable number of undead and jiangshi had been destroyed beyond recovery by him while he was rampaging, it could be said that he had still lived up to the name of a hidden boss.
[Kuhuhuhuhu— Puhahat!]
Now seemingly out of his mind, Yaryul Hwan writhed his body and burst into laughter all by himself.
Hans, who had been quietly watching with a peculiar look in his eyes, slowly stroked his chin. ‘A six-headed dragon... no, Greed (貪).’
It was an exceedingly fine material.
It would not be an exaggeration to call it the finest material that could be obtained in the Ganghwan Realm.
Since the severed heads and the yeouiju had all been neatly recovered as well, if he wished, he could even create an undead that perfectly reproduced its living form. ‘But...’ His gaze turned to the surroundings.
A landscape reduced completely to ruins by the large-scale battle that had raged for so long.
But what mattered was not that outward appearance. ‘The Demonic Realm.’ Having come here and seen it with his own eyes, he understood.
Why this place had become such an infamous land. ‘The situation is worse than I expected. When I only measured the degree to which qi was being depleted elsewhere, I thought there was still some leeway...’ For now, it was only holding out thanks to the qi flowing from the other dragon veins; the force of the Demonic Realm, which sucked in the world’s qi like a black hole, was far beyond what he had assumed.
If they could not somehow fill the hole that had opened here, eventually all the dragon veins would reach their limit, and before long, all the qi in the world would be drawn into this place.
If that happened, it would not simply be a problem for those who used qi.
In this world, qi was both the means that allowed supernatural abilities to be exerted and the energy that formed the foundation of life.
If all of it were exhausted... what would remain in the end would be the death of every living being. ‘Of course, the situation won’t worsen to that extent immediately. Geumodo is also doing everything it can to slow it down.’ But through Horus, he could observe Geumodo’s situation in real time, and he knew very well that it would not last long.
Above all, he had heard that people had even died during the ritual meant for that purpose. ‘I need to resolve the problem before it comes to that. Of course, I do have a method in mind... And if I use Greed’s body as a sacrifice as well, I should be able to finish the matter even more decisively.’ The dragon children chosen by the Dragon God, the Karma Jiangshi Heavenly Demon that devoured karma, and even the corpse of the Dragon of Greed that had once set foot into divinity.
New plans were gradually organized in Hans’s mind.
Then, at some point.
“Mm?”
The voice of Yelu Huan, the Dragon of Greed, who had been laughing vacantly, abruptly stopped.
Along with the life signs that had been clinging on stubbornly, flickering as though they might go out at any moment.
“...He’s dead. I wanted to see how much longer he could endure.”
Of course, he had already decided to use him in another way, but as a mage, he could not help his curiosity.
If there was nothing more to salvage, should he not at least satisfy his thirst for knowledge? ...That was what he had thought.
But it was not as though he had gained nothing at all. 《Achievement unlocked! You have hunted the calamity of the Ganghwan Realm, “Greed (貪).”》 《You have slain the annihilating demonic dragon that, after devouring everything, would have consumed even itself and led the world to destruction. As a reward, the special perk 「Authority of Gluttony」 has been granted.》 《By achieving this feat, you have exerted a great influence on the world. Karma increases further.》 A new achievement window.
It was the first one he had seen in the Ganghwan Realm.
No, it was not merely that... 《Achievement unlocked! You have become the last remaining “Last Yellow Dragon” in this world.》 《You have become the one and only Yellow Dragon of the Ganghwan Realm. As a reward, the special perk 「Orb of the Yellow Dragon」 has been granted.》 《By achieving this feat, you have exerted a great influence on the world. Karma increases further.》 It was an unexpected buy-one-get-one event.