Chapter 2977: Vicious Cycle Many humans in the galaxy tried their best to avoid dying. Death was not pleasant, and no one knew what happened once their time in the material realm ran out. The fear of death was such a deep and primal fear to people that it was no wonder that old geezers were willing to do almost anything to gain an extra century of life! The strong reactions against the prospect of death indicated that human life was too fragile. Modern technological and societal advances significantly improved the survival chances for average humans compared to when they first evolved, but that did not change the fundamental problem that mortals were too weak in the face of many dangers in the galaxy. This reality fully showcased that it was still easy for people to lose their lives in this day and age. Human civilization made many advances, yet it had yet to progress into a utopia where absolute power and perfect control allowed its people to live their lives in total comfort and security. Even Ves was still a mortal, though he sometimes acted as if this was not the case. Many members of the Larkinson Clan who he trusted and befriended such as General Verle, Melkor, Juliet Stameros, Gavin Neumann and so on would eventually become memories to those who had ways to cheat their own mortality. The scarce supply of life-prolonging serum made it impossible for every clansmen to live as long as those who could earn it. While Ves didn't want to think about it, he knew that he would definitely lose friends left and right if he managed to live long enough. Humans were too weak. It was as if a single gust of wind could cause someone to collapse. Yet… there was another class of existences that 'suffered' from the opposite problem. They were dead, yet they did not disappear from the material realm. These powerful spiritual existences somehow managed to grasp a method that allowed them to cling to life when by all rights they should have been dead! No matter how much pressure they endured, these undying people and aliens relied on their individual strengths to cling to life even when their mortal coil had already decayed into dust! Was this bad? Not necessarily. Ves would have never been able to reunite with his mother if she was not a powerful spiritual sorceress. He would have never been able to join hands with Qilanxo and enter into a mutually-beneficial pact with the so-called sacred god. Ylvaine, annoying as he was, provided critical aid in the form of foresight that relieved several crises. Ves felt very ambivalent towards these existences. On one hand, they fought against the natural order and put up a ferocious struggle against their actual fate! On the other hand, these entities were all friendly and helpful to him, so he had a strong interest in enabling them to stave off their final end. The problem was that hostile entities were also capable of staving off their permanent deaths! The three dark gods that Ves fought against were clear examples of this. Just like Qilanxo, they used to be living beings with real bodies in the past. After their fleshy containers expired, their spirits not only lived on, but grew vastly stronger over time. Ves already anticipated that it was difficult to deal with these entities! Though he succeeded in merging the spiritual fragment of the Blinding One with one of his older design spirits without any issue, the Unending One was different. Back during the Battle against the Abyss, Ves had a clear impression of all of the dark gods. The Unending One was clearly the more powerful, more senior and more wily of the trio. Would such a cruel and self-serving bastard be resigned to dying for real? No! A spiritual entity with that much power and that much time to develop all sorts of brilliant methods should never be easy to take care of. Even an inert and highly-purified spiritual fragment of the Unending One managed to come back to life! "Ahhhh! Damn! I should have cut more pieces out of you!" He screamed as he fought back against the forceful invasion and assimilation of the resurrected remnant of the Unending One! He didn't know how, but the Unending One managed to restore and retain his identity even when Ves was using his shards to birth another lifeform. This should have been impossible! Any ingredient that Ves used up to create another spiritual product should have lost all of its associations to its past identity. He had never encountered a case where a consumed ingredient managed to come back to life and be strong enough to launch a takeover attempt. It was like Ves eating a chicken sandwich, only for the spirit of the dead chicken to wake up inside his stomach and try to take over his body! The consequences were extremely dire if the Unending One managed to corrupt the newborn Blinky. Since the new companion spirit was actually an extension of Ves, the powerful and greedy dark god would not hesitate to use this unbreakable connection as a springboard to take over a much more useful human! If such a disaster came to pass, then his life, his dreams and the future of the Larkinson Clan would all go down the toilet. "Hang on, Blinky! I won't let you die! Not when you are actually me in another instance!" Blinky was not just a pet like Lucky and Clixie. The Star Cat was truly an aspect of himself that he happened to grant a lot of independent autonomy. This had a lot of fascinating implications that Ves was eager to explore, but could only set aside in order to deal with the immediate crisis. Mrow! Mrow! Mrow! His new companion spirit was not doing so well at the moment. In his perception, an oily tar seemed to have poured out of Blinky's shimmering form. The beautiful glitter that resembled shining stars began to dim before the darkness swallowed it entirely. The Star Cat was slowly transforming into a Dark Cat! "Hang on, Blinky! I am with you! I'm not a pushover!" Ves leveraged all of his spiritual strength to reinforce Blinky and prevent the dark wave from taking over the rest of his body. It barely helped. While his intervention helped his companion spirit stave off the dark tide, the problem was that the resurrected Unending One had already taken over the rear half of the Star Cat's body! It was at this time that a drastic change took place. A powerful suction force emerged from the stomach section of Blinky's possessed body. The Unending One had captured enough of the companion spirit's body to activate the devouring ability integrated in the design of the living spiritual construct! "Damn!" Ves immediately felt that some of the spiritual energy under his direct control disappeared into the vortex. Soon enough, the vortex's suction force grew a little stronger, which was a clear sign that the Unending One had no problems converting Ves' energy into his own strength! This was the powerful capability that Ves had poured a lot of effort into reproducing for Blinky. While he was glad that his efforts succeeded, it was quite awful that his enemy was the one who benefited from this feature! In fact, Ves was also able to sense that the Unending One was making certain changes in the design of the spiritual sub-components related to his original abilities. The dark god's mastery in this field was much greater, and he knew exactly how to maximize the performance of the features that Ves had pirated from the Unending One! "I can't let this go on any further!" Ves was not stupid. He could already extrapolate the eventual outcome of this struggle. Despite exerting all of his considerable spiritual strength, he not only failed to drive back the dark god from Blinky, but was actually feeding his own spiritual energy to the Unending One! As long as his spiritual energy disappeared into Blinky's stomach, it was no longer under Ves' control. Everything the vortex spat out was fed back to the Unending One, who immediately pumped all of that converted energy into strengthening the vortex. This was a vicious cycle that only grew more difficult to resist over time! At this moment, Ves felt as if he was traveling on a starship that had inadvertently crossed over the event horizon of a black hole. In this harsh region of crushing gravity, the nearby singularity distorted space to such an extreme extent that there was no way to avoid the hungry maw. No matter which direction his starship flew, the curved space caused his path to always end up at the center! This was why not even light could escape a black hole under normal circumstances! Of course, not everything was absolute. There were several instances where light and matter were able to defy the common conception of black holes. Sometimes, they spat out powerful beams of plasma that stretched on for thousands of light-years due to the extreme rotations of electrically-charged matter. In addition, energy at the edge of an event horizon sometimes did weird stuff and caused some light photons to be ejected outwards. This was why Ves did not despair despite having the illusion that he was caught up inside the danger zone of a black hole. His face began to snarl even as the pain on his body and soul grew harsher. "You think I haven't prepared for your resurrection? Then think again! I always have a contingency plan for foreseeable problems!" After putting so much effort into preventing the return of the Unending One, there was no way he had run out of answers already. Ves placed a number of props at his side in case his worst fears came true. He did not spend his three weeks of preparation time in vain! After contemplating several possible options, he ruled out the use of his F-stone. While its offensive charge was definitely powerful enough to cut the Unending One to pieces, doing so would also harm Blinky. This was an intolerable outcome! What Ves needed to do was to drive out the Unending One presence from Blinky's body and annihilate the revived remnant of the dark god in isolation. He already had a suitable solution in mind. He mentally reached out to the Larkinson Mandate placed at the side of the treatment platform. "Goldie, I need your help!" Nyaaaa! The brilliant glowing form of the ancestral spirit immediately materialized into view. There was no rule that stated that Ves had to duel against the Unending One by himself. Since his strength alone was not enough, he did not hesitate to call upon his spiritual allies! Goldie had already been monitoring Ves' condition from the beginning, so she immediately went into action. Her form glowed brighter as she poured the spiritual energy she had under her command into pushing back the Unending One's possession of Blinky's body. "It's not enough!" Ves gritted his teeth. He could see that while Goldie assistance did indeed help in recapturing lost territory, the devouring vortex was already absorbing and converting the spiritual energy she brought to bear. If this continued, the Unending One would eventually grow strong enough to resist them both! "Then let's call in the rest of the gang!" Though he could call out his other design spirits by himself, he had to divert too much of his concentration to do so. He had a much better solution in mind. His head turned to the side and caught sight of all of the small figurines he made. He shaped each and every one of these metal figurines in person with the use of artisanal tools. While these small Breyer alloy statuettes were not that big, they were easy to carry around and granted Ves a direct channel to all of his design spirits. "It's time to leverage the network of spiritual allies that I've built up over the years!"