Chapter 1816: The Will of Evil

เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 มี.ค. 2569 08:43

Chapter 1816: The Will of Evil The Palace of Time was no longer quiet. A hum that could barely be sensed was slowly becoming louder. This was the sound of the Origin of Time, and this entire palace was the sublimation of that Origin. Rowan had discovered through his battles with the Primordials that they all carried multiple Origins. They had plundered many Realities before Eosah, and the last thing they were lacking was Origin. Of all the Primordials that Rowan had killed, he had been able to harvest only a single unit of Origin Force, which was the one from this Reality. He had lost out, but he had no choice; to kill a Primordial without exhausting their Origin Force was impossible. However, Xyris, Primordial Time, had given Rowan a gift; he had allowed himself to fade without battle, thereby preserving all the Origin Force he had. It was important to note that technically Rowan was still an Old One, and he was deliberately stalling his ascension to the ninth-dimensional level because he was sure that once he crossed that road, any changes made to his body would become fixed, and he would be able to build only from the foundations he had made. As an Old One, he was able to easily dominate Primordials inside Reality due to multiple factors, and one of those factors was that he also possessed Origin himself and numerous different types. Still, each of the Origin types had only had one unit, but from what he was sensing arising from this palace, there were as many as fifteen Origin Units of Time left behind! Granted for Primordials, fifteen units of Origin Force were nothing. Primordial Demon had twenty, Primordial Chaos had thirty-five, and Primordial Soul had eighty-seven. It did not do much to help them, only delay their death, although Rowan was lucky that he was able to open a pathway to Limbo during his battle with Primordial Soul as he discovered that the act of resisting the pull of her main body had drained a lot of Origin Force from the Primordial, else with so much Origin Force in her body and Rowan not fully used to his new powers, then there had been a high chance that he might have lost the fight. Fate and Destiny had been on his side on that day, and everything that followed was a result of that battle. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖 So, Rowan knew that for the Primordials, more Origin Force acted like a form of battery; it was most likely that their main bodies could do more with this Origin Force, but their offshoots inside Reality were not able to do so. Every Reality was different, which meant every Origin Force was also different. The Altar of Unmaking found at the center of Primordial Soul’s Origin did not come from this Reality, even the hammer came from another Reality. Rowan was sure that the ability to utilize Origin Force for more than just batteries was possible for the Primordials, but this power had been removed from the ones inside of Reality. But that limitation did not extend to him. There was no telling the possibilities that could arise from exploring the Origin Force of fourteen alien Realities, but Rowan was sure that the final key to unlock his path to the Primordial Level would be found in them. Rowan was a mutant, an abomination, but at his core, he was Eos, a Reality. His path of ascension was supposed to be different from a Primordial, yet he was harnessing both the traits of a Primordial and a Reality simultaneously. This meant that for him, every path forward had to be laid by his own hand. He was like a man who was lifting himself up by his bootstraps. A loud bang and a series of steps interrupted his musing, and the Third Prince finally tore his way through the walls of the chamber. He stumbled, fell, and then slowly crawled into the chamber, leaving a trail of black blood behind him. The act of tearing through the wall had cost him. His fine robes were in tatters. His hands were a bloody ruin, the bones visible in places, as if he had been clawing at diamond walls with his bare fingers. His mouth was a torn and bloody mess, lips shredded, teeth broken and smeared with gore. He had not walked through the Palace’s defenses; he had chewed and torn his way through them. Rowan growled in anger and irritation, "Why does it seem that I will never be done with you?" The Third Prince grinned before he collapsed to the floor again, his body wracked with tremors, but his head lifted, and the eyes that fixed on Rowan were not tarnished silver. They were pits of boiling, hateful blackness. "Son..." the thing rasped, its voice a wet, guttural ruin, yet dripping with mockery. "You... you actually did it. You killed the only part of us... that had any... decency. Even I was not capable of it." Rowan did not move. His expression continuously hardened into something colder, sharper. He looked upon the crawling, broken thing, a realization that he was looking at the curse borne from the slaughter of countless Realities, or maybe something much worse. "You were always the infection," Rowan said, his voice flat. "The fear that curdled into hatred and Evil. Xyris was the cage and you were the rot within it." The Third Prince—or the thing that had worn his name—let out a wet, choking laugh. He pushed himself up onto his knees, his broken hands leaving smears of blackish blood on the timeless floor. "And you are the fool! You think... You have purified the temple?" A violent shudder wracked his form, and for a moment, the skin on his torso seemed to stretch and grow translucent, revealing not bone and viscera, but a squirming, chaotic mass of darkness within, a glimpse of something slick and tentacled, thrumming with a vile, alien life. "You have only... broken the seal!" He coughed, a spray of black fluid spattering from his ruined mouth. "We were not... afraid of the outside, you self-righteous idiot. We were containing it! We built our perfect order... our stagnant, beautiful order... as a barricade! And you... You have kicked down the door!" Another convulsion. A long, shadowy tentacle, slick with ichor, burst from a tear in his shoulder, flailing wildly for a moment before retracting with a sickening slurp back into the miasma within him. The thing that was the Third Prince didn’t even seem to notice. Its mocking, hate-filled eyes remained locked on Rowan. "Xyris held me back... with his patience, his watching... his weakness," it spat. "But you... you with your righteous fury... your glorious purge... You have given me the keys! His death... was the final lock!" It tried to stand, its legs buckling, forcing it to catch itself on its mangled hands. It was a body in the final stages of catastrophic failure, a vessel utterly unfit for the vile energy it contained. "Kill me then, killer of Primordials!" it shrieked, the sound tearing at the sanity of the chamber itself. "Execute the evil twin! Send me back to the silence! But know this... my essence... the true essence of the Primordials... is not order... it is dominion. It is the will to impose our reality upon the void. And that will... is now unshackled! It will not die with me... it will spill out... and it will find new hosts... in the cracks you have made!"

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