Chapter 1954: Breaking The Cradle (5) The Beast of Inevitability was filled with rage and a great feeling of loss and sorrow when it noticed that half of all Realities inside the Cradle had been lost to this unknown corruption. Its serpent’s tail continuously lashed out, and the shards of corruption were erased before they could even cross anywhere close to the Beast and its wards. Eos watched this confrontation with rapt attention. Before he understood the full nature of the Cradle, he was not going to reveal himself, and this was a chance for him to test his speculations about the Primordials, the Beasts, and Enoch for the subtle connection that seemed to bind all of these parties together. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖 It did not take long for him to discover that the Beast was perfectly capable of stopping every single shard that came close. The pattern from its tail might appear to be simple on the surface, but the profoundness it contained was something special. In a short time, the Beast had gotten the measures of the corrupted Realities, and no single shard that they spewed was able to go through, and if this trend continued, the turtle would not be defending for long; instead, it would begin to attack. Eos could see that just a single swipe from its serpent tail would be enough to eliminate a lot of these corrupted Realities, and it would not take long for everything that Enoch had acquired to be erased. However, Eos had just experienced what Enoch could do with a single dead Reality that no longer had any essence contained within, and he knew that the real danger had not yet been revealed. Suddenly, the shards of corruption stopped emerging from the corrupted Realities, and there was silence in the Cradle. The turtle’s eyes narrowed, and Eos could feel a ridiculous amount of power beginning to build in the center of the Beast that was slowly being transmitted into its serpent’s tail. Eos had thought that the Beast would take a short time to cleanse the Cradle of the corrupted Realities, but from the power building inside of it, he saw that the turtle intended to wipe out all the corruption at once, which was frankly the best option in his opinion, yet he knew that it would never be that simple. From every corrupted Reality, a massive wave of ash suddenly erupted, so vast that it shrouded all of the corrupted Realities and raced towards the turtle. The eyes of the turtle flashed with wariness, but it did not stop charging up its power, and that was a mistake. The wave of ash had not reached the turtle, but something invisible was racing ahead of those waves, and that was the final cries of desperation in the hearts of the countless lives that Enoch had just taken. This wave slammed into the turtle, and it became stunned in place. Many immortals were unable to count every individual life inside a single planet, let alone the number of lives inside the Realities that Enoch had just taken over. The weight of all those lives perishing in this manner was a potent weapon that would kill Primordials, and the turtle could barely begin to fight against the cries of so many lives burrowing into its skull when the wave of ash swept over and past it. The cries of the dead burrowed deep into its mind, endless, accusing. "Why did you fail us?" "We trusted." "It hurts." Tens of thousands of Realities were hiding underneath the turtle, with more heading into this area for safety. However, due to panic and the nature of Realities where movement was not just a simple affair, there were still thousands that had not entered underneath the turtle for safety. The wave of ash that swept past the turtle swallowed them whole as cries of pain began to erupt from these Realities. The ash was the burnt soul origins of countless quadrillions. With the nature of Enoch’s power, even soul origins would be destroyed by his touch, but before they were eradicated from existence, there was still a chance, like this one, to use them as a weapon. A cry of rage erupted from the turtle as it shook off the effect of the stun and began to inhale, drawing all the ash surrounding it and the Realities behind it into its stomach. However, the damage was already done as Enoch had placed shards of corruption to mix with the ash, and hundreds of Realities behind the turtle were in the throes of being transformed. The eyes of the Beast turned red, the shards of corruption inside its stomach were turned to nothing, and its snake tail struck down faster than even the consciousness of the Archais watching this conflict to follow, and all of the corrupted Realities were erased. With the danger erased and hurriedly ushering the surviving Realities underneath its shadow, the turtle had become truly enraged. It was one thing to be too late to save its ward, and another to be forced to kill those whom it was made to protect. There was also a hint of wariness in its eyes now, because it realized how close it was to failing its purpose. Ash still covered the corrupted Realities, but there were weird cracking and crunching sounds emerging from within the ash that were hard to describe, almost as if a giant was feasting on meat and bones. A chuckle suddenly emerged from within the awful nose, and a voice spoke within the ash, "Interesting, so you too have changed, little turtle, and no longer follow your directive. Should it not be impossible to harm any of your charge without a heavy backlash?" The Beast was silent, but the rage in its eyes only grew. Eos, who had been monitoring the Beast, now saw the problem. When he saw the Beast, its body had been covered with countless runes of laws, with many that even he could not recognize, but as he watched, those runes were slowly fading. This was happening very slowly and was nearly unnoticeable, but the runes were indeed fading, and it was easy for him to see the connection between the dying Realities and the runes on the Beast of Inevitability. If his theories were correct, then the Beast of Inevitability was opposite to the Beast of Final Rest, in that it drew power from the life underneath its protection. The more life it protected, the stronger it was. The loss of so many Realities had greatly weakened it, and every time it had struck to erase the corruption within its ranks, the Beast had been carving out portions of his domain. It was not surprising that it would suffer a backlash from this act. "You choose to remain quiet, I see, no matter. I was about to offer you a position in my new court when this is all over. But I think I prefer you and everything you hold... dead." All this while the voice had been speaking, the ash had been slowly fading away, and when it pronounced the death of the Beast, the ash vanished to reveal the Abomination that had been growing all this while, and Eos drew in a deep breath. Enoch had taken the general form of the whale-like creature from that one fallen Reality, but he had blown it up in proportion after all the corrupted Realities he had harvested had been fused together. This Abomination created by Enoch was now a Whale-leviathan bloated to a scale that made cosmic appear like nothing, a body of white pulsating flesh veined with stolen essences, with countless mouths opening and closing in eternal hunger, and arms sprouting from every surface like corrupted fins, finally his eyes, like milky voids reflecting devoured dawns. The Abomination was vast, terrible, and Eos could not deny that there was a beauty in its wrongness.