Chapter 164 (1/2)

Fragments of a God

The god of time’s conjecture had been proven to be true in front of me.

‘The god of mind!’

The seal on Mercadius’ forehead was definitely the Mind’s.

A forgotten god whose real name hadn’t even passed on to the current generation.

Since no believer served him, no altar existed as well, and there were no statues modeled after its appearance either. Due to that, it was interpreted that it didn’t have a material form.

No incarnation had been discovered that followed its path in the early days, too.

Most of the deities in the present era were exiled into the void. However, only the god of mind went missing.

Even the gods didn’t know where it was.

‘There was a reason for him to do so!’

I remember what “Rom,” the god of life, told me.

It once mentioned the situations that the gods had come to face in the present day.

‘Life,’ the one who said so, lost its offspring, and… all other gods lost important things or couldn’t exist in a normal state.

‘Magic’ lost its most powerful leg.

‘Luck’ was banished from the valley of convergence.

‘Time’ was nailed to a repetitive loop.

The blade of the ‘sword’ rusted and broke.

‘Space’ split into numerous debris and scattered.

‘Mind’ had lost the foundation to prove itself.

The last among them.

The god that lost the foundation to prove itself.

‘The foundation for the existence to prove itself is…!’

That time, I recalled the knowledge of the dragons Euclid taught me.

What I heard during our climb through the Tower resonated like an auditory hallucination.

‘The divine beings lost most of their essence and memory when they were exiled. Since the essence is broken, there is an issue on the ability to accumulate new memories as well.’

The one that existed solely as a cognition.

The one who had no other essence to prove itself.

Such a god had lost its memory.

The loss was even more fatal for it than the other deities, and in the end, the ‘mind’ lost its ego and was scattered.

And the numerous pieces of the deity… wandered around the material world instead of remaining in the void.

It could no longer be regarded as the true body of a god.

Its class had decreased, lowered, and fallen… to the level of “incarnation” at the very best.

The result was in front of me.

‘So that’s what had happened!’

However, one question remained unsolved.

‘Why would a god’s fragment try to destroy the world?’

Their movements were consistent with the monster’s behavior coming out from the void.

Monsters from the Red Gate physically destroyed the world. They directly got involved in the apocalypse.

Mercadius, on the other hand, brainwashed an important figure in the world and led them to be destroyed eventually. His involvement in the destruction was indirect.

‘One way or another, a god needs a mortal, and if all mortals die, the god loses itself as well. In such a situation, Mercadius’s behavior is… incomprehensible.’

Extremely self-destructive behavior.

It was unlikely that the already-divided deity would be pieced back together by destroying all mortals.

What the hell did it want?

Driiiip!

Mercadius’s face was covered in blood.

The fresh blood flowing from the forehead painted his skin, drawing a bizarre form.

“?!”

The drenched eyebrows became distorted.

He was looking at the back of my hand, too.

Four kinds of seals.

With it in his sight, his lips curved into a strange smile.

“I see you’ve got all sorts of worthless traces in your body.”

He bared his fangs.

“I don’t like it. A mortal who is nothing but a feed for my descendants to eat…”

Feed?!

“How come you’ve got so much unpleasant power in your body…”

He extended his hand towards me. Rampant hostility flashed in his eyes.

“Without knowing your place?!”

The moment he said those words, the scar carved on Mercadius’s forehead noticeably broke open.

His skin cracked, and the red flesh underneath it was revealed.

Mana that resembled the color of the fresh blood poured out.

It was a unique skill.

Swoosh!

After Awakening, I had seen many Awakened beings, and I had observed the Mana they bore and unleashed.

In particular, the red Mana that appeared when using a unique skill was completely different from person to person, reflecting the user’s nature.

However, I had never seen a Mana as ugly and disgusting as the one in front of me.

The red Mana that Mercadius conjured and fired into the atmosphere seemed to convey the malice wriggling inside it to my body.

A torrent of blood rushed in, shifting its form dozens of times per second.

My eyes, under extreme tension, perceived it as if it was moving in slow-motion.

The wave that the red Mana sculpted was like a human being in distress or even a crying animal.

At the same time, it was an unknown being with a melting body, and it became an unpleasant bubble that wasn’t exactly a living thing or an inanimate object.

It was difficult to find similarities in each shape’s aspect, but I managed to find one commonality within it.

The entire thing was expressing terrible despair and horror.

– [The Successor’s Eyes (Rank: EX)] has resisted against [Mercadius’s Seed (Rank: SSS)]!

A static fight began.

Both of us stood facing each other motionlessly, but a fierce battle continued inside.

Direct confrontation with his skills was different from fighting the seed hidden in my Core.

Like a greedy animal trying to bite off its prey, his skill rushed to take over my mind.

It was much more intense than the seed that tried to take over my brain.

However, [The Successor’s Eyes] would never succumb to such attempts.

It was the skill that blocked off the attempt of the ‘magic god’ to forcibly fuse with my mind without letting other deities know during the first time that we met.

All the more, if it’s a deity that had fragmented to such a minuscule extent.

“…!”

Swoosh!

More blood flowed from Mercadius’s forehead.

“You, how the hell-! How dare you defy me when you’re nothing but a feed?!”

He had an expression that told me he couldn’t grasp the situation.

He ground his teeth as if he realized something belatedly.

“Oh, my days! I see. In the meantime, my seed… had been trapped in your body and left to starve!”

Ridiculously, he was expressing his anger while looking at me.

“I had been relieved since it seemed like it had eaten the seed that was arranged as a food…”

I thought he meant the seeds of the people around me who were brainwashed.

“It had not dug up and eaten the mind of the most important host after all!”

As if to give up, the blood-like Mana disappeared.

“For sure, you didn’t have the strength to do that when I planted the seed. I did expect it to take quite a while, but… I thought you wouldn’t be able to stop the erosion completely.”

Eerie darkness lingered in his eyes.