Read Novel Full Chapter 380: Price of The Hunger
Chapter 380: Price of The Hunger
The cosmic equilibrium of the bubble was tilting. In the high-stakes game of cosmic conquest, a three-front war had emerged, but the momentum was far from equal.
Two parties were ascending at a rate that defied all the logics: the Sovereign... Also known as Cosmos, whose raw conceptual power was beginning to warp the fabric of reality, and Lom, the Thief of souls in Demonic realm, whose army of kidnapped prodigies and converted Demon Gods grew by the hour.
Caught in the middle, the Seven Demon Lords were being crushed. It was a pincer movement of existential proportions.
In the Demonic Realm, they were being bled dry by Lom's take and hide tactics, a guerrilla war of vanishing legacies.
Simultaneously, in the bubble of Lady Sansa, Sunny was systematically consuming one multiverse after another.
This was more than a loss of territory; it was a slow starvation of the demonic soul. Demons grew in power through the discord, hunger, and sins of mortal lifeforms.
As Sunny integrated these multiverses into his own inner world, he wasn't just taking land, he was taking the food source of the demon race.
Their power lines were being severed, their future elite were being abducted, and for the first time in a long time, the Lords of the Abyss were reaching the edge of their patience.
Deep within the shifting dimensions of the Pearl of Calamity, Lom sat upon his throne, bathed in the flickering violet and black light of his stolen spoils.
His intelligence network had become a robust, living entity. Through his Heralds, he kept a keen, obsessive eye on the multiverses where Sunny had deployed his Gods.
Lom was careful, however. He never allowed his Heralds to exit into the Open space.
He knew that Thea, Sunny's demigod, was a being of near-infinite sensory reach. If she caught even a whisper of a Calamity Herald's aura, she would convey it to Sunny, and a bloodbath would follow that would turn the deep layers of space red.
"My Lord," a Demon General whispered, stepping out of the shadows. His armor was etched with runes of stealth, and his eyes burned with a restless hunger.
"That Thea... she is but a single demigod. We could snatch those mortals right from under her nose. Even if she senses us, we can slip back into the folds of the Pearl with a flick of our wrists before that Cosmos can blink."
Lom looked down at the General, his eyes cold and calculating. "I have said this a thousand times: do not engage with Cosmos. Not yet. You see a fly; I see the spider that owns the web. I will find a way to dismantle him when the time is right. Until then, you are to watch. If and only if you find a multiverse where no trace of Sunny's Gods exists, are you permitted to harvest the lifeforms for our farms."
Lom sighed, leaning back into the shadows of his throne. Leading a demon army was like trying to leash a pack of starving wolves; their inherent bloodlust and arrogant pride were constant liabilities.
"But they are good at taking orders," Lom thought with a dark chuckle, "provided they know the hand holding the leash is stronger than their throat."
He remembered the early days of his rebellion, when the kidnapped Demon Gods had fought him with every fiber of their being.
But then, he had discovered a terrifying truth: his aura, refined by the Higher Entity in the basement of the Capital, acted as a biological command code for demons. It made them submissive, twisting their innate loyalty away from the Lords and toward him.
After his breakthrough in the basement, Lom's power had swelled to rival the weakest of the Seven, Ichor.
Since every demon was a conceptual byproduct of that Higher Entity, Lom had become their natural shepherd because of his strength and aura.
Lom turned his attention to a shimmering holographic map of Lady Sansa's bubble.
It was a masterpiece of data, filled with billions of tiny white dots denoting multiverses. But in this vast sea of white, two points stood out like beacons.
One was a deep, resonating Purple, representing the expanding territory of Sunny. The other was a Dense, Absolute Black.
Lom leaned forward, his breath hitching. As he watched the real-time updates, he saw the boundaries of the Purple dot and the Black dot beginning to drift toward one another. They were on a collision course.
"Maybe... I can take care of both of them with this," Lom whispered, standing up abruptly. His mind raced with the possibilities of a direct confrontation between the Demon lords, Cosmos and the entity living inside the black dot.
But a hurdle remained. "The problem of the truth is still unsolvable," he muttered, pacing the empty throne room.
"I need to alert the Demon Lords to Cosmos's true location, but how? They believe Cosmos and I are partners. If I send a messenger, they'll kill him before he speaks. If I invite Belial alone, he'll try to execute me the moment he realizes Cosmos isn't standing behind me to protect me. I can fight Ichor, but Ichor lacks the lie-detection to know I'm being honest. It's a stalemate of paranoia."
Lom clutched his head. He was a schemer, not a diplomat. He needed a way to break the Lords' isolation without being vaporized in the process.
Back in the Demonic Capital, the obsidian halls were silent save for the rhythmic clacking of talons on stone.
Deimos sat at the head of the Great Table, surrounded by piles of missing-person reports.
Most were expected: a prodigy here, a rising general there. But one file, bound in tattered grey leather, made even the Lord of Discord pause.
"This is not a report of a missing person," Maledictus said, her voice dripping with venom as she tossed the file onto the table. "It is the missing-report of an entire multiverse. Similar to the multiverse of Gods and the Realm of advancement, The multiverse of Power is also physically removed from the coordinates."
"So they are attacking us from both ends," Phobos, the Lord of Fear, whispered, his eyes darting toward the shadows of the room.
"Lom harvests our future within the realm, while Cosmos eats our foundations in the outer realm. If this continues, our power line will snap. We will grow weaker with every passing day while they grow fat on our losses."
"Is it even possible for Lom to be in so many places?" Phobos asked, looking at Deimos. "The Pearl of Calamity has a cloning ability, yes, but those clones are supposed to be stagnant. They can't expand enough to capture and entire multiverse, and their speed is a fraction of the original."
"He isn't using the clones to move the multiverses," Deimos said, his voice a deep, vibrating rumble of fury.
"He is using the clones as decoys to kidnap our people here, while the real Pearl is being used to devour the outer realms. We are being played by a master of distractions."
"Then we must act!" Phobos cried. "Should we send our Demon Gods into the outer void to guard the remaining multiverses?"
"What would be the point?" Deimos countered, his eyes flashing with a cold, sharp light. "They would just be kidnapped as well. We would be handing them our elite on a silver platter."
For the first time in millions of years, Deimos felt the cold sting of humiliation. To be the Lord of Discord and yet be outmaneuvered by flies was unacceptable.
The air in the chamber began to crackle with his rising aura, an aura so powerful it caused the obsidian walls to weep black liquid.
He stood up, his massive form towering over the other Lords.
"Enough," Deimos whispered. The word carried the weight of a death sentence. "The capital is secure as long as the rest of you remain. With six Lords present, even Cosmos would hesitate to breach these walls. I have sat in this tower for too long, playing a game of defense while my power farm is being dismantled."
The other Lords looked at him in shock.
"I am leaving," Deimos declared. "I will descend into the outer realm alone. I will find the source of this disappearance of the multiverses. If it is Lom, I will peel his soul. If it is Cosmos... I will show him why I am the Lord of Discord."
"Deimos, the risk... " Maledictus began, but the Lord of Discord silenced her with a single look.
"Take care of the Capital. If a tremor happens, signal me. Otherwise, prepare the legions. A bloodbath is coming, and I intend to be the one who spills the first and also the last drop."
As Deimos vanished into a rift of black lightning, the remaining Lords looked at one another. The stalemate was broken. The greatest mind of the Abyss was now hunting in the dark, and the void was about to learn the price of its hunger.