Global Gods : Skill-Resonance Awakened

Chapter 393: A Million Years Long Guilt

In the sprawling, ethereal majesty of the City of Gods, the air was perfumed with the scent of blooming flowers and ancient incense.

Adam stood alone in the royal palace gardens, his gaze fixed upon the billions of shimmering, spherical bubbles that drifted lazily through the air.

Each sphere was a microcosm, a preserved sanctuary for the souls currently undergoing the process of reintegration.

A single, crystalline tear escaped his eye, tracing a path down his weathered cheek. It was a tear shed for a million years of solitude, for the crushing weight of a guilt that had defined his existence since the end of Old Era.

To see these souls, his brothers, his sisters, his peers, pulsing with life once more was to feel the frozen chains around his heart finally beginning to melt.

"Now, only you are left," Adam whispered, his voice trembling as he looked down at the vibrant jade token clutched in his palm. "And then, we will all be united. We will achieve the impossible, a feat that eluded us for eons. We will rise, not as scattered echoes, but as a unified roar."

He wiped his face, a sudden, bright smile breaking through his melancholy. He straightened his shoulders and addressed the empty air. "Thea, what is the current tally? How many memories have the Emperor successfully collected from the past?"

The system panel flickered to life in the air before him, a sleek interface of violet light.

[Out of the 5 billion souls of the old gods, I currently possess the total memories of 50 million Gods,]

Thea's melodic voice replied.

[The collection is ongoing. Master is currently going through the River of Time to harvest the fragmented memories of these old Gods every few hours.]

A long, scrolling list of names appeared, names that hadn't been spoken aloud since the Great battle between Gods And Demons.

Every few hours, the Overseer would plunge into the shifting, dangerous currents of the River of Time, enduring the mental strain of witnessing millions of years of history in a single heartbeat, only to return to the City of Gods to recover and catalog the data.

"That's wonderful... ," Adam mused, his eyes scanning the list. "Slowly, they will all surpass the peaks of their previous lives. They will need every ounce of that strength for what is coming. The Demon Lords will not sit idly while their farms are reclaimed."

Just as the words left his lips, a pillar of blinding cosmic light erupted in the center of the garden. As the brilliance subsided, Sunny stepped forward, his violet eyes dancing with a mischievous, satisfied light.

"I heard you mentioning the Demon Lords, Adam," Sunny said, a sharp, confident smile playing on his lips. "So I decided to drop in and give you some news that I think you'll find particularly... delicious."

Adam turned, his curiosity instantly piqued. He knew that when Sunny smiled like that, the very foundations of the reality were usually about to shift.

"Oh? Your expression tells me the heavens have favored us, Emperor. What has happened?"

Sunny leaned against a pillar of white marble, his posture casual, yet radiating the predatory grace of a hunter who had just cleared a forest.

"While I was wandering the void, mapping the reality and my territory, I stumbled upon a Domain of Negation, a dark sphere that spanned trillions of light-years. It was an obnoxious thing, but my senses told me that the billions of missing Reincarnations of Old Gods were trapped within its center."

Adam leaned in, his breath hitching, "What were they doing there? Was it a refuge? Did the Void Mother lead them to a sanctuary?"

"A sanctuary?" Sunny let out a dry, humorless chuckle. "No, Adam. They were being farmed. It was a slaughterhouse of the soul. An entity from the deep void or you can say from the nothingness, a Beyonder had trapped them there. It was sucking their divine energy, their laws, and their very life-force until there was nothing left but husks."

Sunny's expression turned serious as he looked at the floating bubbles in the garden. "When I entered that darkness, I was stripped bare. My talents went dark. My professions were silenced. My laws were suppressed. For a moment, I was just a man."

Adam's eyes widened to the size of saucers. "If even you were restricted... then these Gods... they were truly helpless."

"Precisely," Sunny said. "Their laws were eaten. Their bodies were reverted to a mortal state. Because their energy was being siphoned so aggressively, they only had about six or seven years of life left in them before they would have withered into dust."

"Chronos, the God of Time, was the most tragic. He had been there so long, and was so drained, that he mistook those six years for sixty. In that absolute darkness, with the parasite feeding on his soul, his perception of reality had fractured. He thought he was waiting for a death that had already claimed his spirit."

"And you?" Adam asked, his voice a hushed whisper. "How did you escape a trap designed to negate everything?"

"The Domain tried to eat me," Sunny said, his voice ringing with a new, harder edge. "But it found my energy... indigestible. However, the silence was real. I was a super-strong, immortal human wandering a lightless maze. My speed was pathetic at first, but as I moved, something started to shift. I didn't just survive the darkness; I began to understand it."

He paced the garden, his hands behind his back. "I found Chronos. I saw the despair in his eyes, he had lost the will to even stand. He told me to lie down and die with him. But I don't do dying very well."

"My adaptability began to rewrite my soul's code. It wasn't just physical; it was a conceptual immunity. I forced my talents to breathe in a room without oxygen."

Adam looked at Sunny as if he were seeing a stranger. To adapt to a Law of Negation while under the effect of that negation was a feat of logic-defying willpower.

"Once the first spark returned," Sunny continued, his chest swelling with a justified pride, "the rest was a landslide. But then, the architect showed itself. An entity of Nothingness. A Beyonder. It attacked me while I was still fighting the silence. We were locked in a deadlock of pure physical violence and raw Faith."

He paused, a dark, amused glint in his eyes. "And then, the comedy began. Deimos, the Lord of Discord, decided to crash the party. He tracked me into the dark, thinking he was the hunter. He didn't realize that in a Domain of Negation, a Demon Lord is just a very loud, very clumsy snack."

"The Beyonder smelled a fresh soul and pivoted. It ignored me to feast on him."

Adam felt like he had swallowed a fly. He gripped the edge of a stone bench to steady himself. "You mean... Deimos was there? Inside the sphere?"

"He was," Sunny confirmed, his smile broadening. "And without Faith to shield him, and without his Laws to protect him, he was defenseless."

"The Beyonder split his throat and erased his physical vessel in a heartbeat. I used that distraction to finish my adaptation. I healed the Gods, opened the gates to Veridia, and then... well, I had a little chat with the Beyonder. By the time I was done, I hadn't just saved the Gods; I had reclaimed every multiverse the creature had frozen for its next meal."

Sunny stepped closer to Adam, his voice dropping to a low, heavy rumble.

"Deimos is dead, Adam. His thread is cut. The Discord Law is shattered and won't reform for a hundred thousand years. The Demonic Realm is currently a headless chicken, and the remaining Lords are terrified."

Adam stood in the silent garden, the sounds of the festival outside suddenly feeling very far away.

The Lord of Discord, the primary antagonist of their era, the being who had plagued the reality since its inception, was gone.

"The demonic realm is in chaos..." Adam repeated, the words tasting like victory. "Emperor... you haven't just saved our past. You've cleared the path for our future."

Sunny nodded, his eyes looking up toward the distant, unseen boundaries of the Real Void. "This is just the beginning, Adam. The Demon Lords are hiding."

'That mysterious backer of Lom is surely angry. And I? I have a quintillion points of Faith and hundereds new multiverses. The game has changed.'