Magical Soul Parade

Chapter 393: Suspicion

Suddenly, Ailin’s manic laughter rang out. A brief, unsettling sound that cut through the silence before her eyes snapped away from Finn. She turned her head sharply, locking her gaze toward the far left of the battlefield.

Two specific figures were staring back at her, absolute horror written into the lines of their expressions. The moment their eyes met hers, the wide, bloody grin on Ailin’s face vanished instantly. Her expression became entirely dead and flat, her dark pupils narrowing into two frozen points of malice as she locked gazes with them.

Meanwhile, back in the air, Finn continued to hover in silence, watching the last traces of the Great Dao’s scrutiny fade back into the endless expanse between worlds. He spent several quiet moments focusing internally, calming the flow of his power and allowing his makeshift divine reserves to settle into their new, permanent boundaries.

The final act of this battle had been incredibly short, but the conclusion itself had been entirely inevitable. Sage Limitless had brought this destruction upon himself the exact moment he allowed Finn to construct those three universal clauses.

The old monster had dug his own grave with his own hands. And even without the direct intervention of the Great Dao, the billion vengeful souls alone would have sufficed to end his existence regardless.

Limitless’s death was a mathematical certainty. When applied well, no one could escape from the inevitability of karma.

Even true Gods took desperate measures to ensure they never found themselves on the opposing side of a karmic debt. The entire universe operated on a strict logic of equivalent costs and balances. But Limitless had been an anomaly whose entire existence had been predicated on pulling endless benefits to his own person without paying a single price…

But there was no benefit without cost.

It was exactly as Finn had stated earlier. Yes, Limitless was a pitiful existence that was never meant to be tolerated by reality. But the man still had it coming anyway. He had grown haughty, prideful, and completely blind. He thought himself a God, yet he lacked the fundamental knowledge of how true Gods actually operated.

His doom was a settled conclusion, and because it was settled, Finn did not bother to waste another thought on the dead man.

Instead, his mind drifted back to the feeling he had latched onto right before initiating the Aspect Adaptation of Ananke.

He thought about the sudden epiphany he had fallen into. He recalled the way the Great Dao had responded when Limitless had been ascending. The way the Great Dao had accommodated the sage’s new existence.

In that moment, Finn had felt like literally anything could be accepted into a law and fact by the Great Dao so long as it had a meritable reason.

With that line of logic, what then was the limit? Was it possible for even karma, this great thing that Gods themselves feared and tried to maintain an equilibrium with, to also be somehow bypassed?

The thought was completely heretical. A dangerous, volatile line of reasoning that Finn knew he shouldn’t entertain for a single moment, lest he begin to pursue a path that would lead him to destruction.

Finn himself was already a heretic. The Errant Heretic.

Now that the forbidden seed of that thought had taken root in his mind, he knew with absolute certainty that he would never stop pursuing it until he understood its inner mechanics.

He filed the concept away into the darkest corners of his mind, intentionally turning his focus back toward the immediate reality of the present.

He expanded his senses, allowing his awareness to spread out across the ruins of the battlefield. Along with the world that was rectifying itself, he could feel the veil that had been punctured between this world and the plane of Gods rapidly closing.

In fact, there was barely any passage left between both worlds, but that was no longer of concern to Finn. His followers that had used the passage had crossed over safely to this world already.

Finn turned his head, his gaze sweeping towards the far distance where a large number of people stood watching him floating in the sky. Looking at their large numbers, a slow smile touched Finn’s lips behind his mask.

“Jon the Delusional,” he muttered with a quiet sigh, the name carrying a trace of ancient fondness.

It seemed that even after he had completely departed that world in the past timeline, Jon had never given up hope. The man had refused to let his belief waver. He had spent his entire remaining life spreading, defending, and proselytizing the faith of the Errant Heretic across the generations.

“But still…” Finn murmured, his faint smile slowly morphing back into a deep, calculating frown.

He could understand if Jon had managed to preserve the faith of the Errant within a small, dedicated core of zealots, or if those core believers had passed the doctrine down through their family lines over multiple centuries.

But the sheer numbers he was looking at right now did not correlate with anything Jon should have been capable of achieving alone.

That world was exceptionally hostile. Even Finn himself, backed by true divine power, recognized how dangerous that plane was for anyone trying to build a new religion.

It would have been an entirely suicidal endeavor for a normal mortal like Jon to build a massive following of believers without a present, active deity to shield his people from the other Gods.

Finn thought back to the precise moment when the veils between the two worlds had grown weak during the height of the battle just now. Of course, he had intentionally prepared Jon in that world for this kind of situation, but never in his wildest imaginations had he thought this level of believers would surge out of that plane.

That moment when he had felt the veil between both worlds weaken and the surge of divine energy flood into him through their belief, even he was very shocked.

He simply hadn’t shown a single trace of that shock at the time, maintaining his absolute composure before his enemies. But now that the dust had settled, he could take his time to analyze the anomaly and decipher exactly why his believers had suddenly inflated to these proportions.

The crowd standing in the far distance numbered nearly twenty thousand. That was essentially an army of believers. Those numbers were enough for any divine entity to comfortably use to anchor their authority into any world.

As Finn focused his divine senses on the distant assembly, he analyzed them very carefully. He felt the exact texture of their belief, he felt the heavy density of their faith, and he felt their absolute reverence.

There was no deceit in their souls. They were entirely genuine. Yet, that reality only made the mystery more troubling. Looking at these numbers, his initial suspicion was that another hidden entity had secretly taken a hand in the survival of his believers, designing a trap to subtly corrupt his godhood from within.

But as he scanned the crowd, he could detect no foreign signature, no secondary influence, and no underlying taint, leaving him completely confused.