Magical Soul Parade

Chapter 394: Conclusion?

Finn let out a low grunt behind his mask. This was something he would have to deal with very carefully. But for now he turned his gaze downward, spreading his senses across the main battlefield below.

He sought out the remaining, heavily wounded Transcendents and high-ranking Ossuarists who had survived the slaughter.

Casmir, the Space Transcendent, was still breathing, his tattered robes soaked in grime as he knelt in the dirt. He was cradling his partner, Lyris, the Transcendent of Combustion, who lay severely injured and barely conscious in his arms.

Further across the blackened earth, Himothy, the Glory Transcendent, could be seen slumped against a shattered ridge. He looked entirely worn, beaten, and broken. The golden aura that usually radiated from his skin had weakened to a pathetic flicker after he had completely expended the entire bank of glory he had painstakingly accumulated over a millennium during his clash against Finn.

From the looks of things, suffering such a definitive, catastrophic defeat after maintaining an unbroken streak of victories for over a thousand years meant the psychological low point was incredibly devastating for him.

He had forgotten what failure felt like, so right now, he looked entirely pitiful, but Finn reckoned the guy would eventually find a way to claw his mind back together.

Finn’s glowing green eyes continued to move across the field, skimming past the newer powerhouses who had risen during his absence. He spotted Sue. He spotted the Transcendent who held command over gravity. Then, his eyes searched for the one entity among the new Transcendents who had actually caught his genuine attention from the start:

The Soul Transcendent.

However, the moment his gaze landed on the massive figure of the Soul Transcendent, Finn’s eyes widened slightly behind the slits of his bone mask.

The man was currently crawling on his knees, his hands desperately clutching his midsection as thick, dark blood spilled out of his ruptured guts, staining the blackened earth beneath him.

Finn didn’t hesitate. With a silent flash of movement, he moved forward through the air, descending from his high position till he was directly over the bleeding transcendent.

There was no way this injury was from the battle at all. The wound was way too fresh, rather, it looked as though he had been ambushed or attacked just recently.

Finn quickly scanned the immediate surroundings, his vision tracking the residual energy signatures left in the air, until his gaze finally latched onto two distinct objects lying fifty meters away.

The moment he processed what he was looking at, his expression went entirely flat.

Those two objects… were humans. Or rather… they used to be humans. All they were now was simply human remains, if they could even be called that.

Their physical bodies had been violently compressed and shaped into grotesque, compact balls of raw meat and crushed flesh, as if every single bone in their body had been pulverized into dust. The only reason Finn could even identify that these mounds of flesh had once been living human beings was due to the intense, evaporating heat their blood was currently releasing into the freezing air.

“Nocturne and Storm?” Finn thought, a trace of genuine surprise flickering through his mind as he floated closer to the mangled spheres.

Just what kind of entity possessed the authority to execute such a swift, gruesome slaughter right beneath his nose?

Finn activated his Error vision, trying to manually walk back the threads of reality to see who had a hand in their sudden deaths, but the temporal threads pointed to absolutely nothing. They didn’t trace back to any survivor on the field, instead, the broken energy lines shot straight up into the high sky, vanishing into the atmosphere.

“The Great Dao?” Finn’s brow furrowed deeply behind his mask.

He recalled seeing Nocturne and Storm active during the early phases of the conflict. After analyzing Sage Limitless’s core abilities, he had already deduced that the Sage had played a direct, unnatural role in forging their existence in this timeline, enabling them to live and wield high-tier Transcendent abilities despite the fact that they were not of this world.

Perhaps, with Limitless’s erasure from the world, the Great Dao had simply moved in to instantly correct the influence of his power, ending their artificial existence in the process?

But that logical deduction still failed to explain why their physical remains had been manually compressed into balls of meat.

“Or was it him?” Finn turned his head, his eyes locking onto the Soul Transcendent who was still crawling away through the dirt, wheezing as he dragged his ruptured guts. Had he engaged in some desperate, hidden altercation with Nocturne and Storm?

In truth, the personal fates of these dead entities were of no true concern to Finn at all. But the fact that something so uncanny, so completely out of place had managed to manifest right beneath his notice, especially now that he was harboring deep suspicions regarding the sudden, massive inflation of his own believers, made him hyper-alert.

Every single variable that didn’t align with logic had to be tracked.

His eyes remained on the soul transcendent. The man was still alive, so he must know what had happened. Even if he hadn’t been the one to commit the act, he must have seen who did. Finn was going to ensure his safety and question him thoroughly afterward.

But for now, he needed to take immediate care of the aftermath of the battle. He needed to organize and secure his twenty thousand believers, and he needed to deliver the final bits of retribution he had promised upon the Transcendents who had a hand in his puppet-like arrival in this world — Casmir, Himothy, and the remaining orchestrators.

Most importantly, however, he needed to actively begin searching for a definitive method to separate his own soul from Arros. The leech that had embedded himself in his existence for so long.

As Finn stepped away from the mangled balls of flesh, a heavy, expectant silence settled over ruins of the battlefield. Every single surviving Transcendent turned their eyes toward him. They knew fully well that everything… the future of the plane, the new distribution of power, and their very lives now depended entirely on his whim.

They waited, breathless, for his next move.

Finn raised his chin, his glowing green eyes meeting every single one of theirs, scanning them one by one, before his gaze finally settled onto someone he was deeply, genuinely surprised to find still alive…

Ailin. The Mnemosyne.