Poison God's Heritage

Chapter 913: Falling World

They didn’t fear. No, it was never fear, because fear implies thought.

This was older. Sharper. A survival reflex built into the deepest part of their being: unsafe.

An instinct telling them that that thing in front of them... wasn’t safe. That they would perish and end if they were to come in contact with it.

Though they didn’t understand, they knew still that If they too were to come in contact with the net, they too would scream like their brother. And that definitely didn’t feel comfortable to do. It didn’t feel... safe.

That was enough. That was all I needed; that simple thought planted in their simple brains was all I needed.

They halted, an impossible thing, two falling catastrophes deciding to stop. Their descent slowed, curved, and then reversed. Their bodies angled upward, rising away from the planet as if the sky itself had shoved them back.

The pressure wave from that change hammered downward, rattling ruins and kicking dust into spirals. The cultivators below flinched again, but they were alive to flinch.

"You’re going! NOWHERE!" I raised my claw-shaped hands, and the net began rising up from the sides, going up, above and beyond, surrounding, gathering, and trying to link.

My shoulders screamed. My spine felt like it was being pulled apart by invisible hooks. The aftereffects of the doping were already creeping in: heat behind my eyes, nausea in my gut, a tremor beginning in my forearms.

I ignored it.

The net rose like a tide, folding upward around them. It climbed above, wrapped behind, pulled edges toward each other. It wasn’t smooth, it wasn’t elegant, this was a cage built from residue and brutality, but it was closing.

The First Borns never knew that they didn’t need to ever care about the Soulsteel; once it comes in contact with their ’healthy’ skin, it’ll simply melt off. It wasn’t strong enough to penetrate. And it only worked on their brother since it was heavily injured and had access points for the poison to proliferate.

They didn’t know.

So the cage finished forming.

A massive sphere of poison, big enough to make the sky feel smaller, surrounded them, blotting light in a dark lattice that shimmered like wet metal.

The two giant maggots stopped just a few miles from the net. They couldn’t go above, nor could they go beyond. They felt fear, so instead of acting like an enraged beast that was encased in steel. They cowered; they slowly went to the safest spot in the cage.

The center of it.

It was almost pathetic, watching apex predators choose the safest point like frightened larvae.

Almost.

Because the scale of them made everything grotesque. Their cautious movement displaced air like storms. Their bodies brushing near the cage made the lattice tremble. If either of them had decided to test it properly, to push through out of spite, Solarous would have paid the price.

But discomfort guided them. The scream guided them. The same as a dog would do to sheep, never needing to use its teeth.

And finally, after my eyes became bloodshot, after my body began to feel the aftereffects of the heavy doping. After my brain felt like it was about to turn to boiled mush. The scream I waited to see echoed.

My vision swam. The world tilted. The black blood in my mouth dried into a bitter crust. My heartbeat thumped in my skull like a war drum, each beat sending a spike of pain behind my eyes.

Then the wounded First Born’s body, still trapped closer to the world, began to fail in a way that even my imagination hadn’t fully prepared for.

Looking up with blood red eyes, I saw it, the massive First Born’s entire body bubbling, rotting, and twisting. Then finally, a loud scream, and an inward burst that magnified and amplified the Soulsteel Poison by a degree that could only be called. Monstrous.

It wasn’t a clean collapse. Flesh swelled into blisters that burst into black vapor. Segments softened like wax near flame, then folded inward, rotting from within as the poison rewrote what it touched. The scream that followed wasn’t just pain; it was the sound of something invincible realizing consequence.

Then it imploded inward, like a world collapsing into itself.

The burst didn’t spread outward the way a normal explosion would. It pulled, compressing, concentrating, feeding the poison until the effect sharpened and intensified, turning Soulsteel into something even nastier for a heartbeat.

One down.

Two to go.

And a mother to kill.

However, the price paid was too great. The instant the final command left my hand and the poisoned tide answered, the cost of forcing that much soul energy through a mortal vessel came crashing down on me with merciless weight.

My knees struck the burned earth hard enough to send a jolt through my spine, but that pain was insignificant compared to the infernal collapse inside my skull.

My mind reeled so violently it felt as though thought itself had become molten, unstable, threatening to pour out through my nose in a slurry of blood and ruin. Warmth ran over my lip and I realized too late it already was.

My vision warped at the edges. Firelight smeared into ribbons. The battlefield tilted as if the world itself had begun to slip. Every breath clawed through my lungs. Every pulse hammered so hard in my temples it sounded like war drums.

For one sick moment I wondered whether I had won only to die from my own technique before seeing its result.

"Stop it, right now, stop the poison!" The Dusking Sun howled at me.

His voice struck through the delirium, distant yet sharp, but I barely had the focus to process it. I could feel my channels tearing under pressure, could feel Qi leaking through me like water through cracked stone.

My hands trembled violently where they pressed into the dirt. Every instinct in the body screamed collapse. Yet behind all the pain sat one unfinished thought, one final thing that had to be done before I surrendered to unconsciousness.

"One second, I still need to do one thing."

The words came out rough, dragged over blood and exhaustion.

"You’ll die! You’re literally pouring your soul energy and Qi out, you won’t last past more than a few breaths of time!" The Dusking Sun howled at me.

I almost spat at him for saying what I already knew. I could feel death close enough to smell. There was a bitterness in me at being warned about self-destruction while in the act of weaponizing it.

"Then stop interrupting me!" I replied as I grasped the very air itself.

My fingers closed on emptiness, but not emptiness as ordinary senses understood it. I felt pathways there. Threads. Poison currents still linked to me through the corpse of the first born. I did not need to flood myself anymore. That would have finished me. I only needed to guide. That thought became everything. I forced my arm upward despite how heavy it felt, as though the heavens themselves weighed against the motion.

"Tell the Flamboyant sun and the Red Sun to prepare for impact," I said through grit bloodied teeth.

My jaw shook saying it. My raised hand trembled, fingers twitching under failing control. Around me, even through fading senses, I could feel people hesitate. That tiny suspended instant before catastrophe had a shape of its own.

Then I slammed my raised hand onto the ground.

The act was simple.

Its consequence was not.

It was a command now that the poisoned first born was dead, I had the link back to my poison.

Now I can control it. Weaponize it.

The realization cut through agony with savage clarity.

And since it ate away at the flesh of the first born, it multiple, duplicated, and became much, much more. The poison was no longer a crafted attack requiring precision from me. It had become self-propagating devastation. It had fed, multiplied, evolved through consumption. I no longer needed to guide it by atom or drop. I only needed to direct the whole monstrous tide toward its next prey.

And it obeyed.

It obeyed with the immediacy of instinct.

The world felt like it was falling, the massive moon sized poison, no, more like a sea of it began rushing down, coming down like dam floods tearing apart. At first even my own mind struggled to accept what I was seeing. It looked as though an ocean had been inverted above the battlefield and released. Vast sheets of venom tore downward in writhing torrents. Their sheer volume bent the eye. Their descent shredded clouds apart. Some portions burned into emerald fire where friction caught them. Others crystallized under celestial cold before breaking apart into poisonous sleet. Yet most of it held together and plunged downward with catastrophic weight.

And it rushed down with vengeance and fury.

The atmosphere screamed around it.

Winds twisted.

Shadows spread.

The sky itself looked wounded.

"That’s a bit too much... don’t you think," Don Ma’s voice sounded a bit worried.

Even through pain, I nearly laughed at the understatement.

A bit too much.

Yes.

Only enough poison to bury an army under a falling sea.

I couldn’t blame him, the amount of poison coming down could easily blot out the sun. And in fact, it did.

The battlefield dimmed beneath it. Light vanished under the descending shadow. The entire area we were in was shaded as the massive amounts of Poison rushed down. Cultivators lifted their faces upward in stunned silence.

Even rakshasas, creatures born for slaughter, hesitated under the impossible sight. For one strange breath, war itself seemed to pause.