Poison God's Heritage

Chapter 915: Conclusion

While drifting through the conscious and unconscious world, all I could hear were the endless screams of monsters as their bodies melted and their mother screamed. The sound did not come from any one direction.

It was everywhere at once, pressing against thought itself, threading through whatever thin line still separated waking from oblivion.

Those screams carried textures, wet tearing, boiling flesh, shrill notes of rage and agony layered into one monstrous chorus.

Even drifting half-dead, I could feel each cry dragging over my nerves. Victory was supposed to sound triumphant. Instead, it sounded like an entire species learning what extinction meant.

I was tapped out, and no matter how many pills I can chug right now, the best I could manage was to stay awake and conscious, fighting is out of the question. My body had gone past exhaustion into something colder and more fragile. Every breath felt measured. Every heartbeat felt like an effort negotiated at the edge of failure.

The medicinal heat from the pills crawled through my channels, trying to patch holes in a dam already collapsing, but I could tell the truth of it. They weren’t restoring me. They were delaying a crash.

My muscles refused to answer even simple intent. I could keep my eyes open through spite alone, but if someone asked me to lift a finger in battle, I’d have laughed, if laughing didn’t sound like it might rupture something inside me.

The rain fell hard, and it was brutal, it didn’t spare any of the Rakshasa it hit, and the mother had it worst. She was literally melting as the Blue Sun was piling blow after blow on her. Through half-lidded eyes and fractured awareness, I watched the impossible become mundane.

The poison-rain hammered down with pitiless consistency, not as droplets but as a sentence being carried out. Where it touched Rakshasa flesh, smoke hissed upward in ugly gray plumes. Chunks of monstrous hide sloughed off in steaming masses.

And through it all Blue Sun descended over and over, relentless, each strike a blazing verdict. There was no flourish in her movements, no wasted grandeur. Just punishment. Each impact shook the flooded ground, sent ripples through poisoned lakes, and made the dying mother convulse beneath forces too vast to resist.

The other Suns were busy keeping the rakshasas that for some ungodly reason still managed to move despite their bodies melting, and they killed them off. The few cultivators from this confederation were also pulling their weight and a half.

It should have been impossible to keep fighting while dissolving, yet those creatures still lurched and clawed and screamed. Some dragged themselves on exposed bone. Others lashed out with half-melted limbs before being cut down by streaks of solar fire.

The Suns moved with terrifying precision, intercepting anything that twitched. Around them, battered cultivators pushed far beyond sane limits, forcing their bodies through pain and exhaustion because retreat was no longer a concept anyone entertained.

It had become the kind of battlefield where people stopped surviving and started refusing death out of sheer stubbornness.

"TAO’ER" the creature howled, a sun stage? No fake one. That proclaimed host in the rakshasa’s body screamed, tears of blood falling down its eyes as if it blamed his situation on the world and not himself.

The sound carried such grief it almost might have stirred pity, if it wasn’t so twisted by entitlement. It howled not like something repentant, but like something outraged consequence had finally found it.

Blood ran down its face in streams that looked black under the poisoned rain, and even while its body came apart it clung to that furious mourning. There was something grotesquely human in that. A tyrant screaming betrayal while standing inside the ruin he made.

The rain fell, and the ground began to flood, saturated with how much of the Soulsteel poison had mixed with the ground. Gray colored rain. It made lakes and waves, and poured down holes deep and wide enough to create seas. The world began to change.

It wasn’t just a battlefield anymore. Terrain itself was being rewritten. Poison pooled into broad metallic sheets that reflected a sickly sky. Craters filled until they became venomous reservoirs. Floods gathered in trenches and sank into wounds torn through the earth, feeding abyssal hollows until they resembled newborn seas. The smell was acid and minerals and death. Even the soil seemed altered, darkening as if touched by something older than rot. There was something almost cosmic in watching a weapon reshape geography.

The Broodmother’s body boiled and began dissolving, unable to withstand the massive amount of poison, her body simply couldn’t stop it from penetrating, and wrecking her.

Massive sections of flesh collapsed inward. Armor-like growths that once deflected impossible force now softened, bubbled, tore apart. Her resistance had become meaningless through sheer accumulation. The poison didn’t overpower through strength alone. It persisted. It entered every weakness, every opening, every layer. Watching something so ancient reduced by relentless inevitability was a lesson in cruelty. Even monsters died by attrition.

Darkness came.

Well.

That’s what I thought.

I woke in front of the massive chamber again, standing where the walls depicted the warriors of old, and the throne that hosted the great entity stood once again. The shift happened without transition, as reality itself had simply decided the battlefield no longer existed. One instant, there was screaming rain and dissolving monsters. The next, silence so complete it felt heavier than sound.

The chamber loomed with the same impossible scale, every stone surface bearing histories too old to measure.

Carvings of warriors marched along the walls in frozen triumph and ruin. The red carpet stretched forward in solemn severity toward the throne, where the great entity waited as though it had never moved. There was no sense of arriving. It felt more like I had been returned to a place that had been waiting all along.

"Shen Bao..."

The words were spoken without him ever moving his mouth; there was something in those words. Pride? No, he was proudful. My name carried weight in the air, layered with recognition and something harsher than approval. It made the chamber seem smaller for an instant.

"You have done something for us that we did not have the ability to do..."

I found myself staring before answering. That statement alone was absurd enough to provoke suspicion.

"I find that hard to believe," Shen Bao said, "Aren’t you the heavens?"

"I am not. I am but an enforcer. You should do well to remember and distinguish us."