The Innkeeper

Chapter 2356: The retribution II

Back on Earth, Lex had encountered, and even studied many religions. It wasn’t because he was particularly faithful, but because when he was young mobile phones didn’t exist yet so he had to entertain himself in other ways. That would, naturally, include reading the books that lay around the house when it wasn’t possible to go outdoors.

A common theme, he discovered, among many faiths was the end of days. Raining fire, ground shattering earthquakes and locust plagues were also very common in them, which is why Lex began to wonder if the Hollow was using his own memories as a template for the retribution.

He wouldn’t say it was unoriginal. Why did that matter? As long as it worked, it would be good enough. It was just that, despite the fact that all of this was actually quite powerful and was affecting the necklace’s body, the danger didn’t scale properly.

He remembered back when he got stuck in the Crystal realm, he had barely started his cultivation journey. He was a mortal, and a very low leveled one at that. He was easily hurt, and easily burned. In that state, he had to very literally swim through lava so heavy that it crushed his body even as the heat seared through his very being!

Back then, if his soul, body and spirit hadn’t been fused together, he would not have survived. That experience was scary, because he had no idea whether his plan would work, or if he would survive, as he swam through that lava. The pain was also much harder to ignore back then.

Then what? He swam through a sea of lava and found heaven on the other side? No, there was no such thing. He had to drag his broken, battered, burned, body and save himself without letting himself faint, or he’d probably die.

Considering his weakness, and the limited options available to him back then, what did it even matter if the sky fell down on him? A cloud of toxic gases? A plague, a curse, an attack targeting his soul directly? Yes, they were all very, very powerful and if he didn’t resist, he would surely die here.

But that was just it. Compared to those early days of his, he had way too many ways to fight back, to resist, to... to truly savor this retribution.

Lex’s smile grew wider as the pain began to pierce through his soul.

"Very good. Show me more, teach me more," he whispered as he looked up at the sky, as if talking to the Hollow itself. "I have too many enemies who are living too comfortably. Show me exactly how... I should exact my retribution on them."

The black dragon was stunned, for he suddenly felt that the retribution that was targeting him disappeared! That was literally unprecedented in the history of the Gilded Hollow!

Yet he instinctively knew... it wasn’t that the retribution had disappeared. The Gilded Hollow had limited energy, so it wasn’t that the retribution had disappeared. Rather, it was that the energy allocated for his retribution was being used somewhere else, and he felt like he had a good idea where it was going.

Red lightning struck Lex from the sky as he finally started to defend himself, and the clap of thunder shattered space around him. Yet behind the space of the Gilded Hollow was not the Void, but just another, deeper level of the Hollow, as if it was folded upon itself.

Divine energy within the necklace began to churn as Lex healed the necklace which, for the first time, suffered actual damage from an attack. The intensity of that red lightning was quite memorable, but Lex could not focus on that.

He fell from the shattered space to the ground beneath, and the ground from the shattered space above him reached down to swallow him whole. Reality itself seemed to be breaking, or maybe this is what premium Saturn cake tasted like, because how was there a ground above him and beneath him?

Lex surrounded himself with a barrier, created a Domain within the barrier and unleashed his new and improved Domination. He didn’t bother trying to attack the retribution - he wouldn’t know where to begin. He only needed to survive, so he defended, and watched as the Hollow unleashed madness upon him.

The dirt in the air clumped together and began to form countless bodies, as if ashes of a trillion corpses joining back together to recreate those very corpses. An army of humanoid insects screeched at him - the screech a mindless wail of fury that, somehow, was also colored red and black. They lunged at him as if he were the enemy they had been dreaming about for an eon, yet there could have been no dream. The corpses were empty, there was no spirit or soul in them, only a single shade of the endless fury that constituted the Gilded Hollow’s retribution.

While Lex defended, he also memorised the way the laws moved, the way they writhed, the way they came together, for even though the Gilded Hollow was attacking, these were the laws of his universe! These laws, at least, he could understand. These laws, he could learn to replicate.

Amidst all the chaos and madness, Lex became even more sure that the Gilded Hollow wasn’t actually alive, or that its will did not have any actual sentience. This retribution was just the natural reaction of the laws of the universe to its own destruction - much in the way that his universe was expressing its anger in the form of Tribulation Fiends.

Lex fell to the ground finally, and what followed him was a mindless army of insects so vast that space threatened to shatter once more!

But just as the space was about to give way, Lex strengthened it, preventing it from breaking again. The laws of space were extremely familiar to him. The reason he stopped the shattering of space, though, wasn’t to avoid more attacks. Instead, he was because he decided to test what he was learning from the Hollow right then and there.

It was too soon to summon the Fake realm he was creating inside the necklace, so using his domain he took control of the space around him, and through his Domination he made it his own. Then he directly clashed against the Hollow’s retribution, not to break through the retribution, but to sharpen his control and consolidate all he was learning.

He was fighting back against the retribution not to end it, but to use it to sharpen his own blade, so to speak.

"Is that all?" Lex asked the Hollow. "This is not even enough to express my own anger, so how can it be enough to express yours? Show me more!"

As if responding to his words, another bolt of red lightning flashed.

Deep, deep within the Gilded Hollow, far beyond where mere Dao Lords could enter, within the ruins of a humble manor, a corpse sat upon a broken throne. Yet, as if carried by some unknown magic, Lex’s words whispered in the ears of that corpse, and one of its eyelids trembled, ever so slightly.

Yet, for better or for worse, there was no one around to witness the event. Though if someone saw the corpse, they might be too distracted to notice the twitch to begin with. After all... seated upon the broken throne, surrounded by an aura that could bring a Dao Lord to his knees, was the corpse of a human.