Young Master's PoV: Woke Up As A Villain In A Game One Day - Chapter 353: The Supreme One [II]

Chapter 353: The Supreme One [II]

Decades turned into centuries, but Briat’iés never stopped mourning his daughter. He fell to his knees beneath the bleeding moon and began to cry, his tears flowing endlessly until they pooled into a silver sea.

Again, in hindsight, Vahn should have done something to console him. He should have shown support, at the very least.

But like the practical God he was, he instead threw himself into building a cure.

He believed that if he could undo the damage — if he could save Briat’iés’ girl and restore the Triviscaris to their true forms — then everything would return to how it once was.

And maybe it would have.

Maybe there was a hidden happy ending he failed to reach.

But he simply ran out of time…

In his grief and anguish, in his hatred and thirst for vengeance, Briat’iés summoned the False God and made a pact with him.

Everyone in Heaven knew of the False God, that vile deity of corruption and evil.

Some called him the Demon Lord. Others knew him as the Spirit King. To many, he was a liberator. To most, he was the end itself.

Vahn had never seen him in person. He had only heard the legends, legends that he had never believed in because they always sounded too far-fetched.

After all, how could there exist a being stronger than the High Gods themselves?

How could someone surpass the deities who could weave the threads of reality with a mere thought?

It made no sense.

…Not until he saw him.

Not until the legend stood there before him.

There was a simple hierarchy.

At the very top were the Outer Architects, the beings who manifested this universe. Beneath them were the Primordials, the living embodiments of cosmic forces.

From the Primordials came the High Gods, who built their own realm known as Heaven.

Below them stood the minor deities like himself.

And at the very bottom were mortals, who danced and died in the dirt.

This hierarchy was a closed circle.

No one could exist outside of it.

No one… except the False God.

Vahn tried to fight, but he could not even withstand the Spirit King’s Spiritual Pressure, let alone raise a weapon against him.

He did not even know if the Supreme One had ever even turned to look at him directly. He merely passed by… and four of Vahn’s heads were crushed instantly, leaving only three. Most of his hands were torn apart as well.

The Fallen God fell to his knees, subdued so effortlessly that even the High Gods would have marveled at the casual cruelty of it.

Vahn looked up through his remaining six eyes, his vision blurred by blood spilling from his ruined heads. And he could only watch as the False God approached Briat’iés.

There was no grand speech or declaration of ideals.

The Spirit King simply extended a hand — a limb that seemed to have been made of the darkest of shadows that existed between the stars — and the Angel of the Highest Choir took it.

That was how Asmodeus was born.

The protectors of the Triviscaris, those who were still alive and sane, were broken without the Spirit King even needing to lift a finger.

It was nothing like Vahn had ever seen. In that instance, he knew what this sensation called fear that the mortals talked of felt like.

But the Supreme One wasn’t done yet. He injected his dark ichor into the very fabric of that world and absorbed it into his realm, corrupting every living thing that dwelled there.

The Triviscari, or what remained of them, were already half monsters. Now the change was complete.

Plant-men sprouted thorns, insect-folk developed rabid fury. All flora and fauna either rotted away or grew monstrously, driven by a singular urge to devour everything nearby.

Vahn was no exception to the effect of that dark ichor. He felt his divinity crumble. But still did not give up.

With his own Spiritual Pressure — as pitiful and meager as it might’ve been in comparison to the Spirit King — Vahn managed to stall the corruption from reaching his soul, confining it to his flesh.

He hadn’t lost all hope yet.

He could still save everyone. He could still fix everything. He was the God of Craftsmanship, fixing things was what he was best at!

So even as his mind began to fray and his body started to deform, he spent the last fragments of his sanity crafting the Ring of Healing, a divine artifact capable of restoring someone’s flesh to its originally unharmed state.

He tried to use it to heal the former Triviscaris… but his corrupted flesh strangled the amount of Essence needed to fuel it at full power.

So, to reclaim his divinity and fight back the Spirit King’s corruption completely, Vahn began consuming the threads of fate from the twisted Triviscaris — the lingering echoes of the people he had once loved.

After all, threads of fate were made from divinity.

He told himself it was temporary. He promised their insect-like forms that he would return everything once he was strong enough.

…But hope had little meaning in a world gone mad.

Soon, the corruption reached all of Vahn’s minds.

Soon, two of his mouths endlessly whispered apologies to empty air, while the third existed only to feed.

Soon, the God of Craftsmanship became a shambling monument of rot, trapped within a decaying body that knew only to resist corruption, but no longer remembered why.

He guarded the Lake of Grief, the silver sea of his friend’s tears, but forgot the friend.

He wandered beneath the Bleeding Moon, but no longer knew the girl it used to be.

He hunted and devoured endlessly, driven by instinct alone.

Thus was born the God Who Eats Is.

…And thus he died, when a fearless young man with an unwavering heart and a blade of gold finally released him from his suffering.

I… was that young man.

•••

After I passed out, I opened my eyes into a dream.

A dream that recounted the entire life of Vahn on Triviscaris’ world from his own perspective.

I saw everything through his eyes.

I saw the first sparks of fire that were ignited in that mortal world, the stained-glass windows reflecting a sun that no longer existed, and the moment when the cries of a three-eyed child were replaced by the wet clicking of mandibles.

I felt Vahn’s despair in that terrible instant, when he realized he had to become a monster to save the world from monsters.

Then it ended.

In the dream, I saw myself killing Vahn. In his final moments, the rust in his mind cleared. The apologies ceased and the hunger vanished.

He did not look at me with hatred.

He looked at me with utter weariness… and gratitude.

The dream soon dissolved into darkness.

And I heard the final verse of the same melancholic song that had been haunting me since my first day in the Noctveil Wilds.

“So curse the thrones that cast you high,

I’ll tear their kingdoms from the sky!

No god will live, no star will lie,

For my daughter they have slain!”

…Only the melody wasn’t as evocative now as it was angry and aggrieved.

It was furious.

“My tears will carve the earth in two,

Until their heaven drowns in rue!

I’ll burn their fate, undo their truth,

And crown you whole again!”

I turned toward the direction of the sound and suddenly found myself standing somewhere out of the darkness entirely — inside an expansive hallway, flanked by a majestic colonnade that stretched endlessly under an arched ceiling.

​The pillars of white marble were carved into enormous relief sculptures depicting what I assumed were weeping gods… or, at least, god-like beings. Torches were strapped onto them upside down, burning with eerie blue flames.

This was a temple.

Yet it seemed less like a place of worship and more like a monument to a grudge.

I did not know why I felt that way.

It was only a gut instinct, one I never had time to question.

Because at the far end of the hall, bathed in sickly crimson light, sat a figure upon a towering throne.

The throne itself was an object of horror. It was built from a mountain of people turned to stone in the midst of fulfilling their deepest, most desperate desires.

I saw a man frozen in a permanent reach for a pile of gold in the grasp of the corpses of the family he had murdered. A married woman locked in an eternal embrace with her lover behind her husband’s back. A scholar clutching a forbidden scroll at the cost of thousands of lives. And so many more.

All of them had drowned themselves in immortality, looking disgustingly preserved before they were forever stuck in their final moments of selfish ecstasy.

…And casually lounging atop this heap of petrified sin was Asmodeus, the Demon Prince of Temptations in all his profane glory.