Chapter 492: Honor.
The word was barely coherent now, just a feeling more than a thought. But it persisted. Stubborn. Refusing to be completely devoured by the darkness.
The creature’s heart gave a final, shuddering beat.
Then stopped.
The massive body went still, its thrashing ceasing as death finally claimed it. The countless tendrils that had been fighting Nero’s shadows went limp, floating in the darkening water like dead seaweed.
But Nero didn’t stop eating.
He couldn’t. The Yang form was in full control now, and it wouldn’t be satisfied until every scrap of the creature had been consumed. His shadows spread through the corpse like roots through soil, seeking out every remaining morsel of flesh, every organ, every piece of bone and cartilage and stranger materials.
He ate the lungs—six of them, arranged in a cluster near what might have been the creature’s spine.
He ate the liver—a massive organ that took up nearly a quarter of the body’s volume, filled with chambers of toxic bile that the Vineheart processed with increasing difficulty.
He ate the intestines—coils and coils of digestive tract that had probably never actually digested anything, existing more as structural support than functional anatomy.
He ate the brain—a collection of ganglia spread throughout the body rather than centralized in the skull, each node pulsing with residual electrical activity even in death.
He ate the eyes—those massive organs that had never opened, that had spent eternity closed in eternal slumber.
He ate the antlers, crunching through bone and keratin, swallowing fragments that should have torn his throat but somehow slid down smoothly.