Chapter 296 : Chapter 296
Chapter 296. Vessel
Moran sat collapsed in the pile of shattered stones, like a stray dog whose spine had been pulled out.
His silver-white short hair, which was always meticulously groomed no matter the occasion, was now a complete mess. Mixed with mud and foul black blood, it clung wretchedly to his forehead.
He looked at Gregory VII, who had slowly landed while keeping an absolutely safe distance, then looked at Elena and Aureus as they gradually closed in.
Seeing these powerhouses treating him like a great enemy, Moran let out a miserable laugh and vomited a mouthful of black blood.
“Mr. ‘Assassin,’ how does this feel?”
Logaris stood at the edge of the pit, looking down at him from above.
The rimless glasses on his face refracted a cold light beneath the afterglow of the Holy Light, as though he were observing a mouse that had entered the slicing tray of a laboratory.
It was also as though he were coldly and precisely evaluating the remaining danger of this mouse, waiting for him to breathe his last.
Moran wanted to laugh, but the moment he opened his mouth, fragments of his shattered organs slid down from the corner of his lips.
Forty years!
A full forty years!
He had crawled out from the lowest mire on the kingdom’s border. In the darkness, he had lurked like a venomous snake. In the light, he had performed like a saint.
He had once been trampled underfoot, licking muddy water from the ground like a dog. He had also once stood at the center of tens of thousands, enjoying the reverence of the entire Royal Capital.
He had even already touched the edge of that throne. As long as he was given just a little more time, he could completely reorganize this rotten kingdom and establish a new order that belonged to him alone—one of absolute rationality.
But now, it was all over.
Everything had been destroyed at the hands of this young man, who was not even half his age.
This monster had brought a group of Seventh-Tier powerhouses who should have been suspecting and restraining one another, and without allowing any explanation, had directly flipped the table!
“Logaris...” Moran’s voice was hoarse, like sandpaper scraping across the ground. His venomous gaze remained nailed to him. “Do you think... you have won?”
His gaze slowly moved downward and landed on the pitch-black ring on the fingers of his left hand.
That was not a symbol of power.
That was the origin point of his entire rise.
That was the first and most fundamental contract he had signed with the lord of the old days.
The touch of his fingertip was icy to the bone, instantly dragging his thoughts back to forty years ago.
In that ancient ruin buried beneath yellow sand, the dying young Moran had put it on—and also put on a heavy shackle called 【Hope】.
“Mortal, I can give you the power to rewrite your fate, allowing you to rise from the dust and look down upon all living beings. But power never comes from nothing.”
That ancient and magnificent voice had once sounded in the depths of his soul.
“When you encounter a desperate situation you cannot resist, you may call upon my true name. At the price of half your soul, I shall bestow upon you... a part of myself.”
Half of his soul... What did that mean?
It meant that he would lose half of his self. His life would no longer be fully under his own control.
This was the final trump card that he had always done his utmost to avoid using.
Because he knew better than anyone that once he used it, he would no longer be “Moran.”
Instead, he would become... a “vessel.”
He did not want to become that! What he wanted was to perform the deeds of a god with the body of a mortal, not to become the puppet of another great existence!
But now, did he still have a choice?
Looking at those cold faces at the edge of the pit, faces without the slightest trace of pity, the last shred of luck in Moran’s heart was utterly crushed.
Rather than be humiliated and executed under their judgment like a dog...
He might as well...
Drag the entire Royal Capital with him into an even deeper abyss!
“Since you want a monster...” A trace of resolute madness appeared on Moran’s face. “Then I will give you a true monster!”
Before his voice had faded, the remaining mana around him suddenly surged backward. The strange ring on his finger actually let out a clear wail and shattered outright!
At the same time, obscure and incomprehensible incantations in the Ancient Dragon Tongue exploded from his mouth like thunder.
“Attack! Stop him!” Logaris’s explosive shout instantly resounded through the night sky, and the reactions of the powerhouses were swift to the extreme.
Almost at the same instant Moran crushed the ring, the attacks of Aureus, Barnabas, Elena, and the Pope poured down like a violent storm!
A pillar of Holy Light, a golden sword aura, a violent four-colored elemental torrent, and a silver arc of light instantly converged into a destructive flood powerful enough to flatten mountains, charging straight toward Moran’s face!
However, at the final moment, the shattered ring burst open with black radiance so dense that it reached the extreme!
The black radiance transformed into an invisible, absolute barrier that seemed capable of swallowing all sound and light, firmly protecting Moran at the center.
BOOM—!!!
The destructive flood slammed viciously into the barrier, and even sound itself seemed to vanish at that moment.
The nearby earth’s crust collapsed downward by a full ten meters under this strike, and the violent ripples of energy directly vaporized the remaining factory ruins in the surroundings into dust.
Under the combined bombardment of several top powerhouses, that invisible barrier twisted violently, and spiderweb-like cracks appeared across its surface, yet it forcibly held on!
Moran ignored the earth-shaking commotion outside. Using the last of his strength, he roared out the final incantation:
“Lord of Calamity hidden at the end of time!”
“Absolute Twilight that governs corrosion and decay!”
“Great Black Dragon King who brings the end of all things!”
“With half my soul as the key and all spirits as fuel, I beseech your gaze—Noxarum!”
As the final syllable fell, Moran felt his soul being torn in half alive by a domineering force that could not be resisted!
The agony left him unable to make any sound. He could only open his mouth wide in silence.
At the same time, in every dark corner of the Royal Capital, the bodies of over a thousand believers of the Corruption Church stiffened at once. They shriveled in an instant, their souls and blood turning into invisible sacrificial fuel that crossed space and surged wildly into the barrier.
Crack!
The barrier finally reached its limit and shattered with a roar.
No longer obstructed, the destructive flood completely submerged Moran’s figure and tore him apart.
“Is it over?” Aureus held his greatsword horizontally before him, but the sense of crisis that made every hair on his body stand on end had not vanished. Instead, it climbed to its peak.
Beside him, Barnabas’s pupils abruptly shrank to the size of needle tips. He stared fixedly at the center of the deep pit where energy was raging and space was in chaos, then roared, “No! Retreat quickly! It is a mind illusion!”
As his voice fell, the scene before everyone’s eyes peeled away inch by inch like a mirror shattered by a heavy hammer!
And at the true center of the deep pit, the sacrifice had already been completed.
At the center of the pit, Moran quietly hovered in midair. That destructive flood had not harmed him in the slightest.
His appearance had already changed completely.
The left half of his body was like an ancient tree scorched by raging fire—shriveled and pitch-black. The surface of his skin was covered in a layer of fine, hard black scales.
His eyes were no longer human pupils. They had become golden vertical pupils burning with dark Dragon Breath. There was no longer the slightest trace of human emotion within them, only absolute coldness and the will to destroy.
A gray domain carrying an aura of extreme despair and finality rapidly expanded with him at the center.
“Dragon... This is the aura of a dragon!” For the first time, Barnabas’s ever-smiling face turned somewhat grave.
“ROAR—!”
The half-draconified monster raised its head and let out a long howl.
The heavy cloud layer above the Royal Capital was directly shattered by that dragon roar. Within a radius of several kilometers, civilians fainted at the same moment, blood seeping from their ears.
The violent Draconic Might pressed outward from the center of that deep pit in every direction like a materialized hurricane.
But at the viewing area at the edge of the battlefield, the atmosphere was entirely different.