Chapter 207: A Shattered World
The splaad were an extraplanar species so dangerous that even Ambrose found them alarming.
Because of certain deranged wizards, unhinged alchemists, and the occasional troublemaking god who simply couldn't resist stirring chaos, the fabric of space had long been unstable.
Many adventurers had experienced it firsthand: while exploring some random ruin or hidden realm, they would suddenly stumble upon a portal leading to another world.
Ambrose himself had once wondered if that was how he had ended up transported into this world in the first place.
The splaad were not from this plane. Rather, they came from a realm known as the Sea of Chaos.
Legend said that a god once attempted to use a divine artifact to calm the turbulence of the Sea of Chaos and prevent its disorder from spreading to other worlds. But the plan failed. The artifact was corrupted by chaos and transformed into a gigantic egg.
From that egg was born the first splaad.
These monsters, which had emerged from an artifact meant to halt the spread of chaos, instead became vectors by which chaos spread across the universe.
They looked like enormous toads, but possessed a horrifying parasitic ability. A single scratch from their claws was enough to implant a splaad egg inside the victim's body. Once the egg hatched into a splaad tadpole, the unfortunate host would be devoured from within, the body hollowed out as the new splaad emerged.