Chapter 131: Convergent 1
Francis pushed through it.
His cells compensated by drawing on Glakor's inherited ability, slowing the particles nearest the surface of his skin, creating a thin buffer between himself and the environment. It worked, but the effort wasn't trivial. Each step deeper into the source of the heat cost him energy to maintain.
The deeper interior was different from the others.
Fluid moved in every direction simultaneously, superheated to the point where it had stopped behaving like liquid and started behaving like something in between states. The chambers he moved through were not hollow.
They were filled — with pressure, with heat, with a restless kinetic energy that had nowhere left to go and had been circling that problem for days.
Thankfully, Enfero was much more reasonable than Francis had expected. It didn't say anything unnecessary and simply allowed itself to be devoured. When the process was complete, a new mission appeared in his vision.
[Converge all the powers of the Kings.]
A flood of information poured into his mind. Thankfully, he was already used to processing vast amounts of data thanks to his own evolution, so he felt no discomfort.
'So that's the final step, huh?'
He nodded in satisfaction and turned his focus inward—or more precisely, toward his soul. Before, he hadn't even known it was possible to access it directly, but the System had already provided the framework needed to do so.
When his vision came back, he found himself in a mental space. He was no longer in his physical body but in a metaphysical form.
Beneath him stretched a surface of crystal-clear water. When he looked down, he saw his reflection staring back at him.
'It was his original body from before he transmigrated.'
He felt nothing at all, mainly because he had never been attached to his human body in the first place.
Then, out of nowhere, the water that had been clear and calm just a moment ago began to change.
At first, only a few faces appeared on its surface. Then hundreds. Then thousands. Ten thousands. The number kept growing until it stopped feeling like a count and became something else entirely—like a presence pressing upward from below.
The crystal clarity of the water broke apart. It no longer reflected him cleanly. Instead, it turned into a shifting mirror of lives he had taken, layered one over another, until the surface was no longer water but a thin barrier holding them all.
"WHY? WHY DID YOU KILL US?"
"YOU MURDERER!"
"YOU KILLED US!"
The voices came at the same time, not taking turns. They collided and overlapped until they became a single, suffocating noise that filled the entire mental space.
The faces rose higher.
He saw people of different ages, some frozen in their final expressions, others distorted as if still struggling to understand what happened. Their eyes were fixed on him, not as individuals, but as a collective memory that refused to fade.
The water beneath his feet darkened, turning a deep red, the color of the blood he had shed to reach this state.
Hands pushed through. They reached for his legs.
"YOU TOOK EVERYTHING!"
"DON'T LEAVE!"
"STAY WITH US!"
Francis looked unbothered and continued walking.
When hands broke through the surface, he kicked them back down without hesitation. Some recoiled, others tried again, but he kept moving at the same pace. He understood what this was meant to do now.
It wasn't an attack in the usual sense. It was an attempt to break his judgment, to force hesitation, to introduce doubt where there had never been any.
It failed.
He had already long passed the point where guilt could take root. At least, that was what he believed.
A figure rose in front of him, blocking his path.
A girl.
No older than eleven.
Her feet barely touched the surface before more began to emerge behind her, as if drawn up by her presence. Smaller hands. Smaller faces. Confused eyes that looked at him not with rage, but with the simple weight of not understanding what had happened.
"Why did you kill us?" she asked. Her voice was steady. "We were just playing."
The words landed differently.
Francis did not respond immediately.
He looked past her, then around. More were still rising. Most of them not directly killed by his hand. Collateral damage. Aftermath. Things that happened when power moved through a place without regard for what stood in its way.
He knew that.
Yet seeing them here made something tighten in his chest—not guilt exactly, but something closer to friction, like a part of him resisting another part.
He stopped walking for the first time.
The girl did not move aside. Neither did the others behind her. They simply stood, watching, waiting for an answer that did not need to be complicated to exist.
"Why did you kill us?"
They all spoke in unison.
"For the sake of my selfish desire." said Francis.
"And what is that you desire that we lost our lives because of it?"
Francis looked at them.
He did not answer immediately.
The question was not new. It was something that had already been accounted for, something already weighed and accepted long before this moment.
His gaze lowered slightly, not in submission, but in thought.
"To revive my daughters and give them a second chance in life."
They stared at him in anger, as if the answer only deepened what they already felt. he surface beneath them trembled faintly.
"You murderer!"
"You monster!"
"You devil!"
More began speaking at once, their voices rising over each other, no longer coordinated into a single question but breaking into scattered accusations.
"That's not fair!"
"We lost our future because of you!"
"We didn't do anything!"
"We didn't deserved to die."
"It's not our fault. It's not our fault. Why did you kill us?"
Francis stood where he was. He did not move. He did not interrupt.
He let them vent their frustration and anger at him. It was the least he could do.
"You're selfish!" one of them shouted. "You only care about yourself!"
Another stepped forward, his small hands clenched.
"You killed us like it didn't matter! Like we were nothing!"
"I know, and I don't plan to run away from my sin. I'll carry this burden for as long as I live. But for now, my daughters are more important than anything else. So get out of my way."
His tone turned colder.
Even without any ability, his stare alone pressed against them.
"You think saying that makes it okay?" one of them snapped.
"You're still walking over us even after committing a sin!" another added.
But the momentum had changed.
Francis did not raise his voice. He did not argue. He simply began waking forward.
"I'm not asking for forgiveness. And I'm not asking for understanding. I'm just asking you all not to block my way."
CRACK!
The disturbance spread outward and the young ones were the first to fade. Their figures blurred at the edges, then dissolved without resistance.
Then the millions of corpses beneath.
For a couple of seconds, there was nothing beneath him again. Only clear water.
Then the surface split.
A long shape rose from below.
A giant serpent the size of multiple mountains stacked together.
Its body was extremely long and strangely structure. Its scales gave off a faint glow, but not like normal light. It looked like the light was coming from somewhere deeper, something inside the creature rather than around it.
It had six eyes.
They opened one after another along its head. Each eye pointed at him from a slightly different direction. None of them blinked.
He did not step back and held his ground.
The serpent rose higher, slowly showing more of its body. It did not speak or make any sound. It did not need to. Just being there was enough to make everything else feel smaller and quieter.
Its multiple eyes stayed locked on him, their golden pupils seemingly able to see through him.
CRACK!
The surface tore apart in both directions simultaneously, as if something had reached through the fabric of the space itself and pulled. The clear water folded back like paper, revealing pure darkness beneath.
And from that darkness, a large creature emerged.
The shape resolved itself piece by piece. First the outline — a body too vast to comprehend all at once. Then the detail, slowly, like a painting being filled in.
It looked like a whale.
But calling it that felt like calling an ocean a puddle.
Its body was long and smooth, built on a scale that made the mental space feel like a jar.
It moved through the space the way things move through dreams — not bound by the rules that governed everything else around it. Each slow motion of its massive body sent ripples not across the water's surface, but through the space itself.
"I am Eerak," the serpent spoke, its voice resonating softly.
"And I am Lugar," the whale-like creature added.