Reborn as a Demonic Tree

Chapter 482: Abomination

Astralis had seen what Veylorak—the Dread Maw of the Molten Depths—was capable of. He was one of the oldest Primal Overlords and had legends dating from before Astralis was even born. For most Primal Overlords, as their cultivation level developed, they could suppress their instincts and think more thoughtfully about their decisions. They even warped their souls to take on human forms, but Veylorak had done none of that. Instead, Veylorak had focused on becoming a living cataclysm.

According to legend, nothing that had entered that abyssal mouth of his had survived. Hence, Astralis had fled to the skies to watch the show from above—not that he expected there to be much of one. Flapping his wings, he gained a little more height from the Qi-empowered magma surrounding Veylorak, as it was turning the surrounding air into superheated steam. This was what made fighting Veylorak impossible. When hunting, the colossal monster approached underground, which acted as a natural barrier on top of his nearly indestructible body. When he inevitably surfaced to go for the kill, he was protected from all sides by magma and steam. His only weak spot was his mouth, but it was filled with fire that nullified anything.

To put it bluntly, they were all dead.

”A shame, really,” Astralis mused. ”I still havenʼt beaten that girl at chess. That was the first time in a thousand years I had felt challenged by such a youngling,” he shook his head. ”What a waste.”

It was rare to find anything challenging at his level. Despite his immense patience and attempts to excel in all things, there was only so much cultivating and studying he could do before he had done it all. Life was incredibly dull at the top. If not for the need to move between spiritual springs, entire centuries could pass without him speaking to another being—just alone, on a mountain peak, cultivating under the stars.

As Veylorakʼs mouth closed, sealing the fate of those on Moros, Astralis had a sudden sinking feeling. While he didnʼt care for her, would Nymeriaʼs mother be enraged if she learned of her daughterʼs death?

He shuddered.

Zephyrine only barely managed to save me from her that night. What if she has grown stronger since then?

The image of Nymeriaʼs mother flashed through his mind. When recounting that night to the other Primal Overlords, heʼd claimed she had been a goddess, but she was more like a demon—an unstoppable force, much like Veylorak. However, unlike Veylorak, whose only goal was to consume, her goal was to reproduce. She wanted to birth the strongest child, and thatʼs why she had hunted Astralis down.

Naturally, when told he was a worthy candidate, he humored her advances. He just hadnʼt expected it to go quite that far. Since then, he had never had such a humbling experience.

”Maybe I should flee...” Astralis muttered as he saw the immense form of Veylorak begin to retreat into the depths of the earth once more. ”No, if she wanted to find me, Iʼd have no hope of running. Even if I went to hell itself—”

Astralisʼs thoughts were interrupted as his cosmic array pinged an immense spiritual presence shooting toward him. His head snapped in the direction—to the south. The presence didnʼt stop at the edge of the beast tide. It kept coming at a speed he couldnʼt fathom, passing through Zephyrineʼs storm and the beasts like they werenʼt even there.

”A Monarch Realm?” Astralis said in disbelief, his eyes widening in surprise. His twin Star Cores hummed to life, cosmic Qi crackling across his scales. He began charging up a long-range teleportation technique, ready to flee the moment the Monarch arrived.

Yet there were no signs of a monster.

The presence was traveling through the earth like a phantom. Narrowing his eyes to scan the horizon, he saw the backend of Zephyrineʼs storm. As the storm had advanced with the beast tide, it had left the Primal Overlordʼs area, so he got a clear view. Yet there were no physical signs left on the land of the Monarch Realmʼs advance, like with Veylorak. It was more similar to an unstoppable beam of light as the presence passed under him in a flash and slammed into Veylorak.

”What the?!” Astralis hissed under his breath as he quickly moved further away. Monarch Realms werenʼt to be messed with, especially one as strange as this.

There was a moment of silence, broken by Veylorak letting out an understandably confused groan as the Monarch Realm presence was inside him. He seemed to be struggling to contain something for a moment. Shocking Astralis, Veylorak slightly opened his mouth, and a pillar of golden flames intertwined with desolation exploded out like a dragonʼs breath.

Astralis attuned his Qi sense and narrowed his eyes. Veylorakʼs body was interfering, but by focusing on the desolation Qi mixed in with the divine energy, he measured its potency to be in the mid-stages of the Nascent Soul Realm. Maybe this new presence wasnʼt a true Monarch Realm but only carried the weight of one?

The desolation Qi burned at the edges of Veylorakʼs mouth as the colossal monster once again closed his maw. However, this time, Astralis wasnʼt so sure who was being trapped by whom. Veylorak could devour beings of a cultivation level above his own, but in the legends, divine energy was never involved.

He had eaten a godly being, and by the intensity of that divine energy, this was no ordinary demigod. It was an entity worshiped by possibly millions.

”Veylorak might have finally bitten off more than he could chew,” Astralisʼs lips curled up into a cruel smile. He didnʼt like a single one of the Primal Overlords. They all lacked proper decorum, and of them, Veylorak had always been the worst. He was a beast that laid havoc wherever he went. It had been an utter pain and many decades of wasted Qi to keep him out of his territory, as he couldnʼt be reasoned with.

Even now, instead of spitting out his food and retreating, Veylorak doubled down and continued trying to retreat into the earth... but he suddenly paused. It was unnatural. The magma around him continued falling to the ground in a wave. Yet he was frozen in place as if an invisible force was preventing him from moving.

Astralis knew that the invisible force was actually the spiritual pressure emanating from the god within Veylorakʼs stomach. Even from up here, he could feel traces of it trying to pull him down.

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”Such an immense spiritual pressure,” Astralis muttered, a hint of awe in his voice. It reminded him a little of Zephyrine, and he couldnʼt imagine how suffocating that pressure would be to endure if it were originating from within his own stomach. He could see Veylorakʼs body trembling as the monster tried to resist and crush whatever it had eaten... but it wasnʼt working.

Suddenly, Astralis noticed a void tendril puncture through Veylorakʼs side and begin to wiggle like a giant leech. Dozens more followed, and soon Veylorak was being devoured from the inside out by void tendrils and black roots ending in spikes that seemed to secrete a digestive fluid that melted through Veylorakʼs carapace, which had once seemed unbreakable.

Astralis couldnʼt believe anything he was seeing. The Dread Maw of the Molten Depths was being eaten from the inside out while unable to so much as move. Never before had Astralis witnessed such a brutal death occur to a Primal Overlord.

He felt a tinge of fear. Could he stand up against that? He wasnʼt sure. Keeping his distance, he watched silently as Veylorakʼs form was slowly engulfed by void tendrils and thorned vines, forming a grotesque cocoon that seemed to pulse like a beating heart. Veylorakʼs groans of pain faded over the following hours. By midday, with the sun glaring overhead, what was left of Veylorakʼs massive jaw finally gave way—melted to nothing—revealing the parasite nestled within: Moros, and more specifically, the void spirit tree that seemed to be housing a mere fragment of a godly beingʼs soul.

To think all of that power came from a fragment. Maybe the girl was really telling the truth, and sheʼs Zephyrineʼs sister, Astralis mused.

At last, Veylorakʼs mountainous form collapsed, crashing into the cracked, magma-baked earth below, splitting the ground with a thunderous impact that sent fissures out for miles.

Now that Veylorak was dead, Astralis was curious why they had gone to such efforts to kill the Primal Overlord. Stellaʼs father had claimed they needed the corpse to fight IgʼZal.

Are they going to perform some type of necromancy? However, I didnʼt detect any death Qi from the godly entity, only desolation, which is a destructive affinity with the sole purpose of unmaking reality. For someone who has comprehended desolation to a godly level, attempting necromancy is akin to kindling a flame in the heart of a storm—it would be consumed before it could begin. Besides, even Death Qi, potent as it is in manipulating the boundary between life and death, has inherent limitations—it cannot restore what has been utterly annihilated.

In his opinion, Veylorak was gone. His vessel had been annihilated, and he had used up most of his Qi reserves in an attempt to devour Moros. Any attempts to revive him now would be impossible.

A sudden ghostly wind of primal fear passed over his soul, freezing him in place. What was that? he wondered, glancing over his shoulder as if expecting a phantom to be there. Finding nothing, he reached out with his Qi-attuned senses. Something was stirring—its epicenter unmistakably the lifeless husk of Veylorak sprawled across the scorched earth. A moment later, a wave of death Qi surged outward from the corpse, blanketing the land in a suffocating stillness, instantly killing anything Veylorak hadnʼt already burned to death in his wake. His instincts had been spot on as the feeling of imminent death now gripped his body.

The stillness was broken by the sound of cracking bones and splintering chitin. Veylorakʼs once-impervious carapace began to transmute into black, gnarled wood. Though he could only see a hundred meters of the behemothʼs remains lying on the ground, his spiritual senses burrowed into the earth, confirming that the transformation extended throughout the entire two-thousand-meter corpse.

What happened next was a grotesque rebirth. The wooden shell convulsed and splintered, contorting into a writhing mass of interlaced black roots. The fallen Primal Overlord was no longer a corpse—but had been turned into something far stranger.

”Thereʼs no way...” Astralis said in disbelief. He had never seen such a fast and violent transformation of a being before—even with necromancy involved. This was on another level. ”Is this the power of a true god?” he wondered.

While in his astounded daze, he felt something trying to enter his mind. He tried to resist, but it punched through his consciousness as if his mental defenses had been previously weakened.

There was only one being he knew of capable of that.

”IgʼZal?” Astralis snarled in his mind as a powerful presence made itself known. It condensed and took on the form of a demonic tree. Its trunk split and a single eye stared at him.

”My name is not IgʼZal,” the tree said in perfect draconic. ”Itʼs Ashlock. A fragment of my soul is currently inhabiting the void spirit tree, as I saw you notice. I decided to take this opportunity to introduce myself to you.”

Every word the tree uttered was filled with a deep sense of wisdom and all-knowingness. Astralis glanced at the spirit tree on Moros and could feel a mental tether.

”Ashlock... you must be Stellaʼs father,” he said, connecting the dots. The shadow lich, which had claimed to be a mouthpiece for Stellaʼs father, had a similar weight to his voice and had claimed that he could wipe out a Primal Overlord from afar. What Astralis hadnʼt expected was that ʼafarʼ meant the cultivator remained at a great distance and only had to find a fragment of themselves present.

”Thatʼs correct.”

”Why have you invaded my mind, Ashlock?” Astralis asked while trying to purge the tree from his mind, yet it was firmly rooted in place. Pushing on the mental tether did nothing either.

”To make sure you uphold your side of the deal. Where is IgʼZal?” Ashlock asked, his tone leaving no room for rebuttal.

Astralis didnʼt actually have the answer to that question, as he had never expected it to go this far. Perhaps Zephyrine would know? But he didnʼt want to lose his control over these powerful puppets he had acquired. If he folded and sent them straight to Zephyrine, thereʼs no telling if IgʼZal would manage to survive, and he wanted that moth dead.

”I can find out, but first, I need you to leave my mind.”

”Very well,” Ashlock agreed. ”But donʼt think you can run.” Waves of spatial Qi surged out from Moros, Spatial Locking him in place. ”I will leave your mind for now. Just know that nobody has crossed the All-Seeing Eye and escaped.” The towering demonic tree in his mind that had been glaring him down withered away, leaving him alone in silence.

Yet he—the great Celestial Star Dragon—was shaken. Heʼd never experienced fearing for his life in his own mind before. Well, except for that night with Nymeriaʼs mother... He shook his head to dismiss those thoughts. Anyone powerful enough to kill IgʼZal wasnʼt someone he could cheat anyway. Having seen what they did to Veylorak, he had no plans of running.

These were people worth befriending.

Surging Qi into his cosmic array, he once again called out to Zephyrine.

A tense while passed before the wind answered, ”Is something the matter, Astralis?”

”Where is IgʼZal?” Astralis demanded.

A tense moment passed before Zephyrine finally answered, ”Who is IgʼZal?”

Astralis felt his stomach drop. Zephyrine had perfect memory, nor did she ever joke. There was only one reason Zephyrine would forget who IgʼZal was—if he had gotten to her and used his domain.

”One of the Primal Overlords, you know, the one who recently ascended to Monarch Realm and has been gathering the other Primal Overlords to face you?” Astralis said, panic in his voice.

”Mhm,” Zephyrine hummed through the wind. ”Nothing comes to mind regarding the name IgʼZal, but my area is surrounded quite closely by the other Primal Overlords, which I found strange.”

”IgʼZal is known as the Mind Eater—since you are still speaking to me, it seems he only managed to erase the memory you have of him and maybe plant a few memories or emotions. I suffered from the same thing.”

”What does IgʼZal look like?” Zephyrine asked, her tone sounding as ethereal and calm as ever.

”A giant lunar moth.”

”Ah,” Zephyrine said. ”I think I found him.”

”Where is he?”

”Right in front of me, staring into my eyes.”