Dimensional Descent

Leonel walked out of the world, his bearing calm… or so it seemed.

With every step he took, the temperature seemed to plummet. It wasn’t that he was exuding a frostiness, but rather that heat, or what allowed heat to exist, was being stripped from reality around him. Vibrating molecules fell into a dormant state, the sun’s rays couldn’t seem to shine properly, and the laws of the world collapsed.

Leonel walked out of the bubble as though it was a gateway. Standing out in the Inbetween World, he let his rage bubble over. But this time, it was far more constrained than it was in the past.

Despite what he had told Aina, this time the trouble was truly large, bigger than he knew if he could handle. It wasn’t that he feared for his life. He was always confident in protecting it. But in the interim, before he truly became powerful enough to snub the faces of the Gods with impunity, what would he do?

Was it even possible for him to stop the Human Race from being eradicated down to their last man?

The only reason the Human Bubble hadn’t already been attacked was likely because of the hole he had poked through the plans of the Variant Invalids. No matter how much they hated the Humans, they wouldn’t hate them as much as those scourges.

But that thin paper defense would only last for so long, and even if he took the initiative to unleash unholy hell, there was only so far that he would be able to make it before the God Realms started ignoring the consequences and sending down the real powerhouses.

Right now, Leonel wasn’t even confident in wiping out the Demi-Gods, let alone full armies of Gods.

The waters of these powers ran far too deep, and even now he felt that he had only seen the tip of the iceberg.

That was why his plan was never to destroy them but to take advantage of their weaknesses instead to make them work for him against their will. But…

What were the weaknesses of the Gods? He simply didn’t know.

He was going in blind, and there was too much he didn’t know or understand. Even his reference for what the Gods were happened to just be stories listed and broken down into tidbits of folktale and lore. It was hard to tell how much of it still applied to this day.

Right now, he was confident that his mind was strong enough to assimilate all the information of the Life Tablet to see if there was more… He simply didn’t have the time.

“Since you’re already here, why are you wasting my time?”

Leonel’s gaze suddenly sharpened as he looked in a certain direction.

There, hidden in the void, or so they thought, there was a Sylvan. It was none other than Bracken, who had gone out to seek information and yet had yet to return.

Bracken was taken aback by the fact he had been discovered. In reality, he had been hiding here for a long while already, so there was already enough time for his roots to take root and for his Domain to spread.

It had to be remembered that even fellow Gods hadn’t been able to sense Willowyn back then, but Leonel had only been here for a few seconds and found him instantly. In fact, by his posture, he seemed to have known that he was there even before stepping out of the Bubble World.

Also, wasn’t Leonel supposed to be heavily injured? Why was it that he seemed to be just fine now?

Realizing that hiding was going to be a worthless endeavor, Bracken made a move, but that was when Leonel suddenly raised a hand.

“No. Since you’re already there, stay there.”

Leonel raised a hand and formed a claw. A mighty momentum surged, and Anarchic Force rushed into Bracken’s roots, catching him off guard.

Originally, Leonel had planned to fight it out with Bracken the normal way. But then he learned through the Life Tablet that Sylvans had very magical abilities, but also happened to be the most vulnerable when they laid their roots. Usually, they would only do so when they had absolute confidence in not being detected.

Maybe if Bracken was in a real world, Leonel wouldn’t have been able to sense him… but in this expanse of Anarchic Force, he stuck out like a sore thumb in Leonel’s mind.

Leonel’s sensitivity to the dichotomy of Creation versus Destruction was all too potent at the moment. And though he had already concluded that Anarchic Force was just another form of creation, just now he had been using his Destruction Sovereignty to influence it to see if he might be able to gain some sort of advantage by battling in Inbetween Worlds.

On that front, he had been half correct and also ended up finding the Sylvan who was a very clear branch of Creation trying to hide in a sea of Destruction.

He couldn’t have made himself more obvious to Leonel even if he tried.

“Stop! What are you doing?!”

The Sylvan barked and his voice seemed to carry the vicissitudes of life.

“I hear that the Sylvans like to buy and sell information about people.”

Leonel said something seemingly completely unrelated to the question being asked of him.

“You’re only in the Sixth Dimension… but to get here so quickly, I bet that you were already here before information about my awakening spread, right? That probably means you came for the Variant Invalid Incomplete World, and it probably also means that your standing in the Sylvan Race probably isn’t too low, huh?”

Leonel continued to talk nonchalantly, almost as though he was thinking to himself rather than speaking to a God.

However, the more he spoke like this, the chillier Bracken seemed to feel. His heart leapt into his throat and his branches and roots trembled.

“You tell me… would your Race buy information about your life and death?”