Chapter 284: That Branch

Chapter 284: Chapter 284: That Branch

Neo turned his back to the colossal eye of the ancient predator. He looked at his children standing on the marble balcony. Silas was still bleeding heavily from his nose and eyes, his brilliant scholarly mind fragile against the absolute mass of the ancient entity.

Lyra held him up, her silver aura wrapping tightly around her brother. Orion gripped the hilt of his broadsword, but his muscular arms shook uncontrollably. Elara kept her eyes tightly shut, burying her face into her sister.

?Neo spoke softly, yet his voice completely overpowered the chaotic cosmic winds. "Lyra, take them inside. The Genesis Palace is permanently anchored to my soul. As long as I draw breath, that sanctuary will remain completely impenetrable. Go now."

?Lyra nodded without hesitation. She guided Silas toward the glowing archway, keeping Elara close. Orion hesitated, his warrior pride warring with the crushing reality of his current weakness.

?"I will grow stronger, Father," Orion promised, his voice tight with frustration.

?"I know you will," Neo replied with a gentle smile. "But today is a battle for the old guard. Secure the palace."

?Orion nodded and followed his sisters. The golden archway sealed shut behind them, locking the children safely within the pristine reality of Multiverse Prime.

?Neo turned back to face the apocalypse. His three wives flanked him perfectly. Zestia spun her crimson spear, creating a halo of fiery sparks that pushed back the freezing void.

Noir let her midnight wings expand, blending seamlessly into the ambient shadows while her cynical smirk returned. Moon hovered on her silver lotus, her serene presence acting as a spiritual anchor for the group.

?"We aim for the nearest branch. We need to understand its biology before we strike the core."

?The four supreme beings launched themselves from the marble balcony. They streaked across the infinite darkness of the Gigaverse, leaving brilliant trails of gold, crimson, black, and silver in their wake.

?The journey toward the branch defied all conventional logic. Because the Aeonic Gigaversal Tree consumed the very concept of distance, flying toward it felt like swimming against a raging waterfall.

Neo had to constantly rewrite the spatial coordinates around them, using the liquid metal in his veins to force reality to acknowledge their forward momentum.

?The branch they targeted was a jagged fracture in the cosmic fabric. From the balcony, it had looked like a simple dead limb. Up close, the sheer scale of the structure was profoundly terrifying. The branch was wider than a million galaxies placed edge to edge. Its surface was a chaotic landscape of jagged dimensional shards and frozen spatial anomalies.

?They touched down on the surface of the branch. The moment their boots made contact with the petrified bark, a crushing gravitational force assaulted them. The gravity here did not pull them downward. It pulled them inward, actively trying to drag their immortal bodies into the dead wood to fossilize them alongside the screaming faces of the ancient gods.

?Neo flared his golden aura, establishing a localized domain of absolute authority. The crushing gravity instantly receded from his wives, unable to pierce the shield of Universal Synthesis.

?"The environment itself is a weapon," Moon observed quietly. "This tree does not just kill. It imprisons the souls of its victims, forcing them to experience their own demise for eternity."

?"Then we will grant them mercy by burning this entire weed to the ground," Zestia snarled. She stomped her armored boot onto the face of a petrified deity, violently cracking the fossilized wood.

?They began to traverse the colossal branch. The landscape was incredibly treacherous. Massive canyons of splintered reality crisscrossed the surface. Pools of thick black entropy sap gathered in the deep craters. The sap bubbled sluggishly, emitting a foul odor that smelled like forgotten memories and rotting stars.

?Noir walked near the edge of a deep crater. She looked into the bubbling black sludge.

"This sap is pure anti genesis. My dark matter consumes light and life, but this sludge consumes the very concept of existence. It is the absolute opposite of your golden fire, Neo."

?"Do not touch it," Neo warned. He pointed his mercurial sword upward.

?High above them, the canopy of the tree shifted. A massive droplet of the black sap fell from a higher branch, hurtling directly toward Zestia.

?The war goddess did not try to block it. She knew brute force would not work against pure erasure. She gracefully leaped backward, clearing the impact zone by a wide margin.

The drop of sap struck the petrified bark where she had been standing seconds before. There was no explosion. The space simply ceased to be. A perfect spherical void appeared in the bark, leaving absolutely nothing behind.

?"A single drop unweaves the tapestry," Moon noted, "We must remain perfectly vigilant."

?They continued their march. Neo wanted to reach the edge of the branch where one of the dead Omniverses hung like a withered leaf. He needed to study the connection point. He needed to see exactly how the tree drained the life from a Grand Reality.

?They did not walk completely unchallenged. The Aeonic Gigaversal Tree possessed a brutal immune system, and it had finally pinpointed the foreign bodies marching across its surface.

?The petrified bark ahead of them began to bulge and crack. The screaming faces trapped in the wood stretched out, their mouths opening impossibly wide. From the throats of the fossilized gods, the defenders of the tree poured forth.

?They were Entropy Leeches. They did not have eyes or limbs. They were massive segmented worms formed entirely from compressed silence and sharp geometric angles. Their bodies shimmered with a sickly gray light, and their maws were filled with spinning rings of absolute void. Thousands of them erupted from the bark, slithering rapidly across the branch to devour the intruders.

?"Finally," Zestia roared in delight.

?The war goddess did not wait for the leeches to reach them. She charged forward, her crimson spear igniting with the heat of a dying sun. She thrust her weapon directly into the maw of the largest worm.

The intense heat of her martial intent clashed violently with the compressed silence of the beast. The worm shrieked, emitting a soundless vibration that shook the bones of the supreme creators, before exploding into a cloud of gray dust.

?Noir took to the air. Her six wings expanded, casting a massive shadow over the advancing swarm.

"You beasts are incredibly ugly. Allow me to hide you from my sight."

?She unleashed a torrential downpour of primordial abyss. The dark matter blanketed hundreds of the segmented worms. The leeches tried to consume the shadows, but Noir was not feeding them. She was suffocating them.

The dark matter filled their void maws, choking their internal engines of erasure. The worms thrashed wildly before collapsing into lifeless gray husks.

?The swarm was practically endless. More leeches poured from the screaming faces in the bark. They tried to flank the group, slithering through the deep canyons to attack from the sides.

?Moon remained perfectly still in the center of the chaos. She brought her hands together in supreme prayer. Her silver light expanded rapidly in a wide circle.

Whenever an Entropy Leech touched the edge of her silver domain, the holy light of the Dao violently purified their chaotic geometry. The worms dissolved into sweet smelling rain the moment they tried to breach her sanctuary.

?Neo walked calmly through the battlefield. He let his wives handle the bulk of the swarm while he focused on the larger anomalies. A massive leech, thick as a mountain range, erupted from the bark directly beneath his feet. It opened its void maw, attempting to swallow the Supreme Creator whole.

?Neo did not flinch. He aimed the tip of the Sunbreaker Blade downward. He channeled the absolute power of Universal Synthesis into the fluid steel.

?"Change your shape," Neo commanded.

?He drove the sword directly into the head of the colossal worm. The golden light of genesis flooded the creature. The pure creation magic forcibly overwrote the destructive code of the beast.

The segmented body of compressed silence instantly transmuted into a towering pillar of solid radiant gold. The massive worm froze in place, completely immobilized by the sudden influx of permanent order.

?The remaining swarm sensed the absolute authority of the golden light. The primitive instincts of the immune system recognized that they could not consume this invader.

The surviving leeches rapidly retreated, burrowing back into the throats of the petrified gods and vanishing from sight.

?The battlefield fell quiet again. Zestia shook the gray dust from her crimson spear, looking thoroughly invigorated. Noir descended gracefully from the sky, her wings retracting slightly. Moon let her silver domain fade, preserving her energy for the trials ahead.

?Neo led them forward until they reached the precipice of the colossal branch.

?Hanging before them was a dead Omniverse. It was a leaf of the ancient tree. Once, it had been a vibrant sphere containing infinite timelines and boundless magical wonders.

Now, it was a withered gray husk. The surface of the sphere was heavily wrinkled and dry, completely devoid of celestial light.

?A thick vascular vine extended from the branch, piercing directly into the core of the dead realm. The vine pulsed with a slow, sickening rhythm, squeezing the absolute last drops of residual energy from the corpse of the Omniverse.

?Neo reached out and placed his bare hand against the withered surface of the dead sphere. He closed his eyes and extended his divine senses.

?He felt a profound, absolute emptiness. Trillions of lives, billions of pantheons, all completely erased. The tree did not just kill them. It digested their concepts, their dreams, and their histories, leaving behind a completely blank slate of nothingness.

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