Chapter 1057: Before Creation Cometh Destruction

In the cycle of existence, destruction overcomes creation, and creation in turn overcomes destruction.

Keeping Harlamagne’s words in mind, Arthur took another deep breath before quietly chanting,

|Before Creation cometh Destruction.|

Cosmic energy erupted from his heart, flowing through his energy circuits into his arm before bursting from his palm, causing cracks to spread across the stone encasing the goddess before him.

The instant those cracks appeared, cosmic energy began leaking out, and Alexia snapped her fingers, creating a barrier around the entire planet to conceal the energy signature.

Noticing this, Arthur increased the output of his destructive energy, forcing back the Cosmic Creation energy and shattering a portion of the stone encasing Gaia’s body, exposing the fair skin of her arm beneath it.

Arthur’s hand came into direct contact with the avatar’s arm, and immediately, the flesh around his fingers was completely burned away, leaving only bone that soon began to crack.

But Arthur didn’t stop.

He poured even more destructive cosmic energy through his arm as he pressed against her flesh and tore it open, causing golden blood to pour out.

That golden blood flowed over his right hand, where part of the Ancestral Regression magic circle had already been drawn and connected to his palm.

As Arthur pulled his hand away from Gaia and his flesh regenerated, he infused cosmic energy into the magic circle at his feet.

It immediately lit up with a glow, connecting to the path drawn across his body.

Immediately afterwards, the two catalysts, Gaia’s blood dripping from his right hand and Lucifer’s blood staining the Energy Core in his left hand, lit up as cosmic energy began to surround them.

The two sources of blood began flowing into Arthur’s body, seeping through his skin.

This was the part of the Ancestral Regression Spell where the blood was meant to stimulate his own blood, awakening any similar physical or spiritual characteristics sleeping within it.

However, it shouldn’t be forgotten that one of those sources of blood belonged to a being who wielded the power of Creation, while Arthur lived and breathed Destruction.

Naturally, there was backlash.

Another issue was that the blood of the one who wielded the power of Destruction belonged to a Grand Supreme Realm Existence, someone who was many Existence Realms and many orders of magnitude more powerful than Arthur, causing a slight overload problem.

However, Arthur gritted his teeth and roused all of his cosmic energy, divinity, and anti-divinity to counter those issues.

He used his anti-divinity to counter the divinity within Gaia’s blood, and his Destruction to suppress the Creation within it. He also used the power of Null, his ability of Nothingness, to suppress the unstable power of Nothingness contained within Lucifer’s blood that wanted.

But despite this, Arthur was still frowning. Not because of pain, but because of a different issue.

"It’s imbalanced."

The moment he said that aloud, Hades asked, "What is?"

Arthur opened his eyes, looked at his left hand, and replied, "This. Lucifer’s blood is from a Grand Supreme."

He then raised his right hand.

"But Gaia’s blood, while it’s that of the Eternal of Creation’s Avatar, that Avatar is, at most, at the Primogenial Realm. The concentration of cosmic energy within their blood is imbalanced, and that’s going to pose an issue."

Hades was about to respond, but Alexia cut in before he could.

"No, that shouldn’t pose an issue. It should still work perfectly fine," she said.

"The only thing that really matters is whether the blood belongs to your ancestors. The fact that the spell hasn’t failed by this point means it does belong to your ancestors. The Existence Realms of those ancestors don’t really matter at this stage."

Alexia’s words were correct, and Arthur’s Ego Weapons both agreed with her.

However, Celestia’s expression quickly became uncomfortable as a bad premonition filled her mind.

[Master...don’t.]

The moment she spoke and the others turned toward her in confusion, Arthur looked up at Gaia and smiled.

"Ah, Celestia. You really do know me so well."

Faster than she or anyone else could react, Arthur leapt into the air, shooting straight toward the top of the stone encasing Gaia.

Before anyone could stop him, his right hand, coated in destructive energy, slammed down onto Gaia’s forehead.

"Arthur, what are you doing?!" Hades shouted as he leapt after him, intending to pull him away.

However, the burst of cosmic energy released the instant Arthur’s hand came into contact with Gaia’s forehead blasted Hades backwards and even forced Alexia back several steps.

The woman looked on in surprise as the barrier of cosmic energy she’d created around the planet cracked from that burst of power.

Then her expression immediately darkened as she realised what Arthur intended to do.

"You goddamn lunatic!" she cursed.

Arthur, however, laughed lightly as he used his destructive energy to crack the stone covering Gaia’s forehead.

As his palm came into direct contact with her forehead, he declared, |Before Creation cometh Destruction!|

Those words, spoken with his True Voice, imbued the cosmic destructive energy erupting from the Aspect of Destruction within his soul with the command to suppress Creation.

But rather than being used to wound Gaia and draw out more blood, he simply used it to protect himself from the Creation energy radiating from her.

Taking a deep breath, Arthur proceeded to perform an action that bordered on suicide.

|Core Absorption.|

The moment he uttered those words, another surge of cosmic energy coursed through Arthur’s arm and into Gaia’s physical body, travelling along her energy circuits toward her Divine Spark before connecting directly to it.

This was the part where his ability was supposed to connect to the target’s soul, but the Gaia before him was only an Avatar of a higher being.

Throughout the avatar’s existence, it had been remotely controlled by Gaia herself from a completely different region of the Cosmos, so it had never had the opportunity to develop an independent soul or personality.

When Gaia finally left the avatar, it was sealed only hours later and had remained that way for hundreds of thousands of years.

As such, there was no soul within this avatar for Arthur’s Core Absorption to affect.

Having already anticipated this, Arthur redirected the focus of the ability toward the avatar’s Divine Spark instead, intending to extract the power of Creation contained within it and continue with his plan of vaccinating himself against Creation by using Gaia’s own power.

The moment Arthur’s cosmic energy entered the Divine Spark, his eyes widened as realisation dawned upon him.

"Yep. I figured this was going to be the case. This avatar’s Divine Spark is quite literally a container for dozens of Aspects of Creation."

Just as Arthur possessed the Facet of the Concept of Destruction known as Selective Destruction and the Facet of the Concept of Time he called Slowed World, Gaia’s avatar possessed multiple Facets of the Concept of Creation within its Divine Spark.

The instant Arthur’s cosmic energy, imbued with the power of the Concept of Destruction through the Aspect he possessed, came into contact with the Aspects within Gaia’s Divine Spark, his expression changed slightly.

Glancing toward Alexia and Hades, he spoke with a somewhat strained expression.

"Guys, brace for impact."

The moment those words reached their ears, the intensity of the Cosmic Creation energy radiating from Gaia’s body increased.

Cracks spread across the stone encasing the sealed goddess, and fragments of stone began falling away, completely revealing the flesh and blood body beneath.

The cosmic energy around Arthur swirled into a vortex before rapidly expanding in a tremendous burst, shattering the barrier Alexia had created around the planet.

However, that cosmic energy signature didn’t spread throughout the universe as she’d feared, nor were the Olympians instantly alerted to Gaia’s awakening like Hades had feared.

Instead, the reality around them completely changed.

The dreary, moss-covered cave looked exactly the same, but Alexia, Hades, Arthur, Lostvayne, and Celestia could all sense that they’d been moved into a completely different space-time.

[Cosmic Conceptual Authority of Creation,] Lostvayne said with a sigh.

[The entire space around us has been completely reconstructed. A new pocket universe has been created to contain the Cosmic Creation energy radiating from that thing.]

Looking up at the avatar before them, Lostvayne added, [To contain the presence that’s about to descend into it.]

Above the avatar, a gigantic spell circle appeared, the rings surrounding it increasing from 1 to 10 in a single second, then to 15, then to 20, before all of them compressed into one enormous incomprehensible rune.

A beam of light then burst from it and shot upward into space before vanishing.

For a moment, there was silence.

Then, in the next moment, a brilliant star-shaped flash bloomed across space as the fabric of reality tore open.

Light descended through the opening, piercing into the gigantic rune hovering above the avatar’s head, which immediately shrank before disappearing completely as the storm of cosmic energy around them vanished.

At that same moment, Arthur glanced toward the avatar’s chest and dashed forward, cosmic energy still swirling around his right hand.

While he moved, the avatar, its eyes still closed, began speaking in a mechanical voice that echoed throughout the cave.

[Spiritual Body Manifestation.]

Behind the avatar’s head, a multi-coloured white cosmic crest appeared.

[Establishing Projection Link.]

The cosmic crest rapidly expanded, and in that same moment, Arthur reached the avatar’s chest and slammed his palm against it, reactivating both Core Absorption and his Progenitor Authority’s Divine Spark Extraction.

His hand tore directly into Gaia’s body, golden blood pouring over him as his arm reached further inside.

Then the avatar spoke again in that same mechanical voice.

[Power Setting: Minimal.]

Immediately, Arthur clenched the hand buried within Gaia’s body and ripped it back out, bringing with it a glowing shard of light radiating Cosmic Creation energy.

He immediately leapt away from the avatar, landing heavily on the ground, his feet carving long grooves through the earth before he came to a stop.

Breathing heavily, he looked down at the glowing shard in his hand, a fragment of the Protogenoi’s Divine Spark containing a physical manifestation of an Aspect of Creation.

"Haha! I got it!" Arthur exclaimed.

Then he looked up, and his body froze.

Goosebumps spread across his skin as he saw the avatar, its eyes now open, staring directly at him.

Silence filled the space, not because no one wanted to speak, but because they weren’t permitted to speak.

No one moved, not because they wanted to stay still, but because movement itself wasn’t currently permitted within this space.

The giant avatar silently watched Arthur for several seconds before lowering her eyes to the wound in her chest that was still bleeding where Arthur had thrust his hand inside.

Finally, she blinked, and when her eyes opened again, her pupils glowed like starlight.

She then slowly lifted her head from the mountain where it’d been resting before raising her enormous upper body.