Chapter 271: The Sovereign Goddess

Priam read his new Karmic Title and let out a muffled, cold laugh. That had genuinely been a devilish move. When he stripped his consciousness of any restraint and unleashed his abilities to their fullest, the results bordered on pure malevolence.

[Special Mission Completed!]

[+10,000 GP]

The System’s glowing notification confirmed the inevitable: the massacre had been absolute. He had actually managed to complete the Goddess’s challenge.

Supported against his back, Dandara was awake. She gazed down at the devastated scene below with a strange and unfathomable mixture of fascination and serenity on her face.

*BUZZ!*

Without warning, the very structure of that world began to tremble violently.

Priam’s eyes widened as he felt an ancient vibration emerging from the deepest reaches of the abyss.

’It’s emerging! My last brother... he’s been hidden underground this whole time!’ the shield’s voice echoed through Priam’s mind, filled with frantic excitement.

Priam nodded without hesitation and shot forward, landing just a few meters from the epicenter of the commotion.

Before him, the earth split open into an abyssal fissure.

A dark light, pulsing with gloomy shades of purple and absolute darkness, emerged from the depths of the earth, accompanied by such an overwhelming aura that it seemed to bend reality itself.

In the blink of an eye, that profane radiance swallowed the entire illusory world. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

"!"

Priam’s body stiffened like a statue. All the flow of energy through his meridians violently came to a standstill.

A searing, agonizing pain struck him head-on—it was as if millions of burning needles were piercing every pore of his skin and embedding themselves into his soul.

In desperation, he tried to call upon the System interface for assistance.

[Failure!]

[Detected energy level drastically exceeds the System’s containment capacity.]

The agony intensified with every millisecond. Priam’s heart pounded against his chest in pure panic. Dandara! She was fragile, weakened... she would never withstand that divine pressure!

He forced his muscles to their absolute limit, trying to turn his torso, trying to cover her, escape... do anything! But his body seemed fused to the rock, completely paralyzed.

That was when he noticed something grotesquely out of place.

With Herculean effort, Priam shifted his gaze toward his own shoulder...

Dandara was there. She stared at the abyss ahead with a fixed, glassy gaze.

Yet her expression showed not the slightest trace of pain—it was one of profound serenity, almost majestic. Her eyes glowed with a mystical and mysterious light.

’She... she isn’t feeling anything?!’

The dark light around them intensified to the limit of what he could bear. Priam looked back at the fissure and saw a sphere only a few centimeters wide slowly emerging from the ground.

However, unlike the gloomy aura covering the surroundings, the sphere pulsed with a celestial-blue light, pure, sacred, and dazzling.

Was this the seed the Goddess had mentioned?

’Congratulations. You really did overcome the challenge.’

The soft, flawless female voice echoed directly in Priam’s mind.

’I hope what I left here will be extremely useful to you. As for the fragment of my soul... I pray that, one day, you will return it to me. When my reincarnation is near, the seed will react, inevitably being drawn back toward me.’

*Crack!*

A dry, thunderous sound, like chains being shattered, echoed through the air.

From that moment onward, all the violet light and overwhelming aura began violently retracting toward the sphere, as though being sucked back into a black hole.

The process lasted agonizingly long minutes.

As the energy was devoured, the suffocating pressure on Priam’s body gradually diminished.

When he finally managed to breathe again, he looked around in utter shock.

The magical illusion had been completely destroyed. There were no more false landscapes or artificial skies: they were at the real bottom of the abyss, beneath the glimpse of the scarlet sky. Even more astonishingly, all the dense Miasma in the area had been completely sucked away.

After everything ended, the pulsating blue sphere hovered in the air for a second before beginning to float toward him.

Slowly... majestically...

Priam forgot how to breathe as he watched it approach.

An immeasurable, divine power emanated from that tiny artifact.

All that energy would be his! What kind of supreme opportunities would it bring him?

When the sphere reached five meters away, Priam stretched his hand forward, unable to contain the triumphant, greedy smile spreading across his face.

Until...

"?"

Suddenly, the sphere froze in midair, still three meters away from his outstretched fingers.

Priam narrowed his eyes, his breath caught in his throat.

Then...

He felt a violent, uncontrollable tremor erupt from the body resting against his back.

Priam turned his head.

Dandara’s gaze was fixed straight ahead, hypnotized. Her frail body trembled in spasms, but her expression was unnaturally cold and distant, like that of an ancient deity gazing down upon the world from above.

"Dandara...!"

Without warning, Dandara’s green eyes changed. The color of her irises faded, swallowed by an overwhelming glow that exploded from her pupils.

It was a deep shade of purple and profane darkness!

At that exact millisecond, the sphere in the air began spinning in an insane frenzy, pulsing and emitting that exact same purple and black aura.

"WHAT THE HELL?!"

Dandara’s body continued to tremble.

Slowly, moving her arms with painful fragility, she stretched her trembling hands forward... over Priam’s shoulder.

Priam remained completely catatonic, frozen in place.

A crushing, cosmic pressure emanated from the sphere, locking every joint in his body. Yet... he knew, with absolute intuitive certainty, that the focus of that colossal power wasn’t him. The artifact wasn’t responding to his call.

The floating sphere began moving again.

Dandara’s weak hands waited in the air.

"!"

Priam felt the blood freeze in his veins. His eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets.

The Divine Seed floated gently forward until it touched the skin of Dandara’s hands.

The instant contact was made, the trembling in her body stopped immediately.

The sphere hovered for a microsecond above her palms, then plunged directly into Dandara’s chest, sinking into her flesh and disappearing into the depths of her soul.

All the light, suffocating pressure, and magical aura vanished in the exact same instant, leaving behind an absolute and terrifying silence.

"Dan... Dandara...?" Priam stammered, his voice failing as his mind spiraled into chaos.

During that brief silence, the gears in his brain finally connected the dots with overwhelming clarity.

Ever since arriving in this world, Dandara had said she could feel an ineffable and painful calling coming from that place...

When the Goddess’s recorded message echoed through his mind, Dandara had reacted violently, trembling as if her very soul were being torn apart...

Then, when he questioned her afterward, she had been asleep and said she had only had a strange dream...

A dream where she saw herself in a desolate, gloomy world covered in Miasma... Her skin was a dark purple, carved with black and blood-red lines and markings...

When she looked ahead, she saw thousands upon thousands of terrifying abyssal creatures kneeling in the dust. They were all bowing toward her, pledging allegiance as though she were their Queen and Supreme Mistress...

The dream became even more disturbing when a unified roar tore through the skies:

*We will follow the orders of the Risen Lord!*

In that dream, she didn’t feel like Dandara. Within her consciousness, there was only one absolute thought:

’I must endure. I must resist. One day, the Missionary will come to save us.’

Immediately after that thought, she woke up clinging to Priam’s back.

Priam swallowed hard. His throat was completely dry, and his heart hammered against his ribs like a war drum.

The Goddess’s words echoed through his mind with terrifying truth.

All this time...

Dandara...

She...

She was the true reincarnation of the Sovereign Goddess...