Chapter 1067 - 25: Divine Power (Part 3)

Chapter 1067: Chapter 25: Divine Power (Part 3)

Perhaps it was an instant, perhaps it was billions of years—

His Perception suddenly felt as if it had sunk into a bottomless quagmire, like a pit without end, and as if it had been seized by gravity, falling endlessly downward.

This is it! This is the beginning of this IF line!

A vague understanding stirred in the Magician’s heart; at once he made his Perception stop its backward tracing... In truth, there was no way to trace any further back—he seemed to have arrived at the region before the birth of the universe.

What entered his vision was no longer that shattered, tragic battlefield.

No longer that scene of densely packed colossal corpses, of torn flesh and broken limbs strewn across the firmament and the void; instead, what replaced it was a hollow, or rather...

A Great Chaos Pit.

Turbid and chaotic, deep and dim; heaven and earth both seemed to have sunk into a realm of pure nothingness, time and space alike a haze of confusion, with no distinction between front and back, up and down, no difference between past and future. Between illusion and reality, between true and false, everything was blurred and uncertain... It is truly hard to describe such a sight; if one must force a metaphor, then perhaps the universe itself was like a tub of ice cream from which some rude hand had dug out a massive scoop with a spoon.

Matter, Energy, quantum fluctuations, the information of time-space, all the manifold phenomena, visible and invisible...

Everything, all of these, had vanished from the causality of the entire universe.

"...!!"

In that instant, the Magician felt his hair stand on end. His mode of Perception was multi-dimensional, able to transform higher-dimensional streams of information into something akin to visual data intake, and so at this moment he dimly, hazily caught a glimpse of the "truth."

Beyond all dimensions, beyond all time and space...

Beyond the fragmentary scene to the totality of the whole, a fixed and unchanging yet infinite real phase...

It had no fixed shape, no way to be described; infinite variables, concepts, dimensions converged into a vast ocean, and upon that sea a Giant lay silently.

In that moment the Magician felt as though he were a microorganism in the sea, suddenly confronted with the Mortal Python whose body rested upon the floor of the four oceans, coiled about the eight directions, winding itself around the entire world... Before such a Divine Body that transcended all common sense, it was impossible to capture its totality with mere physical eyes; only from a multi-dimensional perspective could one barely catch a fleeting glimpse.

It was a white Giant...

Older than the universe, vaster than the world, lying quietly upon the sea, its corpse seeming to stretch across countless dimensions and timelines...

This Ancient God’s mouth was full of golden teeth, its skin pure white, yet its eyes bulged wide with rage, its expression frozen at the final instant of a roar. The armor upon its body was broken in many places; its shining blood looked as though it had just flowed from the wounds and dripped down, glowing upon countless timelines, radiant Divine brilliance illuminating all...

Its cause of death seemed to be the great hole in its chest, black and profound, like the region before the birth of the universe, and also like a boundless abyss.

—W–wait!!

—Could this be that Great Void?!

Forcing himself to calm down, the Magician perceived the truth, and the corner of his mouth twitched slightly. He suddenly understood why he had never been able to find his target: the mode of existence of those Great Gods had far surpassed his imagination. Stars were insufficient to describe their towering might; the universe itself was insufficient to contain their bodies. To seek their manifestations within tangible time-space was fundamentally impossible.

Leaving aside other Divine marvels, speaking only of the sheer scale of their existence...

Even that alone was already too vast, verging directly upon the terrifying, to the point that it could no longer be defined by the concepts of the physical universe...

Thus even if They were right before your eyes, even if Their existence already encompassed your own existence within it, you would still fail to perceive Them, blind to Their presence, deaf to Their voice.

"Mm, I was misled by the situation with the World Tree..."

Knocking his head in some annoyance, he realized that perhaps the World Tree had not, from the very beginning, possessed a recognizable form or manifestation. Only when the Nordic World was destroyed, when the structure of the world itself was laid bare, did it appear—but even then it was merely the scorched remnants and embers, the ruins that had collapsed... It did not mean that the world’s structure had been visible from the outset.

The structure of the world naturally exposed itself only after the world itself was completely ruined...

But the corpse of a God is different; it is not part of the world...

Drawing a deep breath of air that did not exist, then casting a Spell of "Mechanical Mind" upon himself to calm his thoughts, the Magician forcibly purged his distractions, sealed off emotions of shock and awe, and swiftly began to think.

"It should be Heimdall, Guardian of Asgard, the white Aesir God who keeps watch over the Rainbow Bridge..."

"It is said that He is Loki’s enemy, that in Ragnarok He fought a duel with Loki, and in the end they perished together as if by fate, He being the last God to fall..."

"His cause of death was that He cut off Loki’s head with His sword, yet unexpectedly the Evil God’s head suddenly leapt up, striking Heimdall’s chest and thereby claiming the God’s life..."

So—

He closed his eyes slightly; within that Great Void there was...

The head of the Evil God famed for His many epithets, described as the God of Wisdom, the God of Deceit, the Shapeshifter, the liar, the Aerial Traveler, and so on?

In that moment, upon recognizing this fact, he suddenly felt the very core of his own Divinity stir with a faint, leaping resonance—that was the Power with which he had constructed an integrated framework of many abilities, the Power that had supported him along his path since long ago... precisely the Divine Power that belonged to the God of Mischief.