Sandora Corrupted by the Abyss

Staring blankly at the expectant Sandora before me, I suddenly understood—despite being known as the warlike "War Song Princess," after nearly sixty thousand years of war, she must have grown tired too.

After a brief pause, I replied, "Of course I can take you away, but where will you go afterward? Pandora must have already told you that... the Empire exists in name only now. Whether the territory you once ruled even still exists is a question."

Without hesitation, Sandora said, "Of course I'll go with you—to that Carbon-Based Lifeform civilization planet called Earth."

"Huh?" I froze.

Sandora wanted to return to Earth with me? Who came up with this script?! After the Pandora Heavy Armored Legion, was another massive alien workforce about to march grandly onto Nanfu Street?

"Sandora, you're not joking, are you? There are so many of you..." I tried to change Sandora's mind. The Pandora Heavy Armored Legion had already replaced a third of the familiar faces around me. If another Sandora Legion showed up, I probably shouldn't expect to see any Earthlings when I went outside anymore. Although, like the Empire's other legions, Sandora's lower and middle-ranking soldiers were mindless units that could be stored in a Different Dimension, even after putting them away, there would still be no small number of commanders left. So many people flooding onto Earth to buy pirated discs... Ahem. Looks like Sikaro had made me a little paranoid...

"Are you worried about my identity as a Shilin Emperor? Don't worry, I'm only staying at your place temporarily. I won't interfere with your sovereignty—I can swear it in the Empire's name!"

...That was not what I was worried about at all. I was worried that if another batch of pirated-goods dealers like Sikaro appeared, the first interstellar war might break out between the Empire Army and the city management officers.

But seeing Sandora's pitiful expression, I couldn't bear to refuse her outright—she had nowhere else to go.

Besides, was the Empire's supreme ruler really supposed to be like this? Had Sandora become a little unstable after sixty thousand years of war?

In the end, I softened. "All right, you can come back with me, but you have to agree to my conditions."

"Yay—" Sandora cheered, then stood up, took two steps back, and happily pounced at me...

Crack— A crisp snap rang out, followed by a miserable cry of "Aah—"

Broken. Broken again...

Recovering from my injuries again...

It seemed Sandora had been telling the truth about strengthening my body. At the very least, my recovery ability had improved greatly...

Today was already our third day in this world ruled by magical beasts. At Sandora's base, I gained a more detailed understanding of what they had gone through.

It turned out that around sixty thousand years ago, Sandora happened to discover this planet while returning victorious from an expedition to the Helenda Star System. At the time, she had merely planned to have some fun here for a few days, so she led her personal guard away from the main force and came here. Unfortunately, on the second day after they landed, their contact with the outside world was cut off—the Empire as a whole had fallen into slumber. Not only that, but all the equipment they had brought began malfunctioning for no apparent reason. They could not leave, and even their normal combat strength was greatly weakened. As a result, they became locked in a bitter war with the local magical beasts that lasted sixty thousand years. Although most of those beasts were individually weaker than Sandora's soldiers, they were immense in number and reproduced rapidly. What baffled Sandora and her commanders even more was that the beasts seemed impossible to kill off. No one knew where they came from. They only knew that at intervals, huge numbers of frenzied magical beasts would attack from all directions, then retreat together after leaving behind countless corpses. Since they had brought only a small portion of their forces, Sandora and her subordinates already struggled just to hold the beasts at a stalemate, much less spare forces to investigate their origins. Over the past sixty thousand years, the only thing they had learned about these enemies was that they seemed to have been corrupted by a power known as the "Abyss," which was why they had become so violent.

"The Abyss is the most dangerous thing in the universe." Sandora's expression was especially grave when she said this. "It is not energy or matter in the usual sense. More precisely, it represents an intense will, filled with pure urges to destroy and annihilate. This power wanders endlessly through the universe, and whenever it stops, that will begins to affect everything around it—whether Carbon-Based Lifeforms, Silicon-Based Lifeforms, or energy lifeforms. Even beings like us, half-energy and half-constructed entities, are affected by it. More unbelievably, it can influence not only intelligent life, but even things without consciousness cannot escape its misfortune. When the Abyss arrives, planets drift from their orbits, stars burn madly, gravity becomes unstable, all kinds of constants fall into disorder, and in the end, everything heads toward destruction together... You could say that the Abyss is destruction itself."

When I asked Pandora about the Abyss, a solemn expression also appeared on the little girl's face. She said, "Although the data I can access is incomplete, one thing is certain: the power Emperor Sandora mentioned does exist. And according to the information I currently possess, the Abyss has always been the Empire's greatest enemy."

...I never expected we had such a glorious history of protecting universal peace.

"Thank goodness," Sandora said as she stood on a cliff near the base, gazing at the distant mountains hazy as smoke. "It can finally end. We can finally leave this damned place."

"It's unbelievable that you managed to hold on for so long," I said with genuine admiration. "If it were me, I'd probably have gone insane long ago."

"I already went insane." Sandora turned and gave me a radiant smile, her wild curls casting a golden halo. "You know, as the spiritual pillar of these soldiers, I bore more pressure than anyone else. Even a Shilin Emperor's mental strength could not stay clear-minded forever under those circumstances. So, when the war had lasted fifty thousand years, I suffered a mental breakdown once. At the time, I even planned to have the entire legion self-destruct and perish together with this planet..."

I stared at Sandora in horror. She wore a warm smile, and there was nothing in her eyes to suggest she was joking.

"Fortunately, at the very last moment, I regained clarity for a short while." Sandora spoke with a warm, cheerful smile. "At that time, I believed that if I kept living, I might bring terrible disaster upon my soldiers—they obeyed my orders too completely. Even if the mad me ordered them to commit mass suicide, they would not question it in the slightest. So I decided to end myself.

"I entered the Abyss..."

"The Abyss?" I grew even more astonished. "You mean that force that goes around causing trouble everywhere in the universe?"

Sandora could not help laughing at my words. "Hehe, calling something so terrifying a force that causes trouble is really amusing... But you're right, that's exactly what I mean. Although in most cases the Abyss is merely an invisible, intangible force, it has nests of its own. When Abyssal power becomes materialized, an entrance appears... As a Shilin Emperor, I naturally possess certain special abilities. Using those abilities, I found a materialized Abyss entrance by myself and charged straight into it... Even if I died, I wanted to make them suffer!

"In the Abyss, I saw many things you would never see in your entire life, as well as evil powers beyond your imagination. I didn't know how many enemies I killed, nor did I know when I would collapse from exhaustion and die. I only fought day after day.

"I thought my already faltering mental strength would soon collapse completely under the Abyss's influence, and I would become a war beast devoid of all thought, or be torn to pieces by the strange enemies within the Abyss. But—guess what happened afterward?"

I swallowed and stared nervously at the smiling Sandora. Both her earlier reckless behavior and her sudden chattering now made me feel that something was very wrong. This Shilin Emperor's mental state really did seem abnormal. Perhaps her last shred of reason had already been utterly destroyed in the Abyss? Was she actually a puppet controlled by the Abyss? Or perhaps she was simply a madwoman who looked normal?

I did not answer for a moment. Sandora did not mind, and simply continued, "Afterward... I truly was corrupted by the Abyss..."

At that point, Sandora suddenly gave me a faint smile, then slowly raised her right hand. Immediately, black materialized energy like flames spread from her fingertips, rapidly engulfing the entire right half of her body. Within mere seconds, Sandora's right half had completely transformed into black fire. The strange energy flames burned fiercely, leaving no trace of a human shape, while the right hand she had raised became a terrifying half-meter-long claw wreathed in black smoke...