The Inverted Throne
When Iver uttered such outrageous words, the Lord of Scales and Feathers did not mock him, but neither did he encourage him.
The Lord of Scales and Feathers merely burst into inexplicable laughter, then vanished once more.
By then, Iver had already realized the nature of the Void Box--
It did not merely contain the power of nothingness, and the Swan King had not merely almost become the Pillar God of the Tenth Source River... What he had fought was not just the power of nothingness within the Void Box, but the Twilight Kind known as the "Whisper of the Void."
According to the Lord of Scales and Feathers, that Twilight Kind was itself a form of information entity—it was an individual, yet had no physical form. If it wanted to truly gain the power to affect the world, it needed a vessel.
In other words, the "Whisper of the Void" first had to possess an individual whose mind had been corrupted before it could control the power of the Source River.
--Just like a spider.
After injecting venom and digestive juices to digest its prey, it still needed to insert its mouthparts in order to suck the prey into its body. The corruption of the paths by the Whisper of the Void was merely the step of "injecting venom and digestive juices."
And because the Hourglass's Severing Heaven and Earth prevented gods without physical bodies from descending into the Material Realm or directly interfering with it, the Whisper of the Void was in neither the Dream Realm nor the Material Realm. It could pollute phantoms in the Dream Realm and corrupt the wills of gods, but it could not directly possess a god's soul. It could possess beings in the Material Realm, but because of Severing