God!

"It's broken through!"

"It's broken through!"

The church's paladins, solemn and imposing, had finally defeated the national defense forces, punched open a breach, and entered the city.

The kingdom's entire army collapsed like a mountain sliding into the sea. The church's knights swiftly led the faithful in occupying the entire royal city.

"To the Tower of Babel! Great Emperor of Atabia is there! Go hang him!"

the cardinal shouted.

They quickly reached the gigantic Tower of Babel. The twenty-sixth level had just been completed. The emperor sat atop the tower, watching the paladins below prepare to climb it.

Emperor of Atabia's voice was calm. He looked down at them with a gaze that held both pity and sorrow. "I keep feeling that some time ago, the Outer God brought down the third great extinction of civilization upon us."

"Ridiculous!"

A paladin was furious. He said:

"Because of the faithful, God decided to try forgiving the people of the earth. After the Great Flood destroyed the world and the purple heavens destroyed the world, He never again destroyed the people of the earth. Peace has been maintained ever since, and we are still alive! Where did this third one come from?"

"Some people are alive, but they have already died."

Emperor of Atabia looked down at the treacherous rebels before him and merely said, "This extinction is different. It does not destroy our bodies. It destroys our wills."

"You should understand that every great extinction eliminates seventy percent of all life. What you may not know is that seventy percent of the people following the church now belong to that number as well."

Everyone was startled. The figure was too coincidental. Wasn't this implying that they had already become the seventy percent who were "spiritually dead"?

"Faith gives us something to rely on!"

Below, a cardinal flew into a rage. Pointing at the tyrant in the sky, he shouted, "Sinner, you're corrupting people's hearts. You—"

Splurt.

The next moment.

The Tower of Babel seemed to come alive, like some special life-form. A huge, curved rib thrust out from a window on the first level and slammed the cardinal to death.

"This?"

All the paladins wore looks of horror.

Could this Tower of Babel not be a building, but a colossal exoskeletal life-form??

"You really are a bunch of fools. You were even bewitched by this?" Great Emperor of Atabia lowered his head. This saint of civilization seemed to mutter to himself:

"Lately, I've been thinking about it. I've kept thinking about it. This extinction is utterly terrifying. It far surpasses the previous two destructions, because it destroys the human heart rather than flesh and blood."

"I watched the world drown before my very eyes during the Great Flood."

"I also watched their wails rot beneath the violet light filling the sky, powerless to do anything. But the sorrow of those first two extinctions was nowhere near the most painful."

His face was expressionless. Then he suddenly said:

"Because this moment, this third extinction, is the most tragic era of all."

"In this third great extinction, He wants me to personally slaughter every one of you—to kill seventy percent of Atabia's current population."

His gaze suddenly traveled into the distance, as if he could see the deity beyond the world, high above the firmament. That deity's gaze was cold, using all living beings as pieces on a chessboard. It was not merely killing the people's spirits—it was also strangling his fighting spirit.

Great Emperor of Atabia suddenly laughed. "The Outer God in the heavens is vicious. This is the malicious curse He has given me, the human emperor of the earth: to turn me into a true tyrant, forcing me to kill seventy percent of my own people and make them slaughter one another. This is the punishment for the Atabian people, and also the destiny the gods have planned for me—the tyrant of the earth who seeks to slay God."

The crowd trembled. Was God truly so vicious? Had He prepared this future for the Atabian people long ago, making this god-defying race turn on itself? Had He even made the people besiege their own king? Would He nail this mortal leader who resisted God forever to a pillar of shame, leaving him to be cursed and spat upon?

"Tyrant, stop trying to bewitch us!" A devout knight stepped forward and shouted.

"You want to slaughter an entire civilization? Our seventy percent of the population is an immense number! You have been abandoned by everyone, and you are not our God. How could you possess such heaven-shaking, earth-shattering power to destroy the world?"

These fanatics were all high-ranking figures and had long since become unmoved.

"Yes, yes. There's no getting through to you anymore..." Great Emperor of Atabia said quietly atop the Tower of Babel, his hands tightening around the armrests of the Emperor's Seat.

"Then there is no need to keep talking." He sat upon the Emperor's Seat and suddenly smiled faintly, as though operating something on a control console.

Crack.

Crack.

From the windows of the towering structure, enormous muscular roots extended like tentacles. Waving their claws like an enraged octopus, they smashed apart all the cardinals, priests, and paladins who had come to besiege the place. Blood gradually seeped into the ground.

"Let us begin!"

After clearing away the nearby church forces that had come to besiege him, Great Emperor of Atabia said, "Everyone, there is no need for sorrow. Flesh and blood build civilization. The church is not our enemy either. The enemy lies in the higher heavens."

"Begin the Godslayer plan!"

"Declare war on the Outer God!"

"Seconded!"

After casting aside despair and struggle, voices that had regained their resolve rang out from within the Tower of Babel.

The many sages on the tower's twenty-six levels hurried about, each handling their own duties as they activated this enormous living project.

Crack!

The towering Tower of Babel, which pierced the clouds, suddenly moved.

With the spine as its core.

Ribs appeared along the tower's windows.

A skull emerged atop the tower.

A pelvis took shape beneath it.

A majestic, boundless Bone Giant slowly came into being, like a fast-forwarded scene of a meat pig that had eaten hormones and grown wildly over the course of twenty days.

Boom!

The earth began to tremble.

The cities of the ocean kingdom beneath all of Atabia collapsed at terrifying speed, like wooden toys hastily pieced together and then kicked apart.

"What is that??"

The church's imperial guards in the city were still clearing out the remnants when they suddenly looked up in a daze. "A body as huge as a giant god!"

"No, not as huge as one. That is another... god!!!" someone shouted.

The Tower of Babel rose to its feet. The giant's bones covered its original network of meridians, while massive flesh churned at terrifying speed. Its dreadful, sky-spanning body pressed down on everyone until they could barely breathe.

Crack.

The earth thundered and shook.

This was a mythic giant wreathed in clouds, powerful and immense, being born before their eyes!

The twenty-six levels of the white Tower of Babel that pierced the heavens were precisely the twenty-six central vertebrae of the human body!

Everyone stared blankly at the sky and at the Tower of Babel. A sudden realization surfaced in their hearts:

"So the Tower of Babel was a creation built through the united efforts of all the people of the earth, powerful enough to shock and anger God. Because the Tower of Babel truly opened a stairway leading to the world of the gods."

In the distance.

The pope, who had long been on guard, had not entered the royal city.

But when he witnessed this unbelievable scene from the command center outside the city, he let out an enraged roar. "Emperor of Atabia! That madman, that insane engineer!! He actually dares to blaspheme God! Civilization has only existed for a few days, yet he is already trying to become... a god!"

"Impossible!"

"Unforgivable!"

"As expected of an outrageously ambitious tyrant! That madman! He will surely destroy us! God will vent His wrath upon the entire earth, and the final Judgment Day will arrive!"

One furious voice followed another.

The church's knightly orders throughout the earth were utterly stunned.

Gazing up at the sky, everyone felt an indescribable heaviness and shock in their hearts.

The Tower of Babel.

This would be more mythical than every myth, more legendary than every epic and tale—a miracle formed from countless fated ties and fortuitous encounters.

Above the clouds.

Great Emperor of Atabia sat upon the skull's Emperor's Seat, looking down at the surging seawater below. He seemed to be in an excellent mood as he sang:

"The great extinction of life is indeed a magnificent romance. It sends the raging tide of life surging forth, wave after wave, smashing against nature's arrogance and injustice."

The skull palace was a world resembling heaven. High above the cloud sea and its mists, he sat upon the divine throne of nerves at the neural center. He stretched out his arm and slowly clenched his hand toward the Crystal Wall in the empty air, baring his teeth in a grin:

"The kingdom surges forth like the tides."

"The waves of the Single Cells rushing ashore have yet to return to oblivion before becoming the Tower of Babel rising from the earth, shaping a body that roars defiantly at the heavens."

Endless white light descended around him.

He was an emperor who ruled the entire world, a figure containing the highest wisdom of the entire civilization. His body was transparent from head to toe, and the long chains of genes within him gave off a faint silver radiance.

"Let's try mobilizing the musculature."

Crack!

The giant's body swayed. It slowly raised its head, and before flesh had even grown over its enormous skeletal frame, it was already staggering to its feet.

This moment was destined to be etched into all of history.

It was as if the first ape-man born in human history had stood upon a boulder and unleashed a silent roar!

At the plum-blossom mark between the giant's brows, the ant-sized man controlling the giant from within the plum-blossom throne slowly rose. This saint of civilization looked toward the enormous Outer God beyond the Crystal Wall.

The emperor spread his arms as though embracing the entire world and smiled. "The enemy has never been the people of Atabia. The war between all things begins in earnest today."

"The true enemy is you, Outer God."

In the Primordial Era, the emperor of a great empire called upon the people of the earth to build the Tower of Babel. His God War had begun.