The sudden mention of the River Styx Blood Oath made everyone's expressions change.
If they broke the oath, their souls would be trapped in the River Styx forever, with no chance of reincarnation.
That made the River Styx Blood Oath a very serious vow.
But when they saw how shaken and grim Li Wei looked, they realized that whatever had appeared before them was truly terrifying. If word got out, they might all be killed to keep it secret.
With their lives at stake, Tiger and Fischer exchanged a glance. Naturally, they didn't dare hesitate, and the pulse of a River Styx Blood Oath soon passed between them.
Even so, Li Wei couldn't relax. It wasn't that he didn't trust his subordinates; it was that even the River Styx Blood Oath had loopholes.
Li Wei knew that Yeg, the ancient god who had once ruled over the River Styx, had grown tired of his unchanging duties three thousand years ago. After casually dividing his divine portfolio among three ambitious schemers, he had vanished into some corner of the multiverse to enjoy his retirement.
From that point on, the authority over death was split three ways, and three powerful deities arose in Coriel:
God of Strife: Bane.
God of the Dead: Milko.
God of Murder: Baal.
Bane had no authority over the underworld, but Milko held the portfolio of death, while the God of Murder was even known as the ferryman who sent living beings into the River Styx.
Those three were little more than figureheads, for the most part. They generally spent all their time stirring up trouble on the Material Plane, and had no interest in monitoring the tens of thousands of oaths sworn in the River Styx every day. Still, Li Wei couldn't afford to let his guard down.
Why not ask Landis, the Metal Dragon and Scales of Justice who oversaw balance and justice, to witness the oath?
Wouldn't that be like a centenarian hanging himself—asking for death? Though the old dragon's witnessing system worked more like a public court system, Li Wei was a Silver Dragon through and through. Who knew if the old fellow might take a break from his work and have a look? Then they'd be screwed.
The whole point was to keep this secret, yet a dragon would end up knowing about it. Though this dragon had stopped caring much about worldly things besides treasure after igniting his divine spark, if he happened to see the thing before Li Wei, even if he didn't feel murderous as a Lawful Neutral, he would probably report it to the Platinum Dragon God, Bahamut, in order to uphold his duty. Either way, it would be a bad ending.
Of two evils, choose the lesser. The River Styx Blood Oath was the more moderate and reliable option, since no god oversaw the oath; it relied solely on its own mechanisms.
But that still couldn't prevent one possibility: if they were traced through time by a powerful Spellcaster or even a deity using Divination, the truth could still be uncovered.
No, I'll have to find a specialist later to add a Mythal to their memories of this, or just erase them outright. Otherwise, something could go wrong down the line.
Some might wonder why Li Wei was so nervous.
How could he not be?
The reason he was so determined to claim this place, despite how nervous he was, was that he was already committed. If any deity found out about this thing, they'd kill him for sure.
He even vaguely regretted letting these guys dig so deep while mining.
If that thing really was the kind of entity mentioned in the trash heap of his Soul Space, then he was in serious trouble.
According to the information he'd found, this thing had appeared in many universes, for example:
In the Warhammer Universe, it was called a C'tan.
The C'tan were beings the Necrons had found to fight the Old Ones. They might have been the oldest beings in the galaxy, and some in later ages even suspected they were a glitch in the universe's code, something its creator had forgotten to delete after making the cosmos.
They had no physical form and fed on the energy of stars. They could also manipulate and alter the laws of the universe with ease. The Necrons called them C'tan, and in exchange for giving them physical bodies and pledging eternal obedience, the Necrons received the C'tan's gift of immortality.
The result was the Necrons that humanity encountered in later ages. For both the Necrons themselves and the other beings in the universe, this was an eternal and agonizing curse!
After the C'tan transformed them, the Necrons became tireless, emotionless machines. Under the C'tan's command, they attacked the Old Ones in what the Eldar later called the War in Heaven.
A massive war that swept across the galaxy erupted between the Old Ones and the C'tan. The Old Ones suffered defeat after defeat, and to turn the tide, they created the Eldar and the Orks.
The Old Ones' excessive use of Warp energy, combined with the countless casualties of the War in Heaven, caused massive disturbances in the Warp and gave rise to the Chaos Gods.
This brutal war led to the extinction of the Old Ones. But afterward, the C'tan turned on each other when the Deceiver provoked them. They devoured one another, and in the end, only four survived:
The Nightbringer, the Deceiver, the Outsider, and the Void Dragon.
Even with only four left, they were still unbelievably powerful.
The most obvious example was the Nightbringer, the foremost of the C'tan. For some perverse reason, he saddled every being in the universe with the emotional DEBUFF of fear, making the entire Warhammer Universe grow dark and hopeless.
The weakest of them, the Void Dragon, was later shattered by the Necrons.
One of its shards destroyed an entire Necron dynasty and more than a dozen planets.
Another may have come to Earth, which at the time had only a primitive civilization. It was gravely wounded by the Emperor of Mankind and hid in the "Labyrinth of Night" beneath Mars. It was very likely the Machine God worshipped by the Adeptus Mechanicus in later ages.
And, coincidentally, Li Wei's memories of his previous life on Blue Star also seemed to contain records of a similar being.
That was the Celestials in the Marvel World.
Yes, those beings could change any setting or logical concept at will. They had visited Earth four times, created humanity, and on their third visit had beaten the Nordic and Olympian gods, along with countless Chaos deities, so badly that the gods never dared show themselves and interfere in human affairs again.
And what was even more absurdly coincidental was that Li Wei had found a similar being in the knowledge inherited from his dragon bloodline.
In the distant, primitive past, an alien civilization called Sotha had sent a colonization system to the Coriel World: the Ancient Evil, the Saurtha God-Soldiers!
For some reason, when this colonization system sent by an alien civilization arrived in the Coriel World, it seemed to decide that the world wasn't suitable for its activation. So it entered a long state of standby—remaining on standby for who knew how many tens of thousands of years.
Rumor had it that the Saurtha God-Soldiers needed a specific kind of energy to activate.
Once activated, the God-Soldiers would immediately begin "purifying" the world.
But the one that had already been unearthed was said to have been sealed by the gods acting together, and all its followers had been executed.
And finally, after nearly tearing his hair out while searching through the Soul Space, Li Wei found another record that might have been connected to them:
It described a being called the Spirit of the Starry Sky, in a universe with the serial number 1010176175.
The moment this thing appeared before the humans of that world, it overturned their entire understanding of reality. It was like a true god.
But what overturned the understanding of every species in the universe was that humanity had somehow managed to capture the Spirits of the Starry Sky!
To restrain their ability to freely alter constants and the universe's underlying laws of logic, humanity fastened something like armor around them. This meant that even while they slept, humans could control them to a certain extent, using them to reshape the entire world according to humanity's will and slaughter their enemies.
Only then did they become famous, under the name War Apostles!
No one knew how they'd managed it. It was just as ridiculous and absurd as the natives of Mount Olympus in the League of Legends story somehow forcing the Star Forging Dragon King Thor to submit by presenting him with a vicious crown and threatening him with the stars—and actually succeeding.
But reality was often even more absurd than stories.
Legend had it that, to fight the Chaos invasion born from the origin point of the universe, the humans of that world drove thirteen War Apostles to herd the stars. They used the galaxies of the heavens to construct the Shilong Great Wall, stretching 1.37 billion light-years, and encircled the inner universe that had already been corrupted by Chaos. It was also the final line of defense for humanity and the star-faring races against the Chaos invasion.
Viewed only in three dimensions, it was no more than a relatively large galaxy cluster. But from a higher-dimensional perspective, the Shilong Great Wall was a smooth, rounded eggshell.
Just like the—
[Kingdom of the Heavens] shaped by Ao!
After reading this far in the Soul Space, Li Wei's back was drenched in cold sweat—if Gnolls had sweat glands.
He was sure that if he kept looking, he'd find even more beings like this. But the more he read, the more the thing before him resembled the entities described in these records.
With so many examples to go by, Li Wei didn't dare take this lightly, but he was starting to feel overwhelmed.
This thing was a real hot potato. Yet he couldn't throw it away; all he could do was hide it carefully and wait until he was powerful enough to explore it.
Trying to fiddle with it now? That would be suicide!
To put it in terms anyone could understand, this thing was basically an EVA with a key that gave it GM privileges!
And if it really was one of those beings, then death wasn't even a concept for it!
If it still had any will left, the mental contamination it released upon waking could spread across the entire Coriel Continent in an instant!
Nuclear deterrence was a joke compared to it!
Li Wei suddenly seemed to remember something. He stopped Tiger, who was about to carry out his orders.
"What about the three Orcs who found this thing? Didn't you say their mental state seemed to be deteriorating? Bring them here! Now!"
Before you continue