The originally formless, traceless River Styx began to gradually take shape as a surging, turbulent real river once it entered the Lower Planes, filled with the rising and falling wails of the dead.
Yet even in such a chaotic environment, the battle between two gods, transcending the boundaries of death, continued here.
Bane could still only fend off Torm's relentless, mad-dog-like assaults while frantically searching his mind for a way out of the present crisis.
But no matter how he thought, he could not escape one dead end:
Under the rules of the world of death, his soul would inevitably return to the Fugue Plane, the Divine Kingdom that should have belonged to them, the gods of death.
Under normal circumstances, he would have been overjoyed by that outcome.
Because to them, it was no different from going home.
But everything had changed drastically after the Saints' Calamity!
They had all been driven out of the Fugue Plane, and he had no idea—and did not dare gamble on whether—that Cavens Ratman god, who had become a powerful god the moment he ignited his divine fire and then led hundreds of millions of heroic spirits into their Divine Kingdom, or that pale monster which had brazenly slain the Hundred-Armed Giant, smashed the Hall of the Gods, and directly altered the rules of the world, was still there. Nor could he imagine the miserable fate that might await him should he fall into their hands.
"No! I absolutely cannot linger in the Fugue Plane for even a moment! I have to plunge straight into the deeper Lower Planes in one breath!
"If I can successfully enter the domain of the Bottomless Abyss—
"Then one day, I may yet rise again!"
Even with matters having reached such a terrible state, Bane still blindly