Chapter 12

"There are still good people in this world after all!" Sui Xiong felt much better. Smiling, he waved at the sky before turning his attention back to the Shrine.

He could clearly sense powerful magic gathered on the Shrine—or something similar to magic. An intent identical to the vicious, chilling will from before, though much weaker, also lingered upon it. Trapped within his Frost Magic and cut off from outside replenishment, both were slowly dissipating.

Naturally, Sui Xiong was unwilling to let his spoils vanish like this. After hesitating for a moment, he extended a hand of his soul toward the Shrine.

A flash of purple-black light appeared, and his soul hand was repelled by that will.

"Oh? This has some tricks to it." Rather than being startled, Sui Xiong was delighted. "Let's see what you're really capable of!"

His soul hand clenched into a fist and smashed down at the Shrine.

Once, twice, three times... That will's defenses grew weaker and weaker until, at last, he shattered them with a single punch. It could no longer resist.

"At a time like this, I'm supposed to say, 'Plunder—plunder without mercy,' right..."

Laughing heartily, Sui Xiong seized the will, now thrown into chaos after being defeated, and swallowed it in one gulp.

Over the years of his travels, he had long discovered that "eating" was not the only way he could devour souls. In fact, as long as two souls came into contact, he could directly devour the other through that contact.

Compared to devouring through eating, devouring through contact was less efficient. However, it filtered out impurities from the other soul, allowing him to obtain purer energy.

Those impurities were mostly memories and experiences. They were not entirely worthless, but the vast majority had little value. To avoid being affected too much, after every devouring he had to use soul power to expel the useless impurities. It was extremely troublesome.

If he had not learned how to absorb magic and gained the ability to replenish his soul energy with it, the process of eating and purging impurities alone would have wasted a great deal of time.

Thus, in recent years, he had long stopped using devouring to absorb soul energy and switched to contact instead.

But today's spoils were no ordinary matter. They were worth swallowing and digesting slowly!

Nor could the magic on the Shrine be wasted. It was vastly different from Sui Xiong's Frost Magic. If he could analyze and master it, he would gain another formidable method—useful both for self-defense and for defeating enemies.

Not to mention that he had already made an enemy of the owner of that vicious, chilling will. They would surely clash again someday. The more he learned about his enemy now, the better his chances would be later.

So Sui Xiong took the Shrine and departed far away. To ensure his safety, he directly left the Black Forest and retreated into the vast ocean.

For someone using the body of a Giant Jellyfish, the sea was the battlefield best suited for displaying his power.

After the Giant Jellyfish sank into the deep sea, in a dark, cold, tranquil world within distant emptiness, a dignified figure watching the mortal realm shook its head.

"This fellow is truly cautious," it said. "The ocean is not our domain. Once it hides in the deep sea, there is truly nothing we can do."

"It will come out," said an astonishingly tall figure clad in heavy armor.

"Yes, but by then, without the guiding intent from your Shrine, we will have no way to find it unless it crosses paths with you again."

"We will meet again," said a short, aged figure. "With a beginning, there will be further developments and a final outcome. That jellyfish does not look short-lived. Sooner or later, it will appear before us again."

"When that happens, we must subdue it. Its abilities are very useful." The dignified figure said, "Perhaps it would even be worth granting it the position of a Lesser God."

"We are not the only ones watching it. Don't you think that Lion's arrival was rather suspicious?" the aged figure reminded them.

The dignified figure fell silent for a moment, then said, "Investigate it."

"By your command," answered a voice from the darkness.

"Let this matter rest for now. Our primary task at present remains the struggle for the divine authorities of night, death, and related domains. This concerns the rise and fall of our Dark Night Pantheon. Everyone must put more effort into it."

Voices answered one after another, and then the figures departed, each going about their own affairs.

Time slowly passed.

For those whom mortals honored with words such as "great" and "Immortality," the passage of time was hardly worth caring about. Their sense of time was often measured in generations, two generations, or even one or two hundred years. But for humans, things were entirely different.

"Whew... My seclusion is over!"

When the long-missed blue sky and white clouds appeared before him once more, Sui Xiong let out a long breath and could not help smiling.

Hiding alone in the deep sea, silently digesting his spoils and tempering and strengthening his power, was truly no easy task.

This was different from his last cultivation in the Ice Trench. Back then, he would return to the surface every so often to relax. But this time, to prevent his enemies from tracking him, he had remained in the deep sea the entire time and did not even dare approach shallow waters.

By digesting that defeated will, he obtained much information he had desperately wanted: several commonly used languages and writing systems, details about the world's biology, geography, and politics, methods for using power... and much more. Most importantly, he learned exactly who the enemy he had provoked was.

A Lesser God of the Dark Night Pantheon, the Watcher, Sleepless.

A True God!

This was a world where gods, demons, monsters, and other unscientific things existed, a world truly filled with powerful beings. At the very peak of them all were the strong known as True Gods. Not only were they unimaginable masters themselves, but they could also absorb the faith of all living beings and merge with the world's source power. Their divine abilities were beyond imagination. At least, from the information Sui Xiong had obtained, they were truly powerful—absurdly powerful, monstrously powerful!

The will Sui Xiong had obtained came from the thoughts accumulated through White Leaf Village's many years of worship, mixed with the lingering aftereffects of several descents by the Sleepless God. Its contents were somewhat disordered, and more than ninety percent of it consisted of hymns praising the Sleepless God. If all those words were true, then the Sleepless God was unbelievably powerful. Whether it was "Let there be light," "Transcend the sea of suffering and reach the other shore," or "Born before heaven and earth, determining creation itself"... none of it was worth mentioning before him. That Sui Xiong had managed to provoke the Sleepless God and still escape with his life was truly luck so outrageous it defied heaven. Who knew how many wooden fish he had smashed in his previous life, or how much spirit money he had accumulated.

That was obviously bragging. Sui Xiong was not an idiot. The Sleepless God's power was indeed formidable, but had he not been scared away by that streak of golden light? Besides, even Sui Xiong's own Frost Magic could block him.

That so-called supreme and all-powerful Sleepless God was definitely exaggerated!

Still, the Sleepless God was indeed no easy opponent. He was a member of the Dark Night Pantheon, an evil god who loved blood and fear. The chief god of this pantheon was the Emperor of Night, a vampire from ancient times. Every god beneath him was a dark monster, while the Watcher had been a guard who watched over the Emperor of Night's castle gates before the latter became a god—calm, sinister, and loyal.

From the day he entered the Emperor of Night's service until he attained Immortality, this gatekeeper never left his post for over six hundred long years. He never slacked off. When injured, he did not rest. When exhausted, he did not sleep. He continued until his death.

Such unimaginable loyalty won his lord's appreciation. After the Emperor of Night became a god, he elevated his old subordinate—then so aged and frail he could not even hold a dagger—to become a Lesser God. His divine name was Sleepless, and he was generally called the Watcher, Sleepless God.

To put it bluntly, the Sleepless God was just an old gatekeeper under the Emperor of Night. But old gatekeepers could not be underestimated. Hadn't countless boastful figures in The Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils become complete weaklings before the old man who guarded and swept the library of Shaolin Temple? The Sleepless God was no ordinary old gatekeeper either. Over several centuries of service, he had personally slain five or six so-called legendary powerhouses. After becoming a god, he also repeatedly achieved victories in several divine wars. He could be called the Dark Night Pantheon's foremost general.

Facing an enemy like that was already enough to create enormous pressure. Considering the entire Dark Night Pantheon behind him as well, Sui Xiong felt that his pressure was no longer merely "enormous," but the legendary "pressure mountain big."

So he cultivated even more diligently. On one hand, he analyzed the Shrine's magic to gain a deeper understanding of how the various powers in this world operated and were used, expanding the range of his abilities. On the other hand, he discarded the dross and kept the essence, extracting every valuable piece of information from that will and striving to memorize it firmly.

Through this period of cultivation, not only had his control over the power of frost risen to another level, he had also mastered the powers of shadow, death, and protection—using this world's terminology, he had now mastered the powers of these four domains. His mastery of the frost domain was especially superb. Given a suitable opportunity, he could entirely elevate his frost domain further and, through it, embark on the immortal path to godhood.

As for how he was supposed to obtain that opportunity... according to his guess, perhaps another few hundred years of cultivation would do it...

Sui Xiong truly could not patiently cultivate for several hundred more years. In fact, this period of sunless cultivation had already driven him nearly mad. So when he felt his cultivation had more or less reached a bottleneck, he finally could not restrain himself any longer and left the deep sea for land.

Before that, he found an undersea volcano and tossed the Shrine, which had lost all remaining value, into it.

If the information in the Shrine was correct, then no matter how capable the Sleepless God was, he could only use the Shrine to locate him. Now... let him try locating him through lava!

Using a massive tentacle to give the Shrine slowly sinking into the lava the world's largest middle finger, Sui Xiong left without looking back. He decided that he would never return to this volcanic crater for the rest of his life!

Several days later, the enormous jellyfish returned to land and entered the Black Forest once again.

"Mortal world, I'm back!"

After reading the update, please remember to vote in support. Everyone's support is what motivates me to keep updating.

Also, the update times are fixed at noon and 8 PM every day—until I run out of saved chapters.