Watching the chaotic expanse endlessly fracture and expand, Tiamat wore a look of sheer shock.
"Chaos Space... How dare you... No, how could you possibly pull this off?!"
It was common knowledge across the planes that Chaos Space was where the deities exiled races that posed an existential threat to the Prime Material Plane.
Among them were many powerful demons that had once invaded the Prime Material Plane.
Time and space were completely disordered in that chaotic realm. Theoretically, no one could lock onto any specific location within Chaos Space.
Setting aside how difficult it was to exile an entire kingdom, was this lich not afraid of dropping the Kingdom of the Unholy Hymn right into the clutches of those demons? For the tieflings, falling into the hands of those demons would be worse than plunging into the Nine Hells.
Even without demons, the land of chaos was the most barren, desolate place in existence.
No place of exile was hospitable. Most banished creatures died swiftly, their flesh and souls dissolving into the primordial chaos—a fate far more wretched than damnation in Hell.
Tiamat was baffled. Zariel spoke first, demanding, "What on earth are you trying to do? Would you rather slaughter these tieflings than let their souls fall to Hell?"
Zariel was not one for scheming; whenever she had a doubt, she asked outright.
"That's our secret, ladies," Anbaixiu replied cheerfully. "Now, I have to get back to my work. Talk to you later."
Anbaixiu ascended high into the sky, stopping about a hundred meters from Mister Misfortune. He began channeling all his power into the Dice of Fate.
Dice poured down like rain, watering the chaotic expanse as though it were soil.
A moment later, tentacle-like blossoms sprouted from the soil of chaos.
Dozens of massive tentacles, each larger than a dragon, thrust out from the chaotic void. At their center, a single pitch-black eye was revealed.
A resonant, echoing voice boomed from the tentacled creature's solitary eye.
"You actually pulled it off! An entire kingdom, hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land, hurled straight into Chaos Space! You've got guts, I'll give you that!"
Tiamat and Zariel finally understood what the lich was up to. This tentacled monster was clearly the former master of the City of Alchemy, who had been exiled before.
Whatever had happened to him, he seemed to have figured out how to survive in the land of chaos.
So the lich was not sending the tieflings to Chaos Space to die; he was leaving them in the care of this tentacled monster.
How had he managed this?
Neither Tiamat nor Zariel could fathom it. The situation was riddled with contradictions.
This monster had been betrayed by the lich and exiled into the chaotic realm. Instead of seeking vengeance, he was cooperating with the lich?
And how had he managed to survive in Chaos Space at all—and even grow so bloated and massive?
Neither Tiamat nor Zariel knew the specific details of how the City of Alchemy had vanished. They had only heard rumors that the lich had once again swindled others and extracted massive benefits from the deities.
As for how they had locked onto coordinates, Tiamat was not surprised.
For a divination wizard, establishing coordinates for a spatial conduit was child's play. Most deities could not command the power of fate, which was precisely why Mister Misfortune was so valuable—valuable enough that Tiamat had been willing to trade millions of souls for him.
Unfortunately, she had been coerced by Anbaixiu, that counterfeiting lich, and forced to forfeit Mister Misfortune's soul.
Yet compared to Mister Misfortune, this lich seemed even more valuable. Not only did he wield the power of fate, but he also possessed an uncanny knack for twisting minds and turning black into white. To be completely honest, they had seen divination wizards before, but one who commanded both the power of fate and the art of deceit was truly unheard of.
Both hell lords stared intently at Anbaixiu. At that moment, they both desperately wanted to drag him straight into Hell and make him their puppet... No, even an underling would do. With someone like Anbaixiu working for them, the corruption of mortals would accelerate tenfold.
However, Anbaixiu was not the protagonist of today's events.
From the very beginning, this had been Mister Misfortune's plan. He wanted to save the kingdom, not merely buy it a few extra days. Even though Mister Misfortune had traded himself to buy back some of the nobles, the kingdom had lost its leadership and plunged into turmoil.
Sacrificing himself had merely been a bid to keep the kingdom safe while he toiled for the hell lords—or at least prevent the Kingdom of the Unholy Hymn from sinking into Hell.
Then Anbaixiu had stepped in and altered the terms of the contract. Turning a lifetime of servitude into a one-time job gave the hell lords every reason to resume their campaign against the Kingdom of the Unholy Hymn.
Mister Misfortune knew the kingdom needed time to recover from the chaos, and neither Ryan nor the hell lords would grant them that time.
The only solution was to isolate the kingdom completely.
Anbaixiu had suggested that the land of chaos was a viable option, purely because he had connections there.
After hearing Anbaixiu's description of the chaotic realm, Mister Misfortune had agreed that it was a sound choice. The next step was for Anbaixiu to find a way to contact Gary Watts.
That had not been particularly difficult. Anbaixiu had taken a magic mirror, opened a tiny spatial rift, and tossed it through.
At the same time, he had cast in a large number of the Dice of Fate.
A few days later, the magic mirror had drifted straight to the ruined City of Alchemy.
Communication via the magic mirror could span planes because the host network of the system was located within the God of Alchemy's divine realm, which was already an alternate plane. Communication between the two sides did not suffer the slightest delay.
When Gary Watts heard that Anbaixiu planned to dump an entire kingdom of ten million people into the chaotic realm, he had been stunned for quite a while.
Anbaixiu had said he would visit and deepen their cooperation, but who expected cooperation on this scale? They had only parted ways a few days ago, and Anbaixiu was already sending him an entire kingdom?
Fortunately, Gary Watts knew Anbaixiu very well. Cunning though the lich was, his words could be taken at face value. Regardless of how many secrets he kept, if he promised a kingdom, it would not be a mere city.
Gary Watts immediately replied that he had territory to spare.
He had already reclaimed several regions, populated by an assortment of bizarre races. The arrival of tieflings would certainly diversify their cuisine.
As long as the tieflings provided him with faith, Gary Watts would shelter them all and let them live peacefully in the land of chaos.
Whatever they lacked, Gary Watts would simply use his tentacles to plunder from elsewhere.
The chaotic realm did not actually lack resources; rather, every landmass drifted at random and could not establish contact with others, causing its inhabitants to perish from scarcity. Gary Watts, however, possessed tentacles capable of navigating the chaos. He was the apex predator of this world, its sole hunter.
Mister Misfortune had ultimately approved the plan, and now was the time to execute it.
With Gary Watts's assistance, the chaotic space expanded relentlessly. It soon blanketed the entire sky, startling both the Githyanki and the Ryanites locked in bitter combat below. The Ryanites turned deathly pale; in their current state, they could not withstand an army from yet another race.
Beneath this chaotic sky, Mister Misfortune stood alone, radiating a brilliant, arresting light.
For the first time, the threads of fate were revealed to everyone present. The entire sky became a dense weave of lines that stretched endlessly outward, far beyond the horizon of mortal sight.
Having completed his part of the task, Anbaixiu stood aside to watch the show. The banishment of an entire kingdom was a historic event unseen in ten thousand years, an epic worthy of the history books for generations to come. When he wrote his autobiography in a few years, this chapter alone could be published as a standalone volume and fetch a handsome price.
At that moment, Tiamat and Zariel approached Anbaixiu once more. Unable to contain her curiosity any longer, Tiamat asked, "Even if you can open a portal to Chaos Space and have someone waiting on the other side, how do you plan to send the Kingdom of the Unholy Hymn through? Spatial conduits have strict limitations. It's impossible for one to swallow an entire kingdom."
This was likely an absolute rule established long ago by Lord Ao: spatial conduits could not be used to slice the world apart.
One could enter and exit Anbaixiu's personal demiplane, but it could not be used to sever objects. Closing a portal halfway to bisect someone was fundamentally impossible; either the portal would fail to close, or the creature caught halfway would be ejected.
The same applied to spatial portals into Chaos Space. It could be opened, but it could not swallow the tiefling kingdom like a gaping beast.
This time, Anbaixiu did not conceal the truth. Watching Mister Misfortune enveloped in the threads of fate, he explained, "Naturally, we can't slice the Kingdom of the Unholy Hymn into pieces and cast Mountain Shifting to shovel it through. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land. What we can do, however, is let this world push the Unholy Hymn out on its own."
Tiamat pressed, "How could a mortal possibly achieve that?"
"It's simple. Sever the kingdom's ties to the mortal world, and this land will become a foreign body within it—like a gallstone, or a virus, a harmful substance that must be purged. That is what he is doing now: severing the threads of fate one by one, using every ounce of his power, his flesh, and his soul."
Mister Misfortune's body was slowly crumbling. Like a pane of glass, countless fractures spiderwebbed across his form, while the vast webs of fate before him snapped in sweeping waves.
Chapter 348