Tanabo

Yu Xian was not worried that the gods might try to snatch the spiritual spark. He simply did not want the news of him acquiring such an extraordinary spiritual spark to leak from their lips. That was the fundamental reason the gods had to die. If they had not kept their eyes glued to the Calamity Demonic Dragon or the Hero Party, nothing would have happened to them at all. Next, Yu Xian turned his gaze toward the Hero Party. It was time once again to happily eat melon and watch the show! *** Meanwhile, elsewhere. The Aska was still searching for Yu Xian. This time, however, the world they entered presented a scene of utter devastation, strewn with corpses as far as the eye could see. Even though Nora and the others had traversed quite a few worlds and witnessed many tragic sights born of war, they were still shaken by this horrifying scene. "There's something off about these people's wounds," Niman spoke up at that moment. Everyone leaned in to observe carefully, quickly discovering that an eerie power lingered within the corpses' wounds. It was precisely this power that prevented the injuries from healing, causing even minor scrapes to fester directly into fatal wounds. Niman stepped out of the Aska and landed lightly on the ground. With a gentle wave of her hand, a shower of green powder drifted down. Frowning, she returned to the Aska. "A Mighty One!" Niman said gravely to everyone. Zhang Shou, however, chuckled. "Finally ran into one! I was just wondering earlier—we've hopped through so many worlds, yet we hadn't encountered a single Mighty One. It felt way too bizarre." "Mighty Ones aren't common cabbages you find by the roadside. Not running into one for hundreds or thousands of years is nothing unusual," the Twilight Giant, Zhougelasi, explained from the side. His expression then grew somber as he added, "Besides, being a Mighty One only means having greater strength; it doesn't mean they're necessarily good. The one we've run into this time is likely an evil Mighty One!" "Then we beat them to death!" Zhang Shou gripped his blade, speaking solemnly. The biggest difference between him and Yu Xian was that he possessed a little more compassion, and he was willing to lay down his life for strangers. "Let's find the culprit first before deciding," Nora said after a moment's thought, settling the matter. With Yu Xian absent, as his wife, she had become the true master of the Aska. Under normal circumstances, no one opposed her decisions. The Aska immediately began to move, searching for the perpetrator behind this worldly tragedy. *** Above a certain sea. Scores of powerful experts were besieging a woman. She sat upon a peacock-styled throne, looking as if she were fanning a magnificent tail. She looked down arrogantly at her heavily battered opponents and smiled. "Don't stop now. Keep attacking. If you can't kill me, this world is finished." "Witch, I'll take you down with me!" roared a bearded burly man. Wielding a pair of massive warhammers, he launched a desperate, suicidal strike directly at her. He completely abandoned his own defense just to smash her to death. The woman was simply too vicious, openly intending to slaughter every living creature in the entire world. By now, the people of his homeland were likely already dead. "A delightful emotion!" the woman smiled faintly. Just as the bearded man was about to bring his hammers down upon her, she commanded the peacock feathers behind her to lengthen in an instant. The soft feathers suddenly took on an extremely sharp edge, piercing through the man's throat in the blink of an eye. An ordinarily mortal wound like that naturally wouldn't kill the bearded man, but the woman directly infused her power into the feathers. That power rapidly eroded him, ensuring his wound would never heal. With just one strike, she had underhandedly slain a far from weak opponent. Of course, "not weak" was only in the context of this world's power system. To the woman, all of them were merely ants to be toyed with. She was simply having fun teasing ants. *** Tanabo, a member of the Feather God Clan. She was an anomaly among her people, born with the innate ability to read the minds of others. In her presence, no creature could deceive or conceal anything from her. Yet because of this, constantly exposed to what lay underneath, she gradually came to understand the darkness of the mortal heart. Those murky thoughts, those greedy desires. All of them became the clay that molded her character. She had not been born evil, but she was worse than born evil. At age five. Through meticulous plotting, she earned the opportunity to be selected as a holy maiden. To stand out from the rest, she orchestrated an arson attack on the Feather God Nest, burning all of her rivals alive. Because she acted with absolute secrecy, she successfully attained the status of Holy Maiden of the Feather God Clan. Through that role, she gained access to countless cultivation manuals that ordinary people could never lay eyes upon. As she cultivated, her abilities grew increasingly formidable. Where she could once only read the mind of the person right in front of her, she later expanded her range to eavesdrop on vast swathes of thoughts at once. She then used the dark secrets people desperately concealed as blackmail to extort immense resources, thereby becoming the youngest, yet most powerful, holy maiden in history. Weaving a terrifying web of connections out of "secrets," she assassinated the clan's high council, planted her own pawns in their seats, and even joined forces with several formidable experts to forcefully slay the head priest of the temple, establishing herself as the Feather God's sole voice. To be fair, if not for a minor accident, she likely would have stayed in the Feather God Clan her entire life. Propelled by her ambition, she would have climbed step by step to the very pinnacle, becoming the Feather God Clan's true deity, an object of worship for all. Then came the accident. She unexpectedly crossed into a place called the "Zhen Realm," and her assigned class was Doom Messenger! It was a class whose power scaled higher the worse one's own luck became, and upon initiating combat, it could swap luck with the opponent, guaranteeing absolute victory. Rather than quitting the game, she relied on her wits to navigate all sides, at one point even becoming a collaborator with the monsters. In this way, she leveled up smoothly and grew steadily stronger. Several cosmic annihilation epochs ago, she reached the level cap, shattered the void, and became a true Mighty One. The very first thing she did upon emerging was crush the native universe that had birthed and raised her into dust. She utterly despised the cacophony of background noise she had heard throughout her past, and besides, she had already planned her path from the very beginning and knew where she was headed. That world was of no further use to her. On the contrary, containing far too many traces of her past life, it could easily be used by enemies to track her down. Crushing it to completely eradicate it was the best choice. By now, Tanabo had become an exceptionally powerful Mighty One. She could even be called a Mighty One among Mighty Ones. She had already begun seeking Origin Return, and the source she chose was the one with the highest compatibility with her: Calamity! Perhaps due to that extraordinary affinity, she easily condensed a Calamity Seed and began harvesting all manner of calamity origins. Later, dissatisfied with the sluggish pace of passive gathering, she took the initiative to manufacture calamities herself. Sure enough, the results were far better and faster. Now, the Calamity Seed within her had already sprouted. When it grew into a towering tree and bore the Calamity Fruit, that would be the day she became an Origin Returner.