Think Whatever You Want

The Bloodthorn Dragonhunter unfurled his bone wings at will, the air currents letting out shrill howls in tune with his heart's will as colossal boulders rose from the earth. When he lunged toward Yaxiu, his twin claws kicked up waves of blood-red clouds capable of corroding all things, and countless boulders hurtled violently at Yaxiu with a towering momentum like the heavens collapsing and the earth splitting! This was no Void Realm creature, but a demigod sorcerer! Yaxiu made an accurate judgment in an instant. He had long heard that in the Abyss realm, a unique sorcery school called Parasitism was still passed down. Parasite sorcerers merged themselves with Void Realm creatures, allowing them to shift into Void Realm beasts to battle at any time—a condition known as the "Parasitic" state. Furthermore, while in the Parasitic state, they could still cast other miracles, truly combining the physique of a dragon beast with the intellect of a sorcerer! The Bloodthorn Dragonhunter before him was undoubtedly a parasitic demigod! Yaxiu deployed Sword Body Barrier and Refraction Ward simultaneously. The Sword Body Barrier was instantly shattered by the crashing boulders, while Refraction Ward withstood a strike from the dragonhunter's claws at the cost of only one protection charge, though accidentally brushing against the enclosing blood clouds cost it another. Yaxiu raised an eyebrow. He had assumed Sword Body Barrier could block the flying stone fragments, but unexpectedly, these boulders seemed to have been reinforced by the dragonhunter, possessing unimaginable weight and hardness; treating them as ordinary rocks to defend against would lead to severe consequences. The Bloodthorn Dragonhunter appeared rash and reckless, but a seemingly ordinary charging assault was filled with underhanded schemes and traps—the slightest carelessness would result in catastrophic wounds... Such was the combat caliber of a Hell demigod! Yaxiu retreated rapidly, Heart Sword moving with his will, laying down layers of ink-mark snares before him in a flash. When the Bloodthorn Dragonhunter swooped forward, the ink marks twined tightly around him like silk threads, forcefully cutting countless bloody wounds into his flesh! Miracle: Heart Pen! Though the Bloodthorn Dragonhunter's injuries healed almost instantaneously, Yaxiu was already quite satisfied—this was merely an ordinary miracle forcibly elevated to legendary rank. Stopping a demigod for even a single second was a victory. In hindsight, Heart Pen still held considerable potential. If he had the opportunity later, Yaxiu planned to construct a new wonder based on Heart Pen. Not only because of its utility, but also because this miracle possessed great sentimental value to him... It was just as important as Heart Sword and Substitute. Amidst the ebb and flow of the pursuit, Yaxiu tested several of his other miracles, but the results were all rather underwhelming. Right then, Yaxiu's whole body jolted. Tens of millions of tons of pressure descended upon him. A mortal in that moment would have been twisted into paste and smeared across the ground by the gravity, but Refraction Ward bought Yaxiu crucial reaction time. A gravity wonder... Truly marvelous, I want one too! He lifted his gaze and saw the Bloodthorn Dragonhunter's frenzied claws already within arm's reach. You want Hell, so I'll give you Hell! Wonder: Demon Form! Pitch-black darkness like molten asphalt surged over Yaxiu's surface, casting him into a towering, vicious demon. His hands automatically morphed into twin blades. Treating the colossal pressure as nothing, he clashed head-on against the Bloodthorn Dragonhunter! Demon Form was also a wonder derived from the Parasitism school. For the duration of the demonic transformation, all of the sorcerer's resistances increased dramatically, and all damage received was borne by the demon, merely reducing the transformation time without harming the sorcerer's actual body. The demon's hands could morph into any weapon, and as long as the sorcerer's comprehension of the weapon was deep enough, they could even morph into wonder-grade special weapons! Blade collided with frenzied claw; the blade emerged unscathed while a piece of the claw shattered. The Bloodthorn Dragonhunter's thorns trembled all over, knocked flying by the monstrous strength! That was only natural. What rank of wonder was the dragonhunter's transformation? Low-tier? Mid-tier? High-tier? Even if it were a high-tier wonder, it would still be constrained by the scale of a Temple of Sorcery. Wonder Demon Form, however, was a supreme-tier wonder that required a stronghold pieced together from nearly ten Temples of Sorcery just to accommodate it—the sole trump card of the major power "Ancient Castle"! The Bloodthorn Dragonhunter immediately stabilized his footing to fight again, but Yaxiu no longer needed him to test his past miracles; what he wanted to test now was... his newly acquired wonder! A faint golden glow rippled across Yaxiu's ferocious demonic form. The moment he attacked the dragonhunter, the golden light transformed into a chain that bound the creature, freezing the gargantuan beast in place! Expendable wonder: Time Lock. Upon hitting a target, it locked the enemy's time! While extraordinarily practical, it was not calculated by the number of attacks, but rather consumed according to the duration of the lock. The wonder had accumulated 25 seconds of locked time, meaning that if Yaxiu used it all at once, he could freeze the dragonhunter for a full 25 seconds! However, if the enemy suffered attacks, it would consume more than ten times the time to keep them locked—meaning spending ten seconds just to pummel the enemy for one second, and the stronger the enemy, the more time consumed. Thus, the proper way to use Time Lock was to spend one second freezing the enemy, then reposition oneself to the optimal attack angle. Yaxiu landed on the dragonhunter's neck, the blade in his right hand ringing with a crisp hum of wind. With a vicious thrust, he plunged the blade into the nape of the neck, piercing precisely through the spine. As the wind whistled and howled, countless Sword Marks erupted simultaneously inside the dragonhunter's body. The demon roared almost cheerfully, charging down along the clearly exposed spine as the blade chopped through hard bone segment after segment. Fountains of blood welled up in his wake, and the dragonhunter's entire body disintegrated, tumbling down in countless broken fragments! Wonder: Bladestorm! This Bladestorm was naturally not a sorcerer spinning around with blades like a Beyblade, but rather a tempest of steel raised once the blade pierced into an enemy's body, grinding them to pieces from within. To tell the truth, this wonder wasn't particularly practical against sorcerers—after all, a single slash would leave a sorcerer dead or crippled anyway—but it was ideal against massive beasts, ensuring their regenerative abilities were utterly decimated! Crimson rain of blood poured down with a clatter. Yaxiu dismissed Demon Form. Dragon blood streaked across his face, lending his face—ordinarily as approachable as a trash can—a rather ferocious look. He glanced at Dead Frenzy, who was leaning against a wall puffing on a cigarette, and asked, "You're not going to help?" "If I help, things will only get worse." "Why did an enemy like this suddenly show up?" Yaxiu asked. "Didn't they say everyone here was eaten by Ouroboros?" "Let me ask you a question," Dead Frenzy replied. "If one could live safe and sound inside Ouroboros's stomach, do you think we would still be fleeing along the timeline?" Yaxiu froze, then pondered for a moment before nodding. "Yes." "Oh? Why?" "None of you are people willing to just scrape by," Yaxiu said. "Even Nether Demon wouldn't want to live in a hopeless apocalypse. You are vicious beasts looking to avenge yourselves on the world, not ants humbly begging to survive." "Still, if you could rest and reorganize in a devoured world, you wouldn't feel like there was nowhere left to run," he added. "Are The Forgotten the Serpent's Stomach's method of dealing with you?" "One of them," Dead Frenzy said. "You can think of yourself as a virus invading a human body, and The Forgotten are like the body's white blood cells. They are tasked with destroying everything with a name, and won't allow any living creature to survive in Ouroboros's stomach." "Are The Forgotten all sorcerers swallowed by Ouroboros?" Yaxiu sighed. "I get the feeling Harvey would really love this kind of necromancy miracle..." "It isn't of the necromancy faction. Once any of The Forgotten recall their name, they can regain the strength of their peak era, something the necromancy school could never achieve." Dead Frenzy shook her head. "If you had to define it, it's closer to a time miracle, summoning forth one's past self... But is it really okay for you to be taking it so easy?" "What do you mean?" "The appearance of The Forgotten means the 'Stomach' has already noticed you. Killing one will only draw more of them," Dead Frenzy explained. "Until you are completely marked by the 'Stomach,' at which point the moment you appear, countless Forgotten will pour out to besiege you." A chill ran through Yaxiu's heart. He hurriedly looted the source crystal materials in the stronghold, and happened to discover another satin box—perhaps the only method of preserving them—inside which lay a calamity mark! Affixing the calamity mark to the back of his hand, Yaxiu found the eye mark on his hand now possessed two pupils. When he stepped out of the stronghold, he saw two masses of white foam emerge from the ground nearby. Fighting The Forgotten was utterly pointless: there was no loot, and winning would only summon more pursuers. Yaxiu therefore ignored them completely, sprinting straight toward the next stronghold as he asked offhandedly, "Aside from The Forgotten, how else does the Serpent's Stomach expel us?" "Expel? No, no, no, The Forgotten aren't expelling you; they're here to make you 'join.'" Dead Frenzy said, "If you are defeated by them, you will naturally be digested by Ouroboros as well." "The Stomach's other method won't affect you much," she said. "It's merely that you'll continually lose memories." "Oh... WHAT?!" Yaxiu stared straight at Dead Frenzy. "I'll lose my memories?!" "To be precise, for every second you spend in the Stomach, you lose one second of memories," Dead Frenzy explained. "Yet memory is a delicate kind of information. If a crucial second is lost, the entire memory gradually fades. Thus, any coward who tries to cling to life in the Stomach—be they demigods, Divine Lords, or Supremes—will usually forget everything within a year and be digested silently by the Stomach." "Isn't that extremely serious?" Yaxiu's voice trembled slightly. "How does that not affect me much?" "Because of your bonds." Dead Frenzy said, "We also lingered on in the Stomach for a time. To avoid turning into idiots, we developed a miracle called Bonds, forming links with one another to lock in each other's memories and barely stem the flow of memory loss." "You share rank-four bonds with them, so you can survive in the Stomach for around four years before completely forgetting your shared memories with them." Yaxiu paused and asked, "Then what about my... other memories?" "Naturally, they will be wiped clean," Dead Frenzy said languidly. "Though even if I tell you, you probably haven't noticed what you've forgotten—" "No, I know what I forgot," Yaxiu murmured. "I forgot Harvey's joke about the coffin lid... That's why I had to guess for so long." Harvey had once said he carved a chart of Yaxiu's tangled love life onto his coffin lid, and Yaxiu had been angry enough to want to beat him up. When the clue on the coffin lid appeared, he should have recalled this immediately. There was no reason a demigod sorcerer's memory would be so poor, especially since he hadn't even begun indulging his desires yet... Evidently, his memory regarding the coffin lid had been lost the very first time he entered Hell. "Are you afraid?" Dead Frenzy asked. "Losing your past self bit by bit." "No," Yaxiu took a deep breath. "If there is no future, what use is clinging to the past? It wouldn't even count as a lifebuoy." "Besides, I won't lose my past self." He looked at Dead Frenzy. "They will keep my past safe." "Once I go back, I will share the entirety of my life with them, and they will connect my distant past to my distant future," he said earnestly. "I won't forget; I just... won't be able to recall it for a time." Dead Frenzy glanced at him and said calmly, "Careful." Yaxiu twisted his body, dodging an all-piercing arrow and forked lightning from behind. The two masses of white foam behind had now materialized into two demigod sorcerers. Both were long-range fighters; thunder and arrows coordinated seamlessly to weave a thunderous yet agile barrage of sorcery! "There's no time to linger in the First Hell any longer." Yaxiu rapidly fled the killing intent behind him. "The longer I stay, the more severe the threat of lost memories and The Forgotten becomes... I need to loot the most legacy in the shortest time and ignore any petty waste along the fringes!" "Dead Frenzy, I'm heading to the Second Hell!" Though they had only looted a third of the First Hell at most, they had already swept through the top three major powers; whether they looted the smaller factions didn't matter. Dead Frenzy glanced back and asked, "Aren't you going to deal with The Forgotten behind you?" "No need, we just have to shake them off!" Moments later, Yaxiu spotted an estate stronghold and immediately dove down, using the estate to block The Forgotten's line of sight. He then raised his right hand, his left fingernails viciously tearing open the eye mark on the back of his right hand, blood and the multicolored mark overlapping! The mark swiftly expanded into a spatial rift, greedily pulling Yaxiu inward. Almost instinctively, Yaxiu reached back, grabbed Dead Frenzy's arm, and yanked her in. In the next second, half his body was pulled into the rift. At that exact instant, a clap of thunder ripped through the silence of Hell! Far in the distance, the archer demigod pulled his bowstring to its limit. In the sluggishly flowing time, the lightning demigod endowed his arrowhead with an annihilating thunder flash that could shatter all defenses. The strongest destructive sorcery, the swiftest speed sorcery—two demigods who had never cooperated in life achieved seamless coordination after being forgotten. The arrow was impossibly fast, leaving sound far behind. The air along its path was electrolyzed into a long trail of cloud waves, hurtling straight toward the spatial rift leading to the Second Hell. The moment a sorcerer was inside a spatial rift was when they were most vulnerable; if the rift suffered damage and destabilized, the collapsing space would sweep the sorcerer into an endless void of spatial turbulence. The world grew deathly still in that instant. The explosion had not yet occurred, the thunderous boom trailed far behind, and everything was yet to unfold. A cigarette silently materialized directly ahead of the arrow. It was a burnt-out cigarette, leaving only a soft butt behind. Compared to the godspeed arrow brimming with annihilating lightning energy, it was no different from trash... or rather, something that belonged in a garbage can once snuffed out. Yet the point was not the cigarette butt, but the two fingers holding it, and the fingers' owner. She casually flicked the cigarette butt across the air, her movement as gentle as brushing away ash. The godspeed arrow instantly shattered into countless fragments. A profound chasm abruptly opened in the earth, and the severed air cascaded down like a waterfall of clouds, as if the entire world had been severed in two. In that fraction of a second, every wisp of wind, every ray of light, every blade of grass, every stone, everything and all of existence throughout all of Hell turned to gaze at Dead Frenzy's silhouette. Yet in the next instant, the rift snapped shut, leaving the First Hell vacant once more. The archer demigod and lightning demigod waited for a moment before melting into masses of white foam, forgotten once again. In the Second Hell, Yaxiu nearly plunged into the water the moment he entered, thankfully unfolding his void wings in time to stay aloft in midair. As far as the eye could see, there was only azure ocean without a single inch of land. Just like the First Hell, the Second Hell had no sky; looking up, Yaxiu saw the reflection of the ocean, appearing as though tens of thousands of tons of seawater were poised to come crashing down in the very next second. This was the Second Hell: the Ocean. Yaxiu suddenly felt his grip loosen. Turning his head, he saw Dead Frenzy slipping her hands into her trouser pockets. He started slightly, only then realizing he had actually made physical contact with Dead Frenzy just now. "Are the demigod strongholds all underwater?" he asked. "For the time being," Dead Frenzy said calmly, "you probably won't have time to loot." "What...?" Gurgle, gurgle. Yaxiu looked down and saw countless white bubbles welling up on the crystal-clear surface of the sea, like blooms of mold sprouting across the blue expanse. Moments later, demigod sorcerers rose one after another from the sea, demigod creatures breached the ocean waters, and hundreds upon thousands of hunters lifted their heads, gazing up at the named creature in the sky. Because the sky above was a reflection of below, everywhere Yaxiu looked—above, below, in all four directions—was filled with deathly still, callous enemies. It felt as though he were pitted against the entire layer of Hell, unable to find a direction to flee, with not a single crevice left to hide. His heart sank bit by bit, ice shards seemingly congealing in his veins. Dealing with one demigod was easy. Two demigods were manageable. Three demigods were barely possible. But thousands of demigods... This place would be his grave. "You can still sell your psyche." Yaxiu turned his head to look back at Dead Frenzy. Realizing something, he asked, "It's impossible for me to cause a scene like this... Is it because of you?" Dead Frenzy concealed her hand, which had grown translucent, behind her back. Calmly, she said, "Think whatever you want."