Amidst the shattered ruins of Cloud City, Dead Frenzy sat perched upon a broken wall, her legs crossed lazily. The secrets guarded by her short skirt peeked faintly through the gap where her thighs overlapped, while two slender fingers held a half-burned cigarette. Every time she appeared, she was dressed to the nines, giving the impression of an urban beauty living in a lavish penthouse apartment—arriving and departing in private cars, frequenting exclusive venues, as glamorous as a flourishing rose requiring meticulous care.
Yet her presence in such a dilapidated ruin felt entirely natural. Even when facing a cataclysm of tearing skies and crumbling earth, she remained as placid and unruffled as ever. This composure lent her an ethereal, smoke-like aura—though she was fundamentally an apparition, a mass of yearning to begin with.
She was like a beam of starlight projected from the distant future across countless light-years; the star that had birthed it had long since burned out, and the beauty Yaxiu beheld was merely the radiance of something already destroyed.
Yet upon hearing Yaxiu's question, Dead Frenzy shot him a sidelong glance. A sudden ripple broke across her lake-calm face, and her blood-red eyes turned lively—like a solitary beam of starlight encountering a supernova on the verge of erupting, sparked with sudden curiosity to see just how bright it could truly shine.
She took a leisurely drag from her cigarette, luxuriously puffing out a cloud of mist. Yaxiu was anxious beyond measure, but he dared not rush her. He could only stand nearby and stare intently at her, as if he possessed Ouroboros's power to cast spells with a mere gaze.
"I don't know," Dead Frenzy answered, giving a reply entirely outside Yaxiu's expectations.
"How could you not know?" Yaxiu asked, stunned. "Didn't you fight Ouroboros all the way from the downstream of the Flowing Gold River to the upstream? The people who understand Ouroboros best in this world are you!"
"While you're right, I genuinely don't know." Dead Frenzy pointed toward Ouroboros in the distance. "Do you actually believe the Ouroboros before us is the complete World-Devouring Serpent?"
Yaxiu froze, swiftly grasping her meaning. "The Sixfold Hell was swallowed into Ouroboros's belly, so the Ouroboros appearing in Fantasy Hell is...?"
"A tenth? A seventh? I'm not certain," Dead Frenzy said. "You can think of this Ouroboros as merely the World-Devouring Serpent's digestive system, perhaps with a bit of its immune system thrown in, but absolutely not the true body that devours civilizations and consumes all living beings.
"If it were the complete Ouroboros, resurrecting every sorcerer throughout all of history wouldn't even be enough to fill the cracks between its teeth. But you will never have the chance to face its true body anyway. The power it can wield depends on the extent to which it has infected the world. When it can deploy one hundred percent of its power, that also means the world has already been thoroughly digested.
"A situation like this is a first... In a normal invasion of a world, Ouroboros begins devouring upward from the first layer of the Void Realm. The importance of the bottom layer of the Void Realm is far beyond your imagination; at the very least, the Void Realm would never willingly surrender the Knowledge Sea. You can think of it like a normal human being bitten on the torso by a venomous snake—even as the venom courses through the entire body, one has no choice but to endure it.
"But the Sixfold Hell is different. In the hierarchy of the Void Realm, it is the least important layer; both Ruby Mountain and the Sevenfold Heaven are vastly more important than it. The fact that everyone forgot the existence of the Sixfold Hell after Ouroboros swallowed it wasn't just due to Ouroboros's 'Name-Devouring' nature, but also because the Void Realm barely put up a struggle, forsaking the Sixfold Hell with utter decisiveness. If Ouroboros were to swallow the Knowledge Sea, mortals would, at most, gradually forget knowledge related to it over time; they would never forget it completely in an instant. If the first four layers are the torso of the Void Realm, then the Sixfold Hell and the Sevenfold Heaven can only be considered its limbs," Dead Frenzy said. "When bitten on the torso, one must endure it, but when bitten on a limb, it can simply be amputated."
Yaxiu suddenly recalled something. "So the Observer guided Ouroboros to swallow Hell? He wanted to minimize the crisis?"
"Perhaps," Dead Frenzy sneered. "Though certainly not out of benevolence. More likely, he wanted to test how the Void Realm performed under different conditions... It just so happened that this yielded a relatively better outcome this time around."
"Or maybe he truly did his best to save the world—"
Dead Frenzy abruptly reached toward his face with the glowing tip of her cigarette. Yaxiu flinched, unsure of what he had said to provoke her, but he did not dodge, letting the scorching ember approach his skin.
Yet Dead Frenzy merely raised a finger and poked his forehead.
"Our world was destroyed long ago," she said, tilting her head. Her lazy smile once more took on that smoke-like, illusory quality. "What is left for us to save? What does this world have to do with us? If a child couldn't get a balloon when young, will they still want one after growing up?"
Yaxiu looked at her and shook his head. "But don't you care deeply about whether Sonia caught her balloon? There are two kinds of people caught in the rain: one longs to knock away everyone else's umbrella so everyone gets drenched together, while the other wants to hold an umbrella over someone else. Seeing others live happily allows one to feel a little warmth as well. I think you—"
"Then the Observer and Weixi are definitely the first kind," Dead Frenzy cut him off, taking a sullen puff of her cigarette. "Drop it. I don't want to discuss this sort of topic with you."
Yaxiu blinked. "Are you the type who gets shy when praised for your good qualities? In that respect, you're completely different from Sonia—"
Dead Frenzy grabbed his hand and ground the lit cigarette directly into his palm. Whatever brand her cigarette was, it actually managed to burn a faint red mark into the palm of Yaxiu's impervious soul body. *In this respect, she really is different from Sonia. Compared to the silver-tongued Sonia, Dead Frenzy prefers to state her attitude through actions,* Yaxiu thought.
She rubbed Yaxiu's reddened palm, calmly returning to the topic. "Right now, Ouroboros has swallowed the Sixfold Hell, but it is also trapped within it. Constrained by the depth of its infection, the power it displays is only slightly greater than all of Fanxing and the others combined. So if you insist on meddling in this war...
"Most likely, it will be in vain." Dead Frenzy released his hand; his palm had already healed completely. "Yet it might also produce a miracle... a tiny miracle."
With that, Dead Frenzy tapped out another cigarette from her pack. After Yaxiu lit it for her, she said nothing more, paying no heed to his reactions as she leisurely gazed off at the clash of supreme gods in the distance.
Yaxiu wanted to ask for her advice, but after debating back and forth, he swallowed the words hovering in his throat.
She had deliberately stopped there. Perhaps she was mocking his naivety in her heart, or perhaps she wanted to egg him on to sell his mind, but she said nothing of the sort.
She gave Yaxiu no chance to act on impulse, much less guided his emotions. She simply laid out the objective facts, leaving the subjective decision entirely to him.
If Yaxiu kept asking, what he wanted would no longer be an answer, but an order—whether it was to stop him or encourage him didn't matter, as long as it gave him a push.
He had always been pushed forward. Many who knew him thought he was decisive and courageous, as if he would feel uncomfortable all over if a day passed without an adventure. But in reality, that was not the case; he simply had no choice.
In Shattered Lake Prison, he would have died had he not broken out; in the Nabistine Palace, Lisi Diya would have become a vessel for a god if he had not risked his life; in the Silent Spiral, he would have lost Black Crow and Silver Lantern if he had not been ruthless; in the Country of All Stars, he would have been slaughtered like cattle if he had not given everything he had... Others thought he had a choice because he always took risks for others, assuming he could have lived a peaceful life long ago if he were just slightly more selfish. But to Yaxiu, clinging stubbornly to everything and refusing to let go was the greatest selfishness of all.
It wasn't that he couldn't learn to be selfish; he simply couldn't learn to let go.
No matter how heavy the burden, he refused to lighten the load, greedily guarding everything without letting go, whether friends or lovers... In that sense, Yaxiu could be considered a qualified sorcerer. He was sufficiently greedy.
He didn't have much personal initiative at all. Could a child refusing to let go of a beloved toy really be called decisive?
Yet this time, Yaxiu stood at a fork in fate.
There was no pressing urgency, no imminent threat right before his eyes. He had no room for impulse; he had to make a calm decision.
Dead Frenzy had made it very clear: this world had only a few months left. This did not just apply to Sword Princess and the others on the outside, but also to Igola and Harvey in Hell; everyone shared the same final deadline.
If he did nothing, he could peacefully enjoy these final months. But if he sold his mind for a third time... even if he succeeded, there was no telling how much he could accomplish; there was certainly no possibility of completely eliminating the threat of Ouroboros, merely extending things by several years or decades at best... Even if he failed, he could still return to reality. Looking at it this way, it was an absolute steal, and Yaxiu ought to hurry up and pay a quarter of his mind to join the battle.
Yet this was his final chance. If he still had three quarters of his mind remaining, he would not hesitate for a second. But he had only two quarters left, meaning this was the absolute last time he could use it while still alive; the next would be death.
Still, if the world was about to be destroyed, what was the point of keeping those two quarters?
Yaxiu tried very hard to persuade himself. But losing his mind also meant losing memories. He had already forgotten Weise and Weixi; whose turn would it be this time? Sonia or Lisi Diya?
He was willing to sacrifice much, but those two were a price he simply could not afford to pay.
Perhaps Weise and Weixi had also been prices he could not afford to pay, but he had already forgotten just how important they once were to him.
Moreover, this time was different from the previous two. The first two times had left him no choice; he would have died without paying, leaving no time for thought. But this time he could flee. There was no army of the Forgotten hunting him, no four God-Leaders lying in ambush. He only needed to wait an hour or two, and he could return to reality and fall asleep holding Sword Princess's soft, fragrant body.
Paying offered no guarantee of success, whereas not paying was guaranteed ease.
Yaxiu truly despised this sort of dilemma. He would rather Ouroboros relentlessly pursued him, would rather Fanxing suddenly went mad and tried to hack him to pieces, so that he could sell his mind a third time without reservations.
*Even if I forget Sonia or Lisi Diya, there was nothing I could do. It's all the world's fault; I tried my best. I just had no choice.*
Yet the Supreme of Sorcery and the six-winged God-Leaders held the line against Ouroboros ahead, paying him no attention whatsoever.
Yaxiu had assumed Fanxing and the others would harbor ill intentions upon noticing him, planning to cut him down first as an experience packet to power up before turning back to deal with Ouroboros... In the end, they hadn't spared him a single glance.
Why did this bunch of bastard sorcerers choose this exact moment to display the responsibility befitting God-Leaders and Supremes? Why hadn't they wavered even now? Had they really not realized yet that they couldn't defeat Ouroboros?
All his life, Yaxiu had been dragged into colosseums, which was why he couldn't comprehend how Fanxing and the others could hold their heads high, puff out their chests, and stride into the arena of their own accord.
At a time like this, shouldn't someone appear to remind him of the beauty of life and help steel his resolve? Or at least, someone could stake their hopes on him and shove him into the colosseum—that would work too!
"Yaxiu."
Yaxiu and Dead Frenzy turned their heads to see Harvey and Igola flying over. Ouroboros's casual glance had not only shattered the final fortress assembled with everything the demigods of Hell could muster, but had nearly pulverized these demigods as well, sending Yaxiu and the others flying in all directions.
Seeing that they were safe and sound, Yaxiu breathed a sigh of relief. But noticing the urgent expressions on their faces, he couldn't help finding it strange. "What happened?"
"Take this!"
Harvey thrust a piece of sorcery spirit amber into his hands. Yaxiu looked closely and found a mosquito inside the amber.
"This is the greatest achievement of sorcery in my entire life!" Harvey said solemnly. "You will definitely love it!"
"This is a sorcery spirit?"
"This is the 'Banded Aedes' sorcery spirit," Harvey introduced. "It's extremely simple to use. Once you release it, it will reproduce automatically, able to survive in temperatures ranging from thirty degrees below zero to forty degrees Celsius. For every one thousand one-winged Banded Aedes, they will fuse into a two-winged one; ten thousand two-winged ones will fuse into a three-winged one; one hundred thousand three-winged ones will fuse into a four-winged one. As for a five-winged god, I haven't managed to research that yet, but four-winged should be more than enough.
"Don't be intimidated by the massive numbers. If you let them breed without restraint, harvesting several dozen four-winged Banded Aedes every month won't be a problem at all. The Banded Aedes is a single-use consumable sorcery spirit that currently has three applications: when used for offense, it can pierce through the vast majority of barriers, inflicting a severely intense itching and pain curse upon the enemy; when used for healing, it injects pure life energy into a demigod, and so far I haven't found any injury it cannot heal; when used for movement, it temporarily makes you as light as a mosquito, dramatically accelerating your movement speed, though it only lasts ten seconds.
"Isn't it incredible?" Harvey grew more and more excited as he spoke. "The vast majority of four-winged sorcery spirits have virtually no effect on demigods; they have to be organized into wonders to affect a soul body. That's why I specifically invented this single-use consumable sorcery spirit, the Banded Aedes. Because it is single-use, its potency far exceeds ordinary four-winged sorcery spirits, barely managing to take effect on demigods even if it doesn't reach the god level.
"Moreover, it's remarkably easy to obtain, requiring zero effort. I can cultivate it even in Hell, and with your billions of people in reality, it's practically effortless. Oh, don't worry, breeding Banded Aedes doesn't harm life. Necromancy is, after all, the school of sorcery best at utilizing life. After a Banded Aedes takes a single bite from a mammal, it creates a life curse lasting twenty-four hours, transferring the animal's life energy into itself without needing extra nutrition. Throughout this entire process, aside from itching, the mammal experiences no discomfort whatsoever.
"What's more, I very thoughtfully added life monitoring to the Banded Aedes. If a mammal's life curse reaches the transfer cap, it won't be harassed by Banded Aedes anymore until the old life curse fades after twenty-four hours, at which point new Banded Aedes will bite it.
"To adapt to harsh environments, the Banded Aedes is fireproof, waterproof, and impact-resistant—the fire sorcery school Chikala left me was a huge help with that. Even if swatted to death, they have a certain chance of coming back to life, and even if they don't, they'll lay eggs in time.
"However, I haven't studied wind sorcery much, so I couldn't dampen the noise they make while flying. But I added a necromantic illusion to the sound. Now, although ordinary people can hear the buzzing, they mistakenly believe it's coming from the opposite direction, drastically reducing the chances of the Banded Aedes being spotted.
"Life and death in cycle, undying and unperishing!
"I am convinced this achievement will decisively reverse the necromancy school's disadvantage, serving as a milestone for its renaissance and fulfilling its historical mission to bridge the past and the future!" Harvey looked at Yaxiu with burning eyes. "What do you think?"
"You truly deserve to die,"
Yaxiu said with utter sincerity. "For the life of me, I can't find an insult worse than 'beast' to describe you."
Chapter 1230