Chapter 492
Before the aftermath of the battle had even faded, the color universe that had filled the sky began to dissipate like fog.
As if countering the color universe, the canopy sky of the Mini Reaper Garden, which had spread excessively wide, began to shrink as well.
In its place, a deep blue dawn sky revealed itself.
On the eastern horizon, the sun slowly began to show itself.
As I gazed at that brilliant light, I suddenly felt the reality of everything.
It was all over.
“Ah, this is tough…”
With a sigh, the constant burning pain seemed to surge from every corner of my body.
It was a completely different kind of pain from when I used the Halo.
It felt like every cell in my body was experiencing muscle soreness a hundred times over.
The pain stubbornly clung to the Gray Reaper’s body and refused to leave.
Suddenly, the Bleached Reaper came to mind.
The Gray Reaper’s body was somewhat insensitive to pain, but it occurred to me that there was no need to share this pain with the Bleached Reaper.
‘I need to undo the fusion.’
I slowly undid the fusion.
Then, I let my body fall onto the soft marshmallow ground.
As the tension from the battle faded, the fatigue from my whole body came rushing in all at once.
This was a kind of exhaustion I hadn’t felt in a long time since becoming an object.
‘Maah…’
With a worried will, the Bleached Reaper approached me, gazing at me with eyes filled with concern.
“It’s okay.”
I endured the pain and gently patted the Bleached Reaper’s head.
The cause of the pain that engulfed my body was clear.
It was the nameless alchemy I had used to neutralize the red foreign entity.
Looking back, it was an absurd form of alchemy, so the aftermath of this kind was probably inevitable.
[The Alchemist’s God.]
The moment I spoke the final ingredient, everything changed.
Desire and firewood began to burn inside my body, exploding like a fireball.
What followed was an unimaginable surge in power.
It was such an overwhelming rise that it could have easily surpassed the foreign entity and everything beyond it in an instant.
In that moment, just like when I donned the Black Giant, my cognitive abilities reached the very edges of the universe.
A sense of omnipotence enveloped me, as if I could do anything.
Perhaps because I had surpassed even the foreign entity, my domain instantly burned away the red foreign entity.
It wasn’t like the typical foreign entity that simply erodes; it was a domain that completely incinerated everything.
This was probably due to the influence of the firewood I possessed.
It was like a domain that compressed the ‘Alchemist’s Sun’ infinitely.
But this almighty power did not last.
Just as I thought I could conquer the color universe with this level of power, my abilities suddenly began to shrink within an instant.
In terms of time, it wasn’t even 0.1 seconds.
After just that short period of time where I had surpassed the foreign entity, my abilities shrank back, and I fell back into being a regular Gray Reaper.
Ugh.
And now, as the price of briefly touching the realm beyond the foreign entity, my whole body was burning with pain.
‘It seems like an incomplete alchemy, huh?’
That intuition struck me.
After all, a 0.1-second transformation was nonsensical.
The problem was that I lacked the ability to complete this alchemy.
Well, the Bleached Reaper, who knows how to handle alchemy, desire, and firewood, will probably finish it someday, right?
Hehe.
When the Bleached Reaper, noticing my gaze, looked at me with a question mark floating above its head, I got up, enduring the pain wrapping my whole body.
I sat facing the sun, allowing its warm rays to touch me.
The events that had just unfolded felt like a dream.
The fact that I had defeated the red foreign entity still hadn’t fully sunk in.
How long had it been an adversary?
It had been behind the Pudding Reaper incident and had even encouraged the aggressiveness of the objects that once threatened the entire Earth.
One of the great forces that had threatened my peace had finally disappeared.
And now that I thought about it, I could say that, indirectly, the red foreign entity had been the reason I had died in my past life.
Many things would change now.
The number of objects attacking humans would drastically decrease.
Of course, this didn’t mean that harmful objects would disappear.
Even without the blind aggression, there would still be dangerous objects like beasts or those born from human malice.
But still, I felt a sense of pride.
As time passed and the dawn haze lifted, the Mini Reaper Garden’s devastation was laid bare.
The peaceful haven of the Mini Reapers was now filled with the scars of war.
The soft and cozy marshmallow ground had cracked everywhere, as if a massive earthquake had struck.
The deep cracks looked as though they had been slashed by a gigantic monster.
The canopy that had once gently covered the sky was torn apart like a storm-tossed cloth, and the faint light pouring through only made the scene look more desolate.
The once-lush jelly jungle had vanished without a trace.
The grand candy mountain peaks had collapsed, leaving their shapes unrecognizable.
Under normal circumstances, these wounds would have healed in an instant, but the damage caused by the foreign entity’s power didn’t seem to heal easily.
The structures the Mini Reapers had painstakingly built had all turned to ruins.
The scene felt like looking at an old war photo.
But the bigger problem wasn’t the collapsed buildings. It was the Mini Reapers.
Lying cold on the body of the Attachment Human were Mini Reapers, lifeless.
Around them were children, crying tears of sorrow.
The garden, which had always been filled with laughter and happy wills, was now colored by deep feelings of loss.
In the corner, a discarded Incinerator Golem lay in a pitiful state.
Its fallen form seemed to symbolize the current situation of the Mini Reapers and the garden.
The pale morning sunlight cast its rays on the broken gates of James Tower.
Once grand, the gates now stood in a pitiful state.
Signs of explosion covered the walls, and countless bullet marks marred the gates.
It was as if they were scars, showing the marks of a desperate resistance.
The traces of the research institute’s failed attempt to lift the lockdown.
The researchers had used all available means.
They even deployed the advanced weaponry utilizing the Golden Reaper’s energy gems, but nothing had managed to break the blockade.
As the morning sun rose, the once-impregnable blockade disappeared as effortlessly as morning dew.
James looked down at the tablet in his hand.
The screen displayed the continuously updating damage reports in real-time.
His face grew increasingly pale.
“Even if we broke the blockade… we wouldn’t have been able to do anything…”
His mutterings carried a deep sense of helplessness.
The scale of the damage was unimaginable.
More than half of Japan and Korea had literally vanished.
This wasn’t exaggeration or embellishment, but the plain, raw truth.
In the face of the foreign entity’s power, everything had disappeared without a trace.
When checked by satellite, massive mountain ranges, lush forests, bustling cities, and even the roads that stretched out had all vanished.
It was as though someone had erased half of the map.
In their place, there was only an empty expanse, as if it had been carved away.
Strangely, the only thing that remained were human corpses.
This bizarre phenomenon appeared to have been caused by the Mini Reapers.
As if they had tried to protect the humans until the last moment, the Mini Reapers lay lifeless on top of the human bodies.
It was truly an unprecedented catastrophe in the history of objects.
James looked down at his Attachment Reaper with a worried expression.
“Humans have died in droves…”
The slumped shoulders and the expression that seemed on the verge of tears.
The Golden Reapers, who always smiled and made everyone around them happy, were in an alarming state.
James sighed deeply.
“This is bad…”
If the Golden Reaper was in this state, he couldn’t even imagine the shock the other Mini Reapers were experiencing.
He carefully reached out and patted the small head of the Golden Reaper.
The red foreign entity was drifting through the endless gray whirlpool.
The once vast sea of desire, which had been thought to hold infinite possibilities, now felt like nothing more than a cold, indifferent current.
Its consciousness remained faint, but there was no longer any form or will capable of maintaining its identity.
“Was it all a lie…?”
The certainty that had been held for infinite time was now vanishing like bubbles.
Every being, upon raising its rank to reach the level of a ruler, inevitably encounters something.
It was like glimpsing the secrets of the universe.
Some claimed to have seen the gods beyond.
Others said they felt the gaze of the gods, and some even gained certainty that they could reach beyond.
Once, the red foreign entity had gained such certainty, but now, all it faced was emptiness.
In the infinite whirlpool where time could not even be felt, the red foreign entity pondered the meaning of its existence.
The perfection it had longed for seemed to have been nothing but an illusion.
Why had it failed to achieve what the half entity had accomplished?
It was then.
Within the desire, someone lifted the red foreign entity.
Chomp, chomp.
Though it could feel nothing but desire, it somehow seemed to hear the sound of someone savoring something.
