With the divine artifact snatched away, the waterspout Sophia and the others had previously maintained naturally collapsed, and the bugs that regained their freedom pounced forward once again.
"Careful, the bugs are coming again!"
"Those damn Puchis, they really aren't anything good!"
However, before the words even fell, the ocean surged once again, and on a scale far exceeding before. The tossed-up wave crests made this battered large ship rock unsteadily.
By the time Bella finally managed to stand firm again, the bugs that had just been baring their fangs and brandishing their claws as they attacked had all disappeared. Replacing them was a massive wall of water towering into the clouds, standing horizontally between the ship and Keith.
"What in the world is this..."
The ocean was trembling.
This was the Sword Saint's first time using a divine artifact; he could only try to drive it with his will.
As the scepter was raised high, every drop of seawater seemed to be injected with a will. Immediately after, the sea surface bulged up, and eight walls formed of seawater surrounded Keith in the middle.
These water walls were not dead water; undercurrents surged within them. Whenever Keith tried to break through the water walls, its force would be washed away and diverted, making it difficult to break through.
Some bugs flew up, wanting to attack the Sword Saint standing atop the water wall.
The Sword Saint danced the scepter at them, and the seawater transformed into countless sword blades, crisscrossing vertically and horizontally!
Thousands of bugs were sliced to pieces amidst the strangulation of the water blades. The sound of shattering carapaces was incessant, purple blood surged, and severed limbs floated. The sea surface was covered with bug corpses, which then spun and sank in the whirlpools.
The Heart of Keith, relying on the massive size of [Leviathan], only suffered some superficial flesh wounds. However, the bug swarm under its command suffered disastrous casualties in this ultra-large-scale attack.
The Sword Saint Puchi couldn't help but weigh the scepter in his hand; he had finally experienced the joy Mortis felt when using a divine artifact back then.
"Why... why!"
Countless voices erupted simultaneously from the flesh and blood of the Leviathan Keith. There was the shrillness of mermaids, the anger of giant dragons, as well as even more unrecognizable, twisted roars.
They overlapped together, converging into a deafening wave of sound that reverberated back and forth between the sea walls.
"I clearly obtained power! I clearly tried so hard to devour! I am the endpoint of everything!"
Thump, thump...
The Heart of Keith, with the assistance of the Abyss Core, began to beat violently.
Thump, thump...
A second beat, a third beat.
The heartbeat grew faster and faster, denser and denser, like a war drum being beaten frantically.
The black light emitted by the Abyss Core became increasingly intense, gradually turning from grayish-black to pure black.
The light pierced through Keith's wrinkled skin, shooting out from the crevices, wounds, and every inch of the thin membrane valves!
"I—" That voice no longer came from the flesh puppets, but from Keith itself, from the depths of its flesh and blood, from that frantically beating heart, and from the darkest core of the Abyss Core, "—am not a scrapped draft!!!"
Keith's flesh and blood began to expand. Those already-twisted flesh and blood were now like a blown-up balloon, surging outward from the inside, tearing, and recombining.
Countless monsters that had never appeared in the world drilled out from within its body.
Some grew dozens of pairs of arthropod limbs, each pointing in a different direction; some had no heads, only a giant mouth spanning their entire torso, splitting from one end to the other; some were entirely covered in eyeballs, every single one of them rolling.
The instant they came out, they began using bizarre abilities to tear at the surrounding walls of seawater. But very quickly, they were pulled back as if by some force, melting into that continuously tumbling mass of flesh and blood, followed immediately by new monsters squeezing out from within.
Keith's flesh and blood was now like a boiling furnace, and those monsters were nothing more than defective products it continuously cast.
And as for what the final creation would be, perhaps even Keith itself didn't know.
In the sky above, Sophia's [Eye of the Stars] took in all of Keith's changes.
In her eyes, the status panel information for Keith at this moment was constantly shifting. Countless skills or statuses with the suffix "(Scrapped Draft)" surfaced one by one on its panel and then disappeared.
This was her first time encountering this kind of situation. The term "Scrapped Draft" even made her generate a sliver of doubt regarding the authenticity of this world.
However, these were things she could only consider later. Right now, the situation had already completely broken away from the scope that she, a Hero, could control.
On the other side, the Sword Saint's mushroom body was tensed to the extreme.
He tried his absolute best to use the seawater to annihilate Keith. However, when Keith entered this current state of convulsive mutation, even he, possessing a divine artifact, felt the pressure increase drastically.
If this continued, he feared that not only would he fail to crush Keith to death, but by the time it finished mutating, it might really be able to break through the blockade of the sea walls, or perhaps even counter-kill him.
With the situation critical, the Sword Saint had no choice but to shout in the mycelial network: "Louisa, Boss! Do you have any other methods? Use them quickly! I feel like this wooden stick won't last much longer!"
"I'm preparing it, hold on a bit longer!" Lin Jun's cursing thoughts came through the mycelial network. "This dogshit bug, how did it become the spokesperson for the Abyss?!"
Lin Jun himself would occasionally fish things out of the Abyss in that half of the independent space he obtained when he had nothing else to do. Those unknown creatures Keith transformed into—not to say all of them, but quite a few of them—were quite familiar to Lin Jun; they were all scrapped drafts from the Abyss.
Keith's current appearance looked extremely like it was summoning some kind of big boss from the Abyss. Lin Jun naturally couldn't let it just unleash its ultimate move like this.
To this end, an action that he was originally somewhat hesitant about had to be brought forward ahead of schedule.
Deep inside the Mushroom Garden, under the illumination of the Sun Stone, Lin Jun stuffed the previously captured Demon King's soul into the body of a cannon fodder Puchi.
The Demon King Puchi that broke out of the cocoon looked at its perfectly round body and four twisted tentacles, feeling somewhat bewildered for a moment.
Feeling the sunlight sprinkling on its body, the Demon King Puchi raised its mushroom cap.
"The Sun Stone? You are—"
Before he could even ask the question, several Knight Puchis brandished their tentacle blades and finely minced the Demon King Puchi into meat paste, its remains falling onto the fungal mat beneath.
[Greed]
Meanwhile, inside the Empire's Duskfall Keep.
The Demon King, who was originally explaining the construction precautions of a certain large-scale instrument to several mages, suddenly waved everyone away uncharacteristically.
Only after everyone had left did he curl up on the throne, shrinking into a ball of mucus, trembling slightly.
At this moment, the Demon King was suffering the agony of having [Envy] forcibly ripped from his soul.
[Obtained: Envy of the Seven Deadly Sins]
As [Envy] was stripped away, the Demon King's soul also irretrievably disappeared within the Mushroom Garden.
Afterwards, this small blank mass of soul would probably slowly grow back over to the Demon King's side. In order to deal with Keith, who was in cahoots with the Abyss, this couldn't be helped.
With [Envy] in hand, there was only one final problem left.
Deadly Sins weren't usable just by obtaining them; the owner had to fit a certain trait to activate them.
According to speculation, Lin Jun now had to find a way to suppress his own generosity and magnanimity, and maximize that tiny bit of envy in his heart. Suddenly, [Envy] appeared on Lin Jun's panel.
[Envy] bloomed with a dazzling light, every character looking as if it were bordered with a layer of gold.
Clearly, his previous guess was wrong. [Envy] was probably just like [Greed], an ability that could be used directly upon obtaining it, and didn't need to go through any activation.
(End of Chapter)
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