The Sword Saint desperately maintained that sea wall built up from the entire ocean. However, as Keith's mutation intensified, anomalies began to spread outward from its body.
Rifts from the Abyss tore through Keith's flesh and blood, spreading in all directions.
These were not fissures in the earth, nor were they rifts in space. Wherever they spread, the rules of that place began to collapse.
Touching the sky, the sky lost its color, turning from azure to grayish-white.
Touching the earth, gravity became chaotic. Crushed stones floated up, seawater curled backward and upward, making it impossible to distinguish up, down, left, or right.
Touching the sea wall, one of the giant walls condensed with the power of the Ocean Scepter suddenly flickered, and then, amidst the Sword Saint's astonishment, completely disappeared. It wasn't torn apart; it disappeared, as if that wall had never existed.
Before the Sword Saint had time to be surprised, the garbage information escaping from the Abyss poured into his consciousness.
Countless fragmented characters, noise, twisted perceptions, and incomprehensible symbols mixed together.
Although he only came into contact with a tiny bit that had escaped, his thinking felt as if it had been filled with lead, becoming incredibly sluggish. Every single thought required exhausting effort to pull out of the quagmire, to the point where he couldn't even control his own body.
The Ocean Scepter slipped weakly from between his tentacles. Losing its support, the sea wall collapsed with a loud crash, turning into a monstrous giant wave that smashed down indiscriminately.
Further away, Sophia and the others didn't fare much better. Everyone clutched their heads, bitterly maintaining their final thoughts. Facing the incoming giant wave, they could only resign themselves to fate and pray that the battered ship beneath them could withstand this test.
"Fuse... unify... all become me!" Keith's laughter came from that continuously twisting mass of flesh and blood. "Mushroom, I must thank you. It was your pursuit that finally made me perfect!"
Its voice grew higher and sharper.
Its body was still twisting, fusing with those scrapped drafts, replacing order with chaos.
Then, Lin Jun's "gaze" fell through the fungal mats that were still tenuously connected on the sea surface.
The laughter stopped abruptly.
"Why aren't you laughing anymore?" A tattered sack floated adrift on the sea surface. "Keep thanking me, say thank you!"
However, Keith, whose skill bar had plunged into gray darkness, could no longer even speak.
[Envy of the Seven Deadly Sins: Seal the abilities of a single entity]
Lin Jun could directly apply this effect onto an entity through the field of vision of the mycelial network, and those skills of Keith's from the Abyss were still skills, all falling within the sealing effect.
The eye-bugs lurking in the sea and flying high in the sky plummeted weakly into the seabed like kites with their strings cut one after another.
However, this was only the beginning. A terrified scream rang out from Keith's pillar of flesh and blood.
"Where is this? What is... what's wrong with me? Ahhhhh!" A Vampire whose upper body was mostly fused with the meat pillar desperately twisted his remaining upper half, his face written full of fear and bewilderment.
Closely following, more voices rang out from the various pillars of flesh and blood.
The controlled flesh puppets briefly regained their sense of self.
Some cried, some called for help, and some yelled hoarsely, "Kill me."
On the other side, the giant dragons and sea monsters on the pillars of flesh and blood also regained their sense of self.
"You actually dared... dared to turn great giant dragons into this appearance!"
The remaining three dragon heads roared and launched attacks at the pillar of flesh and blood. Breathing, biting—the three dragon heads joined forces and forcefully tore that thick pillar of flesh and blood apart.
The meat pillar collapsed with a loud crash, and the three giant dragons connected to it fell along with it. Although they didn't die directly, they had also entered the countdown of their lives. Among them, the Red Dragon looked up at the sky with its dragon eyes and noticed that figure with a pair of pitch-black dragon wings.
"Svirgis..." Its golden vertical pupils, which had already begun to dim, suddenly lit up. "You have also embarked on the path of the Ancient Dragon. What are you waiting for flying up there? Come fight!"
It struggled to raise its dragon head, spewing a weak dragon breath toward Little Black.
The other two giant dragons similarly tried their best to raise their dragon heads, letting out battle roars toward Little Black.
Little Black tilted her head, then turned into a blurry black shadow, darting into the sky and disappearing into the clouds that had regained their color.
Seeing this scene, a touch of fear unexpectedly surfaced in the eyes of the three dragons. The Red Dragon even roared unwillingly: "Come back! If you consider yourself a dragon, come back and fight! Take my power into the Ancient Dragon Path as well..."
Its roar was merely in vain. The weak dragon's roar couldn't even support its anger, much less reach into the clouds.
However, the next moment—
A black meteor fell from the sky!
A flash of pleasant surprise flashed through the eyes of the three dragons. Exhausting their final bit of strength, they raised their heads and snapped their jaws toward that meteor.
Boom!
Scraps of meat flew everywhere. The pillar of flesh and blood, along with the giant dragons' bodies, completely exploded.
The Island Crab used its remaining pincer to dig and snap the meat pillar beneath it piece by piece. The fused mages urged their remaining mana, blasting themselves and the pillars full of holes; every explosion was accompanied by splattering flesh and blood.
Even those halfway-transformed Abyss monsters on Keith's body began to attack blindly and uncontrollably, and the vast majority of those attacks landed on Keith itself.
After sealing its skills, before Lin Jun had even done anything, Keith had already begun sprinting endlessly toward self-destruction.
It couldn't even let out a single wail or roar of anger, only able to let those puppets it had once swallowed up destroy its massive body bit by bit during their brief moment of lucidity.
Lin Jun was just wondering whether he should use telepathic magic to listen to Keith's final wails.
Suddenly, the mass of meat of the Heart of Keith twisted fiercely, and countless wounds tore open simultaneously.
Purple blood shot out, the friction of the wounds emitting "pfft pfft" sounds.
Miraculously, these sounds that should have been meaningless ultimately converged into a language Lin Jun could understand!
"Mushroom..." Slurred, distorted, every syllable accompanied by purple blood squeezing out from the crevices.
But Keith still relied on it to produce sound. It wasn't a skill, it wasn't magic, it was purely the sound of flesh and blood rubbing together.
"You've got some skills." Regarding this, even Lin Jun couldn't help but offer a word of praise.
"You won again... you will always win..." Every syllable Keith produced was accompanied by countless purple blood being squeezed out, but it didn't care at all. "In the end, I still couldn't replace you..."
"Replace me?"
"You are the true unification..." As death approached, Keith's action of squeezing out the sounds became increasingly sluggish. "I really... wanted to win... just once..."
"So hungry..."
When the final word fell, it sounded like a sigh, and also like weeping.
The sea was dyed purple. Keith's flesh and blood completely lost its vitality, and its status panel disappeared from Lin Jun's field of vision.
Disappearing along with it were the status panels of those flesh puppets; they welcomed their belated deaths.
The massive mass of meat in the center detached, revealing the Abyss Core inside, which had already condensed into a black cube.
"An information cube?"
A Puchi bounded over, stepping on the chunks of meat, and extended a tentacle to touch the cube.
(End of Chapter)
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