My Living Shadow System Devours To Make Me Stronger Chapter 851 - 852: A Wisp

The chained knights were notorious for their tyrannical cruelty and total lack of empathy toward the branded. Thus, exactly as Damon had envisioned like a dark prophet, his grim predictions manifested into reality.

As dawn broke with its radiant light, thousands of these knights were dispatched to the Grinding Gate. Their directive was brutal and clear: slaughter the population until they regained their sense of terror.

They executed their orders without hesitation. No savior appeared to rescue the masses, and no deity rose to answer their desperate pleas.

From his position below, Lazarak could hear the heavy thud of boots crushing the earth above him. The air was soon filled with the agonizing cries of women and children as homes were torn from their foundations, and falling debris entombed thousands of souls.

He remained paralyzed, unable to intervene. Though he was a god, he was feeble in power, and now that realization had finally settled deep within his soul.

His heart was just as weak.

He felt the weight of his own complicity. Lazarak had once turned against the goddess because he could not stomach the sight of war’s flames consuming the world. Peace was always the first casualty of conflict, followed swiftly by lives, property, and the very dreams of the people.

In those moments of despair, he would usually collapse before the effigy of his maker—the goddess of doom and mother of inevitability—to beg for an end to the suffering. Yet, why would the architect of such misery ever choose to halt it?

It was her divine will that fanned the sparks of war. Her hand steered the threads of fate, and her influence ushered in the coming of death.

She had no reason to care... but now, hearing those screams and enduring this impotence, Lazarak acted like any other fool. He reached out to a god not out of love, but because he, much like the mortals, craved a psychological anchor.

That was the essence of faith—clinging to belief even when faced with absolute proof to the contrary.

However, no statue of the goddess stood in this place, and even if one did, he had already cast her aside.

Consequently, Lazarak turned his attention toward the only thing that felt truly divine in his presence.

In a secluded corner of the subterranean hideout they called their base, his eyes landed on a pool of water filled with endless, murmuring whispers.

This was the Lake of Tears. Born from the depths of his own grief, its mystical properties remained a puzzle that even he could not fully comprehend.

The fallen god approached the water's edge and sank to his knees.

If no specific god would hear him, he would direct his plea to the omniverse itself.

He began to pray as the echoes of slaughter vibrated above, as the soil drank the blood of the innocent, and as women suffered through the depravity of men.

Homes vanished and screams were stifled by gore. While the victims endured agony, their oppressors laughed, stripping away the humanity of those they killed.

Because their commanders had given the order in the name of a higher power, the massacre was treated as a holy act. In the name of god, humanity is often discarded.

Lazarak continued his prayer, though he was uncertain of his own request. His hands trembled violently, and with every shudder, his true intent seeped into the pond. Even the darkest impulses he tried to suppress were being dragged to the surface.

After all, even the most optimistic person is still human, and humans cannot maintain hope forever.

Every wish and every desperate plea sank into the pool, drifting toward the metaverse—the realm where all consciousness, past, present, and future, resides. Those scattered thoughts coalesced into a singular, subconscious desire.

"This world is diseased... let it all be destroyed..."

His original hopes for salvation were warped by his own helplessness and the collective resentment of those dying above.

This solitary prayer brushed against various entities: deities, demons, true dragons, mindless Devourers, and horrors from the abyss. It even touched the dreams of commoners, yet no being truly desired the total end of existence.

The prayer seemed destined to go ignored. Like the millions of other wishes wandering the metaverse, it threatened to remain lost. A single drop of water added to the ocean becomes impossible to distinguish from the rest of the sea.

Yet, within that mental realm, something noticed this unrealized intent. A swirling, deep abyss reached out and grasped it.

Perhaps only a second had passed since Lazarak’s wish was corrupted, or perhaps eons had slipped by; time is irrelevant within the metaverse. All that mattered was that the wish had been acknowledged.

The abyss possessed a name, though it loathed it. It felt compelled to find the origin of the prayer, not just because it sought something, but because this mass of darkness wanted to locate Lazarak himself.

To achieve this, it birthed countless wisps from its own essence to hunt for the source. Each wisp ventured into the void. Some perished. Others developed their own consciousness over the ages. Some were merely hollow thoughts, while others were radiant dreams or joyful emotions. Some carried fragments of memory, and some were the stuff of nightmares.

Among these terrors was a tiny, insignificant wisp. It was so minuscule it was invisible to the eye. This particular wisp took a name for itself.

It was called Ittorath. Like many of its kind, it failed to find the source of the prayer initially. After countless years, it matured and crossed from the metaverse into the physical world. However, Ittorath was a nightmare that retained the sentimentality of the Unknown God, so it left a small part of itself behind to continue the search.

Today, that search ended.

While Lazarak prayed with closed eyes, a tiny wisp born from that nightmare drifted out from the Lake of Tears and began to dissipate.

In that instant, the memories of the world flooded its consciousness.

Ittorath shook with a sudden surge of fury.

"Those cursed ascendants... they dared to imprison my true form..."

He drifted away, hidden from sight.

"First, I must find a path out of this place... and then... I will bring them to ruin..."