An abandoned world?
"Hm?"
Thalos ignored Ishtar's long, dangerously beautiful legs—which could probably buff a human's attack speed—and instead found his thoughts drifting immediately to something more sinister, like a vampire castle or cursed ruin.
"How far is it from our world?"
"Uh… about half the usual distance between us and Kraken II."
That meant 50,000 kilometers.
Since it was an abandoned world, there was no need to be overly cautious.
After pondering a moment, Thalos had the Ginnungagap World begin slowly drifting toward the target.
It didn't take long for him to confirm that Ishtar hadn't been exaggerating.
A massive, floating landmass hovered amid the chaotic void.
It was labeled abandoned for good reason—it had not yet been entirely consumed by chaos.
To draw a comparison, the diluted chaos surrounding it was like heavily watered-down sulfuric acid—still corrosive to ordered structures, but at a slower rate.
Thalos expanded his divine perception, scanning the continent in full.
Estimated surface area: around 200,000 square kilometers.
Its original size? Impossible to determine.
Without a world barrier to protect it, the air was saturated with thick chaos energy. The landscape had been utterly transformed—not just the surface, but the substructure of the land itself.
All flora and fauna had either been completely dissolved by chaos or mutated into grotesque, drifting chaos spawn.
Thalos sent a group of lower-tier Sumerian gods, along with Siegfried and other demigods, to lead scouting missions. They were accompanied by divine attendants and reported back every twelve hours.
Three days later, Siegfried returned to the Silver Palace with compelling evidence.
"This is…"
Thalos's eyes narrowed.
Presented before him was a massive mural. Compared to the ground-level ruins already scoured clean by chaos, this artwork remained surprisingly intact. Likely protected by faint traces of divine power, it had escaped total destruction and corrosion.
The mural depicted a radiant figure with four heads or four faces, mounted on a white horse, brandishing a sword and spear, leading a host of 300 warriors.
And surrounding the imagery was something unmistakable to anyone familiar with East Asia—Russian script.
That alone gave Thalos a solid idea of this world's origin: one of Earth's more obscure mythologies—Slavic mythology.
The god in question? Svetovit, war god of the Baltic Slavs—regarded as the supreme deity in that pantheon.
In Slavic cosmology, the world began with a battle between light and dark, order and chaos. Earth and sky were seen as the highest entities—creators and rulers alike.
To Thalos, these Earth-origin mythologies all started to blur together. The only real variation was which god filled which niche in the divine ecosystem.
He had no interest in the tragic fate of this particular pantheon. He cared about only one thing—
This might really be a god-tier battle royale.
"Thor stays behind. Half the gods with me—we're going."
"Yes!" came the unified cry from within the Silver Palace.
To be honest, a destroyed divine realm wasn't exactly thrilling to most of the war-hardened Aesir. But Thalos activated his [Sky] domain, establishing a temporary spatial framework and restoring atmospheric conditions over a wide region.
Not because the gods needed to breathe—those brutes could survive in a vacuum just fine.
But a breathable atmosphere made it easier for certain gods to conduct investigations and reconstructions.
Let's be real—only a handful of them even had the skillset for analysis.
After reviewing the site with another group of gods, Thalos returned to the Silver Palace.
Time to hear from his advisors.
"Enki, your thoughts?"
Enki looked surprised to be called on, but responded dutifully: "Sire, I estimate this pantheon was destroyed around ten years ago. Strangely, I found no divine remains—no bones, no armor fragments. The mortal armor debris is bronze, nothing noteworthy."
"Frey?"
"My analysis aligns with Enki's. However, I believe this god system surrendered after being defeated. Otherwise, there's no explanation for how thoroughly the battlefield was cleaned. If it were a total slaughter, there would be a ton of residual evidence."
The scene was too clean.
Which meant the native gods had either conducted an extremely meticulous salvage operation—or the invaders had done it for them.
It looked like someone had run a horde of dogs through the place… and then a swarm of ants came through and cleaned up again.
"Hel?" Thalos turned next.
She shook her head. "No soul residue. It's as if this world is completely barren."
Thor, ever eager, spoke up: "Father, should we abandon this cursed land?"
"Cursed?" Thalos shot his burly son a side-eye. "When did you become so wasteful? Even if this land has been corrupted by chaos, it still contains a vast amount of [Earth Element]. That's a fundamental building block for any world. No world has too much Earth, Water, Fire, or Wind. Learning how to balance those elements is a lesson every god-king must master."
"Yes, Father…" Thor replied, looking thoroughly deflated.
Even corrupted land could be harvested. Chaos energy, if properly processed, could be weaponized. It might not work on chaos creatures, but it was highly effective against order-based beings.
Thalos ordered Ginnungagap to expand slightly to accommodate this tainted continent. He had it extract earth-element materials while isolating and storing the refined chaos energy and crystallized chaos stones.
In short, this was Thalos letting his world eat god-tier leftovers.
After dismissing the other gods, Thalos remained behind with a few Valkyries, scanning the continent over and over with a pensive expression.
"This is bad…" he muttered.
To most Chinese people, Slavic mythology was a near-total mystery. Before transmigrating, Thalos had only skimmed a few articles out of curiosity.
He barely remembered any of it.
What he did know was that this was a mid-tier pantheon with at least thirty gods. Probably more.
Whoever took them out—whether chaos or another order-based pantheon—must've been strong. Possibly a two-in-one entity, like the Aesir after absorbing the Vanir.
And that meant…
Someone out there was running the same playbook as him.
For once, Thalos felt a bit grateful that he had kept his own house clean. His method of absorbing enemy pantheons had been efficient: cut off the heads, absorb the useful and the weak, bind them with marriage and equality, and integrate them without bloating or instability.
Handled poorly, this could've turned his divine court into a field of live grenades—each one primed to explode during the next major war.
But not with him.
Because now—there was no doubt.
The era of divine free-for-all had begun.
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