After a round of exaggerated gestures and live screen explanations finally got the point across to Belial, Bella broke the screen back down into Nanometal and swallowed it. Belial blinked after finishing shaving his teeth, looking like he more or less understood. He said that if he kept going out to fry fish for fun, there was a good chance an even stronger Great Beast would pop out next time.
"That is annoying. Even my few remaining hobbies of beating up fried fish are banned now."
This was the scene after Belial had just gone out and casually killed a lucky Crimson God and returned. The cause of the whole thing was simple. During the long sleep phase, since he no longer had to fall completely unconscious like before and could send part of his awareness out to play, the bored Belial split off a portion of himself using Clone.
If the Lord could sleep and still stay aware, it was unbearably boring, so he had to find some amusement. He made a Clone body with power around five and threw it deep into Abyssal Void, then randomly picked lucky targets. He did not expect to actually find a leftover from last time.
Without thinking much, he killed it on the spot and then flew back while shaving his teeth. After that, Hamliket hurriedly had Bella translate things. The hope was that before finishing his evolution, Belial would behave a bit and not wipe out all the Crimson God, at least not before retrieving Twilight.
If he provoked another desperate counterattack and the remaining gods pushed The End again and activated it, that would be a real problem. The End was essentially a phenomenon, and the Crimson God had only triggered it early through self-dissolution. However, Belial was unprecedented in being marked by The End, and no one knew what scale of The End phenomenon would appear this time.
More importantly, even if Belial could withstand it, what if The End disliked the World above and slashed it again. After thinking it over, he still agreed. Continuing to devour Crimson God now did not help much anyway, since the Lord had already pushed his energy straight to the limit with g-particles.
His current body could theoretically grow slowly to its maximum potential strength without relying on anything else. Absorbing external energy would only speed up the process, and taking risks just for that was unnecessary. Belial admitted that Baragon was indeed useful, so he would endure for a while.
The storm within Void Rift closed its eyes again. This was now Belial's body, and its size had doubled again compared to the last sleep, reaching over two hundred kilometers. His strength had roughly doubled as well, on top of having already increased dozens of times before, and under Bella's scans, it was unclear whether his body could even be called matter anymore.
After stacking four templates in a ridiculous chain and gaining several evolutionary bonuses, Belial was completely different from before. Energy poured out of his entire body without pause, at far higher output than earlier. The planet's magnetic field and the energy field of Space gradually merged under this infinite energy, forming a domain he did not know how to describe, so he simply called it Energy Field.
Within this Energy Field, his control over power was greatly improved. He could release Heat Ray attacks from almost any point in the domain, even covering everything at once. As for physical form and raw body strength, those no longer seemed necessary to him, since he was no longer bound to simple muscle movement.
If he had to explain it, it was like this. As long as he wanted to, a casual tap or a full punch could both be full-power attacks. His energy output limit now basically equaled his physical strength, since in the end it was all driven by energy, just in a much more direct way.
To put it another way, a single Spiral Heat Ray and a punch were essentially the same thing for him. Both were simply different expressions of his own energy. Each template stacking had brought a near qualitative leap, but this one could honestly be called an ascension.
Although the first three templates together were already strong, their potential had not been fully tapped because potential still needed resources. This time, The End arrived carrying an infinite meal ticket, bringing almost explosive growth. Beyond his own abilities, other functions improved as well, such as the g-particle-based computing System inside him.
Belial felt that if he wanted, he could dismantle a planet like Earth down to basic particles and then reassemble it afterward. It was close to the level of making things happen by sheer intent, since System would automatically integrate his abilities and interfere with the outside world based on his thoughts. With microscopic gravity control, basic particle manipulation, and infinite energy, almost anything within the material realm was possible.
He could even do absurd things like framing the moon with his fingers and pulling it closer. Do not ask how he knew. That was from the miserable experience of a certain Crimson God, whose death was extremely creative.
The previously dispatched Clone had only power level five, but with various buffs it was far stronger than that number suggested. After testing a bit, Belial felt it was better to stay in this place for a while. He was genuinely afraid that one careless move might destroy World.
At his current level, even a sneeze could chill the moon, and casual gravity manipulation could shake the plates of The Continent. With his habit of wild thoughts combined with wish fulfillment, dropping him onto The Continent would be a disaster far worse than Crimson God. What worried him even more was that the The End mark was also expanding along with his evolution.
"There is no way to interfere with it so far. Damn it, Ham, can you try harder?"
"I am trying. I have lost my right hand three times already."
Ham wailed. Right now he was a useless existence without Authority or Divine Kingdom, and being asked to deal with the power of The End was really overestimating him. Just touching it made his right hand vanish more than three times.
The The End mark inside Belial kept spreading with his evolution, and the force that drove everything toward the end kept growing stronger. Not only did Ham keep losing body parts, even the Nanometal used by Bella to build the Observation Station had been replaced by over twenty percent in just a short time. If Belial could not fabricate it himself, Bella's own replication speed would never keep up.
This was Nanometal with self-repair and self-replication, yet it was still reduced to this state. The level of erosion was obvious. Even the spaces between gaps fluctuated unpredictably, and according to Bella's calculations, if Belial grew another one or two times stronger, there would truly be nowhere left for him to stay.
At that point, even the internal space of World would not be able to withstand the effects of the The End mark, and entry would mean immediate rejection. Fortunately, the other essential parts of the Lord that were shut down and sleeping were fine. Otherwise, the trouble would be far greater.
This mark seemed directly tied to Belial's consciousness. Bella even considered letting Belial send robots into World, but that did not work either. Even remotely controlled robots carried the effects of the The End domain, which was simply disgusting.
"The only plan I can suggest now is to wait. Wait until we retrieve Twilight and see if that similar-type power can weaken the effects of the The End mark."
"Otherwise, asking someone as weak and incompatible as me to handle this is just too much."
Bella knew who Twilight referred to. It was the last and unseen one among the three aspects, namely Twilight. Its followers were far fewer than those of Daylight, but still far more than Dawn, symbolized by an old man at the hour of dusk.
It seemed that this Twilight had been taken away earlier due to some accident. Recently, Ham had been secretly making arrangements, apparently to retrieve this missing Twilight Authority. Bella tilted her head and asked if Twilight was that strong, strong enough to solve Belial's problem.
"In terms of raw power, even at full strength, tying me together with Dawn would still not be enough to fight Belial. What matters is the nature of Authority, which can counter The End. That is how we handled it back then."
"Oh."
After that, Bella suddenly thought of something else. She asked how they became gods and forged Divine Kingdom if they did not consume souls, since Belial's translated Divine Kingdom also seemed to be a massive aggregation of souls. She asked where the difference really lay.
"That is a sharp question, and very direct. You really are a robot."