After Magnus' soul and body were burned into nothingness by divine fire, Cillian quietly withdrew his gaze from the fifth layer of the Endless Abyss.
The space gates he had formed with his will collapsed in the same instant. All passages leading upward from the depths were sealed, cutting off the climb before it could even begin.
A tide of abyssal creatures gathered before the fading afterimages of the gates and howled in fury. Their long-awaited chance to ascend had been snatched away. The despair was heavy, and their anger raw.
They knew well the nature of their prison. Each higher plane of the abyss was a little less cruel than the one beneath it, though still poisoned and broken. To creatures born in the choking voids below, even the fifth layer with its swamps and mists was a paradise they could only dream of.
That dream was gone. And yet, for those who had already reached the fifth plane, fought in the war, and survived, fortune had smiled.
They had entered a realm where life's pressure was lighter, where corpses of foreign warriors provided rare flesh and power, and where opportunity for evolution abounded.
Some among them would seize this chance to wipe out rivals, breed, and raise their race into dominion over the layer.
Thus, after the fall of Magnus and the collapse of the Thirteenth Legion, the fifth layer descended into a brutal carnival. A feast of blood, flesh, and new beginnings.
In the abyss, every war stripped life bare, and every war also fed new growth, like weeds springing through the cracks of ruined soil.
But all of that was meaningless to Cillian.
His attention was fixed on the greatest prize this trial had given him: the method of using the Endless Abyss to plunder divine fire, to strip away mortal faith until not even the gods could cling to it.
"What an invaluable experience," he murmured, recalling the instant Magnus had burned himself away. "I finally understand why faith lets mortals resist the temptation of the abyss."
He had prolonged the conflict deliberately, expecting the legion to collapse under fear and corruption. By all reasoning, ordinary soldiers should not have been able to withstand the abyss' whispers. Yet the truth had surprised him, the collapse of faith had not happen quickly, not until the later stages of the war.
Until then, their devotion had shielded them.
Cillian's expression hardened as he pieced it together. "I thought faith was nothing more than a burst of thought, like corruption. But it isn't. Devout faith is a fragment of divine fire planted as a seed inside mortal souls. The more pious they believe themselves to be, the stronger that flame, and the more faith they generate."
He paced in thought, the Battle priests had shown it clearly. Their spells were as devastating as abyssal sorcery, yet their bodies were frail, unchanged from any ordinary human.
Power without evolution , an impossibility by natural law, even the weakest abyssal magi evolved when they mastered their craft and yet the priests did not.
The answer had come at the moment Magnus burned. Cillian had seen it in his soul. A seed of divine fire shielded him from total collapse, preserving his inner sea from corruption even as his body perished.
That seed was the core. That seed was faith.
If it could be polluted, if it could be broken, then no mortal faith would hold. Every creature could fall to the abyss. And every fall would add to Chu Hao's divine fire.
The possibility thrilled him, and unsettled him.
"What are those seeds truly made of? How can they be tainted?" he asked himself. The divine worlds had no reason to seek such knowledge. For them, faith was everything.
They only cultivated piety, never decay. But for him, corruption was the only goal.
Calming his thoughts, Cillian closed his eyes and pulled his mind free of the abyss once more. His work here was complete, 3 worlds had invaded, three tests passed, and more than enough data gathered.
The next step was clear.
"It's time to finish my final paper."