Once upon a time, a very long time, this poison had been the bane of Soren's existence, a slow-acting poison designed by the Oman to experiment and harvest his genes.
But under the constant pressure of his Master Builder Gene, the poison evolved.
It became a highly complex, adaptive biochemical refinery, that parasitically coexist and passively defended him.
The moment the Beast's Wood Qi touched the poison; the Tranquil Poison didn't fight it; instead, it allowed the invasion.
The green filaments that had intended to pump the Tranquil Poison with its essence in a bid to take control of it found no resistance at all. Instead, its very tactics was reversed upon itself.
The Tranquil Poison absorbed and separated the life essence and the Wood Qi into their base components but absorbed none of it.
Instead, the Tranquil Poison Essence engulfed the emerald core and directly attacked the sentience within the core itself.
It looking to evolve itself to higher intelligent form.
Ever since the Black Sun and Master Builder Gene came into the picture, it had suddenly been shoved to the darkest crevice of Soren's mind, desperately waiting for the day it would be called upon, and shine.
However, not once had Soren called upon its services, and after a long time feeling useless, it has finally found the golden finger than can reverse its plight.
Soren felt the sentience within the emerald core shriek within his mind, a sound of primal profound terror and confusion.
It had spent years consuming the life-force of thousands of Ignis tribesmen's consciousness, yet it had never encountered a substance that would seek to consume its own sentience.
Soren didn't respond. He couldn't. His teeth were clenched so hard they were beginning to fuse together.
His skin was glowing a violent, sickly green as an internal battle raged within him.
His Star-Iron skin began to smoke as the friction between the invasive entity and his own generated lethal levels of heat.
But whilst the sentient emerald core was still fighting tooth-and-nail to prevent its sentience from being consumed, Soren's second layer of protection suddenly entered the fray.
The Black Sun flared with a blinding, white-hot intensity as it began to give the sentient, emerald core a dose of its own medicine.
Just like the tree had been pumping the tribesmen full of parasitic Qi, the Black Sun also pumped it full of heat, easing the Tranquil Poison's absorption process.
However, as the Wood Qi and life essence was being funneled over, the Black Sun's stripped the Qi from the wood Qi and began to aggressively feed on it.
It was the absolute antithesis of the Beast's natural instinct. Where it represented parasitic growth, the Black Sun represented absolute, entropic consumption.
And now, the sentient emerald core was engaged in battle on two fronts.
Soren however, wasn't having it any easier. The internal temperature of his chest cavity had risen to a point where his internal fluids had begun to turn to plasma.
It was almost like the fever one experienced when one's immune system is desperately fighting a virus.
As for the sentient emerald core, having been trapped between the insatiable greed of the Tranquil Poison and the incinerating drain of the Black Sun, finally began to crack.
But by all right, the Beast itself was an entity of ancient origins, and as such, its loss was definitely far from being secured.
Instantly, the Sentient Emerald Core began to channel the raw, unrefined "Green Rot" it had stored for three centuries, flooding every inch of Soren's insides with enough to rot an entire mountain.
"I'll flood you so much, you all will choke to death!" the Beast's instinctively transmitted. Its voices merging into a single, terrifying scream of Wood-Elemental fury.
Instantly, the Soren suddenly found his internal systems and failsafe approach peak instability at breakneck speed.
His body began to vibrate, his Star-Iron plates cracking as his internal pressure exceeded all safety parameters.
He swiftly became a reactor on the verge of total meltdown.
His eyes, normally grey, were now flickering wildly between emerald green and molten gold.
However, it was exactly in this moment that Soren's final defensive lever triggered.
This had been the moment it had been waiting for all along.
The Master Builder Gene stopped its analysis immediately and took control of the oncoming surge of Parasitic Genetic Codes.
It didn't fight the rot; instead, it began to deconstruct it even past the cellular level, picking out the Parasitic nature and Life-Wood components of the rot.
Then it began to incorporate it into Soren's very genes, deconstructing and restructuring the foundation that made Soren... Soren.
The Sentient Emerald Core trembled fiercely at this point, to think this little manchild would not only have not one, nor two, but three layers of life-threatening fail safes.
However, instead of lamenting its fate and plight, it became more maniacal and less self-preservative in its approach as it chose a path of mutual destruction.
The Sentient Emerald Core began overwhelmed The Tranquil Poison, The Black Sun, and The Master Builder Gene with a massive surge of what they needed.
By doing that, it managed to buy itself a few breaths of reprieve.
However, it didn't do that so it could take a breather. Instead, it took that brief span of time to pull in the remaining Rot, Life Essence and Wood Qi to its center.
Then it mixed them into a violent soup and entered full kamikaze mode, preparing to self-destruct.
This new development didn't come to Soren on time; after all, the occupied trio had always been his source of knowledge and intellect.
As such, by the time the Sentient Emerald Core detonated its core, the tidal tsunami of violent energy caught them all off-guard.
A cataclysmic shockwave barrelled through every fibre of Soren's being, threatening to rip his consciousness from him.
But he clamped down with every iota of Will he had in him.
But just when he began to think he could manage to withstand the deadly wave of energy and sonic shockwave, a second one erupted from the depths of the Sentient Emerald Core.
This time, the destructive momentum was more than thrice that of the first wave, and not only did it barrel through Soren, but it also fed into the aftershocks of the first wave to deal amplified damage.
The moment Soren felt the new wave barge into his insides, he knew he was gone for good.
There was no surviving this.
It had already taken all he had to hold himself back from crossing the line between life and death; and this oncoming wave, was guaranteed to push him past that brink.
However, it was in this moment that the tiny spark of Starfire within Soren flared to life.
It burst out of the Black Sun where it had always been lying dormant and washed through Soren with a speed that defied every kind of logic.
The spark flew straight into the oncoming apocalyptic wave of sheer destruction, vanishing into its depths.
Then upon centering itself within the blast, it began an omnidirectional siphoning.
The tiny spark began to suck and drain everything in sight, causing the ripples of destruction to first pause in place, and suddenly begin to reverse towards their source.
As the Spark gobbled up everything, it gradually began to swell and grow rapidly.
In mere moments, it had grown from a tiny flint of some sort into a tongue of gold colored flame, and it was still growing denser and denser.
Soren was first shocked, then dumbfounded, then glad. He almost thanked every god out there, including the wicked ones.
However, just as he was about to breathe a sigh of relief, a derisive snort born out of the very deepest depths of malice and fury suddenly transmitted through him.
And for a moment, everything within Soren paused in their activities and focused on the Emerald Core which now had a violent surge of energy brimming visibly across its surface.
This energy was so violent, it was already causing hairline fractures on the core surface.
From just the sheer intensity of light spilling through these hairline fractures, Soren and everything that every factor of his entire being understood one simple truth:
There was no surviving this!
Then it came.
At first, it was an implosion that sucked everything in its immediate surrounding towards the center of the core.
Then the explosion came.
~KA-POOM~
It was like an underwater nuclear warhead test.
The sonic wave came first, barrelling and rupturing everything it came in contact with.
Liora still scuttled behind the most brittle Obsidian pillar realized Soren had been on his knees for so long, twitching and trembling from time to time.
At first, she thought it would pass, after all, she had seen Soren pull through several impossible situations within the span of one day.
However, this was the only time where he had no physical reaction asides from his trembling and twitching, and as such, she felt he was finally breaking down.
Then just as she left the protective area of the obsidian pillar to check up on him, a massive Sonic Wave burst out Soren's body.
~VROOM~
It didn't just blow her hair backwards; it sent her flying and tumbling into the obsidian pillar with abnormal force.
~BANG~
Liora's body almost wrapped around the pillar as she lost consciousness from the sheer impact.
Soren's seismic senses locked onto the source of the commotion, and there he saw the way Liora slammed into the obsidian pillar like a sack of potatoes.
Then he watched as her familiar figure landed on the hard ground, how it didn't seem to be moving, Soren did something that had never ever crossed his mind before.
'I plead with my fleeting life and dying breath to any god that might be hearing me at this moment; please save her.'
Soren prayed... and that, with every form of mental and emotional energy he had left.
But just as he was about to lose all hope, a nigh-imperceptible voice said;
"Deal."
The voice sounded babyish and yet ancient, so much so that it seemed like it belonged to an entity that predated time itself.
Soren had heard that voice once before, but his current plight didn't allow him to recall what it represented.
As a result, just as he was about to sigh a breath of relief, all hell suddenly broke loose.
~ BOOM! ~
Cracks and fractures creviced their way past the length of the obsidian pillar, eating into its core frames even.
The entire depths, cavern, and chamber that relied on that pillar to keep them up, suddenly came crumbling in a violent collapse.
It felt like a slap to Soren's face...
Soren suddenly felt all the energy he had been using to hold back his internal disaster slip away along with his hope for Liora's safety.
The internal destruction however, cared not for Soren's emotions and swiftly flooded through the path of least restriction, taking advantage of Soren's crushed will to live.
And that was how the greatest destruction to ever happen to a seven-year-old began to unravel across every fibre of Soren's being.
His Star-Iron Plates that had proven to be nigh-indestructible blasted open in many areas of his body, leaving his tearing steel-coiled muscles in the open for all to see.
In some even worse parts of his body, his Jade-Alloy Bones were visibly fracturing, and even in some cases completely breaking and crumbling in real-time.
His Hematite-Silt Pores, including all his orifices, burst apart and overflowed with the leaking mixture of silver mercury, green, red and even violet fluids.
Soren's being went stiff, ceasing all its trembling or twitching altogether, becoming totally still... dead still.
The destruction left the Tranquil Poison sitting in his heart like left over milk in a cup; totally annihilating the little sentience in the poison that had lorded over Soren's life for seven years.
His Black Sun had cracked open from the impact.
However, unlike the Tranquil Poison, a multicolored light shone from within its hairline fractures, brimming like the final glory of a dying star just before supernova.
Soren's primal instincts had gone absolutely quiet. The Master Builder Gene was packed up like a knocked engine. Having been utterly overloaded.
However, the tiny tongue of golden flame remained, and it seemed to be the only thing left standing, still trying to hold everything together, and preventing absolute death.
But even that was too much of a burden, as it had already begun to flicker like a candlelight in window drafts.
Amidst all that Chaos, Soren's consciousness had long slipped away as he lost every sense of reality and existence.