Divine Path System

Things spiraled beyond imagination. All hopes of receiving help shattered.

The worst part of it was that no one could be blamed. Who could accuse them of absconding?

Varian made the mistake of thinking they shared the same motivation against the God Emperor.

No, they weren't fighting him to save anything. Not quite. From the start, they were fueled to stop him to secure their own rule, to keep their dominions to themselves, to secure their lives by taking down the only potential threat.

Varian lived a difficult life from the start, fighting almost every week since his awakening. But his had been an intense life, where years, no millennia happened in weeks.

They too had difficulties. But they lived fundamentally different lives. They spent actual millennia, no, millions of years where nothing much happened.

Even though they both reached the same point at the end, the journey was often as important as the destination.

Perhaps they viewed Aur Deus as a man who was saving the world. He was inside God's Eye for so long, wasn't he?

'He might not be the savior you think he is.'

Logos said that a while ago in a sombre voice.

'He might not be the destroyer either.'

Sometimes, Varian was unsure what he should even fight for. The reasons felt flawed more often than not. But his instincts told him that this was a battle he was destined to fight.

It did not matter if he stepped forward or cowered back, destiny would arrive when it should.

Didn't Logos say that long, long ago when he was still a mortal fighting the abyssals?

'Destiny.'

Varian clenched his fists, a feeling of frustration and powerlessness filling his heart.

And then, he threw his head back and laughed.

"A chess piece toppling the board and checkmating the player toying with it. Sounds impossible. All the more reason to try."

There was a hint of madness in his eyes. If he didn't have people to fall back onto, he might've gone insane.

(Var, are you okay?)

Samsara's voice was low, scared and worried. When even the crazy sliver behaved like that, Varian closed his eyes and stabilized his mind.

'Something is wrong with me.'

He's doing what he wanted, how he wanted. But somehow, his mind was a lot more unstable.

Maybe it's because of the events he experienced. They were enough to traumatize even the rulers of the alliance to give up.

Or maybe…

"Urgh."

Varian groaned, bleeding from his mouth as he focused on the pair of his eyes watching him.

They were in his mind, imprinted into his memory.

Every moment he took time for himself, he could feel them. They started at him, those eyes that shone like stars in the sky and watched him whatever he did.

'I need to get rid of them.'

His soul power tried to erase them. But the eyes weren't made up of spirit to be erased like that. He used the power of order and chaos. They shook slightly but remained stable. The manipulation through space time had even little meaning.

If those eyes could elude a god, even if it's a dead god, then he perhaps didn't have much luck in erasing them. At least not now.

Varian took a few deep breaths, his soul growing chaotic under the pressure. Who did these eyes belong to anyway?

It wasn't the God Emperor for certain. God Emperor didn't even exist at the beginning of the forbidden region. He couldn't sneak into the region and watch the dead god, could he?

"Haaa~"

The world around him collapsed into a point and light exploded.

Varian appeared in the core of Genesis Empire. From what looked like the center of a mini milky way, a tree grew.

A cosmic tree that truly overshadowed everything in its path, growing beyond all reasonable measure.

Its length was comparable to a province and its thickness was enough to swallow several star systems.

The cosmic tree was the pinnacle of creation, the proof that the creator reached an unprecedented peak in the path of life.

The leaves of this tree were each as large as a planet and each planet nurtured within it precious life.

Each leaf had the power of a celestial by itself. It had a will to govern itself and was also simultaneously a part of the larger tree system, subordinate to the tree's will.

What's even more dangerous, even more scary was that some leaves were nurturing a wisp of divine aura.

There was no proper estimate to the number of leaves as a whole or even the maturing leaves with divine aura.

But the power they could unleash together would crush all rank 1s of the alliance put together.

The scariest part about this creation was that it wasn't this strong until recently.

Keman had no need for such a tree. The largest tree under him, the one he used a while back to take Varian to the forbidden region of life and death wasn't like this.

It was changed on a fundamental level, to reach a different level of life.

"Save me!"

"Ahhhh!"

"All Mother!"

"Noooo!"

As Varian stepped closer to the beautiful cosmic tree that looked like a work of art, his soul senses tingled.

The picturesque vision in front of him distorted and he could see the traces of death everywhere.

The pristine green bark of the tree was stained red, yellow and silver. It smelled of rotten blood.

The leaves that swayed gently in the space, each one a masterpiece in its own right, carried countless souls.

Souls that were forcibly stripped of their bodies and sacrificed to build up the sentience of this world.

They were slaves to the leaf, to the tree who owned the leaves, to the woman who created the tree.

The tree itself was monstrously large. If a single leaf of the tree, a ring of its bark needed so many sacrifices, how many were sacrificed for the tree itself?

Varian shuddered to think and the words he heard from King Ferdinand rang in his mind ominously.

'All Mother Asherah performed a forbidden ritual, merging with the hundred 'races' she created and re-entered mid rank 2.'

But that seemed to be only the first ritual. The woman performed more and more rituals, decimated more and more lives.

The first ritual costed trillions of lives. There were no figures given by anyone from the second ritual onwards.

Thanks to his powers spanning entire Genesis, Varian knew the truth.

Asherah not only sacrificed the top hundred races she created but also their subordinate races.

Compared to when he was thrown into the forbidden region, a quarter of all life forms in genesis, excluding the satellite galaxies, were gone.

A quarter.

This tree was the result of that madness.

And in this tree were the faint auras of Aurora and Primula.

All inhibitions in Varian, all fears about the God Emperor finding him vanished.

If the God Emperor really wanted him dead, how could he have let him survive for so long?

And if condensing a clone with his main body being in God's Eye was so easy, why wouldn't he keep a clone active all the time instead of condensing it when needed?

Under the surging of rage, the walls of paranoia crumbled.

"Asherah."

Varian's low growl echoed in the space and the entire tree began to shake.

A silverly phantom emerged behind him.

It was a huge figure of his self. The black and white eyes shone brilliantly. A faint orange body, with the light of a sunrise began to solidify.

Large, it was. Far larger than even the tree itself. Its brilliance surpassed even the light from the center of the milk way.

The curvature of space-time itself began to twist, shaking up the entire milky way.

It was reminiscent of the scene fifty years ago.

Of that calamity.

"Asherah."

The phantom surged, growing hundreds of times larger.

From the border regions all the way to the core regions, people peeked out of their window and stared up in fear, in awe, in reverence.

It didn't matter whether it was day or night.

The sky was dyed orange throughout the galaxy.

For people who could see, they saw a giant standing in the sea of the milkway.

In the dark space, the white brilliant light coming from the core of the spiralic galaxy was overshadowed by the orange figure who stood at the center of it.

From his castle, King Ferdinand watched a projection of the galaxy. He collapsed powerlessly, eyes blank.

The divine rankers, regardless of affiliation hurried out, trying to stop whatever was going to happen.

But most of them couldn't even break the twisting space barriers. And those who could break them couldn't approach the power center.

"Asherah!"

The voice rang across the entire alliance and a giant hand enveloped the galaxy.

Click!

With a click, the cosmic tree, the creation built from countless sacrifices, the pinnacle of life power, was uprooted.