Millennium Witch

Book 3: Chapter 304: The Abyss!

What kind of power could suppress the divine realm of a divine-realm powerhouse? Naturally, only a higher level of power could do that. For example, the Demon God.Thinking of that answer, and looking at the sea of lightning before her that blotted out heaven and earth, as well as the fissure in the sky, Yvette’s expression turned more serious than ever before.

She tapped off the ground with the tip of her foot, and green wind wrapped around her as she rose into the air, dodging several purple bolts of lightning crashing down from above. Then more than a dozen rune circles spread open behind her.

Elemental spells of various kinds poured out from them, colliding with and annihilating the countless purple bolts rushing at her, like fireworks blooming across the purple night sky.

In truth, she could have directly counterattacked with Shadowtouch. But thinking that the Demon God was still watching from above and had not acted directly, she decided to keep Shadowtouch hidden for the moment and see what exactly the Demon God intended. It would not be too late to reveal her trump card after the other side launched a more direct, higher-level attack.

Soon, seeing every manner of lightning-based divine art intercepted one by one by the Silver Witch, who could not use divine-realm abilities and was relying only on ordinary high-level magic, a trace of astonishment appeared in Surian’s eyes.

He might have betrayed his teacher, and he no longer had the face to stand before his grandmaster as her grand-disciple, but status and strength were two different matters. Under the divine might that the Lord of the Abyss had borrowed from the Demon God, even the Silver Witch of legend should only have been able to exert power no different from a tenth-tier demon. So why was it that this barrage of divine arts of his had not even managed to harm a single hair on her head?

As expected, I can’t underestimate her, he thought. Strong battle intent immediately surfaced in his golden eyes. Abyss demons were a warlike race, and Surian was even more so. He had no confidence in defeating the Silver Witch in her prime, but if he could not even defeat an impaired Silver Witch, then what face would he have to remain the First Demon General and call himself the strongest on the current Western Continent?

He then reached out, and from the hidden space within his divine realm, drew a silver greatsword coiled with countless serpents of lightning. This was, in essence, the Authority of his divine realm. Only when he drew this sword did he truly begin to get serious.

On the other side, when Yvette saw Surian draw his sword and come at her in a streak of purple lightning, she did not retreat either. She directly used necromancy to summon a bone sword to meet him. It had been a very long time since she had last fought someone in close combat, but with the soul-brain interface assisting her in battle, it was hardly a problem.

The two immediately clashed in fierce battle in midair, exchanging magical bombardments while colliding like meteors, fighting from the sky to the mountaintop, and from the mountaintop to beneath the clouds.

If the miasma had not been obscuring the view, the scene unfolding now would have been enough to make even the people of Riftscar City several kilometers away think that the end of the world had arrived.

No one knew how much time had passed before, with one especially violent collision, the two figures finally separated once more and faced each other from afar.

But unlike Yvette, who remained completely unharmed, Surian’s condition looked far worse. Not only was he panting heavily, blood was pouring from his chest.

Yes, as the First Demon General, Surian had actually never been particularly good at defense. In most of the great battles he had experienced before, he had relied more on the ancient armor on his body, a divine artifact unearthed from the ruins of an Ultra-ancient Civilization, to tank through them.

But since that divine armor was a product of the Ultra-ancient Civilization, that meant it was different from divine arts and Authority. It could be remotely infiltrated through technical means. So during the fight, Yvette had been battling while secretly hacking into it and turning down the power of the combat armor. And just as expected, in the midst of the fierce battle, the huge abyss demon suffered a sudden disaster. Yvette’s sword stabbed into his chest and pierced through every defensive barrier. If Surian had not reacted quickly enough to twist his body to the side, that strike should have gone straight through his heart.

Now, still shaken, Surian hastily pulled back to a distance of several kilometers while repairing his body and guarding against the Silver Witch, who had already revealed her mythical true form of silver hair and red eyes. His mood grew heavier and heavier.

He had never imagined that, even while unable to use any divine-realm abilities, his grandmaster could still beat him into such a state and nearly take his life.

Grandmaster really was grandmaster.

But the problem was, if that was the case, how was he supposed to take her down?

At the other end of the Western Continent, on that same black mountaintop, the Lord of the Abyss still stood gazing eastward. When the black mist dispersed, the beautiful face revealed beneath it no longer held its old composure and playfulness, but instead a faint anger.

She had not expected that Surian, the dignified First Demon General, would be beaten into such a sorry state by the silver-haired girl despite having seized a tremendous advantage from the opening move, and had even nearly lost his life. If she did not have some discernment herself, she would absolutely have suspected at this point that he was putting on an act of self-inflicted suffering.

But now was not the time to rebuke Surian for his incompetence. She had to make a decision, or else it was highly likely that not only would her original objective fail, she would also lose the First Demon General there.

After a brief hesitation, a fierce look surfaced on the Lord of the Abyss’s face. Then she raised a hand and made a grasping motion through the air toward the east.

Along with that motion, on the battlefield thousands of miles away, the fissure hanging in the sky rapidly began to expand. From a spatial rift, it gradually evolved into a gigantic gate stretching across the heavens, and in the end it became like a mirage of another world reflected in the sky, shoving away the entire night.

Yvette looked up and saw a bizarre world projection appear overhead. It was pieced together from countless indistinguishable geographic regions. Its outline shifted between clarity and blur, and innumerable fragmented scenes flickered in and out in subtle places like a revolving lantern, resembling some strange dream sinking into darkness.

What drew her attention even more was that in a few brief instants, she caught some special details. They were technological-style buildings that were very rare in the Mortal Realm, but not uncommon in the Origin Civilization. If she had guessed correctly, those should have been historical scenes from the Ultra-ancient Civilization.

“So that is… the Abyss?” Yvette immediately realized it and looked toward Surian.

Surian did not answer. He chose silence, but many times, silence was itself a kind of answer.

So that’s how it is, she thought. She remembered Tertia once telling her that the Abyss was said to conceal the ultimate secret of the Mortal Realm, and what secret could fit that description better than the historical origins of the Ultra-ancient Civilization?

She just had not expected the Demon God to open the Abyss on its own initiative. And from the look of it, It even intended to let the Abyss descend directly onto the earth and forcibly pull her into it.

That really did leave nowhere to run, at least for the vast majority of divine-realm powerhouses. With one’s divine realm suppressed by a higher-order existence, the life-preserving abilities that divine-realm experts prided themselves on could not be brought into play at all.

But the question was… why run?

If this really was the Abyss, then all the more reason to go in and take a look, wasn’t it?

That said, for safety’s sake, Yvette immediately activated the position-swap function of the flesh-and-blood marker, switching her true body to Ish Island. Left in place was a mimetic marker clone with 50,000 points of Aberrant Mana.

Then she stood where she was, calmly watching the world above slowly descend, as though she were observing something entirely unrelated to herself. Only when the falling firmament, like a veil, surrounded her from all directions did she finally merge completely into the reflection of that unknown world.

……

Very soon, with the witch’s figure gone, the purple lightning between heaven and earth also vanished. Cold moonlight spilled down once more, illuminating the devastated mountain range below.

Back on the earlier mountaintop, Surian did not even have time to take out any healing medicine before the Lord of the Abyss’s icy voice rang out in his mind. “If you can’t even handle something this minor, then don’t blame me for sending her straight to hell.”

Surian understood what the Lord of the Abyss meant. No matter what outcome had occurred today, the Silver Witch had to be imprisoned in the Abyss. The difference was that if Surian had defeated her first and then imprisoned her, he could have taken advantage of her weakened state to lock her inside a special prison within the Abyss, and that place was actually safe. But if the capture failed and she was forcibly dragged into the Abyss, then the outcome would instead be certain death.

“She probably won’t die so easily.”

Thinking of how the Silver Witch had displayed complete ease from beginning to end during the battle just now, and how calm and unruffled she had been in the face of the Abyss’s descent, Surian fell silent for a moment before suddenly giving that reply.

What answered him was a string of silver-bell laughter. The Lord of the Abyss seemed to find his words especially absurd and amusing. She laughed for more than a minute before finally stopping. After calming herself somewhat, she switched to a mocking tone and said, “Heh… if that really is the case, then that would be a good thing too.”

Surian did not know why she said that, just as he also did not understand what exactly the terrifying source within the Abyss was.

But if it were Grandmaster, then perhaps…

In the boundless, pure darkness, Yvette, having entered the Abyss through the mimetic clone of the flesh-and-blood marker, saw that she was falling without end.

This was not the kind of darkness found in outer space, dotted with distant points of light, nor was it like the absolute darkness within Shadow King Vermeis’s divine realm. It seemed to hide a light source, only one that could not be seen. So from time to time, during the fall, she could catch glimpses of certain things sweeping past her.

From her brief observations, she could see that what swept past were gray mists filled with fragmented images, like historical fragments of countless unresolved mysteries.

But she had no way of entering those gray clusters of mist, because the conditions in the world of the Abyss were extraordinarily strange. Here, she could not use any magic. Every attempt to construct a spell would collapse and vanish at the instant the rune circles formed, which was equivalent to sealing away all of her magical abilities.

What remained unclear was whether the Abyss itself was naturally anti-magic, or whether it was targeting her specifically. But judging from how it felt after her repeated attempts to cast spells, she leaned more toward the latter.

Spell prohibition… is this the higher-level power the Demon God has imposed on me? Quite the method. It also fits the sort of display one would expect from that level of existence…

Yvette thought silently to herself. Fortunately, she had entered with a clone, and her aberration abilities remained unaffected. Otherwise, with her spellcasting ability gone, she really would have become an ordinary person by now, the sort who looked delicate, soft, and easy to push over.

The process of falling seemed endless, and even the sense of time passing had become blurred. The only way to escape this state was to jump off halfway and dive into one of the surrounding gray mists.

But she was not in a hurry. Before using her aberration ability to forcibly enter one of the mist-clusters, she planned to wait a little longer and see whether she could discover something of greater value.

What she had not expected, however, was that this wait would truly bring her face-to-face with something utterly unforeseen.

Against the backdrop of profound darkness, she caught sight of a small portion of the outline of an immeasurably gigantic figure. It seemed to be some kind of monster, but even the single segment she could see was already enormous beyond belief, no less vast than a giant mountain range winding and coiling into the distance, with no head or tail in sight. Even more hair-raising was the fact that its surface was covered in densely packed human limbs, writhing blood vessels, and proliferating organs that looked like human eyeballs. It looked, in every sense, like a super-giant aberration with a scale reaching astronomical levels.

How could there be an aberration that huge, roaming within the Abyss?

Yvette’s pupils contracted and her brows knit tightly. She had harvested no less than hundreds of millions of aberrations in the Land of Finality, yet she had never seen one of such immense size. What felt even more inconceivable to her, however, was the warning coming from pure instinct.

Her instincts told her that this gigantic aberration entrenched within the Abyss had the power to kill her.