[Ginnungagap World, please halt your advance.]

[Understood.]

The will of the world responded instantly, obeying the God-King without hesitation. Any other world might have pushed back, shown resistance, maybe even thrown a tantrum—but not Ginnungagap. It had tasted the benefits and wanted more.

From the time when it was just a "small" world to the colossal scale it had reached today, it owed its transformation largely to Thalos.

Time and again, resounding victories proved Thalos's vision and power. For Ginnungagap, there was simply no reason to go against him. Their interests were perfectly aligned.

And so, the world didn't mind the small cost of resisting the cosmic current and remaining relatively stationary.

As a supermassive world, both acceleration and deceleration took time. If one could observe from a lofty enough vantage point, they would notice faint ripples forming beyond the world's barrier—layer upon layer, like slow waves in space.

To go from moving with the current to relative stillness took a full seven days.

During that time, Thalos advanced the expendable probe world—modeled after the destroyed Egyptian world—ahead of the main Ginnungagap by five hundred thousand kilometers. He switched to using the Kraken and other giant soul entities as divine signal relays.

As expected, it wasn't long before things got weird.

The remains of the Egyptian proxy world.

In this nearly lifeless forward-world, a silent palace stood with only a handful of figures moving within it. A closer look revealed that they weren't living beings, but heroic spirits, dispatched to the location to serve.

They weren't serving any full deity, either—just fragments or projections of certain gods.

"Hmm? Something's off." The clone of Pellen furrowed his brows.

Pellen took the mission very seriously—especially after Ginnungagap came to a halt. He knew how critical the forward scouting was, so he had sent out a large number of scouts.

These scouts, formed from heroic spirits, had no long-range detection capabilities. They relied on piloting small soulships to explore the chaotic void.

Due to the limited divine and order power they could carry, these soulships rarely exceeded five hundred kilometers in scouting range.

Compared to the Kraken-based scouts, their detection capacity was pitiful. But this was the best Pellen had to work with.

When one of the heroic spirits reported back, Pellen didn't hesitate to dispatch a second wave. Once the discovery was confirmed, he reported to Thalos.

This time, Thalos sent a scouting vessel made from the Quetzalcoatl soul-shell, which reached the target location two days later.

A world.

More precisely, the ruins of a world.

Unlike the Slavic world remnants they had encountered in the past, this place was in far worse condition.

Though there were still traces of earth-element energy, there was almost nothing salvageable.

Why? The entire region was saturated with chaotic energy—to an extreme degree.

So much time had passed that it was impossible to tell if the world had been dead for a year or a century.

Through Quetzalcoatl's vision, Thalos saw what remained: roughly 10,000 square kilometers of continent, pitted and cratered by corruption.

Only one ruined city remained. A shattered statue, broken in three pieces, lay toppled in what might once have been a central fountain.

The plaza floor, likely once made of marble, looked like it had been chewed by wild dogs.

Nearby, rusted iron chains—nearly disintegrated—swung from broken walls in the chaotic wind, with corroded nooses still gripping what looked like human forearm bones.

The earth glowed with a mix of sickly blue and muddy yellow light. It was covered in a mold-like chaotic growth—thick, greenish moss that clung to every crevice. Each stone crack held patches of disgusting chaos nodules, like moldy cheese.

A dense fog of chaos hung over the entire land, unwilling to dissipate.

Even trying to harvest the earth-element energy from this place would burn more Order energy than it was worth.

Thalos turned and sent a thought to Pellen. "You said there were more?"

"Yes. My forces found multiple abandoned worlds in this void sector. I can't say for certain, but it appears these ruins came from different civilizations."

After surveying them himself, Thalos fell into silence.

The scene reminded him of a terrifying concept known as a "ship graveyard"—regions in the ocean where swirling currents and hidden reefs caused countless sailing ships to crash and sink, turning the area into a watery grave.

This situation felt eerily similar. But on a cosmic scale—because here, what was being buried... was entire worlds.

Seven such dead worlds had already been found. The smallest was 10,000 square kilometers. The largest was 380,000, rivaling some of the larger Celtic islands.

With worlds that large, the pantheons they spawned shouldn't have been weak.

So why... were they all destroyed here?

Sure, the chaotic current here was powerful—but not enough to destroy a robust pantheon.

Thalos couldn't figure it out. He returned to the Silver Palace and held a meeting with his core gods. But even they couldn't find a clear explanation.

Left with no better option, they decided to reroute around the zone.

But only three days later—

The advance Egyptian proxy world was attacked.

A spherical spatial shield was suddenly besieged by countless deformed chaos monsters.

Some looked like octopi, with eyes like irregular sixteen-faced polyhedrons. Lava-like bloodlines danced across each eyeball. Their tar-covered bodies bulged with tumor-like growths and spiraled into black holes, while triple sets of clawed limbs jutted from their shoulders—spewing acidic smoke as they corroded the protective barrier.

Others opened circular, lamprey-like maws filled with gnashing teeth.

Through divine transmission, Thalos could observe everything from the Silver Palace—right down to the wriggling meat inside these monsters' throats.

Their semi-transparent tendrils unfurled, revealing hundreds of compound eyes before unleashing black-purple acid whirlpools that scorched holes into the previously smooth magical shield.

Pellen's clone launched a probing attack—just a low-grade lightning strike.

The creature convulsed violently. From the gash in its tendrils, veins of glowing blue circuitry became visible beneath the surface.

Shattering noises—like breaking glass—began to echo outside the shield. As the creatures' bodies ruptured, thousands of worm-like entities spilled forth, each one bearing the same multi-eyed gaze.

They clung to the spatial barrier, gnawing at it while shrieking in a high-pitched chorus that cut straight through the nerves.

Pellen's brows knit tightly. "Chaos demons? And this many?"

He was starting to understand how those other small worlds had been destroyed. If even one unprepared minor world wandered into this area with only basic shielding, there was no way it could survive the onslaught of tens of thousands of chaos demons.

Still, frown or not—he acted swiftly.

With a wave of his hand, the waiting heroic spirits surged forward, charging into battle against the tide of chaos beasts that had invaded the proxy world.

------------------

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