Chapter 915: The Truth of the Curse
Standing in the middle of the illusion, and though with his eyes closed, he could still clearly ‘see’ everything was falling apart. The palace of the Goddess was collapsing and slowly sinking into the red ocean. The torrential rain of sulfur and flames fell from the clouds onto the world, and the sea of the Star of Creation was up in flame. The fire had a kind of energy that mortals would not understand. All sin and glory would end in this flame.
The inner layer of the Star of Creation seemed to have begun to collapse, and there was some unprecedented powerful force building up deep in the planet. Amid the continuous explosions, Hao Ren opened his eyes again. The last scene he saw was that the Gilded Disc tainted with the Goddess’ blood violently shook as if it would fall off the crack in the palace. He subconsciously reached out and tried to grab something, but had only managed to touch the edge of the Gilded Disc and watched it fall.
His hand was stained with the Goddess’ blood, which was as hot as magma.
It was a sudden boom again, and vertigo caused Hao Ren to lose his intuition. He was losing track of know how long he had been floating in the chaos, and how many indescribable things he had gone through before he finally regained his footing.
He subconsciously exhaled, as if squeezing out all the air in the lungs. His senses came back online as he could feel the temperature, airflow, light, and the surrounding sound again. He opened his eyes and found himself standing on the altar. His finger blenched, getting off the dark-red marks on the Gilded Disc as if there was an electric shock. It was the subconscious reaction of the body, as a large amount of mental noise was drowning his subjective consciousness, he could barely think.
He shook his head, the large face of the Gilded Disc was glistening with light in his field of vision, and there was still black spots at the bottom edge of the disc. The last scene he saw in the previous illusion and the scene before him overlapped. He realized that he finally knew the truth.
“Buddy?” The voice of the MDT awakened him from the stupor. “Why are you zoning out?”
Hao Ren was stunned and saw that the last piece of divine contract paper had been stuck on the edge of the disc. The black things were quickly disappearing. He smacked himself on the head. “How long have I spaced out?”
“How long? A second,” the MDT replied, confused by Hao Ren’s response. “Of course there has been a lot going on in your eyes in that one second.”
There was an indescribable feeling of exhaustion. Hao Ren did not doubt what the MDT had said but was a little surprised that all he had experienced happened in just one second in reality, and this short moment had drained him as if what he experienced in the illusion had impacted him physically. Realizing something was not right with Hao Ren, Vivian and Y’zaks quickly came over to check on him. Vivian held Hao Ren, who was a little bit light-headed. “How are you?”
“I had an illusion,” Hao Ren said, smiling and walking down from the altar. Vivian’s hand was cold, but it made him feel a little more alert. “And I’ve figured out what the innate hostility is all about.”
His eyes landed on his hand, and he was surprised. There was a strange red mark on his right-hand palm, as if a burn or something, very obvious. He clenched and felt a vague burning sensation spread from the mark, which reminded him that it was not an illusion.
Vivian had also noticed the strange mark on his hand. “What is this?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Hao Ren replied. He had a thought, but it was just too strange and completely defying the law of reality. “I had contacted the blood of the Goddess of Creation, but… but that was in the illusion,” he said.
“The Goddess of Creation?” Vivian and Y’zaks said in unison.
At this time Hasse came up. The senior demon hunter had no idea what the Goddess of Creation and the deicidal war were, but he could feel the negative force on the Solar Roulette was gradually dissipating. “Is things done?”
Vivian and Y’zaks stared at Hao Ren, who sighed and rubbed his forehead, thinking about how to tell the things that he had learned from the illusion. “I have unlocked the secret of the innate hostility.”
They were on edge, could not wait to hear the truth. Hao Ren, however, first looked at Hasse. “You may not understand what I’m going to say, but please wait until I have finished, and then I will explain it to you,” he said.
Hasse had already noticed that Hao Ren and his entourage must have known some secrets from the beginning, and this secret was something that he could never get his hand on even if he had lived for thousands of years. He nodded and suppressed his curiosity. “Well, I’m glad that you let me listen on the side.”
Hao Ren nodded lightly, pointing his finger at the dark marks on the edge of the Gilded Disc. “Those are the blood of the Goddess of Creation.”
E everyone was as quiet as a mouse. It was only a few seconds later that Y’zaks broke the silence. “You mean this thing?”
“At the time she was at the scene, the Goddess stood in this position, leaning against the Gilded Disc…” gesturing to explain what he saw, “…the deicide was wearing a gold-red armor, standing near the runes over there, and then stabbing the Goddess with a black sword that looked like the fragment of the universe. The Goddess’ blood splattered on the Gilded Disc, just like what you can see now.”
Hao Ren had not only seen things in the illusion but also had some knowledge that appeared in his head. He did not pay attention to it at that time, but when he woke up, he found the additional memories in his mind. He had put together these memories and what they saw and finally restored the truth.
“…the blood of the Goddess is the evidence of the great sin of deicide, so the Gilded Disc itself is an evidence of the crime. When the Wall of Reality collapsed, a large number of alien races were flung into this universe, along with this Gilded Disc and the sins that the disc carried. The innate hostility is not a curse nor a mind-interfering spell, but a sin of deicide.”
The Goddess’ blood was sacred, but after the deicide, the blood had been filled with the anger of the vast universe and the sin of the treacherous sons. Though Hao Ren had no idea how the transformation process happened, the result was obvious: the sacred blood had turned into a pollutant, triggering the hostile killing of the otherworldlings in the surface world.
The polluting power carried by the Gilded Disc had been leaking since the beginning. As early as 10,000 years ago, when the earliest alien races except Vivian came to Earth, the Gilded Disc had fallen on the earth at the same time. It first tainted the crack on the Wall of Reality, then all the creatures that passed through the crack. It then slept deep in the depths of the earth for thousands of years, until the Ancattero family dug it out of the magma crater. The Shades of Chaos that emerged from the Gilded Disc was indeed another manifestation of the innate hostility, but they were nothing but just spills.
The real source was the Goddess’ blood on the disc.
“If I’m not mistaken, the amnesia of the otherworldlings is also caused by tainted blood of the Goddess,” Hao Ren speculated. “Different races have a different level of resistance to the corruption though. The sirens are not a creation of the Goddess, so they are mostly unaffected, and their peaceful nature remains. Due to the special physique and the high mental strength of the Ancattero family members, they are moderates among the otherworldlings. Werewolves, vampires, and demon hunters came from the same planet and were subject to the same level of corruption, so they became the most hostile races to each other and the protagonists of the otherworldling war on the planet. I guess that some races have been affected more seriously, and if they are overly sensitive to the Goddess’ blood, they may even turn into monsters, ultimately losing the original characteristics of the intelligent beings.”
“The Scorpions of Tartarus,” Vivian said suddenly. “Zeus once threw a group of three-tailed scorpions into the prison of Tartarus. He said that those strange things are strange, they live like beasts, but they have a lot of delicate decorations and mechanics on their carapace, and there are fragments of generators and vehicles in their nests, but they don’t seem to know how to use them at all.”
“That should be the race that had been completely tainted by the Goddess’ blood. Most of these races did not survive the early melee period of the Mythological era,” Hao Ren said, shaking his head and sighing. “What goes around comes around.”