"What is this…"

Cillian stood staring at the impossible sight ahead, a "secret world" that had swallowed both the Endless Abyss and the figure-eight-shaped world beside it.

The world around him was covered in yellow sand, stretching endlessly under a still, colorless sky. It looked like a desert, empty and lifeless. Anyone else might have thought they'd been pulled into a wasteland world. But Cillian could tell immediately that something was wrong.

This wasn't a normal desert, it felt emptier than emptiness itself.

Even barren worlds usually held traces of life, some hidden water or lingering energy. But here, there was nothing. Every grain of sand was pure dust with no trace of life, essence, or meaning. Even the most decayed homeworld he had ever seen held more vitality than this place.

It felt like something had devoured the entire world and left nothing behind.

What unsettled Cillian most, however, was that the crystal wall of the Endless Abyss hadn't been broken at all. It was still whole, meaning the Abyss hadn't been destroyed, but completely swallowed.

That should have been impossible.

The crystal wall of a plane is what separates it from everything else, it wasn't the very sign of a world's independence. To consume a complete world with its wall intact defied every rule Cillian knew. Yet that was the only explanation that came to mind.

He looked up.

All around, in this vast "desert world," countless secret worlds floated, some small, some massive. Among them, he spotted more than a dozen divine realms. Which meant other gods, like him, had been drawn into this place.

And more were still appearing.

This world was spreading fast, pulling others in as it expanded through the depths of the secret realm.

"What's happening…" he murmured.

Cillian's divine body rose from the Abyss and stepped into the desert sky. Across the horizon, other divine figures appeared, the other gods of the devoured worlds.

"Hey! Do you know what this is?" one of them called out.

Distance didn't matter. With enough divine fire, gods could speak freely across any gap.

"I don't know…" Cillian answered, keeping his tone guarded. He didn't know if any of these beings were responsible, even as unlikely as that was he wasn't about to trust them.

One of the older-looking gods, glowing with steady divine power, spoke next. "I was deep in the secret realm, conquering a rare world, when everything went dark , then I woke up here. The same thing happened to you, didn't it?"

He sounded confident, but Cillian could sense the fear in his words, fear of something he couldn't name.

Then, a memory surfaced.

Pandei's warning before he entered the secret realm.

A monster about to awaken… a cycle… a devourer of worlds…

Cillian's heart sank. The pieces didn't all fit yet, but his instincts screamed that something horrible had awakened.

And he wasn't the only one who felt it. The fabric of countless worlds trembled. From divine planes to mortal realms, every living thing sensed it, a whisper echoing through space itself.

It was the hunger.

From the far horizon, a gray tide rose like an ocean, sweeping toward them. Within the waves glowed countless black "stars," each pulsing with strange life.

"What are those!?" a god shouted, his voice cracking.

Cillian narrowed his eyes. He had seen something like this once, during his assessment at Grimstone. Those gray waves were similar to the energy pillars used by evaluation worlds to connect with the Endless Abyss. But this was on a scale far beyond anything he'd seen.

A single pillar was like a thread.

This was a sea.

The gray wave struck the nearest secret world.

Crack.

Crack.

The sound was sharp and brittle, like glass being crushed underfoot. The world's crystal wall shattered instantly. Its divine core, life force, and structure dissolved before their eyes.

Moments later, it turned into nothing more than dust floating across the desert, just another handful of ash among countless others.

Cillian's eyes widened and his heart sped up.

The wave had grown larger.

For every world it consumed, it became stronger.

Now he understood the desert. Every grain of dust was the corpse of a devoured world. This realm wasn't just a prison, it was a feeding ground.

Through divine sight, Cillian peered deeper into the gray tide, and what he saw turned his stomach. Each wave was made up of endless tiny creatures, like insects fused together, crawling and twisting as one.

Billions of them.

And yet, within all that chaos, there was only one will.

A single thought echoed through them all.

Endless hunger.

The gray waves rolled onward, rushing straight toward the Endless Abyss.

Inside the Abyss, every creature stirred. The air shook. Wisps of black mist began to spread outward, meeting the oncoming tide.

"Insects…?"

"Zerg?"

Cillian wasn't the only one who noticed something strange about the gray tide. The mid-level deity from earlier also sensed the difference and like Cillian, he stayed on guard. In a moment like this, every god did.

"Why are there bugs everywhere in this world?"

The thought flashed through their minds almost at the same time.

The Zerg weren't an unfamiliar sight. In the vast divine realms, they were a known species, studied at academies like Grimstone, where Cillian had seen and dissected their kind more than once. They weren't rare; they were simply… undesirable.

The Zerg formed a massive biological branch across creation, with strange origins and endless variations. The term itself was broad enough to mean almost anything, but they generally fell into three main types.

The first were the Hive Zerg, countless in number, but small and weak. Each swarm was guided by a single main-brain will, a central consciousness that commanded them like a living network.

The second were Solitary Zerg, individual creatures without a hive mind, but each one a terror capable of destroying worlds alone. They were few, but their power far exceeded the normal monsters.

The last were Tribal Zerg, an in-between form that balanced numbers and strength, operating through loose collective instincts rather than a centralized will.

And that was only the surface. In truth, the number of Zerg subspecies exceeded all known world classifications combined. Every year, divine Academies published mountains of research on them, theories, dissection reports, entire theses on swarm behavior and neural link mechanics.

Yet despite that, almost no gods ever chose the Zerg as their divine race.

Even those who did never rose beyond mediocrity. The most powerful among them barely reached the rank of Zerg Lord, far from a Sequence-level god.

The reason was simple.

The Zerg were disgusting, chaotic, and mentally taxing to command.

Even gods who tried to act as their "hive minds" quickly eventually went insane, their consciousness overloaded by the endless flood of sensory data from millions of linked creatures. Controlling them wasn't a matter of power, but of mental survival. More than one god's brain had literally burst under the strain.

So while every deity present had studied or encountered the Zerg in some way, none of them were ready for what they saw next.

"Are these really… Zerg?" a lower-ranked god whispered.

Before anyone could answer, the gray tide surged again, sweeping through another secret world like a flood.

The world it devoured wasn't weak; conquering it would have required several mid-tier gods working together. Yet within seconds, it was gone.

Its rules, its divine core, its life and light, all reduced to dust.

Even accounting for time distortion between worlds, the speed of destruction was impossible to comprehend. The wave didn't just consume worlds, it erased their existence itself. And it wasn't slowing down.

It was coming for them.

"Run!" a lesser god shouted. He burned his divine fire and unfolded his divine world, trying to flee through the void.

But then he froze.

"Wait, there are no coordinates!?"

His divine fire sputtered and went cold. The surrounding space was empty of any anchor points or spatial coordinates.

Cillian frowned. "It's not that there are no coordinates…" he said quietly. "It's that coordinates haven't been created yet."

His calm voice struck every god like thunder.

"What? What do you mean!?" several cried out.

Cillian gave them a cold glance. "Think. We're inside the embryo of a new multiverse."

The gods fell silent.

"We can't leave using the rules of our original worlds," he continued. "As outsiders, our old anchor points don't exist here. There's no spatial record of us, This place hasn't been written yet."

He looked around at their terrified faces. "To put it bluntly, we're trapped."

"The prototype of a multiverse…" the mid-level god muttered, eyes glinting. His expression shifted from fear to greed. He understood what this meant, and what such a core could be worth.

A newborn multiverse was the ultimate treasure, a cosmic resource no amount of divine power could buy.

"But… is there truly no way out?" another god asked, voice trembling.

"There is," Cillian said, almost smiling. "If you possess a high-tier priesthood, you can use your previous [Anchor Point] to escape. Servant gods of the Sequence Lords, for example, might pull it off. Or founders of new pantheons."

The silence that followed was heavy. None of them fit that description.

"Is there another way?"

"Of course," Cillian replied easily. "But it's a little messier."

"What way?"

He smiled, the kind of smile that made every god uneasy, and his form began to fade, dissolving into black mist that flowed back into the Endless Abyss.

"Kill the swarm," his voice echoed,. "Seize the essence of this newborn multiverse."

The Abyss roared. Waves of dark fog erupted outward, colliding with the gray tide in a storm of destruction.

Cillian hadn't mentioned everything. He himself was the founder of the Abyss Pantheon, and thus possessed an anchor strong enough to leave at any moment. But he wasn't interested in running. Nor did he care about the other trapped gods.

What he cared about were the creatures ahead, the Zerg that had devoured entire worlds.

He wanted to see how powerful they truly were.

Seeing him move, the other gods hesitated only a moment before gritting their teeth and summoning their divine followers.

Far beyond, deep in the void beyond the expanding multiverse, another figure watched in silence.

Peter stood there, his expression grim as he studied the newborn realm.

"The Lord's mortal enemy…" he murmured.

After a long pause, he stepped forward, crossing into the new world.

"Let's hope this time we can handle it," he whispered. "Otherwise, the Venerable himself will have to intervene."

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