Floating up until he was far away from the anchor planet, he looked inwards, assessing the condition of his body for the first time in a while.

Growing Rage continued to imbue him with Primordial concepts and the path of the Reaper, making him impossibly dangerous. If he flicked a regular mortal with intent to kill, they would explode.

Not only that, but many of his Achievements had a compounding effect on his body- [Pioneer] being the most obvious with its effect of "Body becomes better at surviving." He didn't pay much attention to it at first, but when he looked into it, he could see that it had a mild yet profound effect on him. He was already durable, and he'd long suspected he couldn't die from blood loss with how much his body adjusted to produce at this point, but Pioneer made it so he needed less organs in general. By his general estimate, having his heart blown to pieces may take up to twenty seconds before his cells started to decay.

His brain was semi-vestigial at this point, and he couldn't be knocked unconscious. The brain normally served as a link between the soul and body to interface with the senses, and it did do that for him, but he could easily see through a soul echo if he lost his body; in a regular being, that link anchored the soul to the body, but his soul was a part of his body, so it was… not as necessary

The link was still vulnerable, and he would be dealt horrible soul damage if he had his head blown off, but it wouldn't be the worst.

The more pressing issue he found when looking into his body was his Reaperhood. There was something holding him back, a requirement he still didn't fit. He should've seen this coming after his conversation with Justin, the Shaman who was likely still fighting Oura in court- if Oura wasn't already executed.

Justin said something along the lines of "To think we might have a Reaper fighting for humanity," after seeing Dei's Connect Skill, which implied there'd never been one fighting for humanity before. Were there any Sapient Reapers in quarantine at all?

If not… damn, he should've seen the block coming.

He wondered if there was a way for the System to help with this too, and he was screwing himself over slightly by attempting it outside of System-space but… no, he doubted that. There was no way the Leviathans would stand for meddling with their path.

'Unless it cut a deal with them like it did when giving me my World that Walks Skill? Ha, no, that was after I got an Impossible Class.'

He probed what it meant to be a Reaper from the imbued meaning, but it did not surrender its secrets. Whatever he needed to do, he would have to stumble upon it.

Putting all of that aside for now, he went to the source of his chaos, Hellish Divergence. Perumah said it felt shallow compared to the real thing, and he couldn't say he understood. He just didn't have the equipment to understand the different "Flavors" of chaos like she did, but he trusted her to be correct; out of them both, she was the chaos-born after all.

When he looked at his source, it was an evershifting flame of magic sitting in a perfect void of everything, constrained by his Skill.

Looking around, he ensured that there was nothing around, and nudged open the gate, letting just a smidge through. Watching the lenses closely, he noted that his Affinities barely interfered at all, notably not suffocating the released spark.

The chaos did not tear through his Skill, and it released normally, diffusing into the air. Looking closely at the space he saw…

Nothing.

There was a slight warble, but everything remained the same, so he carefully increased how much chaos was released, bit by bit.

Eventually, he finally noticed the difference. The darkness around him shifted to different hues- the lightless space between stars, a suffocating blindness of the ocean's depths, shade beneath a tree, and several more he struggled to name. Finally, he realized what was happening: the existing world was changing to become jaded towards different affinities.

True, all of them involved darkness in some way, but they all had wildly different flavors. That meant when he tried using this on a planet, it would transmute things into "Similar" concepts.

At least, that's what it did at a glance, but he couldn't forget its actual purpose of allowing affinities to reach into the world and bless/curse people.

'You know, that might be why Perumah said it's shallow,' he realized, 'It's only showing me existing affinities, and chaos has all POTENTIAL affinities. That would make sense, because how could anyone but the Primordial create an energy that contains everything? I'm producing this spark in my body, but it probably links to the gyroscope node which gives me a gateway to my affinities.

'The closest I've ever come was from compressing that spark of Minerali which gave birth to a universe, but I never did get to research how deep it was. Would Perumah have sensed it was true chaos? Or would it be stilted towards universal affinities such as Cosmic, Void, Time, Space, and the like?'

Either way, he made the executive decision to leave it on at low energy for now to see what happened. If he had to go near people he'd turn it off, but he wanted to see how it manifested itself, even if he had to link up with his friends to ensure they, too, emitted chaos- and thus were unchanged by it.

It'd only been a few minutes before something unusual happened, not with his Skill, but the environment.

He noticed faint distortions in his vision as he looked back at the planet he came from, and his brow scrunched in confusion. He would've already teleported away, if each ripple didn't have a powerful, familiar scent within each; of oceans, souls, life, and death, concepts of Leviathan touched upon the world around him.

Though Leviathan wasn't an affinity, they were still Gods, so they had the Leviathan domain, similar to how Dei had his own personalized mana, which acted as his domain. He had a Dei pseudo-affinity, and the Leviathans had the pseudo-Leviathan-affinity.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

He knew what this meant- one was near.

'Huh, I was JUST thinking about my path… well, 'Speak of the devil' appears to be quite literal!' he laughed internally.

The Leviathan's presence was likely intentional, telling him it was close so he would enter the Spirit Realm to speak, it clearly not wanting to enter the Physical.

'I wonder what The Champion did to everyone to make them scared to even appear.'

Obliging the Leviathan's' request, Dei dove down into the spirit realm and, for the first time since he left System-space, found it to be working.

He shivered as it felt like his body took a deep breath for the first time in months, and he realized just how much he'd deprived his Spirit half. He spent a few moments basking in the glow of spirit mana, even if it was very shallow at this layer.

The ripples were slightly stronger, but the Leviathan was not here. He knew it could reach out to him by now, but it apparently wished to see him face to face, and the first spirit layer was too weak for that.

The sent out a pulse from Soul Echo, picking up zero spiritual signatures, and dipped down to the next layer.

'This is the first time I've ventured down of my own volition… is this why I haven't become a Reaper? What kind of Reaper doesn't enter the Spirit Realm?!'

He'd gone deep when he was harrying the Obsidian Elemental, but he'd never actually spent much time here.

The second through fourth layers had little difference other than thicker Spirit mana, nothing living that he could see through his Echo at all. It made sense, he supposed, as he was in the depths of space before entering the Spirit Realm.

The landscape warped as he went. The first layer was a mirror of the Physical world, but the fifth was smudged and blurry, the far off sun and planet becoming more indistinct; it was in this layer that he finally noted Spiritual structures, which were tiny blooming plants on a thin ground-like layer. Somehow, he was standing on a mockery of "Dirt," but he knew he could push through it if he wanted.

Something pulled at his form, but it was not an unpleasant sensation; it instead felt like something was helping him get free of his shackles, it was just that said shackles were… his flesh.

Fluid Shape, his shapeshifting racial ability, would have a much easier time in the Spiritual Realm as his body became less vital. The deeper he dove, the more he relied on Spirit mana to survive, the less he would need things like "Air" and "Blood."

It was around the tenth layer he finally stopped. The spiritual plants had slowly grown larger as the earth grew more solid, the similarities of the Physical world fading with each iteration until the environment was completely different. Now, he stood within a young forest of thin trees, and nearby, on a stump, sat a World that Walks, the humanoid form of a Leviathan.

It observed him quietly, and he spent a moment watching the trees grow at a visible rate. The Leviathan was clearly suppressing its aura, but there were still waves of life emanating from it. It was a keeper, a gardener, and the souls nearby were empowered by its presence.

As for the Leviathan itself it was vaguely feminine, so he would assume it was a woman until proven otherwise. It was also much different from his own, with four arms, more rubbery skin, and the manta-ray-like wings on its back growing to be half as long as he was tall while extending all the way down her legs. His World that Walks was that of a human turned Leviathan, this was a Leviathan turned human.

He wasn't sure what to say, and she wasn't volunteering anything, so he decided to relax a bit, let himself adjust to the surroundings, and watch what Hellish Divergence did to the environment.

When he sat against a tree, the Leviathan simply raised her eyebrow- well, both on the left half of her face- but let him. He watched chaos change the Spirit mana into Bulb, then Beast, Membrane to Larva.

The tree he sat against went from Wood to Fiber, then Flesh. With each affinity, its physical shape changed to match, the surface of it altering into a more stringy structure, then an exposed red and squishy one.

It was interesting for him to see what chaos considered to be "Lateral" to each affinity. Why was Membrane even an affinity, and why was it equal to Spirit, Bulb, and Beast? Aloran said that the soul needed structure, which was provided by the body of something, and he could understand all the rest, but did Membrane do something similar?

Wood, as well, could be called the Flesh of a tree, but why fiber? Or was it just similar enough to wood pulp?

More than that though, he felt tints of deeper affinities appear- Life and Death were the main two, clearly being a part of the Leviathans domain, but there was something of a… cyclical meaning as well, an affinity he didn't know yet involving rebirth and reforging of oneself.

At some point the Leviathan had closed her eyes, but he didn't take note of that as his Hellish Divergence began acting… weirdly.

The other affinities began to die down, muting themselves as Life appeared more frequently, then Death, and Rebirth.

Minutes went by, and the tree he leaned against slowly perished, twisting into a gnarled shape as his influence over it became too much for it to handle.

He frowned, looking towards the Leviathan who was still deep in meditation, but the strangely acting affinities didn't stop there.

Life was soon choked out by Death and Rebirth, fading away to nothing, leaving him surrounded by a deep, hollowing mana.

Rebirth never went away, but Death became prolific.

Death, Death, Death, the air seemed to whisper. He could hear it in his ears, a chill on the wind.

Peaceful.

It was nothing like what he'd experienced. Dei had skipped death, and gone straight into Void. Luke told him he'd rejected Grim's hold on him, which he now believed was both a blessing and curse.

The only reason he was here today was his Wrath and Wrath mana, which provided him the energy he needed to blast through the Conceptual Plane of Void. If not for his unsatisfying ending, he never would've been enraged enough to break through into his second life. He'd considered it an indisputably good decision, as he believed Void was the final destination after the Plane of Death, where everyone went in death, but he questioned that now.

Would Grim protect its gates if there was nothing beyond the veil? Void was simply the representation of the space between things, and in his case it was the space between his lives. Would Grim even send people through Void once they perished? Or would he send them somewhere else, if only Dei had given him the chance to do so?

The Champion was known as God on Earth, was there actually an eternal paradise?

It didn't feel like that though… Death was still Death. It was cold stillness, it was peaceful, but it didn't seem welcoming to him.

He felt it draw closer, a skeletal hand slowly clutching at him through Hellish Divergence, manifesting itself.

Nothing changed in the surroundings, but he didn't need to see it to understand that death was coming for him if he didn't move.

Yet he couldn't contract his muscles. He just… didn't want to. He couldn't bring himself to escape.

Mustering the last of his willpower, he tapped into his Spirit abilities, escaping to the ninth layer and feeling Death's grip lax ever-so-slightly.

The ripples of the Leviathan exploded from below, and he knew she was awake now. Still, he did not stop as he fled upwards, shooting into the Physical Realm as he felt a cold wind behind him.

Only when he manifested fully beneath the glow of the sun did the last vestige withdraw.

Putting his hand over his chest, he felt his heart… utterly calm. No panic invaded his mind, he did not shake in fear despite knowing he'd almost been pulled into his death.

For a second, he considered going back, as his soul felt drawn towards the fatal experience.

He felt completely comfortable with whatever the Leviathan had been doing to him.

And that should have been a harrowing thought.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.