Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 301: It Is Cold.

He’d done it. Somehow, impossibly, he’d—

The water behind him began to boil.

Nero’s relief vanished as he turned toward the pool. The crystal-clear surface was churning now, bubbles rising from the depths where that enormous shadow slumbered.

The now dull blue glow from the fungus reflected off the disturbed water, creating strange, muddy patterns that distorted at every moment, like a smeared picture.

It was something violent and deeply disturbing, Nero could tell, from the instinctual fear that arose in his soul.

Something was waking up.

Then he felt it— a hard pressure around his ankle.

Nero looked down and his heart stopped.

A dark tendril, thick as his arm, had wrapped around his leg. It was cold. Frigid cold. So cold, it burned where it touched his skin. The tendril tightened, and before Nero could even think to struggle, it yanked him off his feet.

He hit the stone floor hard, his broken ribs sending terrible pain through his chest. His fingers scrabbled for purchase on the rough stone, yet finding nothing.

The tendril dragged him toward the pool.

"No—" Nero gasped, Gungnir coming up to stab at the appendage. The blade of the spear bit into the dark flesh. The divine steel cut it, causing it to leak out bubbling black pus. But the tendril didn’t release.

Another tendril emerged from the water, then another.

They wrapped around his legs, his waist, and his arm.

Rummel Abellion’s voice reached him from where it lay pinned beneath the golden chain, its face smashed into the ground. In its voice, Nero could hear;

Fear.

Hatred.

Wrath.

"Wretched human! I do not care if I am bound for another hundred millennia! I shall devour your life as you have deprived me of my freedom!"

Nero gritted his teeth as he cursed out,

"Freaking bast—!"

He was hauled into the water.

***

The water is cold.

’It is very cold.’

That was Nero’s first coherent thought as the lake swallowed him whole. The temperature drop was rather drastic, with the pain biting into his nerves deeper than any blade cut or sunken arrow.

It was so cold, it seemed to burn.

It burned worse than fire.

His gaze went up.

The crystal clear surface remained. He tried to claw at the surface to find purchase, but there was none fo him.

Instead, he was pulled further into the endlessness.

The lake was not an abyssal void of darkness. Rather, it simply seemed to just stretch out infinitely down, so much that his yes could not make out a bottom, even with his incredible sight.

As the tendrils dragged him deeper, Nero’s mind flashed back to another lake.

Another drowning of his...

The day the Divine One had looked upon him in Gor.

A day of ruin and loss.

Of death, and rebirth.

He’d been thrown into water then too. Left to die in the depths by that vile creature. It was unfortunate that he had survived, as it seemed he was destined to die that way.

’What is this, self-pity?’ Nero thought to himself.

He almost laughed.

Was this how it would end? After everything he’d survived, after all the battles and impossible odds, would he simply drown to death?

How would he not pity himself?

’It’s not fair.’

The tendril around his leg tightened, pulling him deeper still.

Nero stabbed at it again with Gungnir, the blade cutting through the tough flesh that was now crushing his bones. But more tendrils emerged from the darkness below, wrapping around the rest of his body. They constricted like serpents, squeezing the air from his lungs.

He couldn’t breathe not could he think any longer.

Even worse, he couldn’t do anything but feel that terrible cold seeping into his bones.

Through the crystal-clear water, Nero finally saw what slumbered in the depths above the depths.

It was enormous beyond his comprehension.

Truly, a thing that couldn’t possibly exist in this world. Its body was a grotesque fusion of man and toad and bird, or perhaps some archaic variant of all these things. And yet, it seemed far more grotesque and twisted.

Massive antlers sprouted from its head like those of an ancient Cervid, each one covered in deep, dark grooves and strange growths. A sac filled with glowing blue fluid hung from its crown, pulsing with a deep azure bioluminescent light that illuminated the horror of its form.

And surrounding that vast body were millions of dark tendrils, each one moving with independent consciousness, reaching out like the fingers of some blind god searching for prey.

The thing was still sleeping. Its enormous eyes remained closed and its massive mouth barely open. But the tendrils moved regardless.

Those tendrils were what had found Nero.

And now dozens more were wrapped around him, pulling him closer to that cavernous maw.

Nero struggled, his arms and legs thrashing and kicking against the inexorable pull. His lungs burned for air and his vision began to narrow.

He was going to die here.

But even as that thought became, as he was dragged towards certain doom, something stirred within him.

The mark of Mephistopheles pulsed once on his hand.

The Vineheart in his core began to burn.

Within Nero’s consciousness, beneath the fear and pain and desperation, something reached out.

No.

He could not die here.

The tendrils pulled him into the creature’s maw— a darkness so absolute it felt like being swallowed by the void itself.

In that moment before his consciousness fled entirely, in that second between life and death, Nero’s body began to change.

His body swelled greatly.

His skin darkened.

Pure black, like Vulcan Stones. His eyes began to glow with golden light that cut through the inky black.

One thought remained in Nero’s mind, repeated over and over like a mantra,

"Devour. Devour. Devour."

Inside the creature’s maw, surrounded by crushing darkness and tendrils that sought to shove him deeper, Nero’s transformed body began to move.

His mouth opened wide. And from that stretched maw, came a darkness that reached out with its own terrible hunger.

The tendrils that had dragged him here tried to constrict tighter.

Nero’s darkness wrapped around them and pulled.

There was a sound like tearing fabric as the first tendril came apart. Then another. Then dozens more as Nero’s Yang form began to feed, consuming the very thing that had tried to consume him.

The vast body in the depths finally began to stir, its sleep seemingly disturbed by the sensation of being eaten from within.

But by then, it was far too late.

Nero devoured.