The Tax Collection Command fleet.
The fleet of over two hundred battleships returning to the Committee Headquarters had long since reached maximum velocity. Now, their engines were firing to decelerate, preventing the accelerated hulls from exceeding their structural limits.
Thus, instead of barking at his subordinates for more speed, Commander Todd could only glare anxiously at the radar.
‘They must have reached headquarters by now.’
If they had maintained that astonishing speed, it was a certainty.
A profound dread washed over him as he imagined the atrocities those fanatics might be committing in a place left practically empty.
Nightmarish scenes flashed through his mind.
He gritted his teeth, forcing himself to remain calm. Just then—
“Commander!”
It was a report stripped of its core message, choked off by sheer panic instead of delivering the immediate facts.
Todd’s head snapped around.
A moment later, his own eyes clouded with delayed terror.
An ominous glow flooded the newly opened screen.
“What is—!”
Their instincts insisted the light was breathtakingly beautiful. But the crew couldn’t afford to let their senses override their judgment.
Their rational minds knew exactly what that radiant cluster was.
“Talent?!”
“Did the seal on the Zero Point break?!”
The AI belatedly spat out its calculations. Their technology was still too primitive to perfectly control, observe, or predict Talent.
“It’s approaching at near-light speed! At this trajectory, it will collide with the allied fleet in—!”
The officer never finished the sentence.
A blinding inferno of light swallowed their vision.
The oldest man on the bridge was the first to lose consciousness. He crumpled to the deck like a marionette with severed strings. The nearby officers rushed to his side, only to feel the strength rapidly draining from their own bodies.
The pillar of light that slammed into the fleet was not ordinary Talent, which would normally scatter and evaporate chaotically. This beam carried a clear, directed purpose.
Commander Todd, the first to fall, had undergone body renewal more times than anyone else. Though the DNA of each new vessel was identical, it did not mean the fresh flesh and his aged soul formed a perfect match. Even in a genetically identical body, a different soul had originally inhabited it.
The informational dissonance originating from the body renewal factories had forced mismatched bodies and souls to entangle and cling together.
Now, that error was being cleanly corrected.
“C-Commander! Urgh!”
Todd had already stopped breathing.
Around his corpse, the approaching officers collapsed one by one. The AI shrieked with piercing alarms. The life signs of every high-ranking officer on board were winking out in rapid succession.
Bodies piled across the deck.
While the vast majority of the crew—save for a small handful of youths—perished, a different scene unfolded in the void.
Outside the battleships, a sight played out that would drive anyone capable of seeing a spiritual body to the brink of madness.
Flash!
The battleships, having taken the Talent beam head-on, erupted with a new, fine-grained brilliance. From afar, the fleet acted as a massive prism, scattering the light into hundreds of thousands of slender threads.
That shower of fractured radiance shot back in the exact opposite direction of the Talent, rapidly converging.
The true nature of that radiant flow was the souls ripped from their bodies.
Stripped of their bodies in an instant, they flew blindly through the void, unable to process what had happened. Ignorant of the lighthouse calling them, they tore across the cosmos like bugs drawn to a light.
Like fireworks detonating in the dark abyss, or a volley of countless missiles, the rain of light traced a massive parabola. It raced ahead toward the fleet’s original destination, moving much faster than the ships. The phenomenon painted a brand-new galaxy across the dark—a milky way woven not from starlight, but from a surging river of souls.
The torrential waterfall of spirits reversed course, flowing straight back to the Zero Point.
Waiting there, Minjun inhaled the confused dead straight into his inner world.
Fwoosh!
Spiritual screams and wails flooded the god’s mind.
The roaring furnace of Talent crushed the egos of the freshly harvested souls, instantly breaking them down. Their transformation into wraiths happened in a heartbeat.
The men who had been anxiously waiting aboard their ships for a battle were completely stripped of their sanity and intellect. What overwhelmed them was a horrific agony surpassing anything they had experienced in life.
The souls thrashed in madness. Only then did they realize the glow they had blindly followed was not a beacon of salvation, but a lantern guiding them to hell.
And when they plummeted into the depths of Minjun’s inner world, they witnessed...
=Aaaarrrgh!=
Hell in its most literal form.
The ghosts from the Tax Collection Command saw a chaotic swirl of wraiths and darkness churning in a massive Taegeuk formation.
The first to welcome them were their fellow prisoners.
=I hate it here. Let me go. I hate it...=
=Aaaah... I hate you. Stop...=
=It isn’t fair... I’m innocent... I just... I only followed orders...=
The existing legion of wraiths warmly welcomed the fresh prisoners. The welcoming ceremony was a grand affair: they gnashed their teeth into the new spiritual bodies—which would quickly regenerate anyway—and tore them into thousands of ragged shreds.
But fellow prisoners weren’t the only ones thrilled by their arrival.
=Finally!=
The moment that mental frequency rang out...
...even the spirits who had already lost their minds felt an unfathomable terror.
=You are here. More sinners... more raw material to dilute me!=
Through the frenzied, erratic thoughts of the veteran inmates, the newcomers realized that ‘she’ was the oldest prisoner in this hell.
The shadow—the very first prisoner of hell, now serving as its warden—unleashed a fit of manic laughter.
Just as the master of hell had ordained, the warden had long since lost all concept of time.
=Yes... now all of you... you will all mix with me!=
The Taegeuk vortex spun endlessly. On one end, the wraiths tore at the shadow, and on the other, the shadow ripped and gnawed at the wraiths in a perpetual cycle of mutual slaughter.
The infusion of new wraiths acted as fresh fuel, accelerating the gruesome cycle.
=...!=
The warden’s euphoric shriek echoed endlessly across hell.
*
Once the ground-infiltrating priests completely seized the key facilities, Asiph-1, who had been monitoring the atmosphere, turned his gaze back to the stars.
“Father has cleared the skies above.”
The Tax Collection Command’s fleet.
Having initially feigned an engagement before withdrawing, Asiph-1 knew it was time to return to them.
The initial reason for avoiding a direct naval battle no longer existed.
“There’s nothing left over there but fledglings who have never experienced body renewal.”
A similar scenario had played out during their invasion of the order headquarters. Back then, Asiph-1 had resorted to intimidating the enemy into shutting down their AI, but such tactics were unnecessary now.
Unlike before, Asiph-1 now controlled a formidable fleet of over a hundred and fifty battleships.
“Come!”
The headless Ancient Race battleships advanced on the planet.
Exactly as Asiph-1 predicted, the enemy ships—now manned solely by raw recruits—had devolved into utter pandemonium. The AIs’ unilateral attempts to reassign command only fueled their mounting panic.
Relentless missile barrages from Asiph-1’s forces rained down on what had once been the Committee’s most elite fleet.
*
Boom!
Kaboom!
The new Kavite Grand Committeeman stared at the approaching enemy forces in utter despair.
He felt a sheer, mind-shredding agony.
His attempt to evacuate beyond the atmosphere had failed. The priests who breached the underground base subdued the area in the blink of an eye. Instead of sliding open naturally, the heavy blast doors leading to the surface had simply been punched through by the enemy.
The fanatics first cut off the fugitives' avenues of escape. The spacecraft primed for their getaway exploded in a vain, brilliant flash.
Rather than annihilating the Ancient Race personnel present, the priests moved to take them prisoner. The soldiers escorting the Grand Committeeman fought back, but they were hopelessly outnumbered from the start.
Tied up tightly in a binding artifact, the Grand Committeeman roared.
“Stop this madness, you lunatics!”
He hurled a string of vile curses, but it didn’t even faze the priests.
Happiness-inducing substances flooded the brains of the three-eyed ones. Suspended in a trance somewhere between sexual climax and religious euphoria, they moved to conclude their holy war.
The Grand Committeeman kept screaming even as they dragged him away. It was a pointless struggle, but he couldn’t hold his tongue.
Amidst his furious, despairing rant, one sentence finally seemed to snag the priests’ attention.
“You absolute maniacs! Do you honestly believe the primordial race is some omnipotent Transcendent?! Asif-666 is no god! He is just a ‘person’ who walked this universe before we did!”
Halt!
The priests dragging him froze in their tracks. Simultaneously, the manic grins that had stretched their lips taut vanished.
The sight of so many three-eyed ones dropping their expressions in perfect unison was profoundly chilling.
But the Kavite kept shouting, sensing this might be his final chance to get through to them.
“Do you actually believe your Divine Power is a gift from Asif-666? You fools, there’s proof everywhere! It wasn’t a god who awakened that ability; it was your own belief! Just like mages and psychics who awaken without any great deity’s intervention, you did this to yourselves. It isn’t a god’s strength! It’s your own power—the power of mortals!”
Dead, freezing stares locked onto the thrashing Kavite.
“If Divine Power is truly the might of a god, then why can’t Asif-666 use it?! Have those hollow heads of yours never once stopped to ask such an obvious question?!”
He pleaded, his voice cracking into a shriek.
“You willingly submit just because he’s a superior lifeform?! You sing his praises because he can do things we can’t, because he knows things we don’t?! Ah! If you have functioning brains, use them!”
The fanatics stared back with chillingly vacant eyes. With their mouths clamped shut and their faces drenched in blood, it was hard to distinguish their features apart from their eyes.
“What do you think will happen to the universe when the primordial race awakens? We’ll be forced into whatever pens they assign us, only allowed to breed and evolve within the boundaries they permit. They might even warp our physical bodies to make us more efficient or easier to control. Anyone who steps out of their designated lifestyle will be ruthlessly butchered.”
“...”
“You want to know how I can be so certain? Because that’s exactly how mortals treat livestock! In their eyes, we’re nothing but beasts!”
His voice cracked.
Fierce tension and blazing fury.
These violent emotions hammered against the Kavite’s fraying sanity, pressing down heavier by the second.
“But you are sentient beings! Intelligent lives with free will! Why willingly surrender your right to choose and become nothing more than puppets? Instead of defining your own values and your own morality, why kneel to the ideals they dictate? You are throwing your lives away for the sheer delusion of ‘religion’!”
Step.
As the Kavite screamed himself hoarse, a single priest stepped forward and approached him.
Fear and hope warred in the Kavite’s eyes.
Had it worked? Had his desperate plea actually penetrated their madness?
Or perhaps...
Step, step.
The priest did not bother pointing out the hypocrisy.
He didn’t mention that the dystopian future the Kavite babbled about was already the current reality—enforced by the Committee itself. The Grand Committeeman’s terrifying vision was nothing more than a projection of his own organization’s sins onto the enemy.
The priest didn’t mention how the Committee had spent ages forcibly relocating countless races, nor how they routinely regulated marriages and breeding.
He did not bring up the Committee’s top-secret operations regarding Dragons—how, deeming the great beasts too violent and unruly, they had grafted docile beast souls into Dragon bodies or explicitly modified their genetics to enforce absolute obedience.
Nor did the priest bother to remark on how dissenters within the Committee’s borders were enslaved, or worse, subjected to the ultimate penalty: Soul Erasure.
And finally, the priest did not bother declaring that their absolute submission to their god was a choice made of their own free will.
Instead.
Shhhk.
The priest silently raised a heavy weapon—a brutal hybrid of a mace and a hand axe.
And brought it down with complete apathy.
Right onto the Kavite’s lower body.
Crunch! Splat! Crunch! Splat! Crunch! Splat! Crunch! Splat! Crunch!...
The sickening squelch of pulverized meat and the shrieks of a butchered animal echoed through the underground bunker.
For those few agonizing seconds, the Kavite completely forgot his mental torment, overwhelmed by the physical agony of his lower half being steadily reduced to paste.
Once he confirmed the Grand Committeeman had finally passed out from the shock...
Smirk.
The priest smiled once again, his perfectly white teeth gleaming with splattered blood.
He called out in a tone that was both bright and profoundly reverent.
“Come! Our god is descending upon this land!”
*
The war was functionally over.
The two hundred returning Motherships, now empty husks, were being systematically dismantled by Asiph-1.
The tentacled monstrosities were still trapped in the subterranean levels of the burning planet, roasting slowly like meat buried in a primitive fire pit. It would take months for them to cook through, and Asiph-1 knew Minjun wouldn’t leave them there that long due to his promise with the Holy Mother. However, Asiph-1 suspected Minjun fully intended to let them simmer just long enough to make their flesh ‘tender and soft’ before putting them out of their misery.
Minjun, who had been scouring the area near the gate of Elahu-Praga for any trace of Ha Eun-seong, was eventually forced to pause his search. After confirming that the boy was absolutely not inside the blood vessels, he temporarily sealed the entrance.
From there, Minjun traveled straight to the Committee Headquarters planet.
The surface conflict had also concluded swiftly. Without their command structure, the surviving middle-management officers couldn’t muster any resistance, even if they hadn’t formally surrendered. Most of them had already been neutralized and taken prisoner.
The priests herded the most high-value targets into an open clearing and stood guard.
Before long, the master who had summoned them descended from the sky.
Above their heads, light and heat raged out of control—the fiery corpse of the Endelion planet hung in the sky, burning like a second sun.
But even against that overwhelmingly bright sky, a single, perfectly distinct streak of light bloomed overhead.
As if attempting a light landing, the streak of light slipped smoothly through the atmosphere.
And as the beautiful light approached the ground, it gradually condensed, shifting into the silhouette of a ‘man’.
Thud!
Rustle!
The priests dropped to their knees in perfect unison. Pressing their gore-stained foreheads against the dirt, they chanted.
Someone led the chant.
“At long last, within your dream, we dream of you!”
And the priests chanted in response.
“At long last, within your dream, we dream of you!”
The man who had come to reclaim what was stolen from him simply looked out over the planet that had become his spoil of war.
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