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The eye burst—not physically, but the restrained fury in it dropped all pretense, and it threw everything it had at the core of Arboriel's Laws, trying to force a final consumption before Haru could act.
The Spirit of Arboriel's Laws screamed. Not a mortal scream, but something that carried tens of thousands of years of sustained suffering. Imagine a body being slowly eaten, aware of every moment and yet it holds on. It had been holding for such a long time, it could hold a little longer.
Haru nodded to the other four, then they pressed in simultaneously, pouring their Divine Power into the light sphere like water through a cracking dam.
…
The blood-red threads numbered in the hundreds of millions. Each one destroyed bled away a fraction of the Eye's strength.
Two hours in, thirty percent were gone. The eye raged, threatened, invoked the Demon Emperor's name like a ward against death, yet no one listened. As the threads thinned, the four worked faster. Less resistance meant more reach. By the time their power touched the outer layers of the core, the threats had grown hoarse and repetitive.
The Native Gods, watching from a safe distance, were terrified in an entirely different direction. The ancient war had taught them what the Dimensional Demons could do, and this era was supposed to be worse.
With the Demon Emperor himself on the field, not just his Demon Monarchs, some were already quietly discussing whether to ask Haru for a passage out of Arboriel entirely once the eye was dealt with. Their logic was solid, at least they would get to stay alive. If they could have that much, they would be grateful.
Phoebe glanced at Haru once, just to check. She'd heard the eye's promises and needed to know whether any of it had landed. He caught her look and gave her one back that settled it. She went back to work.
For his part, Haru wasn't losing sleep over the Demon Emperor. What could he be? A peak Supreme God or at most a pseudo God King, comparable to Celestia at her prime. He still shouldn't be a God King or else he would've conquered the Endless Continent a long time ago.
By the time the war came, Haru would at least be a late-stage Supreme God. He and Celestia together could contend against him and beyond that, he was the 'God of Creation', the Almighty Lord the Angel Faith. If he could get a few more of the Special Angels with Supreme God Tier potential, his empire would be able to take on half of the Demonic Army's top command on their own.
…
Hours later, the Eye's core lay exposed. The blood-red threads were gone and what remained was a single floating eye, its power gutted, able to do nothing except exist and resent. Not far from it, a cluster of nine-colored aurora drifted, which was the Spirit of Arboriel's Laws, looking visibly exhausted. The faint outline of a young girl was still flickering within it.
"Your Majesty Kazehaya, come on!" she called out, "We're almost there!"
Haru looked at her. Then he looked at the Eye. He thought about the fact that sealing this spirit, right here, right now, while it was depleted and unguarded would hand him control of this entire planet. The main reason why he'd entered this Demon Slayer Tournament. Still, he suppressed the urge for now.
'Cranes and clams. Let them fight. The fisherman takes both. Neither the Spirit nor Phoebe have any idea about what I am thinking. Great.'
…
The eye made one last attempt, "You destroy me, the Emperor will never—"
"Evil artifact." The Spirit sounded deeply satisfied for someone who'd been in agony for tens of thousands of years, "You tortured me all that time, and now you know what despair feels like. Good."
Then, it said quietly to Haru, "Your Majesty, the Eye of the Abyss is one of the finest artifacts. Although it's not an offensive one, its ability to devour and assimilate a planet's Laws is unmatched. Seal it. Destroy its spirituality if you can and don't let the abyss reclaim it."
Phoebe moved immediately, "I'll destroy its spirituality—"
"Stop." Haru's voice was enough.
Because the moment his divine power touched the eye's origin core, a system prompt appeared in his mind, clean and clinical.
[The origin of the Divine Law of Abyss detected. Do you want to absorb it?]
[Yes] [No]
His attributeless Godhead didn't discriminate. Whether a Divine Law was demonic, alien, corrupted, it didn't matter. He could absorb the origin, master the law, and control an artifact that ran on it.
He selected yes, with the dry private pleasure of a man who keeps finding new floors beneath the basement.
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T/N: In case anyone else didn't understand the humor in the basement thing like me, I asked an AI and here's the explanation:
The image is of a man who buys a house, goes down to the basement, and finds another basement beneath it. Then another beneath that. Each time he expects to hit the bottom, there's more. It should be unsettling, but he's so used to it by now that he's just quietly pleased.
Applied to Haru: his godhead keeps revealing new capabilities that shouldn't logically exist — absorbing abyss laws, assimilating demonic origins, things that have no business working on a human cultivator. Each discovery is another impossible basement. And his reaction isn't shock anymore. It's the satisfied "of course" of someone who has stopped being surprised by their own absurd luck and started enjoying it.
The humor is in the understatement. He just absorbed the core law of an ancient demonic artifact mid-battle, and his internal response is essentially "yep, that tracks."
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