# Chapter 49: A Cry Named Sorrow
Ignoring time and distance, when the silver star shattered the once dazzling seal...
"Good!"
"Did it break?!"
"It broke!"
"Beautiful!"
"Well done!"
"But the battle isn't over yet—this isn't the time to celebrate!"
In the lower depths of the Abyss, within the Seven-Ring Seal where six gods stood guard, the six deities exchanged brief words before wiping the joy from their faces. They stared solemnly into the depths of the Extreme Dark Abyss, for they knew that all their previous struggles were merely the price paid for the chance at 'victory.' Now, they were truly fighting for victory itself.
A faint rumbling could be heard.
Gazing into the endless distance, at the terminus of the River Styx, the gods could see—beyond countless terminal star traps—the true core of the rebirth seal. There, layer upon layer of immensely vast material currents surged forward.
The seal that had constrained it was shattered. The chaotic force that had been forcibly compressed for thousands of years began to erupt wildly outward. Massive chunks of chaos conglomerate, mixed with broken world wreckage, hurtled through the darkness. These unbound chaos conglomerates, like meteorites of immense mass, dragged long dark trails as they crashed into the black hole traps.
In an instant, a low hum echoed throughout the Extreme Dark Abyss. Then, the entire River Styx began to tremble violently.
Soon, crisp cracking sounds spread from the depths of darkness, like solid crystal being crushed by tremendous force. The sound grew from distant to near, from soft to loud. Those who had long lived by the seashore might find it familiar, for it closely resembled the sound of tides rising and falling, of waves surging in the ocean.
And indeed, it was waves. But this was no ocean—it was the Abyss. What surged was not seawater, but infinite chaos and world wreckage.
The myriad realms trembled. Chaos poured forth from the Extreme Dark Abyss like the furious tides of a black sea.
The six gods could see it—a black chaos tsunami, carrying a low rumble and violent tremors through the Abyss, crashing through the supposedly indestructible black hole trap like a dam bursting, then charging fiercely toward the outer Seven-Ring Seal!
"Coming fast." The God of Protection and Progress, closest to the inner seal, held a pipe in His mouth and a hammer in His hand. He stared grimly at the surging chaos tide, took a deep drag from His pipe—which held no tobacco at all—and muttered to Himself, "I haven't even prepared myself mentally yet."
But even as He said this, the next moment, the God of Protection cast aside His pipe. A massive holy emblem in the shape of a book and hammer manifested behind the dwarven deity. Standing at the core anchor point, directly above the elemental black hole, He redirected His divine power. Iron-gray divine light materialized into a thick divine barrier.
Nor was the God of Protection alone. The other five deities also stood ready, simultaneously channeling their divine power, weaving labyrinthine divine barriers to prepare for the coming chaos impact.
Originally, the gods had reactivated the Seven-Ring Abyss Seal to prevent chaos—born from worlds destroyed in the outer World Star River—from entering the Abyss's Nirvana Ground and stimulating the unknown Evil God into awakening. They sought to block external chaos from entering the interior. That was why the God of Might had burned Himself out, temporarily severing the River Styx to isolate the Extreme Dark Abyss from the outer Abyss.
But now, their purpose was to prevent internal chaos from flowing back outward.
The chaos accumulated for thousands of years in the Extreme Dark Abyss was terrifying. The entire Abyss Nirvana Ground was filled with chaos capable of corroding divine power. If not for the black hole trap locking down the chaos at the very core, the overflowing chaos would have long since corroded all the anchor points set by the ancient Rebirth Plan.
But now, Joshua had shattered the seal's core. The chaos compressed for millennia erupted instantly, even breaking through the barrier wall made of black holes. If this backflowing chaos were not stopped, the result would not merely be the complete destruction of the Abyss—the entire World Star River would become a chaos wasteland a thousand times more terrible than a nuclear wasteland!
If the unknown Evil God awakened, no one in the entire World Star River could escape. But shattering the seal that nurtured it would also cause such terrifying consequences.
So, to prevent this, the Seven Gods had divided their duties with Joshua. If the warrior was the spear, then They were the shield. The Seven Gods could not, like Joshua, bear the blessings of the gods and pierce through the chaos domain like a meteor to shatter the core seal. And Joshua could not, like the Seven Gods, stand like mountain peaks between the Abyss and the normal Star River, blocking the chaos surging from all directions.
The God of Protection and Progress was not worried about whether this could succeed—even if He had to push His power to the self-destructive realm of Divine Annihilation, He would surely block this wave of chaos. Moreover, with the Seven-Ring Seal diverting the flow, even if the true Evil God awakened, it could not break through instantly, let alone these chaos waves that had already dispersed into countless 'ones.'
The most important issue was not here at all.
"And Radcliffe?"
Through Her veil, the Goddess of Life's gaze swept across the entire chaos tide. She murmured gravely, "Could it be... he didn't ride this chaos wave out?"
Although Joshua had charged into the core seal with the resolve to die, it was not necessarily a suicide mission. According to the predictions of the Seven Gods and the warrior, when Joshua's world-body, carrying the boundless divine power of the Seven Gods, shattered the core seal, he would immediately ride the erupting chaos wave out of the most dangerous and chaotic core of the Abyss, back to the Seven-Ring Seal.
But now, let alone seeing the silver world, the Goddess of Life could not even sense any obvious Steel Force. At most, she could see the chaos wave carrying numerous scattered steel particles. Yet Joshua was not dead—through the blessings previously bestowed upon him, all the gods could clearly sense that Joshua's flame of existence had not been extinguished.
He was not dead, yet he had not appeared. In that case, the answer was obvious.
Joshua had never come out.
He was still inside the Extreme Dark Abyss!
Meanwhile.
Within the Abyss Nirvana Ground, at the deepest part of the Extreme Dark Abyss, a dim silver star could be seen.
Joshua's consciousness awoke from a haze of nothingness. He immediately realized that his originally planned course of action had gone wrong.
Using the thousand-year-stored boundless divine power of the Seven Gods as explosives, and his own world-body as the core, Joshua had turned himself into an unprecedented, hardest, strongest steel-core armor-piercing shell, crashing directly into the core seal. In that instant, the temperature and impact released by the divine power and seal runes surpassed a supernova explosion, even approaching the supreme temperature of creation itself. The impact force, capable of shattering even a neutron star, not only broke the seal at one point, causing it to collapse like dominoes, but also inflicted unprecedented damage on Joshua's own body.
Recalling that moment, Joshua couldn't help but sigh inwardly. Even protected by the Seven Gods' boundless divine power, surviving such a violent, desperate suicidal charge was entirely a matter of luck. He remembered that after the seal shattered, the compressed chaos erupted like an explosion. If he had been swept by that chaos wave onto the black hole seal back then, there would have been no 'then' to speak of.
But.
Where was he now?
As he began to ponder this question, Joshua reconstructed numerous thinking organs within his body, accelerating his thoughts. Soon, as his thinking gradually returned to normal, Joshua's expression turned grave.
"This is still the Extreme Dark Abyss!"
"I... was never swept out!"
After confirming this by observing the surrounding chaos concentration and conditions, Joshua was genuinely shocked. He was still in the Extreme Dark Abyss? How was that possible?! The moment he shattered the seal, he should have been carried out by the first wave of chaos. Even if told he had been swept beyond the Seven Gods' Seven-Ring Seal, Joshua would not have been the least surprised.
But staying in place... that was utterly incomprehensible!
Just as Joshua was marveling at this impossibility, he suddenly discovered even more unbelievable things.
At the center of the silver star world, a high-density energy sun rotated its angle. Joshua's core consciousness began to survey his own body. Then, he was shocked to discover that his outer shell—the world barrier—had many clearly severely damaged sections, obviously broken during the impact with the seal. But these severely damaged sections had already been repaired by some crude method.
And Joshua could tell that the material used to repair his world barrier was not 'Steel Force.'
It was chaos.
Gentle chaos surged, with small conglomerates falling like goose-feather snow, covering the silver star. The black condensed matter repaired the damage to the star—or rather, filled the hollow depressions. While making the star appear more complete, it also caused its light to grow increasingly dim.
"What a terrible situation."
Joshua exhaled. The warrior, now fully awakened from his previous coma, sensed that the Steel Force within him had fallen into a near-dead state. It had lost all divine power. The silver steel mist was like ordinary fog, contacting chaos without any reaction.
As the Steel Force fell into 'dead stillness,' chaos used its own power to repair Joshua's injuries. He could sense layers of gentle yet vast and heavy chaos power gathering and solidifying around his star body.
Like moisture in the air condensing around dust particles, forming beautiful ice crystals that grow and extend into snowflakes.
Drifting chaos mist needed a core to coalesce into solid droplets or ice crystals.
In an instant, Joshua understood why he had not been swept out by the chaos wave, why chaos had repaired his injuries, and why the chaos around him—even though he had shattered the core seal—had not yet dispersed into countless 'ones.'
The answer was too simple.
Having lost the Sage's core seal as its own condensation core, the collapsing unknown Evil God instinctively sought out the second intact condensation core present. This core was solid, capable of bearing sufficient power. Though much smaller than the original Sage's seal, the situation was urgent, and no entity would care about such details.
Joshua sensed the increasingly thick chaos power around him, felt the growing activity, the fluctuations drawing ever closer to an 'Evil God.' In his astonishment, he immediately fought back, stirring up towering chaos waves to resist the binding imposed upon him.
It seemed now that the possibility of a Chaos Evil God awakening and immediately ravaging the entire World Star River had likely been eliminated by him and the Seven Gods. But the possibility of a slightly weaker Evil God awakening—smaller than the World Star River, yet stronger than ordinary Evil Gods—had not been eliminated.
The chaos accumulated in the Extreme Dark Abyss was simply too vast. If not for the ancient black hole seal, it would have long overflowed and flooded the normal World Star River. Once the Evil God awakened and took form, even if it was not initially very powerful, as long as no one subsequently defeated or intercepted it, it could still rapidly grow to its full potential using the power of the Extreme Dark Abyss.
To prevent this future, Joshua knew he must give his all.
The high-density energy star within the silver world began to contract violently. Space-time suddenly twisted. An extremely broken hum came from within the world. The silver metal continents scattered inside the world barrier all converged inward. The entire steel star shrank by a full circle, instantly shedding much of the chaos originally attached to its periphery.
The next moment, the silver star expanded rapidly, then trembled violently, as if about to explode, scattering all surrounding chaos. He would rather shatter all the wounds chaos had repaired than allow chaos any chance to re-condense.
In fact, Joshua had long prepared for self-destruction. He was too familiar with this—even in death, the warrior would never allow himself to become the core of a future Evil God.
But just as the thought of 'death' flashed through his mind—
Joshua suddenly heard a cry.
In the Extreme Dark Abyss, surrounded by endless chaos, the silver star that had been struggling fiercely suddenly froze in place.
No, not one cry.
Countless cries.
This was an endless, sorrowful sobbing.
Children's, elders', men's, women's—sad, despairing, hoarse, weak.
They, them, it... all of them overflowed with grief and despair, as if the future had ended, the long road had reached its terminus, with no scenery ahead. In the darkness, love and hope no longer existed, courage had long been extinguished, leaving only endless confusion wandering in dark pain, until eternal sinking.
Joshua sighed and exhaled. He knew what he was hearing.
It was the sorrow of worlds, the pain of all things.
It was the elegy of a race, a civilization, and a world being utterly annihilated together. It was the cry of their names vanishing from existence.
This was the wreckage of worlds, the ashes of flames, the long-dead kingdom of death—that which was called—
The voice of the Chaos Evil God.