Chapter 319: Round Three

‘Territory.’ This was a unique space that only answered to one individual — right down to the Laws this space adhered to and was operated by. Normal spaces adhered to all the ordained natural Laws that had, so far, kept its realm afloat. However, Territories only answered to the Law laid down by its Demigod owner.

This was the most important reason why people at the peak level of power were called Demigods. They possessed the ability to form their own Laws, something that was supposed to be exclusive to divine beings.

For example: in the Demigod Lich’s Territory, he could summon an endless amount of undead, and control the actions of every one of them. This arbitrary control over a near-infinite amount of lifeless beings violated the normal Laws of reality.

When Baiyi first encountered the divine leather suit, after taking care of the Godsfall cultists, it had trapped Baiyi in its Territory; and its Territory, the leather suit was able to resurrect a countless amount of times, and it was able to perfectly. That was also something that was not possible outside its Territory.

If the Lich’s Territory is compared with the divine leather suit’s territory, a keen examiner would easily tell that the divine leather suit’s Territory was more superior. Its range was wider; its effects were much stronger; the duration of the Territory was longer; the threshold to activate its Territory was much lower; And the divine leather suit’s manipulation of the Laws, within its Territory, was much better than the Demigod Lich’s.

The Demigod Lich, on the other hand, had to sacrifice all the souls within his staff, the Souls of the Enslaved, if he wished to open up his Territory.

Most importantly, if a Demigod human was able to open a Territory, that human still would not be able to choose what law could they control.

Laws in a Territory were not easily manipulated by humans. Human Demigod fighters could only “influence” these Laws slightly by completely understanding the core of these Laws. The only way Demigod beings could open their Territories was by unleashing their full powers, which would release chaotic energy to interfere with normal Laws operating in the reality, enough to creating a schism — a limited, special space that hosts the Demigod’s newly-twisted Laws.

An analogy from Earth would be the concept of bugs in computing. When bugs occurred during the execution of a program, it would cause the program to function in a way that was not intended.

However, bugs are always located eventually and weeded out. This was the main why Demigod-level fighters were always hunted down, and subsequently banished into the Void. These beings were the hypothetical bugs of this world, and the more they used their Territories, the more they twisted the natural Laws; this was why they were noticed by Nature and subsequently rooted out of existence.

This was the reason why the few Demigod beings in existence never dared to unleash their powers completely. The more they used their Territories, the higher the chances of them getting a one-way ticket into the Void, where Baiyi lived.

However, not every being had been banished by Nature because they opened their Territories too many times. There were some, like a certain shut-in nerd of a spinster, the Scholar Walker, whose banishment was down to some pretty terrible luck. She was cast into the Void just because she formed her Territory. She did not even get the time to understand the Laws within her own Territory before she was banished from reality!

It was plausible that she had been sent into the Void that abruptly because she had gained a lot of knowledge about Territories; this was from the books she had read and her ability to analyze the enigma that was Laws. To Nature, the divine administrator, she was as much as an eyesore as a grammatical-filled sentence or a line of code that was riddled with bugs.

This was knowledge gained at the cost of being imprisoned, even though these insights had been obtained through the Voidwalkers’ blood and tears. Now, they were obsessed with everything related to Laws, not ostensibly just for their dream of escaping of escaping the Void, but also so that they do not get sent back to the Void while they perfect their use of Territories.

Although the type of Territories that one could run into or open up was something left to chance, there are those who run into Territories that could not be used for battle, at all. Although the Demigod Lich had a pretty good Territory, the same could not be said for the Soul Armature Practioner; his Demigod level powers had granted him a Territory that could be used to accelerate the age of animals. Therefore, the worst that could happen to a kitten in the Soul Armature Practioner’s Territory was that it would turn into a mature cat.

A Territory like that could only be used for academics, rather than for battle. It would not be surprising if a random observer saw the Soul Armature Practitioner use his Territory and still think he was not a Demigod-level being.

This was also the reason why many had made mastering the manipulation of Void Energy their goals. They could not depend solely on Territories for battle, after all, especially if everyone was hesitant to break the natural Laws. As almost everyone shared this fear, battles were watered down to tests of physical strength and supermundane powers — powers which could easily thwart those of a lower level than it, such as mana and combat chi attacks.

Hence, what one wears may be a bigger deal than who they really are — or in this case, stronger than they naturally are. This was certainly true for that leather bodysuit that Baiyi had found earlier, which had its Territory designed especially for it, instead of being picked at random. It was, after all, something made by a Higher Power. Why else was Baiyi so careful with it other than because gods could control the natural Laws.

No matter how strong a mortal was, they could never overpower the Laws.

Back on the battlefield, after the Demigod Lich deployed his Territory, both sides became even. Ordinarily, in terms of the range of area of effect attacks and damage output of attacks; however, as he was now in the Demigod Lich’s Territory, it was no longer a certainty.

His survival would depend on the sort of Territory he possessed. If it was Territory that was not suited for battle, like the Soul Armature Practioner’s, then the Archmage would have to give up, die, and be resurrected as an undead.

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However, that thought did not cross the Archmage’s mind, his book, The Book of Servitude, was rapidly flipping its pages again, and almost instantly, a defensive forbidden spell of light, ‘Svalinn’, was cast.

Golden rays of light burst forth from the rotating formation that had just appeared and formed a sphere of light around the Archmage, which shielded him from the incoming attacks. The light looked frail, but it proved to be impermeable; it was though the Archmage had the Western Wall from Greek mythology shielding him from the undead.

“Whoa! Only the First Walker could pull something like that off! Only he could face attacks of that caliber without using his own Territory!” The Paladin cheered in admiration. “But… That’s ‘Svalinn’! The Church’s very own Svalinn, right? If I’m not mistaken, it’s a grand-scale spell that requires five hundred choristers, a hundred bishops, an array of holy items, and a whole sleuth of complicated formations; Is the Book of Servitude really that powerful?!”

‘That is because that old geezer has already activated his own Territory, my friend,’Baiyi thought to himself.

Unlike the Demigod Lich’s Territory, the Archmage’s Territory was not visually captivating or mind-blowing; however, it granted him to cast any spell irrespective of its requirements. It did not matter how many people were needed to cast the spell or the formations to be used; within his territory, which disregarded spell requirements — and using the Book of Servitude, which did not require any medium to cast spells — the Archmage could cast just about any spell by himself.

Although this territory was not as deadly as the Demigod Lich’s, when it was complemented with the Book of Servitude, the results were bound to change. On seeing this development, the Demigod Lich put everything he had into his attacks, but they were all deflected by the Archmage’s grand-scale defense spell, which the latter had cast with just one hand.

The perfect way in which his territory complimented his book, the Book of Servitude made the Archmage famous — a name that history would ways remember.

The Demigod Lich also seemed to think that this feat deserved some verbal acknowledgment, so he spoke through all the undead present, saying, “Nothing less can be expected from the greatest Emperor of the Ancient Rohlserlian Empire. Even an apocalyptic amount of undead could do harm to you.”

“Your Territory is impressive,” the Archmage replied calmly. “Regrettably, it’s not enough to take me down.”

“… Really?” The Demigod Lich sneered coldly.

He went quiet, and surprisingly, the undeads’ attacks ceased; the skeletal dragons froze in mid-flight, the undead archers stopped firing, and the undead riders and soldiers stopped in their tracks; the entire world had suddenly turned silent.

However, everyone watching believed that this was more than just the calm before the storm.

“Fie. This spell is just too good at defense; it is so good, even I can’t attack while within it! What an idiotic magic spell,” the Archmage cursed under his breath as soon as he realized what the Lich’s endgame wanted to be. Unfortunately for him, he was trapped within the dazzling orb of Svalinn, unable to retaliate.

A dozen low-level dreadshamans suddenly burst into green flames, and out of those flames came doppelgangers of the Demigod Lich; each of them held their own Souls of the Enslaved staffs. The staffs had no souls orbiting them; the Demigod Lich, who had already spent the majority of them surviving the Archmage’s forbidden spells and casting his Territory, had spent what was left of them to create doppelgangers of himself.

“Now, unlike you, I don’t know a lot of forbidden spells… because to me, a true master only needs one, ” the twelve Demigod Lich doppelgangers all said in unison, and then they all began to chant together. A ring of diabolical runes appeared and hovered in front of their chests, and their colors slowly turned green.

The Demigod Lich was more than just a summoner of the undead; he was also a powerhouse in the field of offensive spells that targeted the soul. And now, he was unleashing one such forbidden spell called ‘Gehenna’.

As soon as the Demigod Liches finished their chants, the runic rings in front of their chests cracked; green wisps of undead energy escaped these cracks, and the other undead, who had all been standing still for a while, made sonorous sky-splitting howls. Green energy surged out of their eye sockets and rushed into the sky, and then the energies zigzagged through the air, streaking to accumulate at a single point in the sky.

With their undead-lifeforce extracted, all the summoned undead fell to the ground and turned to dust, which completely covered the surface of the sandy desert. The skeletal dragons dropped from the sky like rain, and their bones disassembled into dust before they even hit the ground. The storm of falling bones and the billows of dust all hit the Archmage’s spherical shield of light and made “pat pat pat” sounds.

The accumulated vortex of undead energy continued to expand in size, and then suddenly, the swirling green energies in the sky turned into a frightening figure that donned a ripped hooded cloak and held a gigantic scythe — a Grim Reaper.

The phantom Grim Reaper was so enormous, it was as large as the legendary Titans of lore; it seemed to connect the heaven and the earth by itself. No one there knew how a real Grim Reaper looked like, but they were sure that it really did exist, it would look just like this gigantic being.

The Archmage seemed like a grain of sand in front of the towering Grim Reaper. Under the control of the Demigod Lich’s undead energy, the gigantic Grim Reaper scooped up the white dome, which had the Archmage within it, and raised it to its face.

The Archmage found himself staring at the skeletal face of Death.

“Thi—this is magic formed from the sacrifice of countless wraiths! It doesn’t matter how strong you think your soul is; none can survive this! Alas, Sir Archmage, say hello to the complete annihilation of your soul!” The Lich cried out.