Chapter 346: Ch 346 : Gardening The Inner World

“Resilience?” Belial whispered, the word tasting like ash in his mouth.

He watched the sixteen clones with predatory intensity. He could feel it now, the subtle shift in the air, the way the clones were not just reacting to his strikes, but predicting the vibration of his muscles before he even moved.

They were no longer mere puppets under his control; they were learning. They were adapting to the Truth of his combat style.

’Just like him,’ Belial thought, his gaze flickering momentarily to the stoic figure of Adam.

Memory, sharp and bitter, bubbled up from the abyss of his mind. He remembered the First Era, the age when the Demon Lords were the ones being hunted across the multiverse by the Void Born Gods.

He had feared Adam back then, not just because of the man’s raw strength, but because Adam’s existence was a conceptual anchor. Adam was so ’True’ so fundamentally grounded in the Law of Growth, that Belial’s Lies often slid off him like water off a diamond.

But Belial was no longer the fledgling lord of that era. He wasn’t going to run. A dark, jagged grin stretched across his handsome face.

He continued the dance of destruction, moving through the circle of clones with a fluidity that mocked the laws of inertia.

He shattered the Creator Clone’s skull; he pierced the heart of the Life Clone. He destroyed them as quickly as they reformed, a relentless cycle of death and resurrection that seemed like it would last for an eternity.

Inside the shared consciousness of the seventeen bodies, Sunny was drowning in data. Every broken bone, every ruptured organ, and every disintegrated limb was a data point. Slowly, the Divine Adaptability talent reached its tipping point.

Sunny felt a change. His skin, and the skin of every clone, began to vibrate with a metallic frequency. It wasn’t just hardness; it was an evolutionary leap.

He felt as if his body were being forged into a new material, something that shared the density of a neutron star and the cold indifference of the void.

“It’s time to counter-attack,” Sunny’s voice resonated from seventeen throats.

The clones shifted. The loose, semi-circle formation tightened into a high-pressure sphere of violence.

They lunged simultaneously, striking from every angle, their fists now capable of tearing through the stagnant space Belial had established.

“Counter-attack?” Belial chuckled, side-stepping a kick that would have leveled a universe into a flat disk. “A bold ambition, Emperor. Let’s see how your new skin handles the weight of my lie.”

Belial spread his arms, his eyes glowing with a terrifying, crimson light.

“I can see that your skin has become as strong as the void itself,” he proclaimed.

The reality around them groaned and buckled. The Paradox of the Liar took hold. Because Belial had “praised” the strength of the skin, the Law of Lies was forced to make that statement a falsehood.

The transition was agonizing. The metallic, invincible hide Sunny had spent “farming” through his clones’ deaths didn’t just vanish…. it inverted. It turned paper-thin.

Sunny’s main body winced. He could feel the microscopic friction of the air against his skin, and it felt like being flayed by a thousand razors.

But for the clones, who were in the heat of the fray, the effect was catastrophic. Every time they flexed a muscle, their own skin threatened to tear open from the internal pressure.

Belial moved like a shadow through the now-hesitant swarm and appeared directly in front of the Destroyer Clone.

With a movement so swift it bypassed the concept of time, Belial reached out and tore the cosmic robe and mask away from the clone’s body. He didn’t use strength; he simply denied the existence of the clothing.

The Destroyer Clone stood exposed. Its skin was translucent, stretched so thin that the pulsing of its veins and the white of its bones were visible to the naked eye. It looked like a being made of wet tissue paper.

Belial didn’t punch. He didn’t kick. He simply leaned in and exhaled a light, frosty breath.

RRRIP.

The mere pressure of the Demon Lord’s breath was enough. The paper-thin skin of the clone tore away in long, jagged strips, flying into the vacuum like autumn leaves.

The clone remained standing, a horrific masterpiece of exposed muscle and ivory bone.

“You look much better this way,” Belial laughed, the sound cold and grating.

But as he looked down at the clone’s hand, his laughter died in his throat. His eyes widened, his pupils constricting into pinpricks. He recoiled, taking two rapid steps back through the dimensions, his heartbeat, usually a steady thrum of malice… stuttering.

“What… How?”

He stared at the clone’s hand. It wasn’t muscle and bone. It was something else entirely. The hand was made of a swirling, dark-matter substance, dotted with miniature stars and spinning nebulae. It wasn’t clothing. It wasn’t a mask.

It was a Cosmic Body.

Belial realized with a jolt of terror that this wasn’t an effect of the Law of Lies. This was Sunny’s true form, hidden beneath a shell of humanity.

And the transformation was spreading. The cosmic essence was eating away at the flesh, converting the leftover body matter into the stuff of the Real Void.

’If he is related to the Void Mother… then why didn’t she stop us?’ Belial’s mind raced through the possibilities, each one more terrifying than the last.

One: She didn’t care. Two: She was too busy to intervene. Or three, the most chilling thought, Belial and the rest of the Demon Lords were never the antagonists of this story. They were merely the whetstones. They were the Stepping Stones provided by the Void Mother to force this Cosmos to evolve.

“No… I am a Lord of the Lies!” Belial sneered, forcing his fear back into a dark corner of his mind. “Even if I am a stepping stone, I am a stone that will crush his feet. I can kill him with a single breath!”

While Belial was spiraling into a conceptual crisis, Sunny was having his own realization. The “Paper-Thin Skin” lie had taught him a valuable lesson: he couldn’t rely on physical adaptations alone against a Lord. He needed to change the scale of the battlefield.

’I think I need to start the process,’ Sunny thought, his mind flickering back to the memories of Cai Zhen and the warnings of Edgar. ’The capture of the multiverse.’

From Edgar, Sunny knew that the power of a Royal Void Beast wasn’t just in their physical form; it was directly linked to the “Inner World” they possessed. The more life, the more mass, and the more “Reality” they carried within their cosmic body, the more powerful they become.

If Sunny could capture the universes of this multiverse, actually pull them into his cosmic hands and house them within his soul… his mass would become so absolute that Belial attacks would loose their meaning when in front of him.

You cannot call a mountain a grain of sand if you are standing beneath its shadow.

“Adam,” Sunny called out through their mental link. “Can you stall him? Truly stall him?”

Adam stood beside him, his gaze fixed on the shivering space around Belial.

He let out a low, grim laugh. “I will try my best, Emperor. I still have a few lives to burn, and a few old tricks Belial hasn’t seen since the dawn of time.”

Adam knew what Sunny was planning. He understood this just by the body language of Sunny.

“Start with the universes with the highest populations,” Adam advised, his voice serious. “If something disastrous happens, those are the souls that will generate the Faith you need to survive it. Secure the sub-universes, the City of Gods, and Veridia first. After that… save as many as you can before the demon lords find something amiss.”

Adam’s directive was clear: The Empire can be rebuilt as long as the Emperor lives.

Sunny nodded, his cosmic eyes flashing with a violet-gold resolve. He looked at the sixteen clones, who were already reforming and shifting into a defensive formation around Adam.

“Good luck, old friend,” Sunny whispered.

With a sharp flick of his wrist, Sunny’s main body distorted and vanished, teleporting back to the heart of the City of Gods.

He left the battlefield to the sixteen souls and the Ex-God King. He had a garden to harvest, and time was the one thing the Lord of Lies couldn’t take from him.

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