Lightning Is the Only Way

Gravis looked with horror at the new mosquito.

One Sin Monster was already painful enough, but now there were two!?

Gravis immediately felt the terrifying pain of the new bite. Even worse, the Sin Monsters seemed to bite in an alternating pattern, giving Gravis double the instances of pain.

He would have preferred for them to do it simultaneously.

Mortis looked solemnly at the new mosquito. "I don't believe that this is normal," he said.

"What do you mean?" Gravis asked, his voice shaking slightly. His mind wasn't in the best of shape. Otherwise, he would have noticed the same thing.

"It's too fast," Mortis said. "If they keep doubling, you will die in less than a century. That's not a reasonable timeframe to deal with your Sin Aura. If they keep doubling, this would be a death sentence."

"However, I can imagine one getting added every week. With this, it would take the Sin Monsters around 10,000 years to fully consume you," Mortis said.

"That's still too short!" Gravis said with a nervous voice.

"There may be a way to slow them down," Mortis said. "These Sin Monsters exist to push you towards paying back your debt. I guess that the more you pay back, the slower they multiply."

"How can we test it?" Gravis asked nervously. Usually, Gravis would have found a way himself, but the pain was making it nearly impossible for him to focus.

Right now, Gravis fully relied on Mortis' mind.

"We need to wait for the next addition," Mortis said. "We need to check if the time has shortened."

"Shortened? How? Why?" Gravis asked.

"You fed the Sin Monster 100,000 God Stones earlier. If this counts towards your payback, the last multiplication should have already been a delayed one. Now, we need to see what happens when you don't give it anything," Mortis explained.

Gravis took a deep breath. "Okay. I don't like it, but we need more information."

Gravis and Mortis continued planning, but Mortis got an interesting thought a couple of minutes later.

"Sin Monsters are made of pure Death, right?" Mortis said. "Their nature is also very different from beasts or humans. Instead of killing you directly, they simply slowly consume you and put you in as much pain as possible."

"Yes, I noticed," Gravis said. "What about it?"

"We could assign that behavior to Heaven, but it should also be similar to something else, according to the information we have heard," Mortis said.

Gravis wasn't sure what Mortis meant, but his mind quickly made a connection.

"Father's Cosmos," Gravis said.

Mortis nodded. "From what we've heard, father's Cosmos is made of sheer brutality and a war between Death and Energy. Apparently, there is a way to harness brutality to create incredible force."

"Look at them," Mortis said as he gestured to the Sin Monsters. "They don't use Laws. They don't have feelings. They only have powerful bodies. Yet, is their body the only thing that makes them so incredibly powerful that even Divine Gods fear them? I'm not sure how powerful Divine Gods are, but I don't think that their power is that simple."

Gravis looked at the mosquitos. He didn't want to look at them since it was a terrifying feeling to watch something gnawing on one's body.

"I don't think that's everything," Mortis added. "Maybe the pain it is inflicting on you is increasing its power. Have you ever thought about that?"

Gravis couldn't test the hypothesis, but he could imagine that.

"Maybe the more pain and terror this beast inflicts on others, the more powerful it becomes. It's even absorbing your Will-Aura. Eventually, when your Will-Aura has been emptied, you will also have no will anymore. At that point, you would be just like someone that has died to Samsara."

"Wouldn't the beast then have squeezed every bit of anguish and pain out of you? This would be the eventual logical conclusion, and it would also explain how a more powerful target would be more useful. Being more powerful means having a stronger will, which means that more will and sorrow can be extracted out of the victim."

"The Sin Monster would probably be happy when you went through another form of tempering. It would only mean that it would have even more to consume," Mortis explained.

Gravis' mind started going to a dark place.

Gravis was imagining his father's Cosmos.

What did it look like?

Gravis imagined a world filled with monsters with indescribable appearances. Some of them may only be a walking mouth. Some of them might be tentacles filled with eyes. Some might be made of several human corpses that fused to create a larger monster.

Even more, Gravis imagined parasites like the Sin Monster littering these monsters. These monsters might be too stupid to realize that the parasites were even on their bodies.

Yet, the monsters would still feel the unreal pain, which would make them even more aggressive. They would attack absolutely everything and might even consume their own body in hatred and pain.

The number of deaths in such a world would be insane, which would require an equally fast method of reproduction.

Maybe some monster made out of mouths simply spat out a smaller version of itself, which would run into the distance to eat other young?

Maybe the ground of the world was covered by a mass of small, continually battling monsters that kept consuming everything around them.

However, that would probably only cover the Death side of the Cosmos.

On the other side, Gravis could imagine humans and beasts living together.

Humans and beasts probably wouldn't even fight each other since they needed their entire power to resist the Death part of the Cosmos.

The Opposer's power came from the balance of Death and Energy in his world.

If Death were eradicated and only Energy survived, the Opposer's power would fall significantly, which would result in Orthar killing him.

If Energy were eradicated and only Death survived, the Opposer would die. The Opposer was a being made of Energy, and if only Death filled him, he couldn't exist.

This meant that the war had to rage on indefinitely.

Even more, the different forces in the Opposer's Cosmos probably also had to be dealt with. If a large area were entirely made of Death, its influence might consume all the little pockets of Energy near it, which would make it grow exponentially.

This meant that the Death areas and Energy areas had to be distributed over many small areas.

'This would be hell!' Gravis thought. 'However, this would be completely plausible.'

'Luckily, I haven't been born into my father's Cosmos. It's ironic that I would prefer a place that Orthar created over a place father created.'

After these thoughts passed, Gravis focused on dealing with the pain again.

It was very difficult for Gravis to deal with the pain, but he had to persevere. Sadly, he couldn't get used to it, no matter what he did. Every single bite was just as bad as the first one. It was like the ability Gravis used to dissociate from the pain didn't work on the Sin Monsters.

Luckily, or unluckily, Gravis didn't have to wait for long.

One day later, a third mosquito appeared.

Gravis gritted his teeth while Mortis' eyes shone.