novelraw Chapter 1403 709: Utter Disgrace
Chapter 1403 709: Utter Disgrace
Huge.
Truly huge.
Ji Jue raised his head, gazing at the towering shadow rising from the Fierce Flame below. Its ever-changing contours resembled mountain ranges, filling the entire sky. The majestic shadow seemed like a tide, enveloping all of Xiang State.
This was no longer the centipede figure that once appeared on the outside, but the genuinely awakened Family God, after the sacrificial rituals!
The enormous city appeared to have long been swallowed into the belly of the Family God.
So exaggerated.
With just a breath, it felt as if all warmth from the world was taken away. Under the hollow eyes' overlook, a vast expanse turned into a dead domain, emanating sheer ferocity and terror.
It's…
Still pretty huge.
No choice, Ji Jue had done his best.
As a polite adult looking at a sniveling child pulling a mess everywhere, without words of praise, one could only say, "Well, haven't seen you in a few days, and you've grown so much?"
Otherwise?
What else can be said!
For the Chopra family, this might be the family's miracle, a manifestation of power; for the Seven Cities, it's a seventh of their foundation and a strategic weapon... anyone who witnessed such terrifying scale and the power within couldn't help but marvel.
Purely in terms of size, even the Heavenly People might find it hard to match, right?
So?
Do Heavenly People rely on size?
Ji Jue could say, in terms of fixing cars, the Seeder isn't even fit to carry his shoes!
If size were of use, everyone would stockpile Fusion Bombs, line them up by count and tonnage, and conflicts in the world would reduce by half instantly.
Even with Tian Yuan's size, sweeping everything aside, wouldn't the Ruins bow down? Despite covering everything present across all realms, the Ruins never succeeded in leveraging such superiority over others.
If praying to gods were effective and could truly fulfill wishes, the Chongguang Church would have long led the way in worship!
The era of enhancing by adding has long passed.
Numbers can multiply, but if the mechanism and quality don't keep up, it's all futile!
Moreover, the law of diminishing returns is universally present. After a certain point, increasing size hardly boosts numbers notably.
In fact, it might even contradict itself, unable to integrate with its own, and self-destroy instead...
Such as the legend-worthy code mountain Ji Jue faces now is a prime example.
Patch, just patch!
Patch the Empire's family fire Secret Ritual, then patch the Federation's ancestor worship. With ancestors' souls as the foundation, massive souls and spiritual materials are aggregated, forcibly merging through Ascension's Secret Ritual into one, resulting in such a monstrous entity.
No wonder it's devoid of sanity.
This is essentially an imbecile!
And that too, severe schizophrenia, utterly incurable. Stack thousands of imbeciles together, and they wouldn't earn a primary school diploma.
The Ascension Series cherishes the notion of 'I'!
Exclusively refined and unique.
So resilient is a single thought, unyielding despite multiple setbacks.
Just like a bank card balance, no matter how many O's follow, there must be a 1 at the start, otherwise, it's meaningless... The Family God achieved Ascension but shattered consciousness inside fails in Integration, completely devoid of 'self.'
It's one thing that they are hardly compatible, but they keep rearing, forcing more soul fragments and spiritual materials inside, nurturing a pig.
From the very beginning, its roots were crooked. Plus, to control the Family God, the Chopra family locked it with bloodline, bound by family through family fire as the core...
The more they stitch, the bulkier the wreck, sinking deep with no escape.
"Wasting so much material to create something like this, truly…"
Ji Jue lowered his gaze, sighing indifferently:
"——Disgraceful!"
Let alone in Tide Sound, even within the Association, if anyone dared write such things in a paper, they'd be openly shamed and labeled as clowns of the year.
In the Netherworld, such worthless creations would be humanely destroyed!
Even just saying disgraceful, Ji Jue felt he was being extraordinarily cultured as a craftsman... With so much material used, so much effort spent, having achieved only this?!
If there's no work left, one should just die instead of wreaking havoc!
The key is, if it were merely previous heads lacking competence, perhaps that would be alright, but since the Chopra family settled in Xiang State, hundreds of years have passed, isn't there anyone insightful in such a large family?
Insight makes no difference.
One must say, precisely because they understand better than anyone, they have become stagnant, utterly refusing any change.
Fearing it might become uncontrollable, layers of restraints were added through bloodline and family sacrifices, engraving the code mountain into the very bones; fearing the Family God's power might be insufficient, nourishing and patching up to forcibly boost size and deterrence, regardless of whether they reach a point of no return; lastly, fearing others' envy and disputes, they locked the creation with the family through such god-making technique within the Chopra family...
Resulting in this absurd, mismatched existence.
Though it appears fierce as if soaring into the heavens, imposing all Four Seas, realistically if it showed any expression, right now it's probably drooling uncontrollably.
If the next moment it devours everyone present, it wouldn't be surprising.
No, it already wants to devour.
Just that, shackled by family fire, bound by the decrees engraved within its core... Outside the family fire, countless pairs of eyes gaze over thirstily.
"I see now…"
Ji Jue noticed Minkler sitting in the front row, seemingly without feeling any pressure, suddenly understanding: "So blood relationship is necessary?"
Bloodline is a crucial foundation; otherwise, it cannot be called a Family God.
Similarly, it's one of the keys for identification.
Otherwise, it might devour everyone at first sight.
Precisely because they share the same bloodline, the inherently mixed Family God produces confusion, considering members of the Chopra family as part of itself.
No matter how hungry one gets, they won't eat themselves.
At this moment, the selection of the Family God is to choose, among all the candidates, the one truly capable of mastering all the Family God's powers.
The master of the Family God is naturally the Family Head of the Chopra family.
Only a candidate who is most compatible with the Family God, has enough affinity, and also possesses some resistance to the Family God, can best utilize this power to its fullest.
Signing the contract means becoming a part of the Family God. After using this power in life, upon death, one merges into the core of the Family God, enhancing the contract for the next generation...
From generation to generation.
For hundreds of years, since its inception, the sacrifice of over seventy Family Heads has truly formed the foundation of the Family God.
As for how to screen them...
In that instant, amidst the praises and prostrations of the ancestral elders, the selection ceremony finally commenced.
An Invisible maw emerged from the void.
Without hesitation, it swallowed all seven candidates sitting in the front row into its belly!
Dragging their souls into the stomach of the Family God!
In that soul world built by endless madness, residual spirits, and evil thoughts, the one who can go the furthest, delve the deepest, and reach the Family God's core first will naturally become the new Family Head!
As for the others... perhaps if they're lucky, and not fully digested, when the Family God feels benevolent, a little bit of them might be spat out.
At the very front, all the candidates lost their souls simultaneously.
Leaving behind just a lifeless shell.
Their consciousness plunged into that man-made Hell within the Family God's belly, never to be seen again!
Boom!!!
Suddenly, it seemed as if the world whirled around. Minkler felt himself plunge into a layer after layer of darkness, endlessly falling, as faces emerged from the blackness, gazing hungrily at him.
Like a pack of wolves eyeing their prey.
Until he fell towards the ground, unable to feel the pain of the impact.
All he saw was so familiar.
As an outsider of the family, Minkler knew roughly, but just how could he understand what the world inside the Family God's stomach was truly like?
But now it seemed...
"Xiang State?"
Minkler exclaimed in surprise.
The eerie island and city he saw at the moment bore a seventy to eighty percent resemblance to Xiang State, yet the details seemed off, blurry, even buildings overlapped and twisted like AI-generated images, forming contradictions.
Xiang State from hundreds of years ago and Xiang State today were chaotically pieced together, dizzying to behold.
The Family God itself, composed of countless residual spirits, naturally inherited those contradictory and scattered memories. The aggregation of countless similar memories constructed the current Netherworld Xiang State.
The world seemed to have lost its color, leaving only black and white.
Chilling winds blew from afar, making Minkler shiver, penetrating to the bone, as the all-pervasive Erosion of resentment began.
He had to be quick.
Quickly head to the increasingly eerie old mansion of the Chopra family, head to the family temple, and gain the recognition of the family fire!
But what unsettled him even more was, since there was Xiang State, then...
Where were the people of Xiang State City?
In that instant, in the shadows of the streets, behind the windows of houses, stiff, wandering figures appeared before his eyes. Behind the windows, pale, venomous faces stared at him intently.
By the time he realized it, he'd already been surrounded by those incomplete evil spirits, step by step, converging on him.
And then, starved and ravenous...
They knelt to the ground!
In the world formed by the Family God, the bloodline of the Chopra family remains the rightful ruler!
No matter how starved, these residual spirits wouldn't dare defy the decrees that even the Family God must obey.
"Ha..."
Realizing this, Minkler sighed in relief, grinning smugly, but before he could truly smile, he heard the distant screams, wails, and pleas emanating from afar.
A disheveled figure was frantically sprinting from the end of the street.
Yet, that face...
"...Ximuria?"
That was the Chopra family's old Nineteen!
Minkler still remembered the confident, assured expression he wore before entering, but now he was in tears.
Rainbow light surrounded his whole body, now riddled with cracks.
Under the attack of strange, snake-like limbs, he'd been caught when his guard was down, and from the shadows, a swarm of bizarre snake shadows rose up, tearing him to pieces.
Yet, even torn apart, he couldn't die. His head was grasped by a hand from the serpent swarm.
Soon, white snakes entwined, weaving into a slender, half-formed body.
"I was wondering, Nineteen brother, where'd you get the nerve to stand up and challenge me..."
The thirty-first in rank, Hippolita, chuckled softly: "In the belly of the Family God, everything relies on one's own soul. What use are a few Amulets from the Empire?"
"Stop playing around, finish it quickly."
A hoarse voice spoke as a slightly hunched man walked from the edge of the street, clearly the most low-key of all the candidates, the old Nine, now saying: "The fourth already set off first, we must be quick."
So Hippolita smiled slightly, crushing the skull in her hand, and looked in the direction where Minkler was hiding, "What about Minkler then?"
The old Nine cast a cold glance:
"Kill him!"