Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 303: The Devouring (2).

Nero’s darkness met them all.

For every tendril that wrapped around him, his darkness tore three more apart. For every constriction that threatened to break his bones, his consuming hunger devoured the flesh that dared touch him. He was a void within a void, a hungry thing within the bowels of an endless hunger, and he would not be denied.

His mouth opened wider still, the jaw dislocating completely now, grotesquely stretching like a void. The darkness pouring from it formed a vortex, a swirling maelstrom of consuming force that pulled everything toward it.

Tendrils were sucked into that vortex by the dozens, shredded by the rotating black, torn into pieces that Nero’s body absorbed with terrible efficiency.

The creature’s thrashing grew more violent.

Through the golden glow of his eyes, Nero could see the thing’s interior. The walls of its throat were lined with strange growths, pulsing organs that served purposes he couldn’t begin to comprehend. Its internal flesh was a strange patchwork of rot and different materials, with some glinting like crystals and metals, some cracked like stone, and some even squirmed like they possessed life of their own.

It was a chimera, it seemed. A thing assembled from pieces of a dozen different horrors and merged into one impossible whole.

And Nero was eating all of it.

His teeth found purchase on the creature’s throat lining and tore a chunk free. The flesh came away in his mouth, thick and gelatinous, tasting of brine and rot as he swallowed it all down, devouring it at an alarming rate as he turned into a dark blur.

The energy flooding through Nero’s body reached a critical point, and suddenly his transformation deepened. His skin turned blacker still, now seeming to absorb light rather than simply reflect it. His eyes blazed brighter, the golden glow intensifying until it illuminated the creature’s entire throat in bloody radiance. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

And his darkness—his darkness began to take on solid form.

They manifested as appendages of their own, extensions of Nero’s will made physical. Claws of pure darkness that raked through the creature’s flesh. Tendrils that mirrored the ones he was devouring, reaching out to grasp and tear and feed.

He had become a reflection of the thing he was consuming.

The horror of that realization tried to surface in Nero’s fragmenting consciousness.

"Devour!"

The thought was crushed again, but this time Nero fought back. Even as his body continued its terrible feast, even as his shadows tore through the creature’s internal organs and pulled them back to be consumed, some core part of him clung desperately to the memory of being human.

*My name is Nero. I am not just hunger. I am not just this darkness.*

It was a mantra, a desperate and fragile one. But it gave him something to hold onto as the Yang form threatened to consume his identity entirely.

The creature’s heart beat somewhere deep in its vast body. Nero could feel it through the connection of consumed flesh. It was a massive organ the size of the Red House, beating slowly with a ponderous rhythm.

His darkness reached for it.

The heart of the creature was not in its chest.

Instead, the organ resided somewhere in the lower portions of its body, nestled among coils of intestine and clusters of smaller organs that fed it blood through a network of vessels, flesh and stringy blood.

Nero’s darkness found it anyway.

They pushed through layers of muscle and fat and stranger tissues, following the pulse of that massive heartbeat like hounds tracking the scent of carrion. The creature thrashed harder as it felt the darkness approaching its core, its vast body convulsing with enough force to send shockwaves through the entire lake.

Above, on the shore, Arthur and Jacob stirred awake as the turbulence within the waters became more and more unstable. Their consciousness was returning, it seemed, drawn back by the violent disturbances in the waters.

Nero on the other hand was in the middle of fighting for his life.

His darkness wrapped around the creature’s heart— a strange thing of pulsing black flesh covered in nodules that glowed with that same blue bioluminescence as the fungi on the surface. The organ was enormous, each beat sending torrents of dark ichor through vessels thick as tree trunks.

Nero’s consciousness finally understood what he was looking at.

This wasn’t a natural creature.

It had been made, it seemed. Constructed from pieces of different entities and bound together through some terrible working of power. The heart bore runic markings similar to those he’d scraped into the fungus-covered floor, but much older, and far more complex. This thing was something’s creation, perhaps even their prison.

And now Nero was devouring it.

His darkness constricted around the heart, and the organ responded by pulsing faster, harder, pumping desperate floods of ichor through the creature’s body in an attempt to fight off the invasion. More tendrils emerged from the walls of its interior, smaller ones, thin as fingers, trying to pull Nero’s darkness away from their vital target.

Nero’s mouth opened impossibly wide and he bit into the heart directly.

The flesh of the organ was different from the tendrils and the flesh of the creature. It was tougher and a bit more resistant to his bite. His teeth couldn’t quite penetrate at first, glancing off the rubbery surface. But his darkness helped, prying open the surface to create gaps where his jaws could find purchase.

He bit down harder.

His teeth sank in.

The heart’s blood exploded into his mouth.

It the darkness of the beast’s bowels, Nero tasted the rich blood essence of the foul abomination.

It was wretched and bitter, thick and cold, tasting like all the terrible things he could imagine. There was a slightly numbing taste as well, but that was of no mind to him.

The moment it reached it stomach, Nero let out a roar.

A swelling heat engulfed him totally.

The Vineheart in his heart reacted violently.

Pain. A terrible pain.

Not the pain that can with the dull pulse of broken bones, or the sharp pain of a bruise or cut.

This was excruciating beyond thought. Horrid and terrible, it made him wish for death as it shot through his body. The ichor was toxic, filled with concentrated corruption that even his dark form struggled to process. His stomach convulsed, trying to reject the poison.

But even then, his body would not let it.

"Devour!"

Nero swallowed the ichor, forced it down despite every instinct screaming at him to stop. His throat burned like he’d swallowed molten metal. His stomach felt like it was being dissolved from the inside out.

And still he drank.

The creature’s thrashing reached a crescendo. Its massive body rolled in the lake, creating waves that crashed against the chamber’s walls. The antlers on its head scraped against stone, carving furrows in the ceiling far above.

Nero’s darkness tore even deeper into the heart like a cancerous growth. Dark ichor flooded out, mixing with the crystal-clear water of the lake, staining it black.

He ate the heart piece by piece.

Each bite sent fresh agony through his system as his body struggled to process the concentrated corruption. His very form was changing in response, adapting and evolving to handle the toxic influx.

He was becoming less human with each swallow.

And somewhere in the drowning fragments of his consciousness, Nero felt that truth with terrible clarity.

The price to pay for a terrible power, was terrible suffering.

That, he cold not delude himself on.

Not just physically suffering.

But a haunting.

A haunting that would accompany him the rest of his days.

It didn’t matter anymore of he was human or not. But with this pain, he could feel a surge of blasphemous, terrible strength flooding him to the depths.

There was nothing left to be lost.