Chapter 834: The Overlord of Transcendence's Kin! The Defeated Devouring King! The Audacious Assimilator
"Who are you?" The Assimilator demanded, his voice echoing through the void. His eyes, swirling with the brilliance of dying stars, locked onto Ren.
Ren let out a dry, amused chuckle. "Heh. Don't you go around claiming to be the all-powerful God? How is it that an all-knowing deity doesn't even know who's standing right in front of him?"
The Assimilator choked on his next words. The mockery hit its mark, leaving him momentarily speechless.
He had a point, the entity realized. As the self-proclaimed all-powerful God of this realm, he was supposed to wield absolute, boundless authority. Why was this human's existence completely obscured from his divine sight? More alarmingly, the aura radiating from the man felt entirely alien. He didn't belong to the fabric of this reality.
Not of this world?
The starry galaxies within the Assimilator's eyes violently contracted. "You... are you a kin of the King?!"
Ren's eyes narrowed by a fraction. His mind immediately flicked to the cosmic entities he had encountered in the past.
"The Devouring King..." Ren let the name roll off his tongue casually, testing the waters.
The reaction was instantaneous. The Assimilator froze, his cosmic form stiffening before he threw his head back and erupted into a fit of unrestrained, booming laughter.
"Hahahahahahahahaha!!!"
The sheer force of his amusement sent shockwaves rippling through the surrounding space, rattling the very foundations of the universe. It was a laugh dripping with pure, unadulterated mockery.
Ren didn't flinch. He just stood there, hands tucked into his pockets, watching the cosmic entity lose his mind. The mockery clearly wasn't directed at him personally, so he patiently waited for the booming echoes to die down.
When the Assimilator finally caught his breath, his entire demeanor had shifted. He floated higher, projecting an aura of absolute superiority. While his star-filled eyes lacked pupils to convey emotion, the sheer disdain radiating from his form was thick enough to cut with a knife.
"To think I was worried," the Assimilator sneered, his voice dripping with condescension. "I didn't expect to be facing a mere kin of my Lord's defeated foe. How utterly embarrassing for you."
"And who exactly is your master?" Ren asked, his tone perfectly flat.
The question caused the Assimilator's metaphysical mouth to stretch into a grotesque, sky-splitting grin.
"Hahaha! You don't even know that much? It seems you truly are an ant among ants!" The Assimilator puffed up, thoroughly convinced he held the absolute high ground. If this intruder was ignorant of such a monumental cosmic truth, his authority level had to be pitifully low, far lower than the Assimilator's own divine status.
Ren's expression didn't shift a single millimeter. "So, is this all-powerful God going to enlighten me, or just keep laughing at his own jokes?"
The Assimilator scoffed, crossing his arms over his chest in a display of supreme arrogance. "Since you have asked with such pathetic sincerity, I shall graciously bestow this knowledge upon you before you die."
He raised his hands as if praising the heavens. "My Lord is the absolute strongest Great Existence across all realms! He is the Overlord of Transcendence, the one who will ultimately subjugate and rule over every dimension in existence!"
'So it really is Him,' Ren thought, completely unsurprised.
The moment the Assimilator had called the Devouring King a defeated foe, the pieces had clicked into place. The Devouring King clearly harbored an irreconcilable blood feud with the Overlord of Transcendence. The Devouring King had even gone out of his way to invest power into Ren, banking on him to resist the Overlord in the future. That alone proved the Overlord of Transcendence was a vastly superior threat.
Ren just hadn't expected the apocalyptic doomsday entity of this specific world to be one of the Overlord's lapdogs.
"I have graced you with my Lord's name," the Assimilator declared, looking down his nose at Ren. "Now, how do you wish to die? Out of the goodness of my divine heart, I will grant you the right to choose your own execution."
At first glance, the entity almost sounded generous.
Unfortunately for him, Ren was feeling even more generous today.
"I'll return those exact words to you," Ren replied, a lazy smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Pick a grave. How do you want to die?"
The Assimilator blinked, genuinely taken aback by the sheer audacity. "How dare a speck of dust bare its fangs at me? It seems I must personally demonstrate the absolute might of an All-Powerful God!"
He raised his right hand high into the void. His fingers curled inward, and as his fist clenched, a terrifying maelstrom of chaotic light began to swirl around his knuckles. The sheer density of the energy warped the space around it, emitting a low, apocalyptic hum.
Looking down at Ren with absolute contempt, the Assimilator sneered. "Ant. Do you know what this is?"
Ren sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. "As long as you don't hit me with that classic sandbag-sized fist line, I think I'll manage to keep a straight face."
The casual, flippant ridicule struck a nerve. The Assimilator's starry eyes flared with genuine fury. A mortal? Mocking a god?
"Hmph. A tiny insect with a remarkably sharp tongue," the Assimilator growled, the chaotic light around his fist intensifying until it blinded the eye. "Fine. I will let you die with clarity. This single punch contains the compressed mass and explosive power of an entire universe."
"Is that so?"
The Assimilator froze. The voice hadn't come from below. It came from directly in front of his face.
Without a single ripple in space, without a fraction of a second passing, Ren had bypassed the laws of physics entirely. He was hovering right in front of the self-proclaimed god, his own fist raised in an identical, albeit far less flashy, posture.
Ren flashed him a bright, terrifyingly calm smile. "Then do you know what this is?"
The All-Powerful God's mind blanked. His divine reflexes failed to process the sudden shift in reality.
Ren didn't wait for a guess. He provided the answer himself.
"This is a sandbag-sized fist."
Wham.
Ren's fist shot forward. There was no grand explosion of light, no cosmic hum. It was just a simple, brutally fast punch. It sank directly into the Assimilator's chaotic, starry face with an incredibly smooth, entirely unhindered impact.
For a microsecond, the Assimilator actually wanted to laugh. He wanted to throw his head back and mock this ignorant mortal for daring to strike his divine, untouchable form with bare knuckles. He was already drafting a thousand different ways to torture the arrogant ant for the offense.
But reality had other plans.
In that exact same microsecond, the Assimilator felt something shatter. His starry vision violently fractured. The absolute certainty of his existence dissolved into static. His consciousness, vast and supposedly immortal, began to rapidly blink out like a dying candle in a hurricane.
"What... happened...?"
That single, confused whisper was the only thing he managed to force out before all the strength vanished from his cosmic form. His body went entirely limp, plummeting straight down through the void like a shot bird.
With his consciousness fading, the compressed universe held within his fist instantly lost its containment. The chaotic light violently expanded, the apocalyptic energy threatening to erupt and annihilate everything in the sector.
But just as the catastrophic detonation began, the expanding singularity abruptly halted. The blinding light snapped backward, shrinking and compressing as if the very fabric of time had been forcefully rewound.
The erupting universe vanished. The Assimilator's plummeting body snapped back to its original position.
He stood frozen in mid-air, completely intact, staring forward in absolute, mind-numbing confusion.
Ren was still floating right in front of him, casually shaking out his knuckles with a lazy smile. "Well? How about it? Is my sandbag-sized fist a little punchier than your universe-destroying fist?"
"What... what exactly did you do?" the Assimilator stammered, his voice trembling. He couldn't tell if the death he had just experienced was a horrific illusion or a terrifying reality.
But the nightmare wasn't over. A cold, creeping horror washed over him as he realized his all-powerful power was rapidly draining away. The boundless energy that defined his existence was hemorrhaging from his body, flowing through the void like a river of starlight, and gathering directly into the palm of Ren's hand.
In a single second, the supreme deity had been violently stripped of his divinity, reduced back to absolute zero.
Ren opened his hand. A swirling, brilliant blue orb rested innocently in his palm. It pulsed with the condensed essence of the Assimilator's all-powerful power.
Without a second thought, Ren tossed the orb into his mouth and swallowed it like a piece of hard candy. He smacked his lips, then looked back at the trembling entity with a playful, predatory glint in his eye.
"I killed you once just now, but I don't think that's quite enough to settle the tab," Ren said smoothly. "I told you I'd give you the right to choose how to die, just like you so generously offered me."
He tilted his head, his smile widening. "Come on now. Don't be shy. Tell me how you want to go out."
Stripped of his godhood and degenerated back into a mere Assimilator, the entity began to shake. The violent tremors wracked his cosmic form, visible to the naked eye. His very mind felt like it was vibrating out of his skull.
"Why? Why is this happening?!" he shrieked, his composure entirely shattered. "You are definitely not a subordinate of the Devouring King! Who exactly are you?!"
The Assimilator had descended into pure hysteria. The absolute victory he had practically held in his hands had just grown wings and flown away. He had been so close to offering this world's all-powerful power to his great Lord, so close to ultimate glory. The sheer whiplash from absolute triumph to utter defeat was breaking his sanity.
Ren's playful demeanor vanished. His eyes turned as cold and hard as glacial ice.
"Heh. It seems I was being a little too merciful by letting you pick your poison," Ren scoffed coldly.
He raised his hand and casually hooked his fingers through the empty air.
Twang.
The void rippled, and a network of previously invisible threads suddenly materialized, glowing with a faint, sinister light. They were deeply insidious, extending directly from the Assimilator's trembling form and creeping stealthily toward Ren's body.
The Assimilator's hysterical expression instantly morphed into one of sheer, unadulterated panic.
He had been discovered.
His frantic screaming, the violent trembling, the desperate questions, it had all been a carefully crafted pretense. He had put on the performance of a lifetime just to lower Ren's guard. Yes, the initial shock of losing his omnipotence had been genuine, but that despair had quickly been replaced by a twisted, ecstatic thrill.
Because with the all-powerful energy gone, his original, foundational ability had resurfaced: the absolute power of assimilation.
And standing right in front of him was an infinitely better, vastly more powerful target to assimilate.
He had played the role of a broken, defeated victim perfectly, hoping to silently and imperceptibly sink his assimilation threads into Ren's soul while the man was gloating. But his ultimate trump card had just been casually plucked from the air like a stray cobweb.
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