Chapter 15: Omi
The wind howled through the shattered valley like the dying wail of a thousand betrayed spirits. Crimson mist clung to every leaf, every cracked boulder, turning the once-lush forest into a slaughterhouse bathed in perpetual twilight.
Somewhere in the distance, a river ran red, not with water, but with the liquefied essence of lives harvested too greedily, too soon.
Damon moved through that hellscape like a storm given human shape.
His body cut the air with such velocity that the ancient trees on either side bent backward as though bowing before an emperor of old. Lightning energy danced coiling and hissing beneath his skin. Each heartbeat thundered like war drums summoning forgotten armies from their graves.
I must reach him before the final strand of karma frays, Damon thought, teeth clenched tight enough to draw blood. Two million souls already fed to that parasite. If he digests them fully… even I will need to expend true divinity to erase him completely.
His divine sense erupted outward, not gently probing, but smashing across the landscape like a heavenly hammer seeking heresy. Distant mountains trembled faintly. Birds that had somehow survived until now dropped from the sky, hearts bursting from sheer pressure. Rivers momentarily reversed course in terrified obedience.
Nothing.
No heartbeat. No nascent soul-flame. No flicker of living qi.
Only… that.
Ahead lay a lake, but a crimson wound in the earth. The slime boys flesh churned and bubbled as though the ground itself were bleeding from an artery severed by the heavens. At its exact center hovered the Blood God.
He was beautiful in the way rotting roses are beautiful, perfect features marred by something fundamentally wrong. Crimson long hair floated around him as if suspended in invisible currents. Black robes clung to a physique sculpted by slaughter rather than cultivation. And those eyes… twin abysses of coagulated blood staring down at Damon with the casual contempt one reserves for vermin that has wandered too close to sacred ground.
The Blood God tilted his head, lips curling into a smile that revealed teeth sharpened to points.
"Well, well…" His voice rolled out like blood pouring over velvet, smooth, thick, ancient. "A little flesh-bag dares step foot upon This Seat's newly claimed playground? How delightfully suicidal."
Damon halted standing before the voids slimes flesh .
He Stared at the void slime flesh hiss and recoiled from his feet as though it mustere up it last strength in worship for his prayers being answered.
He raised one brow. "Playground? You call the stolen lives of what belongs to me a playground?"
The Blood god laughed, a sound like bones grinding together under immense pressure.
"Stolen? No, no, little ant. Offered. Freely given in screams and tears and final prayers. Two million souls, ripe and screaming, poured willingly into my cup because their so-called 'protectors' were too weak to shield them." He spread his arms wide. "And now you, a qi-less cripple with delusions of grandeur, come to… what? Lecture me?"
Damon's expression never changed. But something in the air grew heavier, colder, as though the valley itself held its breath.
"You speak of weakness," he said quietly, voice carrying the weight of eons. "Yet here you stand, an Omi, a mere probationary godling, forced to descend personally because your puppets failed. How embarrassing for you."
The title struck like a brand seared into divine flesh.
Omi.
In the upper realms, it was not an insult. It was a measurement. A cold, clinical designation carved into the divine jade tablets of the Heavenly Hierarchy:
Onzi.
Rahim.
Maki.
Zosen.
And then… the probationary tiers.
Omi, A baby god below one hudred thousand years old permitted to call itself divine. A god in name only, still crawling on its belly toward true transcendence.
The Blood God's pupils contracted to needle points.
"How… does a mortal insect know that word?"
Damon smiled, small, cold, merciless.
"Because I have walked among those who sit far above your petty rung. Because I have broken beings who would consider an Omi beneath even their notice."
Rage ignited.
No more words.
The Blood God moved.
His body dissolved into nine streaks of scarlet lightning. Each streak birthed an identical afterimage, each wielding a dripping longsword forged from the blood of the child he had just devoured. Nine blades sang through the air in perfect killing formation:
One aimed to split the jaw and sever the tongue that dared speak his title.
One sought the throat to drink the defiant words.
One stabbed from behind toward the heart, intending to pierce and twist.
One descended from directly above to cleave the skull in twain.
Five more filled the gaps, creating a perfect cage of death from which no mortal could escape.
Damon did not move.
He simply… waited.
His soul has not yet fully fused with this vessel, he noted clinically. The descent was rushed. The karmic backlash still lingers. There is a sliver of time, barely a breath, where his true qi is exposed.
Yet something troubled him deeply.
No… I sense no authentic divine mark. Only stolen fragments. Borrowed filth masquerading as holy radiance. What exactly are you, little godling?
Then he acted.
Lightning exploded from every pore in a perfect sphere of violet-white annihilation. The storm swallowed the nine afterimages whole. Crimson illusions shattered like glass struck by thunder, dissolving into bloody mist.
The true Blood God staggered backward, robes scorched black at the edges, crimson hair smoking.
For the first time, a trace of uncertainty flickered across his divine features.
Damon took one step forward. Then another. Leisurely. Unhurried. As though he were merely strolling through his own garden.
"I have wondered," he said, voice calm yet carrying across the valley like judgment from on high, "why an Omi would risk his true-body to descent for such meager spoils. Two million souls? In the upper realms that is barely enough to moisten the lips of real divinities. Yet you treat it like a feast."
He stopped ten paces away.
"Which can only mean one thing."
The Blood God snarled, blood dripping from between clenched teeth. "And what is that, cripple?"
"You are starving," Damon said simply. "Desperate. Cornered. Your true energy is crippled, your divine foundation cracked. You need this body not for pleasure… but for survival."
The words landed like slaps across the face.
The Blood God roared.
"You dare!"
He lunged again, this time faster, more vicious. The blood sword in his hand swelled to ten meters long, edge weeping crimson tears that burned the ground wherever they fell.
Damon vanished.
Not moved. Vanished.
The Blood God's divine sense screamed in alarm. He swept the area in frantic pulses, nothing. No qi signature. No heartbeat. No presence at all.
"Where ?!"
A knee materialized from nowhere and smashed into the side of his skull with the force of a falling star.
CRACK!
The sound echoed like a mountain splitting open.
The Blood God dropped to one knee. Fresh divine blood, thick and glowing, trickled from his ear, his nose, the corner of his mouth.
He stared up in disbelief.
Damon stood above him now, calm as ever.
"Divinity," he explained patiently, as though lecturing a particularly slow child, "is not merely power. It is proof. Rank. Age. Wrath. Presence. When a true god looks upon another, they see everything in an instant. Yet you saw nothing when you looked at me."
He crouched slightly, meeting the Blood God's gaze.
"All I did was wrap myself in a thin veil of divinity. To your starved, broken senses… I became invisible."
The Blood God tried to rise.
His legs refused.
Agony lanced through his sea of consciousness, sharp, cold, relentless.
"What… have you done to me?!"
Damon shrugged one shoulder.
"When my knee kissed your temple, I gifted you a single wisp of my own divinity. Just a fragment. But your foundation is so fragile, so hollow… it is already reshaping your soul from the inside."
"It was supposed to be undetectable!" the Blood God screamed, voice cracking. "The descent ritual was flawless! No one should have sensed my arrival!"
Damon tilted his head.
"Flawless for an Omi, perhaps. But not for someone who has tasted true divinity."
He straightened.
"Even after consuming a child of he void and the two million lives along side it , yet you remain this… pathetic. A starving dog wearing a dragon's hide."
The air behind him warped and darkened. A colossal silhouette slowly took form, jet-black from horn to hoof, curling ram horns inscribed with runes older than most stars. Its eyes were empty sockets that somehow still managed to stare. The sheer weight of its presence pressed the ground downward, creating a shallow crater beneath Damon's feet.
The Blood God's mind began to fracture.
"No… no… impossible…"
Damon's arm darkened until it matched the shadow behind him. Fingers lengthened into obsidian claws. Black veins pulsed beneath the skin.
The Blood God's voice rose to a shriek.
"Who are you?! WHO ARE YOU?!"
Damon leaned forward slightly.
His smile was gentle. Almost kind.
"Almehi," he whispered.
The name rolled across the valley like the tolling of a funeral bell in the heavens.
"The God of madness. The one who once bathed the plains of Deveron and the seas of Surlik in divine gore until even the stars wept red. Captor of the Dream Demon. Breaker of a thousand false thrones."
Golden-black divinity erupted from him in solar flares of annihilation.
The Blood God screamed, a sound so raw, so primal, it cracked the sky overhead.
"I must escape, I must."
His body refused to obey.
Panic flooded every line of his once-perfect face.
"Please… mercy… spare this one… I beg you…"
Damon placed his palm gently atop the Blood God's head.
Almost lovingly.
"Your begging," he murmured, voice soft, savoring every trembling syllable, "is the sweetest music I have craved for millions of years ."