The Voss clan had built their centuries-old fortune on a monopoly of divine spell cards, but that empire was crumbling by the month. Bootleg printers and new independent manufacturers had flooded the market in recent years, churning out low-grade but functional copies that undercut the Voss price point at every turn. House Liu had no such problem. Their trade was divine artifact fabrication—a craft of precision, ancient forging techniques, and secret family recipes no amount of reverse engineering could crack. Even a third-tier god with a passing grasp of rune-lore could slap together a shoddy spell card. A proper artifact? That took generations of skill.
It was the wealthiest house in the empire, and its sole heir was currently face-down in a garrison hospital cot, muttering about undercooked beans.
Tobias Hale Liu had been carried in an hour prior, limp as a sack of flour, after his grand demonstration of "protagonist-level luck" had ended with him face-planting three steps into the outer mist. The attending medics had said it was mild abyssal essence intoxication, common for folks with low-tier resistance who pushed past their limits. Tobias insisted it was food poisoning.
"Those lunch beans were off," he mumbled into his pillow for the dozenth time. "I'm telling you. If they'd been cooked properly I could've gone a mile in. Easy."
The junior officer who'd fished him off the ground leaned against the doorframe, staring at him with the exhausted patience of a man who'd seen a hundred spoiled rich kids make the exact same mistake. He'd already gotten the frantic call from Lord Hale himself, along with a very generous bonus to make sure his idiot son didn't get himself killed before they could send a guard detail to drag him home.
It was a cruel quirk of divine traits that two bearers of the same named ability could be worlds apart in strength. Tobias's Abyss Resistance, earned by a very stupid five-year-old who'd snuck a bite of raw abyssal fruit off a factory production line, was the barest, lowest grade of the trait. It kept him from dying instantly on contact with the outer mist, and that was about it. Step past the first line of purple fog, and his core would start to shut down.
No one had bothered to tell him that. He'd spent his whole life thinking his childhood accident had made him some kind of chosen one.
A mile west, Laia was three miles deep into the abyssal zone, reloading her rifle without even breaking a sweat, and had been for six straight hours.
High on their jagged observation ledge, Rorgoth the shadowfang worg's throat was raw from growling, and his stomach was growling so loud it was starting to scare the smaller scavenger beasts away. He and Veyra had been camped there for nearly two full days now, waiting for the mother venom to take effect.
"Is it ever going to work?" he rasped, his voice cracked and hoarse from disuse and hunger. "She's not just holding on. She's getting faster. Are you sure you didn't dose her with some kind of stimulant instead of poison?"
Veyra's scales rippled with frustrated rage, her slit pupils fixed on the figure below cutting through another pack of stinger beasts like she was pruning weeds. "Impossible. The mother venom is flawless. She's bluffing. She's forcing herself to keep going to lure us out. Five more minutes. Her faith will crumble any second now."
Rorgoth let out a dry, croaking laugh. "You said that five hours ago. And five hours before that. At this rate she'll slaughter every last beast in the outer den before her realm even gets a headache."
He wasn't wrong. Down in the ravine, Laia had paused just long enough to pull a dried meat strip out of her satchel, take a few bites, and wipe her hands on her robe before reloading and moving deeper into the gorge. She looked less like a god being slowly corrupted by abyssal poison, and more like a farmer finishing up a long, satisfying day in the fields.
If either beast could have peered past the veil into Laia's divine realm, they would have collapsed from fury.
King Theron stood in the central research hall of the human capital, surrounded by scribes and alchemists, and looked down at the flat of golden grain sprouting in the test bed before him with quiet, sharp satisfaction. The mother venom that was supposed to rot their crops and starve the realm into rebellion had done the exact opposite. Combined with the Maxwell Demon's entropy-reversing abilities, his team had successfully stripped the toxin of all harmful corruptive properties, leaving only the raw, growth-boosting abyssal energy behind.
The result was a new strain of grain they'd named deep-wheat: hardy, fast-growing, capable of thriving even in the thin, poor soil of the realm, and able to draw nutrients directly from faint void and abyssal energy seeping through the veil. No fertilizer needed. No crop failure from bad weather. It was the solution to every food shortage the realm had faced since its founding.
Vorath was practically bouncing on his hind legs beside the table, his tail thumping so hard it rattled the glass vials on the shelves. "Does this mean cream? Real cream? From actual cows?" "With proper grazing land and surplus grain?" Theron said, a faint smile tugging at his mouth. "Yes. This means cream." The dragon let out a booming, triumphant roar that shook dust from the rafters. "Feast night! Everyone brings their own side dishes! No skimping on frosting!"
In a shadowed alley between two warehouse buildings on the edge of the capital, the last remaining abyssal wraiths huddled behind a row of trash bins, shivering.
The anti-fraud pamphlets had been bad enough. The official realm-wide wanted poster had been worse. The latest edict, posted that very morning, had broken them entirely: Wanted: Abyssal Impostors. Five coarse grain loaves per live capture. Turn in at the nearest guard post for reward.
Five loaves of bread. That was all their lives were worth now. The lead wraith, the one with the flat back of his head from the cast-iron pan incident, let out a quiet, wobbly sob. He'd been doing this for two hundred and thirty-two years. He'd walked into a dozen different divine realms, whispering promises of power and glory, turning subjects against their gods, crumbling realms from the inside out. He'd been feared. He'd been respected.
Now a bunch of mortal farmers were chasing him around with brooms, hoping to trade him for bread.
"Never again," he whimpered, tucking himself deeper behind the bin. "Next assignment, I don't care how thin the veil is. I'm not stepping foot in this godsforsaken realm ever again."
Back in the abyss, Laia slung the last of the day's kills over her shoulder and checked her merit tally in her head, nodding firmly. At this rate, she'd hit fifty thousand in barely six weeks. Maybe even faster if she kept pushing into the third-tier dens.
She adjusted her grip on her rifle and started walking deeper into the mist, completely unaware that two very tired, very hungry abyssal predators were still waiting for her to collapse, and that her realm had just solved its centuries-long food shortage entirely by accident.
以Laia视角展开,描写她在军医院的所见所闻
详细描写深渊之灵被全城搜捕的场景
继续以西方奇幻风格续写,在Laia视角下展开后续情节