My Living Shadow System Devours To Make Me Stronger

Chapter 803: Chapter 804: Hollow Stillborn

Every trial demanded something different.

The first trial of self trapped you in a beautiful dream, a gentle illusion meant to swallow your will and never let go. It left you without any doubt or pain. This trial was meant to render you unwilling to fight against what you yourself desired most.

For Damon, it was peace. His mother, his home... he wished the nightmare that was his life had never happened.

On the fifth floor, where it unfolded, some of the most dangerous and vile entities were imprisoned.

To break free, Damon had killed himself within the dream. It had been an act of self, a rejection of the dream’s comfort, rather than the murder of the illusion of his mother.

Though he still didn’t know if she had been real.

By killing himself he had completed the trial.

Something the other prisoners had not done, the warden did not fight him; he simply let him leave.

The next was the trial of truth. Its prisoners were mindless things trapped in mirrors. Damon could not see them properly because, like him, they wandered an endless labyrinth of reflections, their identities stripped away, reduced to soulless husks. That trial forced you to face your truths. It was torment for liars. Damon had almost failed before Matia dragged him back to clarity.

She had made him admit his truths.

Following that ordeal came the trial of sin, which punished guilt rather than the act itself.

Its prisoners were bound as flesh-parchment books, forced to relive their sins endlessly. Damon endured the weight of his guilt until he refused to be chained by it any longer. Despite the pain, it had been the most liberating of all the trials.

He had always carried guilt, always hated who he had become to survive. Now he did not feel that way. His guilt would not guide him anymore.

Now came the current trial. The prisoners here had no bodies. Each one was a discarnate soul, some already twisted into shades. The warden, the Mother of Stillbirths, drowned her enemies beneath her countless stillborns until they died and became discarnate souls that fed her children.

This trial required no philosophical brilliance. Birth was the ultimate form of creation. The opposite of creation was destruction.

To pass, all you needed to do was kill the Mother of Stillbirths. Killing birth itself was the ultimate destruction. Her death was the only requirement.

Damon’s blade carved into her soft flesh. The Mother shrilled, a high, wet cry.

Lazarak followed with a raised arm, forming a pillar of darkness that roared upward and shot toward the Mother of Stillbirths.

”This wasn’t the plan Damon...” he shouted, knowing Damon had abandoned everything they discussed about how to fight her.

”Plans change.”

Damon twisted aside as one of her umbilical cords lashed toward him, spraying fluid that hissed across the ground.

A spear of ice from Matia slammed into the Mother. She screamed, her voice thick with infant agony.

Damon shifted his weight to attack again when he sensed more and more shades dying.

”Matia, go back up the shades.”

She dashed toward the rear without hesitation. The shades were being overrun as more stillborns crawled into existence, spilling slowly from every shadow.

Damon raised his hand, mana building hot and violent in his palm.

[Magic Gatling]

Thunder cracked through the cavern as streams of magic bullets erupted toward the monstrous fetus. The barrage tore stone apart, dust sweeping across the chamber in choking waves.

The Mother moved with disturbing speed. She stabbed her umbilical cords into piles of rubble and dragged her enormous body in sharp lunges, weaving with unnerving agility between the bullets as they carved through rock.

Lazarak slid beneath falling debris and manifested chains of darkness, sending them whipping toward her. She slapped them aside with her cords, sparks of dark energy scattering from each impact.

Her swollen body split open and a tiny stillborn wriggled free. It was hollow, even more lifeless than her deformed brood.

The moment it emerged, it floated toward Damon, who pursued the Mother with a relentless barrage of magic bullets.

He didn’t hesitate. Damon raised his hand and fired thousands of bullets through the newborn’s frail frame.

Even in death, it drifted toward him.

It had been born and killed in the same breath, its corpse drifting through the air, leaking blood and amniotic fluid as it floated closer. It reached inches from Damon, who was still tracking the Mother with his aim.

He did not have his usual senses in this body. No danger sense, no shadow form or skills. But instinct surged through him, carved into him by many of his near-death battles.

’Move. Now.’

In that instant Damon cursed his refusal to ever learn a proper barrier spell. He had relied too much on raw power and speed, on transforming into a shadow. None of that existed here in this body.

He gritted his teeth and crossed his arms, forcing the mirror seraph’s body to morph into a shield.

Before the shield fully formed, Damon saw a spark ignite at the center of the hollow corpse.

A wave of destruction detonated outward.

The mirror shield shattered. Damon was thrown across the cavern, smashing into pillars and tumbling over rubble. Shards of mirror trailed behind him in glittering arcs as violent mana tore through the seraph’s form.

He crashed into the far wall, buried beneath broken stone.

Lazarak snarled, twisting darkness into weapons instead of chains. He hurled them toward the Mother with brutal force.

”Damon!” he roared. ”Damon, speak to me, are you okay?”

His voice was raw, cracking from how hard he was screaming. The battle’s thunder made anything quieter impossible to hear.

Damon pushed out of the rubble, his body fractured and bleeding liquid mirror.

”I’m better than ever. I only took an explosion to the face.”

Lazarak let out a breath of relief.

”Careful. You might get hit.”

Damon lifted his sword, eyes locked on the Mother of Stillbirths.

”A little too late for that.”