Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 887: Absolute Corruption

The strongest female member of the Vesper Consortium only blinked in response.

Vex smiled even wider.

”Ah. Something came up. Please excuse me, my one and only amazing Master~”

*Click.*

The comm artifact cut out.

Black Fang stared at the darkened stone, frozen in place, her bath suddenly turning eerily quiet save for the bubbling poison.

”... That little minx. It’s no wonder that the two lunatics fell for one another... They’re a perfect match.”

She smirked.

Then erupted into manic cackles once again. Finally, this mundane existence was promising some excitement after all these boring centuries.

...

Far beyond stars, past the edges of time’s decay, where forgotten gods weep in silence and the void screams without voice, he feasts.

A dying world floated like a blistered fruit within a sphere of unraveling laws. Mountains bled molten tar. Oceans turned to rust. The cries of billions of mortals rose not as sound, but as delicious essence.

High above, perched atop a throne sculpted from the bones of a dead reality, loomed Xar’Zal, The Unmaking, The One Who Corrupts Law.

This being was Absolute Corruption. Not a mere God of Corruption, but Corruption itself.

He had no true shape, only the suggestion of form:

A crown of weeping mouths.

A core of writhing eyes.

A cloak made of laws unraveling, stitched from the broken commandments of slain deities.

His presence caused space itself to scream.

Tendrils of pure conceptual decay spiraled from him like roots from a cancerous tree, touching the planet below.

Every contact was a verdict.

A soul screamed?

It withered.

A prayer was uttered?

It crumbled into rot.

He didn’t corrupt with poison. He rewrote the meaning of purity itself.

And as his eldritch limbs touched a cathedral that defied entropy, once a bastion of hope, he smiled.

The cathedral wilted.

Priests shattered like porcelain, their souls sucked out in reverse, flowing into his maw of entropy.

He gurgled with satisfaction, emitting a sound that was akin to planets cracking, archangels sobbing, and sanity bleeding.

The world below was now nothing but a lifeless husk. Orbiting nothing, forgotten by everything.

Satisfied, Xar’Zal withdrew. He did not travel by moving through space, but by collapsing into his domain: the place of true corruption.

...

The hall was forged from cracked gold and cursed fire, suspended between law and madness. It pulsed like a living wound in reality.

Here knelt Sel’Ashra, The Withered Flame, acting leader of the Withered Pantheon.

Her once-divine skin was fissured, glowing with ember veins and ashen tears.

The sacred warmth she once embodied now reeked of rot and longing.

Before her, yawned the throne of violation, a hole in law itself, rippling with reality’s inversion. And within that impossible void... Xar’Zal had returned. 𝔯ἈɴＯ𝐛ĚṦ

Fresh from his divine feast.

She did not dare look up as she whispered with a strained tone:

”...My Lord. Venthros has fallen... Slain by a primordial. A mere demigod. What do you demand we do? We’ll become a laughingstock in the eyes of the other pantheons.”

The void didn’t answer with a voice.

It answered with a convulsion of reality itself.

From the rippling dark, a mass began to bulge forward. It was not flesh in reality, but memory, bloated with psychic residue and screaming remnants.

Faces—billions of them—began to emerge from its surface. Not faces as in ”visages,” but soul-masks: warped, twisted, and writhing. The very mortals he had devoured from the dying world just moments ago.

Each one wore the same expression:

Agony.

Mouths stretched too wide, as if trying to vomit up their own essence. Eyes empty, long since scraped hollow, yet still blinking in the echo of suffering.

And then...

They all moved, perfectly synchronized. Every mouth, every contorted face, spoke as one:

”Let them laugh.”

The words didn’t echo through the space. They infested.

They squirmed through Sel’Ashra’s divine marrow like worms through meat. Her thoughts went black for a moment, invaded by madness too ancient, too powerful for her to resist.

Her flame spasmed, breaking shape. Her embered skin cracked anew, glowing gold bleeding into diseased black. Sweat rolled down her face, hissing to steam as it hit the floor.

She forced herself to bow lower. Not out of respect, but because her body could no longer bear his gaze.

”...Yes, Lord Xar’Zal.”

Sel’Ashra did not dare linger. As she departed, the wall of soul-faces began to shudder.

The billions of tortured masks—those agonized remnants—split open from the mouth down. Their features peeled back like rotten fruit, revealing the raw corruption pooled inside them.

Then, without gesture or ceremony, Xar’Zal devoured them for the final time.

He did not feast on them in the way a beast devours meat, but in the way a Law devours deviation.

The corrupted fragments of the souls were extracted, digested into his infinite mass of Unmaking.

What remained—the flickers of cleaned essence, no longer sentient, no longer stained—were stored away.

They would not be reborn into a life of mortal peace.

They had been recycled.

Soon, those purified husks would be fitted into the ranks of his vast, silent army that was a trillion strong, marching across the void of space, each soldier a ghost without memory, a vessel of obedience, bearing armor forged from the laws of dead gods he’d long since consumed.

Thus, Xar’Zal wasted nothing.

Even damnation had a purpose.

Even agony could serve The Unmaking.

As Sel’Ashra left, she couldn’t help but wonder why he cared so little about their Pantheon’s horrible humiliation. Even if Xar’Zal was not officially part of the Withered Pantheon, he was still their true leader. Their master they all obeyed down to the letter, or else...

But what the Withered Flame didn’t quite grasp just yet was that the god who had become one with Corruption itself—the embodiment of the Law, the maw of the rewritten—saw things entirely differently from mere gods like her.

He was neither furious nor frightened.

The others could mock Venthros’s failure all they wanted.

But soon, laughter would be the last sound they made.

After all...

Laughter was but a melody he hadn’t yet rewritten into wailing.