Lord: Sequence Master

"I won…"

Rosen had defeated two Sequence 3 spiritual beings in succession and was now at his limit.

After all, he was a demigod. Even the weakest demigod was still a force to be reckoned with.

If he had only relied on raw power and instinct without leveraging his pseudo-authority with wisdom, victory would have been impossible.

Taking a brief moment to recover, Rosen prepared to assist the Wood Elf Queen.

Across the battlefield, near the Ancient Tree of Life, the Wood Elf Queen had already slain one Sequence 3 being and gravely wounded another.

It was then that Rosen realized he might have underestimated her.

The difficulty she faced against two Sequence 3 Giants earlier stemmed from years of passive defense. If she had disregarded the reinforcements from the spiritual world, her true strength under the Ancient Tree of Life would have been even more terrifying.

Rosen turned his attention away from the Queen's ongoing battle and refocused on the Titan trapped within his gluttonous stomach.

The nine-fold infinite cycle of gluttony had indeed imprisoned the Titan. However, the Titan continued to resist, damaging the stomach's inner walls, rendering the gastric juices ineffective. After days of entrapment, the Titan remained alive and resilient.

It became clear: the only way to eliminate the Titan was with the Time Bullet.

Rosen charged the Time Dragon Crystal, pouring all its temporal energy into a single, decisive bullet.

He aimed at the Stomach of Gluttony's canvas, and with the Future Silencer, fired the time bullet, set to strike the Titan three seconds into the future.

The Titan froze as two thousand years of his life were instantly erased.

Ten more shots like this, and even with his rebirth abilities in the spirit world, the Titan would truly face death.

While theoretical immortality existed through traces of existence, each death extended the time between resurrections and decreased the chances of regaining sentience. The Titan couldn't rely on luck.

Realizing the threat, the Titan enveloped himself in Steam Titan Heavy Armor.

The once two-hundred-meter-tall Titan expanded into a thousand-meter colossus, armored in golden mechanical plating, crackling with arcs of electricity and steaming with pressure.

Rosen felt a pang of concern for his gluttonous stomach.

The Titan Heavy Armor, a masterpiece of alchemy and machinery, was five times thicker than the Titan's body itself. Physical damage, even from Rosen's most powerful attacks, seemed incapable of penetrating it.

If physical force couldn't break the Titan, Rosen decided to strike spiritually.

Previously, Wrath of the Dragon King had slain two Sequence 3 beings with the passive blessing of Void Spear Dance. Their souls had been captured by the Judgment ability and transformed into Judgment Bullets, specialized for spiritual attacks.

Though these bullets could wound the Titan, they wouldn't be enough to kill him outright.

Rosen began sketching a portrait of the Titan, opening a path with Death Judgment that directly connected the Titan's physical sea of consciousness to his painted representation.

The Time Bullet struck first, erasing another two thousand years of the Titan's life.

Though memories spanning millennia vanished, the Titan remained functional. For divine beings, the past and present are equally abstract.

The Judgment Bullet followed immediately, piercing into the Titan's sea of consciousness, delivering significant spiritual damage. However, Rosen realized that an electric arc barrier surrounded the ancient sequence tree within the Titan's spiritual domain, preventing a direct fatal blow.

Yet, damage to the sea of consciousness still left lasting repercussions on the Titan's spirit.

Rosen fired a second Judgment Bullet, obliterating the Titan's sea of consciousness entirely.

Without a functioning sea of consciousness, the connection between the Titan's spiritual form and physical body became fractured. The Titan's control over his own form lagged as his focus split between repairing his sea of consciousness and maintaining his corporeal body.

Rebuilding a destroyed sea of consciousness, especially one shattered by two Sequence 3 bullets, would take days.

Rosen had no more Sequence 3 Judgment Bullets, but he still possessed plenty of Sequence 4 ammunition.

Each time the Titan neared a critical stage in reconstructing his sea of consciousness, Rosen fired another bullet, resetting his progress.

In addition, every day, Rosen fired a Dragon King's Roaring Bullet into the stomach of gluttony, scorching the Titan's mechanical armor repeatedly. The once-impenetrable plating was now weakened and warped.

The Titan realized the inevitable. If he continued to endure this siege, he would eventually perish from exhaustion.

In a final act of desperation, the Titan turned inward. The Eternal Steam Furnace at the core of his armor began to glow ominously. Internal pressure surged as the Titan initiated a transformation—he was converting the furnace into an Alchemical Bomb.

If successful, the bomb would annihilate the entire cyclic world of gluttony, taking Rosen and everything else with it.

Rosen noticed the sudden drop in the Titan's resistance and immediately understood—the Titan was preparing for one final, devastating counterattack.

Moreover, the perception of death, combined with his sixth sense, made him feel like his stomach was about to collapse from overeating.

Now, there were two choices: let the Titans kill his gluttonous stomach or reset time and memory.

During these days of trapping the Titan, Rosen had only used space reset.

Once time and memory were reset, however, the Titan, with low health, would instantly return to full health.

Moreover, the spiritual consumption of these two resets was extremely alarming.

Estimates suggested that it would take 200 million spiritual crystals to reset the Titan's state and memory back to when it first entered the stomach of gluttony.

But this also meant that all the hard work of the past few days would be wasted, along with the 200 million spiritual crystals.

So, after weighing the pros and cons, Rosen decided to let the Titan kill his gluttonous stomach.

No matter what means he used to escape, if this method came at no cost, the Titan would have used it long ago. It was likely a strategy that would kill one thousand enemies and lose eight hundred of his own. When the time came to face the seriously injured Titan, he could choose to kill him head-on.

Rosen returned to the divine territory with his gluttonous stomach and set up a double barrier.

The elemental barrier of the Castle of Ashes and the spatial barrier of the territory merged together to ensure that even if the Titan broke out of the stomach of gluttony, it couldn't escape the territory of the gods. Then, the glorious barrier of the Magnificent Lighthouse protected the Castle of Ashes and the Lighthouse from any threat.

It took the Titan only half a day to transform the Eternal Steam Furnace into an alchemical bomb.

When the Eternal Steam Furnace exploded, endless light, heat, and lightning, wrapped in the endlessly expanding high-temperature steam, burst the Nine-Layered Gluttony's Stomach alive with the ever-increasing steam pressure.

Finally, a steam shockwave rose directly in the divine territory, blocked by the elemental barrier.

The Ninefold Gluttony's stomach was blown to pieces, and the Titan's condition was certainly not much better.

The entire body—inside and out, from the skin and flesh to the bones and internal organs—was cooked by high-pressure steam in a short time.

Such a body was obviously unable to continue fighting, as the nerves had completely died.

However, the Titan had already anticipated this result. Before the Eternal Steam Furnace exploded, he had used the spiritual mechanical ascension ritual to integrate the source of life in his body and blood into spirituality, and then completely integrated the spirituality and the ancient sequence tree into his soul.

Finally, the soul sublimated into a mechanical quantum state—a special route of abandoning one's body and occupying another's.

Unless forced into a desperate situation, no Titan would take this route willingly.

The Titan giant, now in a mechanical quantum state of soul, turned his soul into a flash of lightning and rushed toward the border of the divine territory. But he was blocked by the elemental barrier. At that moment, the Dragon King's Roaring Bomb was approaching the Titan giant.

The mechanical quantum state of the soul gave the Titan's soul lightning speed.

But the divine territory was so small that the Titans had nowhere to hide.

The Dragon King's Roaring Bomb exploded, but this time, it didn't release high-temperature dragon breath. Instead, it converted the power of dragon breath into a dragon roar. The roar echoed in the divine territory for ten minutes. Without the high-temperature flame, the damage at the material level was very low, but the damage to the spirituality was severe.

The much-weakened Titan's soul was then targeted by the Brilliant Lighthouse, which had transformed into a Sun Jellyfish.

One of them turned into lightning, and the other turned into light. Their speed was equally matched. However, Rosen kept shooting judgment bullets to interfere. The Titan giant's soul was constantly caught up by the sun jellyfish, entangled by jellyfish tentacles fused with nightmare shackles.

The Titans had no way to advance or retreat and could only fight in the limited space of the divine territory and the Magnificent Lighthouse.

As time passed, the Titan's soul grew weaker and weaker under the continuous damage from the judgment bullets.

It wasn't until this day that the spiritual world was no longer hungry, completely separated from reality, and restored stability.

At that moment, Rosen also took out the portrait of the Titan.

With the help of the Lighthouse of Glory, he quickly pulled the weakened Titan's soul into the painting and sealed it.

In fact, if the Titan hadn't blown up his own body, it wouldn't have been so easy for Rosen to defeat him.

The Titan giant, now only a soul with no body, would have been destroyed by the Judgment Bullets and the Dragon King's Roar Bullets if Amy hadn't wanted to capture him alive.

Since they were capturing the soul alive instead of hunting it down completely, unfortunately, they didn't get the trophy light ball.

However, the knowledge possessed by the Titans was enough to make up for all the losses when it fell into Amy's hands.

After dealing with three demigods in a row for a month, even though Rosen's body and spirit were still at their peak, the tiredness in his heart made him fall into a deep sleep after returning to the Sky Garden. He wasn't awakened until the next day by Alicia.

Alicia looked at Rosen tenderly. If it weren't for him, the Wood Elf Kingdom would have suffered heavy losses.

Now, in a few decades at most, the Ancient Tree of Life would be able to recover to its peak state.

Rosen opened his eyes and looked at Alicia, who was about to breathe towards him. He immediately hugged her and started a two-hour morning exercise.

After the morning exercise was over, he entered sage mode and logged into the deep web of the spiritual world through the main god computer interface projected on his retina.

In the past twenty years, the total human population had only decreased by 10%.

Then, in the last month, the population had decreased by 10% again.

Although it was better than the 30% population reduction over countless years, humans had still suffered a great loss this time.

The tower defense war between humans and the spirit world was just the beginning. There would certainly be many large-scale wars in the next ten thousand years.

Because the surrounding alien races had clearly stated that they were joining forces to kill the human race.

At this stage, it was still just the boiling frog method to weaken the human race little by little. When the third catastrophe of the world government came ten thousand years later, that would be the best time for the true gods of various alien races to join forces to destroy the world government.

After twenty years of war, the combat power of the world government's top level had not decreased but increased, though the combat power of the middle and lower levels had suffered serious losses.

Therefore, intelligence agencies in various places had investigated the actual losses of various kingdoms and principalities, and then issued a batch of compensation.

Finally, the prices of potions below sequence 7 were further reduced, and potions of sequence 9 were directly free.

Although 20% of ordinary people had suffered casualties in recent years, the partial integration of reality and the spiritual world had led to a significant increase in the concentration of spirituality. Many ordinary people who had previously been unable to awaken their spirituality had gradually done so in recent years.

Therefore, in the next few years, an astonishing number of new extraordinary people would emerge in the human world.

This was the terrifying thing about human civilization. Humanity couldn't be defeated in one blow and could always be reborn in the flames of war.

It wasn't stronger than other races in fertility, nor better in talent.

However, with such a huge population base, the potential of even a small number of humans was not inferior to that of all the top alien races.

This was the key to human civilization's ability to fight against many alien civilizations on its own.

Now that he finally had some free time, Rosen began to count his gains.

After 20 years of continuous hunting of spiritual beings, his spiritual strength had increased to 56 points.

He also upgraded his skills—Ash Armor Breaking, Three Trap Making, Human Body Painting Acting and Drawing, and Mind Canvas—to Level 6. Before being promoted to Sequence 4, he had nothing else to upgrade.

However, Rosen still had a long way to go before he could reach Sequence 5 perfection.

Especially for the Noble Sequence and Hunter Sequence, there was still a skill slot that hadn't been filled.

These were only superficial changes in strength. The real change was that the divine territory had undergone earth-shaking transformations.

After twenty years, the number of Sequence 6 Shadow Fiends had increased from more than ten thousand to fifty thousand.

As for the Metal Slimes, their total number had increased to more than one thousand.

The total number of extraordinary sequences in the territory had exceeded one million, with thousands having reached sequence 6.

This was already an astonishing growth rate. Not everyone could become a Sequence 5 in just a few decades like Rosen.

In the end, the Ash Bee Hive produced only 19 Ash Bee Queens, Ash Bee Kings, and Ash Bees, excluding the deaths of several Ash Bee Queens. The remaining number exceeded a thousand, and even the hive itself was about to be promoted to Sequence 5 due to the continuous synthesis of the Hunter's Eye.

It was precisely because of his incredible growth over the past twenty years that Rosen was able to defeat three demigod giants in succession last month.

Aside from the increase in strength, Rosen's biggest gain was the ecological planetarium and 30 trillion low-grade spiritual crystals.

Although there were many of these spiritual crystals, it was easy to deplete them all if used recklessly.

With the help of the remaining elves, it would cost hundreds of billions to revive a life elf civilization equivalent to a Sequence 2 spiritual painting.

If the conditions were relaxed a little, the cost of creating a Sequence 3 spiritual painting would still be at least tens of billions.

To light up the entire map of the Dark Continent, at least 999 Sequence 3 alien spirit realms would be needed.

30 trillion low-grade spiritual crystals might not be enough to illuminate the entire map of the Dark Continent.

Over the years, the time in the Hunter x Hunter world had stagnated, wasting the faith of billions of believers for twenty years and 20 years of development. Therefore, illuminating the Hunter x Hunter spiritual realm became the most urgent task.

Only by doing so could the value of billions of believers in the Lord God's Church be realized.

When he advanced from Sequence 4 to Sequence 3, things would naturally proceed more smoothly with enough faith.

However, obtaining 999 Sequence 3 alien spirit realms was truly difficult.

But Rosen couldn't bear to spend money to buy them.

After thinking it over, he decided to use the firewood painter's method to create the realms himself!

Rosen took firewood made from the embers of the life elf civilization, placed it into the firewood pile, and lit it with the miracle firewood. The ash curtain reflected the residual light, immediately reproducing the historical traces before the destruction of the life elves.

The magic pen began to draw, and its miraculous properties were passed on forever, reigniting the flame of civilization in the ashes.

A steady stream of divinity poured into the painting, and soon Rosen's divinity was nearly exhausted.

He took out 600 million high-grade spiritual crystals, worth 600 billion low-grade spiritual crystals, and piled them in front of the Lord God's computer. The computer extracted the divinity from these high-grade spiritual crystals and sent it into the gluttonous stomach for faster digestion.

Finally, all the divinity from the 600 million high-grade spiritual crystals was injected into the painting for eternal inheritance.

The life spirit civilization reflected in the painting began to rekindle its flame of civilization.

Rosen then took out drawing paper and a picture frame made from the bark of the Mother Tree of Life. He began projecting the revived flames of civilization and the life elf civilization within the ash curtain onto the drawing paper. Gradually, space began to form within the painting, and inside this space, life elves began to revive in the spiritual realm.

This method used by the fire painters was essentially the same as the one used by the spirit world to create spiritual realms.

Both methods use spirituality to bring everything recorded in historical traces back into the world.

The difference was that Rosen relied on the power of painters and the miracle flame, and the revived historical traces were integrated into the painting.

As long as there were embers of corresponding alien civilizations and enough high-quality spiritual crystals, reviving these alien civilizations into spiritual paintings wasn't difficult. Rosen examined the painting before him and read the properties using the painter's extraordinary source.

[Life Spirits: Paintings of the Spiritual Realm of Fire]

[Level: Sequence 2]

[Characteristics of Fire: Life Candle]

[Range: 10,000 miles]

[Population: One Sequence 3 Ancient Life Tree, 1 million Life Elves]

[Specialties: Life Candle, Life Spirit, Tree Man, Life Essence, Life Spring Water...]

Rosen realized a problem. While he had created this Xinhuo Spiritual Realm painting, he couldn't refine or master it.

The level gap was too large—Sequence 5 could not refine a Sequence 2 painting.

He would likely need to wait until he became a demigod and use the ancient god's sacrificial vessels to amplify the nine points of divinity to refine this painting.

However, this didn't mean the painting was useless to him.

By rekindling the flame of civilization that had been extinguished by the Life Elf with the Fire of Miracles, supreme control over the Fire of Civilization of the Life Elf was no longer in the hands of the Life Elf, but in the hands of the Fire of Miracles.

Although the level of the Miracle Flame was too high for Rosen to fully refine it, he could indirectly manipulate the characteristics of the civilization flame of the life elves, even harvesting the civilization specialty—Life Candle—through this flame.

This wooden candle functioned as a special means of resurrection.

By using his own spirituality to ignite the pillar of fire of life, he could be resurrected from the candlelight of the Life Candle, even if killed.

Thus, one Life Candle equaled one life.

The function of the Life Candle's fire characteristic was to condense the destiny of civilization to generate the Fire Candle of Life.

Rosen thought about this for a long time but still did not use this painting to illuminate the Dark Continent.

The reason was simple: The life elf civilization was not weak. Although the Ancient Tree of Life had fallen to Sequence 3 during the war, there was still a Sequence 2 Life Elf King and a dozen Sequence 3 Life Elves in the royal court.

If he couldn't fully control such a force, he wouldn't feel comfortable integrating it into the Dark Continent.

Therefore, to rekindle the flame of civilization and create paintings of the Flame Spirit Realm, it was best if the sequence level did not exceed Sequence 3.

Otherwise, he wouldn't be able to fully control it, and using it to illuminate the Dark Continent would do more harm than good.

(End of chapter)