She put the draft away and kept thinking about funding for her future ambitions. After much thought, her expression turned strange and she clenched her teeth. "Fine, I will just write a few more volumes."
"This time I will twist the relationship between the princess and the evil dragon even more. I refuse to believe I cannot drain the wallets of the natives of Otherworld."
Vera was not someone who followed a predetermined path. "Anyway, there are still more than ten years before that Black Dragon comes to catch me. If I cannot beat it then, I can always call for help."
"Today is another day of being fed. I do not even remember which day it is anymore." "The supply efficiency has slowed down lately, and the portions are not as generous as before. Looks like those old fellows are almost out of gold." "But whatever I can skim is still a gain. I am not losing anything."
In the rare idle moments, Belial nodded while writing in his diary, then casually flicked the sheet of paper away. The space around him was still blood-red, black fog rolling in all directions, but compared to before, its violent scale had shrunk. What had once been a sea of blood had dried into a vast lake.
Within the black smoke, a shadowy figure grew clearer, whispering endlessly. In this boundless darkness, there existed a deeper black that swallowed even despair and fear without residue. Its mere presence was like a black hole, drawing in all bloodlight and fog, leaving behind only crushing sensations of despair, terror, and destruction.
"Roar…!!!"
Gigantic chains wrapped in blood-red runes were embedded deep into flesh, trembling under overwhelming force as they shattered into Shard and reformed again and again. Every breath carried terrifying pressure as blue-white flames ignited and died out, sending waves capable of burning everything nearby. The wings stretched beyond restraint like enormous talons, bloodlight surging through the gaps in deep scales and shooting out through mountain-like spines along the back to the edge of space.
Yet the body had no fixed shape, constantly shifting, with countless wailing souls visible within the darkness. At the same time, it was like a boundless starry sky, planets bathed in stellar eruptions and evolving over billions of years into an ecosystem of endless change. Unlike the earlier Great Dragon that was barely a hundred meters long, this was now a dragon-shaped demonic shadow over a thousand meters in length, made purely of black fog and still growing, its malice so strong that even a gaze felt crushed into Shard.
With a single beat of its wings, shockwaves tore outward as it carried mountains on its back and breathed out light of destruction. Three pairs of crimson eyes glowed on its face, filled with nothing but the desire to destroy. Since Belial had fallen into this all-you-can-eat place, so much time had passed that he could not be bothered to count it anymore.
As for how things ended up like this, it took some explanation. At first, Belial assumed that with enough energy supply, his size would naturally grow quickly. What he had forgotten was one key problem, this place had no matter at all.
Even when he slept elsewhere before, he still needed to eat when hungry, because a growing body could not be built from pure energy alone. Energy piled up inside him, but his body did not really grow, maybe longer, but not heavier. That was not a big issue at first, since the energy reserves were not enough to push him into Burning Mode, and at worst he could just tear open the space and leave once he had eaten enough.
Later on, the observers feeding him seemed to be using the delivered power to do something to him. The power felt familiar, the light and dark forces he had never fully understood, with light tied to memory and time according to what he had pieced together. That left the question of what dark was used for.
Since they were poking at him anyway, he decided to peek back, fair exchange and all. After tanking an unknown number of hits with his own body, Belial finally understood part of dark's function. One aspect was time-related, accelerating decay, which did nothing to him and could be ignored.
The second use could only be described as decomposition. That was the method they were using to tamper with him. At first he did not care, since the damage felt like an itch, but later he realized this attack was not about numbers, it was a mechanism.
When Belial lowered his defenses, even his scales could be broken down by this power, ignoring certain physical properties. Left unchecked, it could pass through electromagnetic shields, bypass cellular cohesion, and forcibly break down his flesh, effectively ignoring defense values and directly cutting health. However, when he activated aggregation-based protection, it could be blocked easily, and the damage was less than what he lost from a casual sneeze.
The final point was the most interesting part. After being hit so many times, Belial learned how to use this method himself. When he applied decomposition to his own body, the resulting black fog still carried his consciousness and could even breathe, as if it were a different body.
That gave him an idea, and he dispersed most of his mass outward, forming this thousand-meter-long black Great Dragon. In this form, it was basically an oversized can for his former self, but its energy storage and use of Energy Field were far better. Once he figured it out, he slowly decomposed and reassembled himself into this shape, since he could merge back at any time, and it worked just fine for eating and hiding small tricks.
He knew the ones feeding him had bad intentions, but that did not matter. He was freeloading anyway.
"In this form, the painfully slow modifications can speed up a bit, and I even get everyone's generous support."
Using the prototype drafts designed by Bella and the improved micro-level control granted by Energy Field in this state, Belial took advantage of their tampering to carry out large-scale self-modification. He could decompose with Rend or aggregate at will, as long as he used light and dark properly, instantly breaking complex spell structures into basic elements. Those fragments then became tiny puzzle pieces embedded into a vast system.
By volume, these rebuilt structures were even smaller than cells, yet each could carry constructions matching the thousand-meter body outside. Billions of such basic circuits would eventually form an enormous System, something Bella and Lilith had once speculated about, imagining how terrifying it would be at this scale. With enough Magic and sufficient knowledge, reshaping the world with a thought would not be impossible.
Now, this System had been refined even further. The secret modifications added by the others were also quite interesting, and many structures could be optimized away. After a long stretch of electronic serf labor, the upper limit of the System rose again, though the cost was that it became even slower, so slow he could not be bothered to calculate it.
"I will eat a bit more and then leave. You can tell those old guys are almost out of gold."
Muttering to himself, Belial put on a show for them, roaring once or twice and shifting his body as a token response. From the outside, the shadow of a thousand-meter Black Dragon let out an earth-shaking roar. With no medium for sound, it still sent massive waves through energy fields, shaking everything violently.
Crimson light flared in its eyes and body as silent shockwaves rolled outward through the black fog, making the chains rattle while searing blue-white flames spread. The black stone altar, already extended many times, cracked open with new Rift, and the eight High Tower at the cardinal points were destroyed again, barely held together by trembling red runes. With a beat of its wings and a twist of its body, the entire mountain range struggled against its shackles, snapping countless thick chains that quickly regenerated and multiplied.
The towering figures around it poured in power once more to maintain the seal, barely suppressing the rampaging Black Dragon. Corrupting it to this extent had cost far more power than expected, far more than even their not yet fully revived companion had consumed. After growing to this size, it rampaged frequently, each time forcing them to spend more power to reinforce the seal.
Originally, more than ten entities had been present in this space, but now only a few remained. The reason was simple. They spoke of joint investment and turning it into a puppet for action in the Material World, but everyone had thoughts of monopolizing it.
If used well, this puppet promised enormous returns, and even if the gate opened later, it was impossible for all of them to leave together. Conditions aside, none of them wanted dozens of peers sharing the world. Cooperation only existed because of a shared goal, while backstabbing was routine.
Dozens invested power at first, then dropped out one by one due to betrayal, insufficient power, poor returns, or distance and signal issues. A few more were forced out whenever Belial yawned, rolled over, or moved to digest his meal. In the end, only the strongest and best-prepared remained, pushing the transformation into its final stage.