Extraordinary Pedigree.

Chapter 1061 The Well-Deserved Lord of the Planes

Hearing about Saint Cuthbert's unfortunate and tragic experience, Xia Xiu bluntly expressed his true thoughts:

"To be honest, you're really unlucky."

Saint Cuthbert's voice rose from the silence, slightly hoarse yet steady, like a faint echo squeezed from a weathered stone tablet, carrying an irreversible sense of vicissitude.

He chuckled softly, but his laughter was as dim and eerie as a shadow hanging on a streetlamp.
"I also feel like I'm very unlucky."

Then, he said in a low voice:

"Let's continue talking about the stars. Back then, the star projection brought... a unique artifact."

"The name of that object is—the Radiant Trioctahedron."

"This artifact houses the single consciousness of that star-like being in the dark dimension; its name is—Night Demon."

"Although the Night Demon is just a concrete shadow of the stars, it can move freely between all darkness."

"Note that darkness is not its dwelling place, but its medium of survival."

"It can spread itself through any shadow, crack, or darkness in the corner, just as naturally, quickly, and silently as a virus spreads in the air."

"Contact with or gaze upon the Night Demon will produce echoes in the brain, leading to auditory hallucinations, dreams, and speech disorders. Long-term exposure can cause personality breakdown, religious fanaticism, or a craving for darkness; it can whisper in dreams and cause victims to actively destroy light sources."

"Doesn't this sound exactly like the Fifth Church and the Cosmic Starfish...? They are all a kind of consciousness parasitic structure that can exist in countless dark spaces at the same time."

He paused, lowering his voice even further, almost as if he were delivering a eulogy:
"When the world enters a state of darkness, it will manifest naturally. There is no summoning, no ritual; it will come as long as the conditions are met."

"Its physical form is not the source of its power, but an anchor point—a consciousness anchor that is forcibly plunged into reality through a trioctahedron."

"Only pure light can dispel it. Fire, lightning, holy light, the sun of faith, and even parts of the elemental sun can do it. But if the light fades, the holy fire goes out, the thunder ceases, and the sun no longer rises..."

"Then the Night Demon will bring an end to this world."

In the dim light, Xia Xiu's gaze seemed to pierce through the curtain of the entire world, staring at the darkness that was as still as stagnant water, as if he wanted to dismantle and piece together the logic behind all the structures bit by bit.

“So…” he said softly, “that layer of darkness outside is the Night Demon.”

He gazed at the night slowly churning behind Saint Cuthbert, the thick shadows that clung to the edge of the light source like a black tide, no longer merely a juxtaposition of dimness and emptiness, but a hostility inherent in existence itself, a resounding echo of will that could not be measured even at the edge of the universe.

Then, Xia Xiu's expression shifted, and his brows furrowed slightly. It was the instant when some kind of deduction was broken and the chain was reconnected.

He looked out into the darkness beyond the light, then down at Saint Cuthbert beneath it, who was struggling to maintain his form, and whispered slowly and steadily:

"Wait, according to Abelio's natural characteristics..."

As one of the seventeen outer planes, Abelio is a world that defies common sense. It is a plane wheel structure rather than a planetary structure, so it has no stars in the traditional sense, no sequential twilight and dawn, and the alternation of day and night is controlled entirely by the special mechanism of the day-night sphere.

"The rotation of the day and night sphere is the only rhythm of Abelio's day and night alternation; it has no transition and no buffer."

"Once night falls, all light vanishes instantly, and darkness sweeps down like a falling knife; but when light returns, everything is illuminated without warning."

"Given this dimensional structure... if the Night Demon truly descends simultaneously with the Fifth Church..."

He paused, his gaze becoming increasingly calm and sharp.

"Then Abelio should have been devoured by the two of them hundreds of nights ago."

Within the logical loop, Xia Xiu suddenly seemed to have grasped some fundamental anomaly, a hidden thread that he had previously regarded as background noise but which had now suddenly become clear.

"...the light that has died..."

A profound solemnity, born of a shattered understanding, appeared in his eyes.

"I see... There's more to this than just cosmic starfish."

He slowly lowered his eyes, as if reciting something silently, or perhaps peeling back the layers of a vast illusion beneath the overlap of history and reality:

“I originally thought that the cosmic starfish was just trying to accelerate the process of corruption, to mature the faith structure and spiritual origin, so that the number of corrupted beings would surge and the process of depravity would be accelerated, thereby satisfying the threshold formula for His true form to descend.”

"They also thought that He was merely trying to destroy the fundamental laws of this plane, to strip Himself from the mechanism of resisting the abstract conceptual layer, and to bring His real tentacles down to the lower-dimensional world."

"But now it seems..."

He raised his head, his eyes gleaming with a golden-red light, his gaze passing over the enormous biomechanical light source, as if staring at the reality beyond the sky.

"The abnormal behavior of the day-night sphere is not that simple; it was not just disrupting the natural order, but trying to escape."

"To break free from the control of the consciousness of the Abelio plane, to escape the jurisdiction of the logic of light, and to plunge the entire world into darkness forever, thereby creating an eternally lightless ecosystem, one of the purposes of which is to allow the Night Demon to reside there forever."

The so-called "dead light" was actually the distorted spacetime radiation torn apart by the escape of the day-night sphere from control, which also isolated Abelio from the outside world.

Under the lamplight, which seemed to freeze time, Xia Xiu slowly turned his head to look at Saint Cuthbert, who was hanging on the street lamp. For the first time, his gaze was filled with a rare solemnity and respect.

“…You see now, right?” Saint Cuthbert’s voice was not loud, but it was filled with a sense of tragedy.

"There is a tacit understanding and a prior agreement between the cosmic starfish and the stars."

Saint Cuthbert gazed at the device that imprisoned him. The light maintained the last order of this world, yet it was also like a scalpel of divine punishment, dissecting the fabric of this universe and exposing it to the vision of two higher-dimensional predators.

"They have a division of labor: one erodes the spiritual realm, one devours the metaphysical foundation of existence, one infuses ideas into corruption, and one spreads the medium of survival."

"The Golden Court, the so-called kingdom of gods and the lord of the plane, is nothing more than a rotten orchard waiting to be picked in the eyes of the deities."

As he spoke, a bitter smile appeared on his lips. He understood the entire game, which only made him more desperate.

"Actually, whether you come to Abelio or not, whether you pursue the Fifth Church or not, the Day and Night Spheres will take off at the time they set, and the 'dead light' will fall on time."

"They will seal off the world, stopping other insects that covet the corrupt fruit, just like erecting a fence around an orchard."

Then, they will find time to slowly savor and contemplate the divinity, dreams, structures, and civilization we have built with faith.

His voice paused for a moment, then he spoke in an almost calm tone, revealing the cruelest truth: "To them, we are nothing but insects."

Saint Cuthbert's fiery golden eyes, those divine eyes that once reflected thousands of armies and steadfastly upheld the law and faith, are now forcibly sealed under chains, able to sustain this abandoned corner only with the light they emit.

“I know I can’t fight both of them at the same time. I know that the corrupted Church of Dreams can still be resisted through the law, but the Night Demon… that’s an omnipresent enemy that exists solely through darkness itself. So I have no choice but to gamble everything. I must deal with it first.”

“I transformed the Mirror of Truth into this inner world on the edge of reality, making it the final containment chamber I could set up. Then I deliberately lured the Night Demon into it, trapping it within this mirror domain structure, and at the cost of burning my own divine essence, I created a light source to suppress its true form.”

"To put it bluntly, I'm not actually fighting the Night Demon right now; I'm just stalling for time."

His tone turned serious, carrying an extremely complex emotion:
"I'm just... trying to buy this poor world a final breather."

Saint Cuthbert paused, raised his head slightly, and looked at the darkness that lingered beyond the lights, like thick ink surging, like a virus spreading.

"Unfortunately, I am facing beings who are willing to wait 100,000 years for their fruit to ripen. They are projections of time themselves, rulers whose minds are not on a time scale that we can understand."

After hearing this, Xia Xiu silently took off his top hat, placed it in front of his chest, and gave a slight salute to Saint Cuthbert.

“Your response was undoubtedly perfect. If the enemy were not them, if you were only facing fallen gods or a plague of ideas, then you have already won.”

After he finished speaking, he stared into Saint Cuthbert's eyes for a long time. There was no arrogance of a victor in his eyes, only deep regret.

This is a god who stands alone against the ultimate absurdity of the universe, burning himself to protect even a moment of light.

“Saint Cuthbert, you are the rightful master of the plane.”

After Xia Xiu finished speaking with respect, Saint Cuthbert, hanging on the street lamp, simply watched him silently. His two blazing golden divine eyes did not respond with any words, yet they seemed to see through the true intentions and silent motives behind all the praise.

His voice was flat, yet it struck the maintaining light of reality like a shard of cold iron:

Fortunately, my desperate struggle was not in vain.

There was no self-pity, no sorrow, and no lofty self-confidence in that voice; only a stubbornness that remained steadfast on the mountaintop even in the face of overwhelming darkness.

He lowered his eyes and slowly began to speak:

"Your appearance has given Abelio hope for survival..."

He paused, then raised his eyes, his gaze as intense as the scorching sun, fixed firmly on Xia Xiu's face. The words that came from his mouth were as heavy as a sacred decree:

"Although your purpose and motives for coming to this world are not pure."

Xia Xiu raised his eyebrows slightly, offering no explanation, but simply met his gaze calmly.

"You are backed by a heavenly kingdom dominated by human supremacists. Your journey is essentially a clash between ideologies. You have come to conquer this world. In the past, we would have been mortal enemies..."

"Unfortunately, the universe is absurd. Compared to the conquerors, there are even more terrifying higher-dimensional beings. Those two super-dimensional beings that devour everything regard Abelio as a sacrifice. They will crush everything like insects."

"At this moment when Abelio is dying, and this world is sliding towards the tipping point of the apocalypse, the so-called conqueror has become the savior of the world. Even the consciousness of the plane has to rely on you, choosing you as the next plane ruler and entrusting you with the wedge of miracles it has nurtured."

"But this is for the best. As long as Abelio can survive from the jaws of these two hyperdimensional predators, any sacrifice is worthwhile—whether it's the four Storm Kings, Silverbeard, or even me..."

Saint Cuthbert continued, his tone no longer flat, but slowly infusing a suppressed, alchemically refined light of will—a steadfast determination to burn oneself despite knowing there is no hope.

"The Night Demon is spreading. It feeds on darkness and is ubiquitous and invisible in places without light... but it is not uncontrollable."

He looked up at the holy light emanating from him, his tone as if recounting some ancient knowledge that transcends millennia:
"It is not a truly immortal being—it is merely a vessel for the consciousness of some supreme being, relying on darkness to spread, on chaos to nourish it, and on concealment to exist."

"And the medium through which it invaded Abelio was that shining, off-center trioctahedron."

He paused, then said in a low voice, "That is both the key and the lock."

"The octahedron is its summoner, the anchor point of its consciousness in the coordinates of this universe; but at the same time, it is also the only cage that can seal it."

"We must find a way to force the Night Demon out of the darkness and compress it to a size that can be re-imprisoned into a triangular octahedron."

"It must be forcibly restrained, stripped of its room for diffusion, weakened to the lowest possible state of existence, and guided back into the geometric object in the shortest possible time and with the strongest suppressive light."

He looked at Xia Xiu, a divine flame of unyielding spirit igniting in his eyes:

"Once we successfully seal it back in, it will never be able to reappear in the world."

“Therefore, I need your strength, Hugh Abraham.”

“I have calculated it repeatedly before… Even if I completely ignite all my divine essence and burn the last remaining wisp of divinity in my body, I can only compress that Night Demon's existence to half its volume.”

When he said this, his voice was like the gentle tolling of a deep bell, carrying a kind of solemnity and tranquility as if he were offering himself as a sacrifice.

"It is too vast, too deeply rooted, too close to the origin of the world's shadow... If I were alone, it would eventually escape the realm of light, swim back into the boundless black sea, and make a comeback."

Then, he looked up and stared directly at Xia Xiu. He could see through the other's body his true form as an information integration entity, and he could see the blazing sun suspended in the ether.

“You possess the aura of the sun, a primordial force field utterly contrary to that corrupt darkness. What resides within you is not ordinary flame, but… the rightful holder of the sun godhood and divine office.”

"Your very existence is the Night Demon's natural enemy."

"If you are willing to lend your power of sunlight and illuminate the darkness on the other side in the form of your information integration, I can force the Night Demon into the convergence state required for sealing."

He abruptly changed the subject, revealing a rare frankness and openness:
"You don't need to worry that I will betray you, take the opportunity to imprison you, or turn around and lead you into this dark realm, etc..."

“You don’t need to worry about these things. I will personally ignite my entire divine essence before you, and use my last bit of holy light to illuminate the boundary of the Night Demon’s existence for you—I will burn myself to become the last guiding light in your hands.”

After a slight pause, he slowly uttered an additional condition—a private wish, devoid of hostility yet utterly solemn:
"But I also have my own selfish reasons."

"You must grant me one request: once all this is over, I will order the Church of Saint Cuthbert to voluntarily relinquish all forms of resistance and cease fighting the Horizon Faction in the name of the War of the Gods."

"In exchange, you must promise to let the horizon spare them, accept them, allow them to continue living, and... respect their beliefs, respect their memory and choices regarding the gods."

The moment the words fell, the entire town fell silent once again. In the distance, the edge creature hanging at the boundary between darkness and light slowly rotated, casting mottled holy light. In the stagnant space-time that seemed to be the boundary of the universe, Xia Xiu looked at the deity of faith hanging above the light source.

He remained silent for a moment, and finally, he slowly nodded, giving his answer calmly but firmly:
"I agree to your terms."