27: Chapter 27 Accepting the Contract and Stepping into the God War Meat Grinder

Su Chen's gaze shifted away from the newly born Queen of Blades Sarah.

His divine sense pierced through the crystalline walls of his divine realm, landing in that cold, lifeless void.

On the interface of his divine realm, a crimson countdown was relentlessly ticking away.

Time passed, second by second.

The final deadline for accepting the divine war challenge was drawing ever closer.

Sixty seconds.

Fifty-nine seconds.

...

Within the War Temple's public channel, it had long since become a sea of jubilation.

Countless deities belonging to the faction of the God of Corrupt Corpses were wantonly mocking the challenger who had yet to show himself.

And the God of Corrupt Corpses himself was at the peak of arrogance.

His divine sense avatar, a bloated, pus-oozing giant, sat high upon the virtual throne within the temple, roaring with laughter for all spectators to hear.

"Hahahaha! Just half a minute left! That new god called Su Chen doesn't even dare to let out a fart!"

"This deity said it long ago, newcomers should keep their tails tucked between their legs! Yet he had to jump out. Now he knows fear?"

Streams of divine sense messages scrolled beneath his throne, all filled with flattery.

"My Lord's divine might is unparalleled! How could a mere newborn deity dare to contend with your brilliance!"

"That brat must be scared out of his wits. Let those three million units of Power Of Faith serve as a tribute of apology to our Lord!"

The God of Corrupt Corpses clearly reveled in this feeling of being the center of attention. Every fold on his corpulent face glistened with smug satisfaction.

"Three million units of Power Of Faith? No, that's not an apology. That's an offering!"

He proclaimed word by word in the public channel, his tone filled with an overbearing arrogance that brooked no dispute.

"That is his compensation for the mental distress he has caused this deity! Hahahaha!"

His wild laughter echoed throughout the public channel, grating and brazen.

Ten seconds.

Nine seconds.

Eight seconds.

The countdown continued. Each flicker of the crimson numbers seemed to pronounce Su Chen's cowardice.

The atmosphere within the channel had reached its peak.

Everyone was convinced this farce was about to end with the challenger's last-minute desertion.

Three.

Two.

One.

At the very moment the God of Corrupt Corpses' laughter reached its crescendo.

At the very instant the countdown was about to hit zero, the moment everyone thought the matter was settled.

*Ding!*

A crisp, cold system notification tone resounded unexpectedly throughout the entire War Temple.

The sound was not loud, yet it possessed an absolute penetrating power, instantly drowning out all the clamor and laughter.

Immediately after, a line of golden divine script slowly materialized at the very center of the public channel, carrying the supreme authority of divine law.

[Deity 'Su Chen' has accepted your divine war request!]

The laughter stopped dead.

The entire public channel fell into a deathly silence.

It felt as if a massive gear spinning at high speed had been violently jammed by a steel rod.

The divine senses of all the deities froze.

The God of Corrupt Corpses' arrogant, laughing face stiffened, his bloated muscles twitching unnaturally.

He accepted?

He actually dared to accept?

In the very last second?

After a brief moment of stunned disbelief, a sense of humiliation at being played, mixed with a violent, murderous intent, surged into the God of Corrupt Corpses' head!

His divine sense avatar abruptly rose from his throne. From his turbid eyes erupted two rays of venomous, cruel, and savage light.

"Good!"

The single word was squeezed out from between his teeth, grating like the sound of metal scraping.

"Good! Good! Good!"

He uttered three 'good's in succession, his divine sense roar causing the entire channel to hum and vibrate.

"The path to heaven you refuse to take, yet you charge headlong through the gates of hell that have no door!"

*Boom! Rumble!*

It wasn't thunder in reality, but a violent tremor from the level of divine law itself.

As the divine war pact officially took effect, an independent, isolated battle space was forcibly carved out within the endless void.

Su Chen felt his entire divine realm shudder slightly, as if seized by an invisible giant hand and dragged forcibly towards a specific coordinate.

In the next moment, the scene before him changed abruptly.

The formless chaos that had enveloped his divine realm was torn open, revealing a massive rift.

On the other side of the rift was another world, equally vast, yet radiating a dense aura of death and decay.

The two massive divine realms, like two continents suspended in the cosmos, were slowly drawn together by the laws of the void, finally connecting.

The planar barriers dissolved. The battlefield was fully linked.

To the left was the God of Corrupt Corpses' divine realm, cultivated for centuries—the Rotten Marsh.

A dark green poisonous miasma shrouded the sky. The ground was a morass of muddy pools and swamps bubbling with filth, with bones and rotting flesh scattered everywhere.

Tens of thousands of undead constructs of various forms had already formed neat phalanxes.

The lowest tier were slow-moving, rotting zombies dripping with putrid flesh.

The higher-tier ones were Stitched Abominations, cobbled together from countless corpse parts, wielding massive bone cleavers and iron hooks. They emitted dull roars, and their mere presence exuded a nauseating stench of blood.

At the very rear of the army formation, over a dozen giant catapults, twisted from flesh and bone, were already angled, their dark muzzles loaded with sacs brimming with virulent Plague.

Deathly aura soared to the heavens, and resentment coalesced into clouds.

This was a veritable army of the undead scourge.

To the right was Su Chen's Desert Divine Realm.

Compared to the noisy, filthy military might opposite, this place seemed excessively quiet, even bordering on... pathetic.

Scorching air. Boundless yellow sand.

On the endless sand dunes, no large-scale legions could be seen.

In the sky, only a thousand Corrupted Wyverns, not particularly large in size, circled, flapping their membranous wings and emitting monotonous shrieks.

On the ground, the visible forces were even more sparse and scattered.

About ten thousand Steel-Fanged Ants, their bodies pitch-black, were distributed like stragglers across various corners of the dunes. Compared to the oppressive pressure formed by the tens of thousands of undead troops opposite, they seemed utterly insignificant.

The entire divine realm was empty, as if ground resistance had been abandoned in advance.

All the deities observing through the divine war system gasped in disbelief.

"Is this his entire force?"

"Is he insane? Using ten thousand ants and a thousand wyverns to oppose the God of Corrupt Corpses' undead scourge?"

"I thought he had some hidden card. Turns out he's just a fool who doesn't know his own limits!"

The God of Corrupt Corpses stood upon the shoulder of the largest Stitched Abomination, whose height was nearly that of a small hill.

He looked down upon the empty desert opposite. After a moment of stunned silence, he erupted into laughter a hundred times louder than his earlier outburst in the public channel.

His laughter shook the Stitched Abomination beneath his feet.

He laughed so hard he doubled over, tears almost spurting from his turbid eyes.

"Hahahahaha!"

"Brat! Is this your confidence? Is this the backing that made you dare to accept the challenge in the very last second?"

He extended a bloated finger, pointing at the Corrupted Wyverns circling in the sky, then at the seemingly fragile Steel-Fanged Ants on the ground.

"You don't actually think these few flying bugs, these few ants, can stop my glorious undead army, do you?"

The God of Corrupt Corpses' voice was filled with the playful mockery and disdain of a cat toying with a mouse.

In his view, this was no longer a war.

This was an utter and complete rout.

A massacre with no suspense.

However, facing his frenzied ridicule, Su Chen merely hovered quietly above the crown of the mother tree.

He stood with his arms crossed, his posture composed.

Golden sunlight bathed him, outlining his figure with a sacred silhouette, forming a stark contrast to the filthy Lord of the Undead opposite.

He gazed through the dissipating planar barrier at that overbearing figure.

His eyes were calm, indifferent, devoid of the slightest emotional fluctuation.

It was the look of someone gazing down upon an ant.

Su Chen did not speak.

Nor did he respond.

Because the dead require no explanation.

And beneath his feet, in the seemingly empty, placid yellow sand dismissed by the observers as containing nothing...

Deep within that endless sea of golden sand...

Thousands of massive forms, covered in thick chitinous carapaces, lay in silent ambush.

They were perfect hunters, having merged with the desert itself, not leaking a single trace of their presence.

Now, with the appearance of the enemy army, they received the will of their master.

One by one, the already-buried Lurkers were slowly, silently, opening the vicious, deadly spine launchers on their backs from beneath the sand.

Sharp bone spines, glinting with a cold, eerie light, stood dense as a forest of death.

This was not a battlefield.

This was a machine, designed long ago, waiting only for its prey to step inside...

A meat grinder of flesh and blood.