NOVPUBParker's gaze fell upon the remaining ones—the smirking bastards, the whispering cowards, the ones who hadn't laid a hand on him but whose laughter had hurt just as sharp but he didn't care about them. He tilted his head, almost playfully, as if sizing up the weight of their fear and looked at the real bullies.
The screams from the Voidhowls still howled from the portal. Louder now. Closer, somehow. As if pain itself was echoing back into the hall.
Parker pointed lazily toward the rippling gateway beside the throne.
"You'll be spending the next five years in there," he said, his voice dipped in velvet and venom, slow and deliberate like a guillotine lowering inch by inch. "Don't worry—"
He let that hang in the air, just long enough to feel the room tighten.
"You won't die."
A silence followed, punctuated only by the shrieking torment spilling from the Abyss. One girl sobbed. Another backed up a step, only to bump into a wall of shadow Nyxavere had conjured behind her. No escape. No second chances.
Parker's voice dropped, intimate and cruel.
"That place doesn't let you die. It burns your lungs with every breath. Strips the skin off your bones with every blink. Your muscles rot, your veins scream, but your heart keeps beating. And just when you think you've blacked out... it starts over."
He smiled again.
That same cold, beautiful, fucked-up smile that said: You made this version of me.
"Again, don't worry — you won't die."
He took a step closer, eyes burning like frozen stars. "And just so you to remind y'all..."
"Every breath you take will singe your lungs from the inside out. The air's not made for mortals. Or monsters. It hates you equally. Your skin will peel every time it brushes the mist. The dirt will rot your toes. The rain will sear your nerves like acid. And the longer you survive in it… the less you'll remember what it means to be human."
His voice dropped to something near a whisper. Not for gentleness—but because silence always cuts deeper.
"And every second? Will feel like a fucking century trapped in your own screaming."
He tilted his head and offered a smirk that could gut gods.
"Funny, right? That's exactly how I felt… back when you treated me like garbage. Like I didn't matter. Like I was some mutt chewing scraps in the cold. So now, you get to feel it too. You get to live it. But unlike me…"
He turned toward Zhang Ruoyun. "Strip them."
The Yin-Yang Phoenix moved like judgment given form. Her hand rose — and down came the light.
Bella screamed first. Then the twins. Then Maya's brother, the Voidhowl cousins, every snickering coward, every smug, arrogant whisperer who had laughed while Parker suffered. Screams rang out as their souls were severed from Duality — cleaved from joy, comfort, rest, and everything that made being alive bearable.
There was no grace. No pause. Just agony stitched into the air.
Scarlett stood frozen. Spared. Shaking.
Parker didn't even look at the rest as he waved one last time.
"Bon voyage."
Nyxavere didn't need more than that.
She snapped her fingers like a goddess clicking off a tune — and they were ripped from the hall.
Gone.
No last words.
No forgiveness.
No gods.
Only silence where they once knelt.
And a throne that now radiated a cold so deep, even hell would hesitate.
Parker didn't even glance at them when he gave the command.
"Nyxavere," he said coolly, like he was asking her to dim the lights or pour a drink, "show them."
The sweet daughter obeyed.
At once, the space above the hall shimmered like glass hit with a hammer—cracks of dark light spidering out until the image burned itself into the very air. A projection opened in the sky, vast and suffocating, like the ceiling itself had been peeled away to reveal a window into Hell.
There they were—Robert, Annabelle, Julian, Bella, the twins, the cousins, Maya's brother... and the rest. Each one screaming in a voice that didn't belong to them anymore. Not after the Abyss took it. Not after it reached inside and rewrote what it meant to suffer.
The Chaotic Abyss was no place. It was a sickness. A living, breathing, starving void with rules built on inversion. Gravity didn't exist here—it laughed. Sometimes you floated, sometimes you were slammed into the ground with a force that liquefied bones. The sky above? It moved like a lung, breathing hate.
Crimson clouds stitched with black lightning drifted too low, dragging pieces of the earth upward like meat being peeled from a carcass.
And the air. God, the air.
Those watching took at least a step back.
They could tell that breathing was like inhaling fire-drenched razors—burning from the inside out with every desperate gasp. Their lungs bled until there was nothing left but steaming holes, then the Abyss healed them. Badly. On purpose. Over and over. It wanted them to breathe again just to suffer again.
Nyxavere made it so that even watching was tinged with vivid feeling of being there.
The ground wasn't dirt—it was flesh. Foul, pulsating, moist. It cracked and moaned beneath their feet like a dying god begging for silence. Every step came with a price—tendons pulled from their feet, nails torn off without mercy. Some fell face-first and got back up without a nose, without lips, mouths frozen open in screams that never ended.
And their skin… melted like wax under a hellish sun, sliding off in sheets only to regenerate with nerves exposed.
Eyelids wouldn't close. Eyes wouldn't stop seeing. One boy—one of the twins—tore at his face so he wouldn't have to watch anymore, but the Abyss grew new eyes all over his chest and shoulders. Just so he would.
One girl had her tongue ripped out by something invisible… only to find another slithering back in, bloated and wrong, covered in black thorns. Her mouth bled every time she tried to scream—and she tried.
A lot.
Then came the whispers. Not real language—just hisses made of guilt and memory. They reminded each of them who they used to be. What they had done. What they had laughed at. The exact second they ignored Parker's pain. The precise moment they mocked his name.
Their minds didn't snap.
The Abyss made sure they didn't. That was mercy, and mercy was banned here.
Their skin peeled like fruit under boiling oil, but slower. Slower than pain had a right to be. Maggot-like worms, translucent and wet, slithered beneath their flesh as if the Abyss had injected them with living needles. You could see them squirming through muscle—curling around bones, chewing softly, lovingly.
The worms didn't feed for sustenance. They fed for sport.
Every movement triggered agony. Each step caused more worms to erupt, pushing through pores and fingernails like cursed silk threads. Some writhed down their throats. One girl screamed so hard a cluster of them burst from her tongue, splitting it down the middle like a flower blooming backward.
Their nerves were overstimulated beyond mortal limits—burning with electricity that wasn't from their bodies but the Abyss itself. Veins bulged and ruptured. Spines cracked like dry twigs, only to heal in shapes no human body should ever take.
And they couldn't stop feeling it. Couldn't go numb. The Severance of Duality ensured it.
There was no blackout. No mercy switch.
Just—endless reception.
Every second was a broadcast of suffering piped directly into their consciousness.
Some tried to claw out their own eyes. One boy begged—begged—for a blade to tear open his neck. But there were no weapons. Only tendrils of cursed wind that whispered through their ribs and filled their lungs with rot. They vomited black bile—sometimes blood, sometimes teeth.
And still they lived.
One of the cousins had collapsed, twitching, as hundreds of microscopic hands clawed through the soles of his feet, tunneling up into his legs—digging for nerves to scrape.
Another—Maya's brother—stood frozen, a figure locked in a moment of absolute terror as shadowy larvae burst through the top of his skull, carrying pieces of his thoughts like parasites dragging luggage.
Their screams blurred into something feral.
Something that didn't sound human anymore.
Up above—high above the projected vision—the audience of Origin Families and gods in Olympus stared in frozen horror.
Some turned away. Others couldn't stop watching.
Parker?
He watched it all with an expression carved from obsidian. Cold. Exact.
Not satisfied.
Just... resolved.
Because this?
This wasn't revenge.
This was a warning. And the Chaotic Abyss was only the first chapter.
