Divine Dragon Parasmus felt something was out of place just now. A glance at his status quickly confirmed his suspicions. Just a moment ago, he felt something take hold of his soul. So quickly it was applied and so quickly was it masked that he’d almost thought he’d imagined it. Almost. He’d learned to trust his intuition during the journey that got him here.

Despite the mark concealing and scrambling itself, he was still able to decipher parts of it. Not very much, but enough to glean a general understanding. The curse had a two-part structure: a “tether” going somewhere imperceptible connecting to the “body”, which settled within him.

The “body”, or mark to make things more simple, comprised the bulk of the curse he could contact and was currently inactive. In the time between its application and his quick notice, it had already permeated every facet of his being, body and soul. An impressive feat, given the size and nature of his existence. Though an enemy was the last person he wished to be impressed by.

He found certain isolated parts that he was able to parse after an hour of careful prodding. Though reluctant to do anything drastic for fear of somehow alerting the caster or triggering some prohibition.

There was no indication that the caster realized he knew, as there was no movement after its application and if they knew and did nothing that was all the more reason to be cautious.

Furthermore, there was nothing in this world that could threaten him, which meant this mark could only mean one thing. There were otherworlders about, an extremely difficult problem to solve, as their methods range from strange to mind-bending.

That he was not already insane from the onset of this mark gave him solace in the fact he was not dealing with the latter. The Calamity had left an indelible mark in his memory, a lingering fear that did not abate over time. It only increased with the growth of his power and understanding of the existence that brought incalculable damage to the world.

After reassuring himself after the sudden and forceful resurfacing of sealed memories, he got back to work understanding the spell he was put under. Despite the complexity, the ‘tether’ was rather simple.

However, therein lies its unsettling aspect. Why would someone cast a spell that allowed the target to figure out where the caster was once they figured it out? Were they just that confident in their strength?

Of course, he wasn’t able to tell exactly where it led to, but with enough time he would be able to narrow it down. The tether was like a taut string, just waiting for the person on the other side to pull. Now, that wasn’t the extent of the spell, but it should be its major focus.

The destination was obfuscated masterfully, but even now he was able to tell it led to somewhere on the surface. It would be a lie to say that he wasn’t comforted by the idea that the opponent wasn’t some higher-dimensional being that just happened to take interest in him or his world.

He had a fighting chance and wasn’t put up against some impossibly more powerful higher being. Though it also indicated the opponent had carefully planned this and already had a staging ground on this world. He humored the idea that this was all misdirection, and if that were the case he’d be even more confident in solving the issue.

After all, he was no stranger to plotting against those far stronger than him. The larger the gulf between the two, the more obfuscation was necessary. It was with this understanding that he engineered the fall of a Greater God early into the Calamity, along with multiple other attempts at fishing in muddy waters.

There was a time when he’d felt self-conscious, burdened by the guilt of sabotaging the Pantheon’s resistance against a foreign threat. At the time, he made those petty moves with confidence in their victory, even if they were missing a few members due to his actions.

But in hindsight, those worries were laughably misguided. That ∎∎∎∎ abomination was going to have its fill, whether the Gods were able to band together and make a stand or not. If anything, he was able to save a few scraps of divinity for the world, lest it all be delivered straight to the door for that creature to eat. Regardless, he saw the irony in the situation.

He, like those gods all those years ago, had no ability to run away from this threat, stuck confronting a terrifying opponent. The only thing missing now was one of his followers running along to give him a “righteous backstab” during his weakest moment.

Which would probably be now, now that he thought of it.

However, this wasn’t the time to be doubting his dependents. He needed cannon fodder to bring this enemy into the light. Their mobilization would have to wait until after he’d narrowed down the target first, however.

He couldn’t just send them after all the otherworlders, there were too many powerful ones. Too many smuggled in through the weakened world barrier, with those able to cross all possessing either strange abilities or overwhelming strength.

There were even some that approached his state prior to merging with the world. They were no match for him in his current state, but the premise was that they went under the ground to fight him.

He’s rather immobile at the moment, a necessary consequence of power. Going after the weaker ones would only tip off the one that truly mattered as well, to say nothing of the time required for such an endeavor. He needed to gather his strength and give whoever schemed against him a decisive blow, either to disrupt their plans and buy him some time or kill them directly. He hoped for the latter, as unlikely as it was.

Oh, the sorrows of living in a damaged world. Bah. Who am I to complain? I only got here because it was damaged to the point of brain death.

Turning his attention back to studying, he moved on to the ‘body’ portion. This, being the bulk of the spell, took considerably longer, requiring him almost half the day to understand. He’d wanted to spend less time, as time was of the essence, but he needed to confirm a suspicion he had.

The conclusion was not something he liked, however. The mark contained two law fragments that he was all too familiar with, and their inclusion, which he wished was a result of misidentification earlier, was the trigger for those unbidden memories.

They are infinitely close to the tendrils with which the foreign god used to feed, borrowing the world’s laws of ‘corruption’ and ‘sublimation’. With the descent of that entity, whose writhing body was suffused with these laws, what was once a minor backdrop in this world, became a major player.

It was only after the monster left that Parasmus realized these natural laws he had so much trouble dealing with were simply their leftover digestive enzymes, painting the world in its color to facilitate consumption, which made the fact that they were left over easy to understand. Why else would something so powerful be left behind like waste? It was because they were waste.

However, these dregs were still leagues ahead of anything native, and if Parasmus had chosen to incorporate them into his godhead he would have reached a height unfathomable compared to him now. It was fortunate, then, that he had a feeling early on that dependence on such a power was a massive pit, and that he was clear-headed enough to guess the consequences of using it any more than he had to. As a result, he’d excised the parts of himself that were hopelessly corrupted, and ascended with the divinities he pieced together, cutting off the very thing that allowed him to reach such a position.

Following this was a tale spread across the world, his very first myth, and possibly the greatest good he’d done for the world’s recovery. These myths spoke of him ending the Calamity, sealing the great evils, bringing balance to the world once more.

He was rightly crowned as the savior, bringing legitimacy to his reign even to this day. Had he not been so decisive the world would be in a much worse shape now. It would even be a miracle for anything to even be alive at this point. In hindsight, while doing this had done wonders for his sanity, it also stripped him of the deep connection he had with those powers, making the current situation all the more concerning.

Now, with that delicate balance threatened, coupled with the emergence of an enemy that can control such a force, it would be strange to not be worried. Those sealed fragments are essentially buried land mines, ready to blow up in his face at any moment. His face, of course, was the world itself.

Are they stabbing me with a borrowed knife?

However, up to now, he hasn’t felt those seals being loosened or their contents taken away. Though he wasn’t arrogant enough to stare at each of them directly to ensure it, as he still very much liked his sanity, his myriad failsafes indicated that everything was operating as usual.

Despite this assurance, the similarities were uncanny and with this perspective, the mark made sense.

With continuous study, the curse seemed more and more like some sort of sacrificial ritual, one set out to transmute his soul into a more palatable, or in this case, more useful state for the recipient.

In alchemical terms, it would be likening it to the creation of a philosopher’s stone, akin to what he was trying to do with the world's heart. That his specialties lay in transmutation and the soul, a necessary outcome after his attempts at grasping the ineffable, paralleled the manner the enemy attacked him, had not gone unnoticed.

Perhaps they too drew plenty of inspiration from that ∎∎∎∎ being as well but failed to rid themselves of the corruption. This theory would prove disastrous if true, as he can’t afford to take in much more of that taint.

This fact also made him consider the possibility of a native being behind all this. Those heretics were strangely quiet for the past few centuries. He had chalked it up to the efforts of his faithful and those otherworlders, but could it be that they managed to break a seal without his notice and did something with its contents?

That would be difficult to confirm, as he abhorred the idea of checking them all one by one himself. Fodder wouldn't do, either, as they wouldn’t make it deep enough to see if it were truly missing because even the leftover residue would kill them.

The [Blessed], his greatest creation, might be able to, but they weren’t enough to check them all, and he wanted to save them for the inevitable confrontation.

While it might be better than getting blindsided, the costs were too much for that kind of information. He’d rather just prepare for the worst. Whatever this spell intended, these findings were hardly heartening, to say the least.

If their methods were anything close to his, he was in for a tough time. He knew what his victims experienced and he would be damned if he were to suffer such a thing as well.

He mused the irony before, but it became increasingly clear that this time, he was the fish on the chopping block and was in no position to take advantage of the situation. Nonetheless, now The only event that would be insurmountable would be if ∎∎∎∎∎, as the system dubbed it, was not a singular existence, and another of its kin invaded.

However, he could only gamble that this was not the case. He hadn’t felt the telltale warping of the world’s natural laws that come with their presence, so he felt that this gamble was likely to go in his favor, but he only had one example to go off of.

Furthermore, it was impossible for ∎∎∎∎∎ to invade once again. The world was sure of it. He didn’t know why himself, from the pieces he’d gathered together but the world seemed to know a lot of things before being severely damaged.

Hell, he was quite surprised to find out that the previous Overgod was an incarnation of the world's will. It was rather competent, too, before being kicked in the head.

Yet based on that little bit he figured out, time was of the essence. He didn’t have more time to sit around studying the thing. The next breakthrough would take too long, and the gains outweigh the losses. He’d narrowed it down to the Northern Everfrost. There weren’t many otherworlders there, and they were ones he had confidence in taking out together.

There was only one person that he had a feeling was the target. There was a foreign wizard who built a massive entrenchment up there, though he didn’t seem strong enough to do something like this, you could never guess what a mage could do with enough preparation.

From the scouts and attacks he’d sent so far, he judged their level to be well past a thousand. However, they were very sneaky and had a way of obfuscating their level, making themself appear much weaker than they were.

If it were truly him, then even his highest overestimation was under their true capabilities. To be able to put such an insidious mark on him after he’d assimilated half the world would be impossible for someone so much weaker than him.

That Turtle of the North hadn’t shown any indication of being a threat so far, but that was the issue. No one at their level just decides to go into a world as tumultuous as this one without a plan.

It was settled then. He’d ascend an avatar and rally everyone that could be mobilized and see just how tough this turtle’s shell truly was. All the while hoping that this deduction was correct. While it may be a little hasty, he was running out of time. He felt a change in the mark about an hour ago, an unsettling shift that weighed on him. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he was sure that it wasn’t going to be good for him. Now was not the time for more study.

Furthermore, as he turned his consciousness upwards in preparation to contact his followers he made another startling discovery. The mark was not just targeting him. No. It was targeting everyone. The people, the plants, the animals. Even the otherworlders he was able to spy upon. All of creation lesser or greater, from the smallest insect to the mightiest beast were beset by this spell, and they were none the wiser. The scale of this threat had gone up magnitudes in his mind, pushing him to make a move now.