The parasite made its way into Arad’s veins and swam through his boiling blood. The distance between the veins of his throat, and brain wasn’t that far and it would’ve only taken it a fraction of a second to end him, but it didn’t work in the end.

Arad’s blood was boiling hot, rich with magic, and infected to the brim with more filth than even abominations dare deal with. A vampiric curse, a lycanthropic curse, and those two have fused into a new and utterly wrong existence, a pricolici curse. But that wasn’t all the evil flowing in his blood; he had Shi’s Tarrasque blood, and what was even scarier, the blood of gods and spirits. Kali, Eris, and the blood of all the spirits he knew flew in his vein like a current of pure lightning.

The parasite got violently torn apart and consumed by his blood, and it was at that moment that the abomination realised it. Arad was by no means a normal creature; he was neither a mortal nor a god, but an abomination like him and the rest of Nyar’s spawns.

Arad twitched, and his eyes spun around, each moving on its own and looking for the moon elves. To his eyes, all of them were naked to the flesh; He could see their blood flowing, their muscles contracting, and smell the fear seeping into the veins. Their bodies were open books to him, and it didn’t take him a fraction of a second to locate all of the parasites infecting their bodies now that he knew where to look.

But since Arad himself was now aware of the parasites, he knew that the abomination would also change its plans. As expected, all of the parasites in the elves’ bodies were rapidly making their way to their brains so they could be used as hostages.

Arad could see those parasites swimming up the elves’ necks through their veins, and immediately took action. The spirit was just a few meters away, so such a thing was extremely risky for him, but he couldn’t let those elves die.

Why would Arad even risk his life to save those elves whom he had never known before? The answer was simple: Arad didn’t care about their lives more than he cared about spitting the abomination and ruining its plans.

He clapped his palms together, and blood gushed out of his forearms in the form of hundreds of tight, needle-thin, compressed beams of bright red blood. Each elf was hit once, and the wounds weren’t even big enough to bleed. All of the parasites, without exception, were hit directly and eradicated by Arad’s violent blood.

It seems that the abomination implanted those parasites in the elves and caused them to secrete hormones and compounds to control their emotions, thoughts, and beliefs. So with them gone now, the elves’ blood would clear in a matter of hours, and they would return to their right state of mind.

Arad had saved them, but at what cost? By the time they all fell to the ground, the spirit was already upon him, and her attack had hit him. The abomination didn’t just try to use the elves as hostages; he had them be the distraction that created an opening in Arad’s defence.

The white flames of time engulfed Arad’s whole, and his entire being got violently jolted across it. He was no time dragon, but fully understood the feeling of himself getting erased from the flow of time and fate.

This abomination didn’t try to kill Arad; he was trying to get rid of him for now, and this attack would just send him a few thousand years into the future, not kill him.

A second had passed, and nothing remained of Arad. He had disappeared alongside all of his incarnations; no one was left. The spirit gasped for air, looked back at the tree, and her eyes twitched. Arad was gone, and he won’t be coming back for at least a thousand years. He might not be strong enough to kill today, but in the future, when this sapling grows, he should be able to finish him off.

"O’h, Unholy Draconic Terror of the Unknown... I had never witnessed a creature with so much unaffable power like you, beside my great father Nyar." The spirit spoke in a ragged, vibrating voice that sounded more like a distorted cry than regular speech.

She took a step forward, and knelt toward where Arad was. "May we meet in the future. Your soul shall be mine to take."

The shadows around grew even darker, and the spirit’s eyes opened wide. A woman’s voice replied to her, and she gasped.

"So, this is why he called me? I admit, it was smart to inform me the moment he realised he was facing someone related to the tree of time." From the shadows, Linda emerged with her body riddled with wounds and burns. In her right hand, she held a bloodied brain with the spine still attached to it.

"But this time magic doesn’t belong to Qliphoth, it’s utterly alien to the universe’s time." She glared at the spirit with burning red eyes. "Are you an abomination of time?"

Just like how Vorvadoss was called the Lord of Space, this abomination here was the Lord of Time. The sapling of Qliphoth was just an enslaved vessel he used to mask his own existence and magic, to hide from the gods, and from anyone who might’ve sniffed him out.

The spirit stood, glared at Linda for a second, and then growled. "What is an elder time dragon doing here? No, you’re touched by shadows. Your kind isn’t supposed to be able to interfere with the flow of time and fate, just observe."

Linda smiled, "Of course, how did you think I got this badly wounded?" She lifted her hand and showed him the bloodied brain in her grasp. "But I didn’t die. The fabric of fate didn’t dare approach me, or him..."

While she looked confident and calm, her mind was a mess and in chaos. She was unable to believe what just happened, but it seemed that what Arad had heard and told her before was the truth.

^Shit! Shit! Shit! He is AO in the flesh, how, how? Why! Did I just have two children with him? How did I end up getting pounded by him? No, fate and time themselves refused to let me die when I tried to fish him out, even though his body was obliterated; the universe itself was furious.^ She gulped.

^Did mother know about this? Is that why she pushed me and a thousand drakaina to him? I knew it was strange for her to appease a man like this, and even sell her own daughter; it looked strange. But... what does this mean? Why did she send me to his side? Is she and the gods planning on some suicide charge, and they don’t want us to be there... with Arad building an entire world inside his stomach... that might be the case.^

She threw the bloodied brain away and glared at the spirit. "I only feel pity for you, poor thing. You don’t know what horror you’re facing."

The brain and spine flashed with magic, and the eyes were the first to regenerate as Arad’s consciousness revved back in full force. At this moment, Linda had already pulled all moon elves into her shadow, so Arad could finally go all out.

A blinding flash loomed on the horizon, and all the wood elves who looked toward it were blinded for a few minutes. A shockwave followed right after, cracking their walls, and the only thing that was left in the sky was a titanic mushroom cloud, dominating the charred stump of Qliphoth.