Chapter 8: S-Rank Talent: Shared Divine Grace
Truth be told, any normal person hearing Cheng Shi's words would freeze for three seconds.
A male human being, declaring he was going to give a swarm of genderless Fear Demons a child. No matter where you placed that sentence, it was an absolutely explosive statement.
Fear Demons did not reproduce sexually. They were born from the Tree of Terror in the subterranean underworld.
The Tree of Terror absorbed fear from every plane of existence, then grew new branches. After a period of time, those branches would drop off and become new individual Fear Demons.
Amidst everyone's shock, Cao Sansui was the first to snap back to his senses. He asked, not quite daring to believe it:
"You plan to… heal the Fear Demons?"
Cheng Shi snapped his fingers:
"Bingo. I'll unleash a single heal that blankets the entire ruin field. Every Fear Demon will receive my Lord's gaze and embrace reproduction."
"Impossible… no Priest could possibly have a healing range that massive…"
Nangong said, her face ashen. She was beginning to conclude that, under the crushing pressure to survive, Cheng Shi had lost his mind.
A pity, really. The young man had a good heart and a handsome face, but he'd gone mad awfully fast.
Cheng Shi didn't over-explain. He merely smiled:
"Nothing is impossible.
When you think something's impossible, it's only because your understanding hasn't gone far enough."
Hearing Cheng Shi's gentle ribbing, Nangong pursed her lips, unable to refute him. She might indeed be privy to certain secrets outsiders could never know, but as this fellow practitioner had said, her grasp of the game was still far from sufficient.
"You…"
Cheng Shi ignored her and instead extended his right hand, assuming the most plain, unassuming starting stance for a healing spell.
"How long is left on the Holy Light Wall?"
Chen Chong's face darkened. This guy had finally remembered the shield was running out of time. He had no idea whether to trust Cheng Shi or not, but seeing the man's unshakable confidence, he resigned himself and barked:
"Still enough for you to show off for 10s!"
"9 seconds…"
"8!"
"…"
"3!"
"2!"
"Now!"
Cheng Shi roared, and the light of healing in his hand began to surge.
At the same moment, Xia Wan swallowed a handful of Genesis Seeds without hesitation. Her right hand conjured six spore arrows from thin air, nocked them, drew the bowstring, and aimed straight overhead.
With a hiss, the six arrows, laden with the rich essence of reproduction, detonated above the group.
"1!"
The Holy Light Wall shattered like glass, its light extinguished in an instant. The Fear Demons that had been pressing against the barrier from outside suddenly lost their support and plummeted.
The outer Fear Demons, seeing the shield broken, howled and surged in.
The spore filaments grew frantically within the confined space. The Fear Demons were packed so tightly there was almost no gap between them, so a single thread could link the flesh of countless demons.
Whether it was the Fear Demons' headlong collision clogging their own advance or that one extra spore arrow doing its work, the enemy's lunge toward them took far longer than a single second.
Just as everyone's face contorted in terror and they braced for a desperate breakout, Cheng Shi's ultimate was finally fully charged.
"Let me show you what real healing output looks like!
All corners of creation…
Shared Divine Grace!"
As the final word left his lips, a tremendous bolt of holy light struck the nearest Fear Demon in front of Cheng Shi. Then the light passed through it and refracted at blinding speed toward its kin in every direction.
This wasn't like a standard healing spell. It was more like a healing chain capable of curing multiple targets.
The problem was, healing chains suffered from falloff. The more targets, the faster the effect decayed.
Given the sheer number of enemies before them, a chain heal like this would probably only manage to restore a few hair follicles.
In past trials, plenty of people had tried healing enemies. The [Faith Game] might be called a game, but it was more like an alternate reality.
There was no "friendly fire immunity" or "healing enemies is ineffective" mechanic here. You healed an enemy, and the enemy genuinely recovered, then proceeded to hammer you even harder.
So when Cao Sansui saw that Cheng Shi had only loosed a single healing chain, his fear shot through the roof.
What good could this possibly do?
But even if he didn't believe in the plan, it was too late now. Clinging to the resolve of a last stand, he followed through as instructed. The instant Cheng Shi acted, he released an Overload-tier Zone Acceleration across the entire ruin field outside their immediate vicinity.
"Zone, Accelerate!!!"
The time outside pressed fast-forward. The Fear Demons lurched into sudden acceleration.
The time around them ground to a halt. Everyone froze instantly.
Within their limited consciousness, the group could only watch as the healing chain propagated faster and faster, branching more and more. In the space of a blink, it transformed into countless streams of holy light, a raging torrent that swept across the entire ruin field!
Healing surged like a tidal wave, swallowing everything!
Everyone was stunned.
Cao Sansui watched the surrounding Fear Demons lunge forward, then hit the temporal stagnation zone, piling up outside into a wall of flesh and blood that "protected" them within. He couldn't help but wonder: was this also part of the plan?
His vision of the outer field gradually dimmed. In his last glimpse, his mind was still reeling from one question: why was Cheng Shi's healing chain not decaying but escalating?
The chain healed harder and harder, until it finally blanketed the entire ruin field!
How was that possible?
Nothing was impossible.
When Cheng Shi's nearly frozen mind registered the Fear Demons around them sinking into temporal stagnation and forming a new "Great Wall," he knew his plan had succeeded.
The reason he could stretch a healing chain across the entire ruin field was his exclusive S-Rank Class Talent: Shared Divine Grace!
This talent allowed his healing to propagate among targets of the same type of lifeform. For every additional target of the same kind, both the healing effect and the healing range expanded.
Ordinarily, since a team consisted of at most six members, this effect was merely icing on the cake.
But now, if every single Fear Demon was counted as a target, even a true god descending probably couldn't tally the final number.
Even if each individual only added a 1% gain, compounded a thousand times, it became over twenty thousand times.
And there were far more than a thousand Fear Demons here!
Today, right here, every last Fear Demon was bathed in Cheng Shi's healing chain!
And all in a single instant!
Healing enemies might be inadvisable, but everything depended on context.
For instance, healing infused with the divine power of [Birth] was not something just anyone could enjoy.
The moment that terrifying healing radiance slammed into them, amplified by the zone acceleration, countless Fear Demons found their bellies swelling exponentially before they could even react.
[Birth], in this moment, gazed upon them.
Madness unfolded instantly.
Fear Demons were inherently genderless fiends. When their bodies suddenly began gestating new life from every part, even they, creatures who had never known fear, began to feel terror.
They extended their talons to slice off the bulges, tore at their own flesh trying to kill the newborns.
But the overwhelming healing light sealed their wounds shut the instant they appeared.
A deep, crushing helplessness welled up from within.
They saw their future: every last one of them would become a "mother" hauling children around.
Some, more than one.
As if that wasn't enough, the will of [Birth] began to spread like wildfire, overwhelming the Fear Demons, whose threshold for rationality was never high to begin with, and reducing them to freaks obsessed with nothing but reproduction.
Slow to tell, but faster to unfold!
Under the influence of the zone acceleration, in barely a dozen seconds, the scene descended past the point of no return.
Every Fear Demon was reduced to a slave of reproduction. Though they had no concept of gender, they mechanically and mindlessly mimicked the most primal act in nature.
Mating.
Reproducing.
An entire right flank of the Bone Army, on a ruin field without a single soul in sight, completely let itself go…
The scene spiraled beyond control; words fell short of description.
Time kept accelerating, and the indescribable grew ever more indescribable.
Countless Fear Demons drowned in the frenzy of reproduction, utterly unable to extricate themselves, while the "children" inside them grew ever larger.
When the healing chain finally reached the last Fear Demon and completed its mission of curing all creatures great and small, the battlefield had already been reduced to a paradise of [Birth].
The first Fear Demons affected began to burst. "Newborns" eagerly descended, throwing themselves into [Birth]'s embrace, then began devouring their "mothers'" flesh, striving to grow into new "mothers" themselves.
And these newborns all shared the same face:
A pair of adorable big eyes, atop a tentacle body.
Cheng Shi didn't want this, but his [Birth] divine power originated from the pregnant woman in yesterday's food dungeon, and he couldn't control that.
This was precisely why he'd needed the Assassin of [Death] to prepare Death's Requiem.
When the zone acceleration ended and the tentacle newborns finished devouring every last Fear Demon, they would become another army, perhaps far more terrifying than the Fear Demon horde.
However, a ruin field where so many Fear Demons had just perished was the finest Death Domain imaginable.
Song Yawen's final strike would obliterate these abominations completely and save all six of them.
That was the entirety of Cheng Shi's plan.
It was just a shame that the other teammates, walled in by the Fear Demons' barricade of bodies, probably wouldn't get to appreciate this magnificent spectacle.
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