Chapter 1
My brother ripped out my S-Class Sword Bone and shoved it into his own chest, then stuffed his trash-tier talent, [Shepherd], right into mine.
My fiancée cuddled up in his arms, while my biological father expressionlessly threw me into a chaotic spatial anomaly.
They thought I would rot in that alternate dimension. Little did they know, the trash talent [Shepherd] harbored a hidden evolution: [Outer God Shepherd]. A talent perfectly tailored to enslave the various outer-god monstrosities lurking within the void...
Seven days later, surfing atop a hundred-meter-long Demonic God Train, I smashed backward through a skyscraper. I punched my cheating fiancée, kicked my scumbag father, and pierced my brother’s chest with a single bare hand, ripping out that glowing Sword Bone along with his flesh and sinew.
"Time to pay the interest on the bone you borrowed."
Chapter 1
"How does it feel to watch the S-Class Sword Bone you were so utterly proud of being ripped out piece by piece, my almighty big brother?"
Inside Containment Cell 0, my half-brother, Victor, stared with fanatical zeal as he manipulated the floating, rule-breaking taboo artifact—the [Exchange Hourglass]. Meanwhile, I was pinned to the operating table by four High-Dimensional Bone-Corroding Nails, my entire body convulsing, my mouth overflowing with blood.
The Exchange Hourglass was executing an inversion that defied all known physics.
As the hourglass flipped, the S-Class Ether Sword Bone at my spine—brilliant as a galaxy—was being crushed into golden quicksand, injected grain by grain into Victor's body.
Conversely, the upper half of the hourglass contained Victor's F-Class scrap talent, [Anomaly Shepherd]. Now reduced to a puddle of pitch-black, putrid sludge, it crawled along the threads of causality and was forcefully stitched into my vivisected chest cavity.
"Just three days ago, you achieved the monumental feat of suppressing the anomaly riots across the entire territory. You were practically moments away from taking over as the Supreme Enforcer of the Bureau. Yet here you are, lying like a dead dog."
Victor's face contorted with grotesque excitement, though his eyes burned with pure venom.
"But why?! Why were you born the golden child, while I, the illegitimate son, was doomed to be F-Class trash?! Thank God we found the [Exchange Hourglass] to swap our talents! Soon, everything you own will be mine!"
"Darling, I'm already yours. Once you take Arthur's position, don't forget to cash in on everything you promised me."
A coquettish laugh echoed through the room. My fiancée, Eleanor, alluringly pressed her body against Victor's chest.
Wearing a fiery red evening gown, she looked down at me from her high horse, her eyes full of mockery. "Was the wine good, Arthur? I personally spiked your victory toast with an entire vial of maximum-concentration [Ether Blocker]."
Fighting the excruciating pain of my torn abdomen, I glared at the two of them.
These two treacherous bastards! They had been sleeping together all along?!
I had absolutely zero guard up against Eleanor. After drinking her blocker, I lost all capacity to resist.
"Do you really think swapping a Sword Bone will put you in power? The Oversight Committee will intervene tomorrow. A high-ranking official vanishing out of nowhere—you'll never survive the audit!" I spat coldly.
"The Oversight Committee? They are nothing but lapdogs I keep, easily silenced whenever necessary."
From the shadows, an utterly bloodcurdling voice ruthlessly shattered my final trump card.
My biological father, Reginald—the absolute dictator of the Federal Control Bureau—slowly stepped forward.
He watched me spasm in agony, his gaze identical to one looking at a discarded, broken tool.
"Arthur, you are too much like your short-lived mother. Your head is full of pathetic delusions about protecting the weak and defending humanity. Remember this: the Control Bureau exists to rule over humanity, and humans are nothing but consumables! Elevating you to the seat of Supreme Enforcer would only threaten my absolute totalitarianism."
Reginald coldly waved his hand. "Victor is more obedient than you. Therefore, your S-Class talent belongs to him."
In that instant, my heart turned to absolute ash.
So much for love. So much for family. So much for blood ties! In this rotten-to-the-core lineage and system, there was nothing but tyranny and predation!
Puchi!
Snickering viciously, Victor severed the final nerve endings, violently tore my S-Class Sword Bone out from me, and blissfully pressed it into his own chest.
Then, he gouged into his own heart and pulled out a writhing, foul-smelling crystal of black sludge.
"Brother, I'm not a man who takes without giving. This F-Class scrap talent, [Anomaly Shepherd], universally recognized as the greatest garbage in the Federation... consider it my burial gift to you!"
He ruthlessly smashed the lump of black sludge directly into my bloody, mangled chest.
Without a second of hesitation, Reginald slammed the red button on the console: "Initiate dimensional exile. Dispose of him cleanly."
Rumble!
Beneath the operating table, an absolute darkness that consumed even light violently ripped open.
This was the [Lightless Sea]—the absolute-death graveyard where the Control Bureau dumped its spatial waste.
In my final plunging moments into the abyss, I didn't struggle. I simply locked eyes with the three sickening faces above me, driving the most absolute hatred deep into my very soul. Not only was my heart dead, but the Arthur who once held unto his moral bottom lines died with it.
…
Freezing cold and weightlessness instantly swallowed me.
The F-Class trash talent Victor had crammed into me triggered a violent visceral rejection, but before I could even catch my breath, true desperation arrived.
Screech—!
The void ahead of me shattered like glass. Hundreds, thousands of bizarre, dolphin-sized monstrous fish surged out from the spatial rift!
They possessed no eyes. The front of their streamlined, pitch-black bodies consisted entirely of an annular, gaping maw filled with spiral-shaped jagged teeth.
Low-Dimensional Beasts—[Scavenger Fish Swarm].
These monsters, which exclusively fed on spatial debris, instantly caught my scent. Like sharks smelling blood in the water, they swarmed toward me in a suffocating cloud.
Merely the blink of an eye—
Pudge—Crunch!
Bone-piercing agony shredded my nerves! A dozen monstrous fish lunged simultaneously, their dense spiral teeth instantly flaying the flesh off my left arm.
In less than a second, my entire left arm was gnawed down to the white bone, then bitten completely off from the shoulder and swallowed!
Am I going to be eaten alive by these disgusting, low-dimensional bugs?!
Why do those bastards get to clink glasses on the surface, while I have to die down here like unrecyclable trash!!?
The extreme agony and hatred instantly shattered the spiritual shackles in my mind!
BOOM—!!!
Right as thousands of jagged maws prepared to tear me limb from limb in an inescapable death, the lump of black sludge in my ruined chest—the very scrap talent the entire Federation viewed as a joke—underwent an extreme compression fueled by my overwhelming negative psyche and zero-survival odds. It abruptly erupted in a scorching, dark-gold light!
A barrage of frenzied text smashed directly into my brain:
[WARNING: Host's soul extremity has breached the dimensional limit!]
[Talent (Shepherd) seal forcibly broken. Talent upgraded to S-Class — Outer God Shepherd]
(Talent Trait: Emits an absolute superior-ruling aura that ignores dimensions. Any Conceptual Law Entity can be contracted and provide power feedback to the host.)
The corners of my mouth stretched wide, pulling out a manic, ghost-like cackle amidst the endless torment.
A hidden talent!
Any hidden talent would evolve into an S-Class once its seal was broken.
Victor's Shepherd was never garbage to begin with!
The sole condition to shatter this seal required the host to stand on the true absolute "brink of death" and push past the seal with extreme, unyielding willpower!
But Victor, that idiot, was an overgrown man-child. He didn't even have the balls to face an F-Class anomaly. Even if he lived a thousand years, he would never have triggered this god-tier clause!
Hum—
A tyrannical aura, transcending all dimensions, blasted outward from my body.
The Scavenger Fish that were inches away from crushing my skull crashed into an invisible wall. Hundreds of the grotesque fish violently trembled, letting out shrieks of ultimate horror as they froze mid-air in sheer terror.
But I knew this aura granted me no actual combat power at the moment. These beasts would see through my bluff in seconds.
I had to find a true "Law Entity" to contract, immediately!
Taking advantage of the fish being paralyzed by fear, I endured the agonizing pain of my severed left arm, kicked hard against a floating meteorite fragment, and used the recoil to flee madly through the chaotic, weightless void.
Hiss—!
Sure enough, mere seconds later, the swarm behind me noticed I was all bark and no bite. Humiliated, they unleashed an even more furious roar, converging into a black, jagged torrent that chased me relentlessly!
I weaved frantically through floating starship debris and asteroid belts, shaking off their deadly bites multiple times, but I simply couldn't shake these ugly bastards.
Bang!
Just as I bolted through a narrow "canyon" dead end formed by two massive sunken shipwrecks, I collided head-on with another baffling commotion.
Ahead of me, a second massive wave of Scavenger Fish was surging in from the other side of the canyon.
And fleeing desperately just ahead of that swarm... was an incredibly abstract creature.
It was a chick no larger than a palm. Most of its feathers had fallen off, making it look even more pathetic than a plucked chicken.
Conceptual Law Entity Remnant — [Calamity Night Owl] (Near-death juvenile stage).
This was actually an Anomaly on the level of a Conceptual Law Entity!
But right now, the cold flames of Law that could supposedly incinerate reality itself had been reduced to a few pale sparks no bigger than green beans.
The Night Owl, failing to dodge, slammed directly into my chest, letting out a pathetically weak and croaky "Ji."
One man. One bird. Staring at each other.
We both turned our heads. The swarm behind me had sealed off the retreat. The swarm ahead of it had completely blocked the exit.
The two black tides of scavengers merged, effectively trapping the two of us "pieces of trash" inside an inescapable dome of tens of thousands of drooling, spiral-toothed maws.
No heaven to fly to, no earth to hide in.
"Fuck it all!"
I looked at the monstrous fish surrounding us, flashing a savage, bloodstained smile.
A violent cruelty that no despair could ever extinguish ignited in my eyes.
Without a single shred of hesitation, I dragged my near-dead body forward, grabbed the confused, bald chick against my chest, and ruthlessly jammed the spurting stump of my left arm right into the faint, pale flames lingering on its back!
If we die, we die together!
But even if I die, I'm going to light a fire in this hell!
"Little thing, I know you’re about to be eaten clean too."
My blood aggressively sacrificed itself to the pale embers. Surrounded by ten thousand piranhas about to tear us apart, I tightly gripped the shivering owl, my voice as cold as a polar storm:
"Drink my blood dry! Then let me see if you can carve us a bloody path out of here—!!!"
BOOM!
Countless giant jagged mouths lunged at us.
