Titan King: Ascension of the Giant - Chapter 1276

Chapter 1276: The Titan and the Ark
RUMBLE.

It was a surreal, almost glitch-like spectacle.

Whatever blocked the Asura Titan Form’s path appeared to be nothing more than wisps of gray fog. Vapor. Smoke.

Yet, when the trident pierced it, the sound wasn’t a swish of air—it was the grinding, thunderous roar of tectonic plates colliding. The mist screamed, a cacophony of distorted, agonizing wails echoing from nowhere and everywhere.

BZZT!

The stalemate broke. The Asura Titan Form seized the advantage.

Bolts of lightning detonated outward, fueled by a surge of Abyssal Energy. The trident moved like a railgun shot, tearing through the resistance.

Orion reached the core. The trident slashed downward, severing the root-like tendrils anchoring the Gray Crystal. In one fluid motion, the Asura Titan Form snatched the crystal, absorbing it into its inventory.

Without the Gray Crystal to anchor its reality, the pocket dimension destabilized instantly.

Space folded in on itself. The world fractured like tempered glass.

Outside, in the real space of Vigil’s Point, Makareth watched in awe. The colossal body of the Unhallowed, which had been thrashing in silent agony, began to fade. It was being deleted from existence, pixel by pixel, turning into a fine, dissolving mist.

And from that fading gray fog, a figure emerged.

Suspended in the air, the Asura Titan stepped out. Four heads, eight arms—one hand gripping the massive Abyssal Devil Shield, another clutching the trident. It looked less like a creature and more like a deity of war descending from the heavens.

It was an image burned permanently into Makareth’s memory.

“That,” Makareth would later tell his descendants when recounting the old wars, “is what a Titan God looks like.”

***

Abyssal Sixth Layer. Foundry Citadel.

Compared to the reckless, high-stakes gambling of the Asura Titan Form, the Deathly Soul-Reaper was having a much more frustrating time.

Orion had managed to exploit a weakness in the Unhallowed on the Second Layer by attacking from the inside. But here? Against these spores? The Deathly Soul-Reaper was stuck.

The Doomsday Fire was doing its job, burning away the spores to keep the pressure manageable, but it wasn’t a winning strategy. It was just stalling. The defensive ward was still groaning under the strain.

Orion couldn’t find an angle. No exploit, no weak point, no win condition.

“Are we just going to wait this out?” Orion muttered.

He wasn’t impatient. Even if he killed this Unhallowed, he couldn’t transport the Gray Crystal out until the Abyssal Ruler cleared the Gray World from the Sixth Layer completely.

“The Abyss is like Hell,” Wraith Knight Ashreign said, his voice heavy. “They’re both higher planes of existence. Trying to set up a permanent base here… the risks are higher than we calculated. We’re playing with fire.”

Ashreign was visibly shaken. To him, Orion’s Deathly Soul-Reaper avatar was already a Demigod-tier entity. Yet, even with the Conquest Legion backing him, they couldn’t gain ground against the Unhallowed.

“Eparus,” Orion said, turning away from the sky to face the Scourge Warden. “I have a question. If the Abyss gets hit by monsters on the level of the Unhallowed regularly, how is anything still alive down here? Logically, the native species should have been wiped out eons ago.”

It was a plot hole Orion couldn’t ignore.

“You are correct, My Liege,” Eparus replied. “Every time the Gray World invades, the death toll is catastrophic. Entire layers of the Abyss get swallowed whole and deleted.”

This was a fact etched into the Scourge Warden’s racial memory.

“However,” Eparus continued, his eyes narrowing as he tapped into ancient lore, “over countless eras, the apex predators of the Abyss—the Demigods—developed survival strategies. Cheats, if you will.”

“Take the Abyssal Rulers. They are powerful enough to forge Divine Kingdoms.”

“The Gray World can corrupt the Abyss, but it cannot breach a sealed, independent Divine Kingdom. These kingdoms act as Arks. The Rulers herd their subjects inside for protection. Once the Gray tide recedes, they release the survivors to repopulate the layer. It is the only way the ecosystem recovers.”

This was high-level lore, accessible only through genetic inheritance.

“Furthermore,” Eparus added, “it’s not just Divine Kingdoms. There are fragmented dimensions parasitic to the Abyss—hidden pocket spaces. If the connection passage is severed in time, they disappear from the map, safe from the Gray World.”

“These fragment spaces are essentially Divine Kingdoms left behind by fallen Demigods or Gods. Before they died, they gifted these spaces to their kin. Think of them like barnacles on a whale—safe as long as they stay closed.”

“My Liege, even the Abyssal Caves you traversed to enter the Abyss are a variation of this survival mechanism. Those branches are the First Layer’s immune response—a way to preserve the biodiversity of the Abyss.”

“Speaking of which, the First Layer seems… it seems…”

Eparus stammered, his face twisting in concentration. He was hitting a mental firewall. He sensed a secret buried in his bloodline memory, but he lacked the clearance level to unlock it.

After a long silence, Eparus shook his head, looking defeated. “I apologize, My Liege. The memory is too blurry. I can’t see it.”

“No need to apologize,” Orion said, his gaze drifting back to the spores raining from the sky. “We can deduce the rest.”

“From what I know, the First Layer has the highest biodiversity in the Abyss,” Orion mused. “And there’s a hard rule there: no entity above Legendary level is allowed to claim territory.”

Orion had experienced the strangeness of the First Layer firsthand when he encountered the Wraith Knight and Scourge Warden armies. It was a chaotic, neutral zone.

Nobody knew how big the First Layer actually was—not Orion, not Ashreign, not Eparus. The water there was deep, hiding ancient secrets. That was why the heavy hitters never tried to conquer it.

“Your people and the Wraith Knights both garrison in the First Layer,” Orion said. “I assume other species do the same. The Doomguard, for instance?”

“My Liege, you are correct,” Eparus confirmed. “There are Doomguard in the First Layer. But we have… an understanding. A tacit agreement. Where we operate, they do not. And where they hold ground, we do not linger.”

“The Scourge Wardens and the Doomguard do not fight in the First Layer. It is forbidden.”

It was a strange, unwritten rule.