Urban Plundering: I Corrupted The System! - Chapter 371

Chapter 371: Dark Pantheon High Council and the Dark Harbingers.
The portal split the dark like a wound, its edges bleeding sickly violet light into the endless blackness of the hall. For a heartbeat, nothing moved and two figures stepped through, silent as regrets.

Their boots kissed the obsidian floor—and without hesitation, they dropped. Hard.

Foreheads to the stone. Hands splayed flat, almost trembling from the sheer gravity pressing down on them. Backs bent so low it looked painful, but neither flinched. Here, posture wasn’t ceremony. It was survival.

The silence wrapped around them like a noose.

Above them loomed the four.

They didn’t speak.

They didn’t move.

They simply were—massive and inevitable as natural disasters wearing human skins.

The woman exhaled first, shaky but determined, her voice cutting through the thick, buzzing air:

“I greet the Iron Tyrant—Chi You, First and Eternal Warlord of the Dark Pantheon.”

The being she addressed stood unmoving, a living war monument. His body—inked with living metal tattoos that shimmered like molten rivers—radiated a kind of crushing dominance. His eyes, twin storms of cold calculation, didn’t flicker once.

No response.

None needed.

The man beside her swallowed hard, then spoke next:

“I greet the Blind Abyss—Hundun, Devourer of Realms.”

Across the room, the cracked mask shifted slightly, as if sniffing the words themselves. No eyes behind the breaks. No mouth to smile. Just a hollow face, leaking the stench of ending things.

The woman continued, her voice catching just once before she forced it steady:

“I greet the Warden of Lunacy—Taowu, Breaker of Minds and Flesh.”

Chains clinked faintly as the giant creature tilted his head. His massive frame was draped in twisted iron, scars forming a map of every civilization he’d ever crushed by simply existing. Breathing in his radius felt like inhaling madness itself.

The man hurried to the final name:

“I greet the Golden Sin—Qiongqi, Slayer of Hope.”

A smile, too perfect, too pretty, curled the golden-haired being’s lips.

It wasn’t kindness.

It wasn’t welcome.

It was the slow, gleeful curdling of whatever bravery had been left in the room.

The agents stayed kneeling.

They did not lift their heads.

They did not breathe too loudly.

Not until they were told to.

Because in this cathedral of ruin, mercy wasn’t even a concept.

It had been bled out of existence eons ago and standing tallest among them, his arms crossed casually like a general surveying worms, Chi You watched.

He was the spine of this nightmare.

The hammer waiting to fall.

The mind every other monster here deferred to without so much as a whisper.

And in the stillness that followed, it became clear to any soul unlucky enough to glimpse it—this wasn’t just power standing before them.

This was finality dressed as men.

In this hall vast and abyssal, the air so still it felt carved from stone even the torches embedded high into the black-marble walls burned without flickering, as if the very air here dared not stir without permission.

The two agents remained kneeling, heads bowed so low their foreheads touched the freezing floor. The tension around them was suffocating, the kind that soaked into bones, into blood. They knew better than to move without being spoken to.

At the center of it all stood the Four—giants in presence if not always in size—each one cloaked in a mantle of force so dense it seemed the void itself bent around them.

Chi You shifted first.

A small thing. A slight cant of the head.

But it was like tectonic plates deciding to move.

The molten-metal tattoos over his body pulsed faintly, a low heartbeat of restrained apocalypse.

“Progress report,” he said.

Quiet. Controlled.

Yet it hit like a blade laid against the throat.

The male agent lifted his head just enough to speak, keeping his eyes trained low like a priest before an altar. “My lord,” he began, voice steadier than he felt, “the Dark Harbingers are… a breath away from perfection.”

He dared a fuller breath, continued:

“Even now, at seventy percent maturation, they would stand against the Olympian Champions. Individually. In groups…”

He paused, pulse hammering in his neck.

“In groups, they would not survive.”

A beat passed.

The air tightened, like the hall itself was holding its breath.

Then the woman spoke, her tone sharp, surgical:

“Doctor Voss reports that with the Heaven Eater’s integration… Phase Three will not just be successful — it will be catastrophic to the very world and gods!”

Across from them, Taowu shifted his mountainous bulk, chains wrapped like jewelry over corded arms clinking softly. His lips peeled back in a sneer, exposing teeth meant for shredding more than food.

“I have no interest in squashing their little Champions,” Taowu rumbled, voice thick as thunderclouds. “I hunger for gods. Tell me — what of the other plans?”

The agent straightened a fraction, sensing a shift in the atmosphere — danger tightening its fingers around his throat.

He hurried his answer:

“My lords, Doctor Voss confirmed the viability of full Devourer synthesis. The Heaven Eater’s genetic material… If– can be bred into the Dark Harbingers.”

He swallowed, felt the sweat bead at his spine despite the freezing air. “They won’t merely destroy. They’ll consume. Gods’ blood, Ether, magic—stripped, assimilated. Left hollow.”

For a long, heavy moment, none of the Four spoke.

But the room… changed.

There was a slow uncoiling — something thick and monstrous stirring behind those calm, ancient eyes.

Chi You’s lips curled into the ghost of a smile. Not warmth. Not pleasure.

Purpose.

At his side, the Silent Judge — Yeomra — pressed two fingers together, as if already sentencing the gods to their silent execution.

Hundun, standing not quite still, his very skin rippling faintly like reality was struggling to contain him, let out a noise that might have been a chuckle. Or a death rattle.

And Qiongqi, the Golden Sin, simply tilted his head, golden locks shimmering faintly even in the blackness, smiling as if he’d already seen the world burning—and was waiting for the smell.

They remembered what it had cost to capture the Heaven Eater. How many abominations they had lost. How even some of their peers had fallen. How the thing had nearly consumed their fortress itself in its raw hunger.

They hadn’t tamed it.

They hadn’t beaten it.

They had merely… captured it.

But now?

Now, they would copy it.

Breed its nightmare into thousands. Into obedient hounds that would tear apart Olympus and every pantheon foolish enough to stand against them. When the gods lay weakened, when their divine blood soaked the broken cities and temples of the mortal world—then the Dark Pantheon would rise.

Rise like a second apocalypse.

Chi You’s voice broke the silence, low and absolute:

“Perfect.”

No cheers. No grand declarations.

Just grim smiles.

Because victory wasn’t something to celebrate yet.

It was something to savor after the screams.

The man and woman remained kneeling, still waiting, still not daring to breathe too loudly.

In the far distance of the hall, somewhere deeper in the shadows, the Begin Gem pulsed once—like a second heartbeat underneath the world.

The clock had started ticking.

And this time, no god would survive the chime.