Urban Plundering: I Corrupted The System! - Chapter 372

Chapter 372: Slithering Darkness
The silence lingered—dense, oppressive, like the air itself had learned how to suffocate—before Chi You finally moved. It was not a grand gesture, merely the tilt of his head, but it carried the weight of empires. Like a general deciding whether today he would burn a city… or a continent.

“How long,” he asked, voice molten and corrosive like acid poured over iron, “before Doctor Voss delivers the first set of Devourers?”

The agents didn’t stutter, didn’t flinch. They knew better. In this hall of predators, even breathing wrong could get you crushed.

“Six months,” the male agent answered, steady and clear.

For a single heartbeat, that number felt almost laughable. Six months. To creatures who had existed since the ink of time was still drying across the cosmos? It was nearly an insult that they had to wait.

And yet—

The woman agent, more attuned to the ancient rage festering in the chamber, lowered her head further in reverence. She felt the ripple of something old and hungry shifting above her.

Six months was nothing. A blink. A yawn. A whisper between stars.

They had waited centuries while human civilizations rose like fireworks and fell like ash. They had watched pantheons sprout from the soil of mortal hope, only to wither into myth.

They had buried gods before.

They could wait six months more.

Especially now—now, when victory hovered just a breath away, sweet and heavy like the scent before a thunderstorm.

Chi You’s black-metal tattoos pulsed faintly, the molten lines slithering beneath his skin in slow, serpentine patterns. His mouth twisted into something between a smirk and a snarl, a shape so alien even the stone beneath his boots seemed to recoil.

“No problem,” he finally said, the words sliding out like sharpened blades. “But do not let them sleep easy even though our ultimate champions are not here yet.”

Across the dark hall, Hundun’s cracked mask twitched, and a noise rattled from him—a sound too broken to be called laughter but too amused to be anything else.

“We must prepare for the champions,” Yeomra murmured from the shadows, his voice colder than a sword pulled fresh from a grave. “Shake the mortals’ pillars. Soften the gods’ vigilance.”

Qiongqi, leaning lazily against the blackened columns, smiled—a slow, decadent thing, the kind of smile a wolf gives a lamb when the chase was over before it began.

“Let them feel helpless,” he purred, voice low and sticky, “let despair ferment in their blood like poisoned wine even before our Devourers arrive.”

The male agent bowed even lower, voice clipped with precision:

“As you command. Already… movements have begun in the ancient lands of Gojoseon, Bharat, and Huaxia.”

Not Korea. Not India. Not China.

Those names were for bureaucrats and schoolchildren.

Here, only the old names mattered. The names that still tasted of blood and gods.

Chi You’s molten eyes flared, casting wicked shadows across the room.

Ancient lands.

Ancient bones.

Ancient powers clinging desperately to broken thrones, pretending they were still kings.

And the Dark Pantheon?

They were the rot that would consume them all.

“Good,” Yeomra whispered, tapping the butt of his cane once against the marble floor. The sound rang out—sharp, solitary—a death knell for an entire era.

The woman agent dared a glance upward.

She wished she hadn’t.

There was something… deeply wrong about the way satisfaction curled in the Four’s expressions. Something far more terrifying than anger ever could be. It was the patience of executioners sharpening their blades with love.

They had waited too long to lose now.

And soon, when the world finally realized what slithered beneath its feet, it would already be too late to scream.

The agents bowed again—this time so low their foreheads kissed the frozen marble.

“Glory to the Dark Pantheon,” they intoned, voices as thin as funeral hymns.

At the far end of the hall, the portal shimmered into life—a gaping rift of violet wound through with bleeding crimson veins. The edges wept tendrils of a substance that wasn’t smoke, wasn’t mist… but wasn’t anything that belonged in a sane world either.

Without turning their backs, the agents retreated, vanishing into the portal like offerings swallowed by a living altar.

The rift sealed behind them with a muted, sickening blink.

The Four remained.

Unmoving.

Unbreathing.

Patient.

Because when the Dark marched again—

It would not whisper like fog.

It would fall like the blade of an executioner, and the earth itself would bleed.

Chi You, the Iron Tyrant, lifted his gaze first.

Where others might’ve seen a general or a warlord, here stood something altogether more terrible — a conqueror of gods and history itself. His frame rippled with molten tattoos, every flicker along his arms telling stories of worlds lost, of armies broken and turned to ash. His armor creaked softly when he moved — blackened steel kissed by a forge not made for mortal men.

“We have waited,” he said, his voice low and absolute, every word a thunderclap in waiting. “And now the wheel turns.”

To his right, Hundun — the Blind Abyss — tilted his broken, faceless head ever so slightly. No eyes were needed to see, yet he witnessed things no sane being should have. His cracked mask smiled, split down the center like the world had once tried to kill him… and failed.

He exhaled a mist that wasn’t smoke — it was entropy, breathing out the inevitable death of all things.

Next stood Yeomra, the Silent Judge, his black tailored suit immaculate, the ghost of golden scales stitched onto his sleeves catching phantom light. He leaned lightly on a cane carved from the bone of something that no longer existed in any world known. His lips barely moved when he spoke, but when he did, even the idea of rebellion felt absurd.

“Six months,” Yeomra murmured. “Enough wait to rip open the heavens with precision.”

And then there was Qiongqi — the Golden Sin — lounging as if the end of all things was a party he’d been fashionably late for. His hair shimmered like the last light before the apocalypse, and his smirk could’ve undone kingdoms without lifting a single blade.

A corrupter of heroes.

A whisperer of doom.

A snake who made kings slit their own throats — happily.

“Let them tremble,” he said, voice smooth as poison. “Let them weep… before they realize no prayer will be heard.”

Chi You’s armor shifted as he stepped forward, boots pounding against the black marble like war drums heralding the coming slaughter.

“Begin preparation, order the other gods to start causing chaos as we wait for the Dark Harbingers and Devourers.” he ordered, no louder than a growl — but the power in it etched cracks into the walls.

The other three merely inclined their heads, shadows leaking from their feet like ancient beasts stirring beneath their skins.

Above them— far above this sunken hall of despair—the world spun blindly on, presidents slept in their golden beds, gods postured and gambled and planned against Parker.

And none of them knew.

None of them saw.

That beneath their cities, their temples, their so-called thrones—the true kings of death and darkness had awoken.

And this time?

There would be no mercy.

No prisoners.

No survivors.

Just ruin.

And their names would not be sung.

They would be wept.