The Heavenly Martial Empress Returns: An OP Xianxia Returnee LitRPG

Chapter 44: Leviathan, The King Of The Oceans

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In the past, Bing Xue would have never dared to go against such an ancient and almighty being. She could tell it was strong. He was stronger than most of the foes she has fought since she got here. In terms of physical prowess and abilities, it surpassed even the Chronomancer whose only specialty was controlling Time Essence.

And his Level wasn’t low; it was very high!

Level 5000!

She didn’t know what Level the Gods had; it seemed as if they didn’t have any Levels themselves, working with another type of system she might have gotten. The thing is, she had both the systems of the gods and could continue leveling up, unlike them.

However, right now, Leviathan in front of her was the mightiest foe she had ever fought since her return from Murim; he wasn’t a god, and for the level of strength and his ancient aura, she had to admit he was someone slightly respectable.

“You seem unfazed!” Leviathan smiled, showing his countless teeth through all three of his gigantic heads. “Well, let’s see how you react to this now! Go, my army of the depths!”

Leviathan roared as hundreds of S-Rank Ocean Beasts surged from the depths; Megalodons, Krakens, Bloodthirsty Whales, Golde Carapace Crabs, Titan Squids, and more creatures surged endlessly.

Yet Bing Xue remained unfazed by the approaching, calamitous army of the oceans. She looked towards her family and winked at them; they immediately knew there was nothing to worry about.

“Sit down and relax; I’ll take care of this little thing.” She smiled, two rings appearing on her left and right sides.

One ring shone with divine brilliance and golden light. The other shone with dark, umbral energies. Both started spinning rapidly, growing larger and larger and larger.

She enlarged them to their very limits; each ring was as big as a hundred meters. Bing Xue nodded. “Barely acceptable, I suppose."

FLASH!

She sent both rings towards the beast below her, and they spun rapidly at lightning speed, so fast they only left trails of blood and guts as the beasts that could take whole legions to defeat were slain within seconds.

SLASH! SLASH! SLASH!

“E-Eh?”

Leviathan remained in the same position he was before, all three of his heads glaring in utter disbelief as all his minions perished in a matter of... twelve seconds.

“Phew, well, this should be enough food for a while.”

Bing Xue smiled. The seas were now completely tainted with the color red, the blood and guts of all the monsters decorating them. There was an ocean of blood in front of her. The smell of fresh fish was strong; she already wanted to roast some of that and fry a few of those.

“So, do you truly want to become a god, Leviathan?”

“I-I…! That’s…”

Despite being Level 5000, even Leviathan felt a sudden pressure; a feeling of regret slowly started emerging from within his brave and ancient heart. It has been almost a million years since he was born, another of the many sea monsters in the oceans of Eclipse.

However, unlike the rest, he was a bit stronger, learned a bit faster, and became much smarter over time than other beasts. He hunted, ate, evolved, and slept. Continuously, for hundreds of thousands of years.

Every fight at the beginning was full of stakes; his life was always on the line; however, as he continuously became stronger, he also felt like everything became much, much weaker.

Standing at the peak was lonely, and he went to sleep for eons.

His Level continuously rose as his subordinates fought and killed other beasts through eons, until he reached Level 5000 as a beast, the maximum level he could reach within Floor 1, apparently.

And as someone bound by the oceans, he was unable to explore the tower. Full of resentment, he continuously trained and cultivated his abilities, refining Mana through thousands of years.

His goal was simple: to wait for the opportunity to come—any opportunity!

And that opportunity presented itself; the gods were slain, and their divine thrones were empty; he could feel them.

He had reached the peak of this world below the gods, and now that they were gone, what was going to stop him from becoming the new God?

Well, what stopped him was a single woman. A rather young woman at that, only eleven thousand years old.

In fact, he was much older than her, as he was almost a million years old!

Yet the eleven-thousand-year-old woman in front of him vastly surpassed this old monster.

He could tell by merely looking at the massacre she left behind.

But could he give himself the privilege of stopping now, when his subordinates have all died because of him?

No!

“I have to defeat you, no matter what.” He spoke with his eyes flaring with motivation. “For my foolish minions that died so pathetically, and to make sure to carry the title of the King of the Oceans!”

“Good, that is the spirit.” Bing Xue nodded. “Then come, Leviathan! Fight me to the death! Show me if you’re truly worthy of becoming a God.”

“I SHALL! RAAAAAHHH!!!”

With a furious and draconic roar, the oceans obeyed Leviathan, swirling upwards. The people on the beach glanced in utter disbelief as the seas reached the skies. It felt like at any moment, Leviathan could simply drown the entire continent if he wanted.

SPLAAASH!

The oceans rushed down as Leviathan decided to drown everything, including Bing Xue! He saw she was strong, but inside his head, there was absolutely no way she could easily overpower the entire strength of the oceans.

“Drown to death!”

As the water engulfed everything, a flash of bright golden light and umbral darkness surged from within, splitting the oceans into not two parts but four, six, twelve, twenty-four, a hundred, two hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, two hundred thousand, one million, two billion, and more times!

Leviathan could see Bing Xue’s small figure floating below the seas; her very presence forced the oceans to not go down. Her very pressure defied gravity, forcing the seas to simply stay floating in midair. As she cut them, she cut all of the seas.

“{Yin and Yang Harmonious Blade Arts}: {Radiant Echo}! {Umbral Cry}!”

SLASH! SLASH! SLASH!

Bing Xue was using her two rings as blades, slashing through the seas until, before everyone’s eyes, in just a few seconds, the oceans were cut so much to a subatomic level, that they exploded into white clouds of mist, dissipating into the air.

Not only the water above her, but the entirety of the wave, capable of drowning at least a tenth of the entire continent, disappeared into an explosion of mist!

“H-Huh?”

Leviathan couldn’t comprehend what he saw, but Bing Xue already appeared right above him; her rings spun rapidly and then combined together into an even larger spinning ring, which she moved downwards.

“Ah!”

Leviathan quickly swam into the seas, using them as protection. Explosions of white mist erupted every time the ring ran through the waves of oceanic water. Leviathan quickly conjured thousands of swirling spears of high-pressure oceanic water, capable of easily carving through mountains.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

However, they were all futile and useless; Bing Xue was completely unmoved and unaffected by anything. The three-headed behemoth was unable to comprehend how it was possible for such a small body to take on all that damage with ease!

And the explanation was rather simple: Bing Xue had refined, recreated, and reforged her own body hundreds of times through her long life, each time making it tougher, each time making it even more dense.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say her body density was higher than anything Leviathan had ever fought.

Yet…

“Dammit!”

He rushed out of the seas, realizing his attacks were useless. He confronted her head-on, opening his jaws and going for his deadly triple bite, a powerful technique that nobody that ever took it survived!

Yet.

CRASH!

The moment his first head tried to bite through Bing Xue, it felt like he was trying to bite through an incredibly hard metal for a baby without teeth!

Utterly impossible.

And painful!

Crack, crack…

CRASH!

“UUAGH!”

His teeth shattered on the spot, his eyes full of disbelief as he glanced at the fly-sized (for him) woman glare at him with her bright, rainbow-colored eyes.

“Your breath stinks. My turn.”

She swiftly disappeared from the scene and then reappeared behind Leviathan. The next thing he knew, he felt utter agony through half of his body as his tail was immediately cut into countless round slices, which splashed into the oceans, generating enormous ripples that almost created another tsunami.

SLASH! SLASH! SLASH!

“S-Stop! STOP!”

Leviathan fought back with teeth and tails, but to no avail; Bing Xue was overwhelmingly strong and tougher than him. Each of his bites did no damage, and each of her attacks cut cleanly through his incredibly hard scales.

In the end, the giant, three-headed sea dragon had to beg for his life!

“Please forgive me! I won’t do it again! Don’t kill meeeee!”

He was already missing two heads, and Bing Xue was about to go for the third and finish him off. She looked at her family and noticed that her mother sighed as she saw her about to kill yet another being.

“…No, there’s another way to solve this.”

Perhaps it was the desire to not disappoint her mother for once, or maybe it was her wanting to do something different. For once, it just goes against her own "logic,” the logic that she forged inside a world of bloodshed and vengeance.

Her mind told her to just kill the talking beast. So she decided to do the complete opposite of that. It wasn’t like he was a genocidal god like the other two, so certainly he deserved a bit more time to explain himself to her.

“I’ll stop.”

“Eh? R-Really?!”

Leviathan screamed in surprise as he looked at Bing Xue making her rings disappear, her Divinity Aura still exuding an almighty pressure that forced him to bow his head to her.

“Yes, tell me, Leviathan. What is your true purpose in this world? And why do you want the throne of the Gods?”

“I… I just want to surpass them; originally, I wanted to be able to walk on land and explore the tower! But I was born too big and bound to the oceans…”

“I see.”

Bing Xue detected no lies; despite how monstrous and savage he was, this beast was more pure-hearted than most of the people she had met throughout her life.

“Hmm, how many innocent lives have you taken, though?”

“E-Eh! Ah… Ugh… N-None?”

SLASH!

Bing Xue quickly cut with her bare hands one of his gills, making him scream.

“Don’t lie to me, beast.” She spoke. “I see through your lies! Speak with honesty!”

“I-I have sunk several ships through my long life!” He screamed. “I-I’m sorry! I might have also caused disasters through history with the tsunamis."

“Hmm…” Despite that, Bing Xue saw that such deaths were too scarce and spread over almost a million years. Most of them were without him knowing what he was doing or by accident. “Huh… Hmph.”

Leviathan would be sweating the entire ocean if he could right now. Below her sharp gaze, there was absolutely nothing that could escape!

Yet, suddenly, her eyes relaxed and were full of benevolence.

“You’ve done great crimes; as an intelligent beast, you still must take responsibility for what you’ve done!” She said.

“Y-Yes!” He nodded. “Anything, but I don’t want to die!”

“It’s fine; I will not kill you. For once, I shall go against my own beliefs.” Bing Xue sighed. “Maybe because I am desperate for the approval of my soft-hearted mother, or perhaps because you are just a beast without truly evil intentions. Or maybe… Maybe, just maybe, you can be useful to me.”

“U-Useful?” Leviathan’s titanic body started to tremble.

“Leviathan, I have a job for you!” She smiled. “Become the God of Eclipse for me, will you? I don’t want such responsibility myself, and I would be bound to this world as well, which is not something I want.”

“Wha… Eh? HUH?!”

Out of nowhere, Leviathan was granted what he originally wanted!

However, why?

Why did this feel so unsatisfactory?!

He had not earned anything, and it felt like Bing Xue was just handing him a very heavy responsibility.

But what else could he do now?

It was either becoming a God or dying.

“I-I accept…” He nodded with his last head.

“Good. There you go.” With a simple thought, the two thrones were finally occupied again.

The Primordial Energies of Eclipse shone brightly, blessing Leviathan with new powers.

His body changed in form, size, and appearance.

He was overflowing with a divine aura!

“By the way, I will be taking 90% of the Faith Points you earn.” Bing Xue smiled. “I hope you accept my terms and conditions.”

“WHAT?!”

Poor Leviathan was about to become Bing Xue’s first-ever worker in her ever-growing company of replacement gods.

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