843 The Undying Gods
The Undying was there to witness the day the world broke.
The day he was free of the eternal darkness was the day that would lead to the world being in an eternal war.
Humans attacked other humans because they were different and started calling them demons.
The Undying went on to fight in the war. He fought Immortals, Divinities, and Celestials. No matter how much damage he took, no matter how many times the people killed him, he still came back.
Slowly, the demons praised the Undying to be something bigger than they all were.
They called him the Undying God.
As the war progressed over thousands upon thousands of years, the Undying God became one of the prominent figures in the war.
However, he saw that he was going to die in the battle ahead, so he left behind an inheritance that someone worthy would soon acquire.
* * * * * *
Alex was now a woman. She fought humans in battle, jumping head first into danger, completely unworried as she had inherited the powers of the Undying God.
Space twisted as one of the humans slashed at her, but the girl simply flew upwards.
The attack cut off her left foot at the ankle, but by the time she was next to her attacker, her foot had grown back.
A sword flew out of her soul space, and she cut carved the human who just attacked her in two.
Another human jumped at her from the right employing the Dao of heaviness.
The man struck at her with a force of a realm itself.
Alex was sent flying away with a few broken ribs. But before she was too far, her ribs healed immediately, and her hands turned into vines and then grabbed onto the man before pulling on him.
Due to the man's weight, Alex was herself sent pulled towards him, then she turned her hands back to normal and fought the man for a while before the man realized he couldn't win and ran away.
Alex looked around nervously, while also wondering what she was doing here.
She? Was she a she? What about the man that was dying of cold in the forest under eternal night? What about the youth with a feline pet beast? Were those just memories she acquired from the inheritance?
"No!" Alex said. "No, I'm not this girl"
He tried to fight it, he tried to fight the invading memories, the invading personalities, but it was hard. Too many things were happening at once, and it was impossible to remember who he was.
* * * * *
Alex was now a man again. Was this real? Was she really this man?
The memories of 8 different Undying gods made it hard for him to understand which one of the 9 memories in his mind belonged to him.
"I'm Alex. Son of Graham and Helen. I was born in Maplewood city and lived my life on my farm," he said to himself, reminding him which one he was.
The third Undying god was still fighting in the war. Alex saw that his body was furry, like a beast.
He fought alongside many demons, and while the other demons died, he alone survived.
Slowly, people started learning of his feats and used the name for him that was once used by the other fighters of the Demons.
The Undying God.
And Alex understood that this man was not him.
* * * *
By the time Alex saw the memories of the fourth Undying God, he had already started to dissociate himself with the person whose memories he was seeing.
"I am Alex," he said to himself from time to time, just in case he was sucked into believing he was someone he wasn't.
The fourth Undying god was a healer and not a fighter. He used what he got from being Undying into healing the victims of war.
The war still razed the world, so he was as much needed on the battlefield as any fighter. Perhaps, he was doing something more important than anyone else was doing.
He was never called the Undying god, but in his heart he knew, he was one.
* * * * *
The fifth Undying god was a mad man.
With a weak will, he could not handle 4 different alien memories in his mind and quickly succumbed to the four different personalities in his mind.
Some days, he was the Undying. He was the monster that the humans had come to fear. He was the man that had never seen sunlight until he was an Immortal.
Some days, he was a woman with hands that could turn into vines, even though his hands never turned to vines.
Some days, he was a demon with the ability to turn into a bear. When he tried, he never could.
Some days, he was a healer who would walk into camps where the wounded warriors were kept and start treating people. Of course, since he had no knowledge of anything related to healing, he would fail every single time.
The fifth Undying God was a broken man, who never once again ever had his own personality back.
* * * * *
The sixth Undying God was a thief. After learning of someone with multiple personalities, all belonging to the so-called Undying Gods of ages past, he found the fifth Undying God and stole his memories.
Along with his memories, the Sixth Undying God found the inheritance of the Undying god flow into his mind.
5 different memories plagued his mind. Until that time, he was the one that had to fight the most memories to keep himself from going insane. Fortunately, as a man that was used to stealing memories of others, he had a strong mind to digest all the memories.
The thief let go of his scummy ways and became an honorable man. He fought on behalf of the many dead demons in a war that had been going on since before many people involved in it were even born.
At some time, he set up the next inheritance, but he knew how his inheritor would most likely be plagued by his memories as well.
So, he found a method to make sure the inheritor wouldn't lose himself in the process.
It wasn't a foolproof method and still had glaring flaws, but it was something that increased the chances of a proper passing of inheritance.
The Sixth Undying God left behind a will that would kill his inheritor many times over to solidify their own will before they were ready.
* * * * *
The 7th Undying God was struck down before she could fully utilize the powers of the Undying God.
In fact, she couldn't even regenerate her body from a nascent soul when she was dealt the lethal blow.
Knowing that she was going to die, the 7th Undying God ran away from the battlefield, to a distant land where the war had torn the place, but not as much as it had done to what these people called heavens.
There, she was saved by a weak Saint realm demon and decided to pass along her inheritance to him.
She took the saint to a secret realm and in one of the 7 mountains there, she did to him what the 6th Undying God had done to her.
The young saint died over and over again as the volcanic mountain poured out all of its lava, and the young saint inherited the Undying God Physique.
* * * * *
The eighth Undying God was a curious man by nature. Any pill, script, talisman, formations, or even beasts he came across, he would want to learn more about them.
Alex saw him make armors and weapons that were some of the best there could ever be.
However, he had to pause his passion as the war began growing bigger and he had to go fight them. Now that he had the power of the Undying, he couldn't sit behind not doing anything.
As human soldiers came through the heavens, he was one of the prominent figures that stood up against them.
However, as the humans slowly started winning more and more, and the demons submitted to them, he held the last force of resistance.
He raised soldiers to fight while hiding in secret realms that only he could access.
He discovered many pastes that would otherwise not be known in this world and passed them along.
He created pastes that he had blinded himself with before learning the Demon Eyes that were passed down to him by the 7th Undying God.
He even tested on seeking mice to pass along the power of being Undying so they could be reused over and over to scout the battlefield.
The project was a failure as while he did manage to give the beasts a bloodline that did similar things to what an Undying body did, those only worked when they were bonded to other beings and needed to use their Qi to survive instead of their won.
Finally, as the war got harder and harder to fight, the man decided to leave behind an inheritance just in case.
Alex saw his memories of him creating the interior of the mountain peak, where he carved the Demon Eyes technique onto the wall, and left a sliver of his being behind to help the next inheritor that came along.
Once the inheritance was set, the images vanished.
* * * * *
Alex sat, not on hot lava, but on frozen land. The lava that should have been hot and burning, had already cooled in the blizzard and he was now covered in a thick layer of snow.
The many memories in his mind remained vivid, but he pushed them away back in his mind. He did the same to his experience of death as well.
Finally having inherited everything, after being forged in ice and fire, the Ninth Undying God opened his eyes.
