Chapter 2942: Who Cared?

Leonel's mind was in a state of turmoil. His memories had become fragmented. Thoughts that he hadn't had in years, memories he hadn't touched in even longer, floated around in pieces of broken glass akin to fissures in space.

It felt like his entire mind had completely collapsed under a power he had little to no understanding of. And the worst part seemed to be that he couldn't quite think his way out of it too.

He was stuck in limbo, his thoughts just as fragmented as his memories. It was impossible to deduce anything if he couldn't complete a single sentence.

All he could see was that single pair of lingering eyes, but the irony was that while everyone else was thinking about the eyes of the Void Beast, Leonel was thinking about a completely different pair of eyes.

The eyes of that woman, the eyes of the person he hated more than anyone else in this world, the eyes that he had wanted to slash apart, and yet found staring at him even more intently as a result.

It was like everything that his father had done to give him a chance to break free of her had been worthless. He was right back at square one. No, he was in an even worse spot than square one, a place where the Demoness had more control over his life, his thoughts, his existence now than she had ever had before.

Then there was the rage.

It was just as omnipresent as the eyes, lurking in every corner of his mind. Everything seemed to only enrage him further and the glass and mirror fragments of his memories became tinted with red at their edges.

The shade of red was all too familiar. It was a red that had followed him for years, a red that had been with him ever since he awakened his Metal Synergy Lineage Factor.

But now it felt even more potent than before, and it fed off his rage, growing larger and more substantial.

Kill. Kill. Kill.

The word echoed in his mind again and again, and for a moment, he felt that he had been transported back to the first time he had heard Mo'Lexi's name... that woman that seemed to have disappeared into thin air.

No... she was dead...

In the past, Leonel wouldn't have been certain of this. But with his current abilities, seeing through the life and death of someone that he had already met was a breeze. Especially when he knew that that person only had an Impetus Force at best. What right did she have to hide from him? Black Tablet or not?

Leonel couldn't even cohesively finish these thoughts. It was like the images and short form of them ran through his mind instead before storming away and slipping through his fingers.

But then that was when something unexpected happened.

His mind worked on its own, and he seemed to peer through the layers of time, only to watch Mo'Lexi kill herself.

Something about that scene stirred something deep within Leonel, and he felt shaken to his core.

Mo'Lexi was a woman he didn't know much about, and objectively speaking, she had never helped him either. Although she had provided some form of shielding in the beginning, it was only for the purpose of making use of himself and Aina.

Back then, she always seemed to have a particular distaste for Aina, and Leonel had deduced that it was because she didn't like the fact she thought Aina was using him. In fact, it was because of this that Leonel was able to get the upper hand on her and eventually escape.

For the him of then, trying to slip through the cracks and outsmart an Impetus State Dream Force user was impossible. But thanks to this mental weakness, he had been able to take advantage.

He never really thought about why she felt that way, but seeing her choose to take such a step now, Leonel felt hints of melancholy for an unknown reason.

She hadn't done it for fame or attention, she didn't do it out of revenge or hatred, she had just truly given up on her own life and felt that it simply wasn't worth living.

Leonel had grown a long way since his youth. It was only a short time in the eyes of the old monsters of the God Realms, but in his views, it was an entire third of his life. This was to say that he was no longer the boy who pined over every life and felt that every death was a tragedy.

And yet, watching this old woman silently take her own life without any witnesses or care to be seen, almost as though she wanted to be wiped from existence forever and forgotten by the world...

He couldn't help but feel saddened.

What was the worth of a life?

It was the answer to this question that had left him so shaken and confused for so many years. It led him to treasuring every life, then to a pursuit of Kinghood, and then to a complete disregard for life entirely.

It could be said that this one question and his varying changing answers to it had dictated more of his life than almost anything else.

Sometimes, the destruction of a life could truly be so fleeting and unimpressive. In fact, it often was.

The annoying part about the answer to the question was that there probably wasn't one... or worse than that, that the answer changed based on the situation.

To a mother, the life of her baby was worth more than the world itself.

To a meteor falling from the skies... a tsunami hitting a coastline... a hurricane sweeping through the ocean...

A life wasn't worth very much at all, now was it?

So fleeting, so fragile, so tragic...

Maybe when you reached a certain level of power, this was always bound to happen.

Who cared about lives when you could crush Stars in your palm?