As if a god suffocating is not absurd enough, Rier's godhood was taken by a transcendent who then brought it to Malekite. This shocked every god watching.
They expected rebellion in the form of theft. The transcendents were supposed to take the godhood for themselves. After all, they had shed their lives for it. It would also give them power greater than that of Malekite.
It would have been perfectly normal for the transcendents to run away from their low-god ancestor with the godhood of a mid-god. However, the transcendents were not tempted by the godhood enough to rebel.
A god said, "I have never seen this kind of loyalty."
"27 of them out of 30 died but they didn't rebel. Instead, they helped her to advance further. No wonder she has so many vessels. It seems that the loyalty of her race has not been broken by their transcendence."
They marveled and sighed. Then they prepared to return to their life. After all, Malekite should not attack anyone now that she suffered so many losses.
Malekite didn't disappoint them this time around. She stopped fighting and became silent.
The gods knew then it was the calm before the storm. They have seen enough to know that Malekite has the potential to become a Celestial and she is also crazy so they don't expect her to stop until she achieves it.
They expected a series of wars after she was done recuperating and they were all preparing for war themselves. Despite all their preparation, they were still unprepared for the kind of storm that was coming.
Malekite or Legion-7 rested. In the meantime, he combined the ability to spread his soul fragments as spores with the ability to reanimate corpses with the soul fragments and the ability to infect living beings with his soul fragments.
In the past, he needed to kill living beings before he could create soldiers. He needed to use the old method of creating Malekites to mask what he was actually doing. It is why the gods thought the Malekites he created could betray him.
They don't know that the Malekites have already been brainwashed before they were born. But now, he doesn't need to do that since he has overcome the barrier between living things and his spores.
He could already possess a body, but it needs him to personally act. It is how Rier died. But now, his soul fragments can possess bodies too. They will invade living things like poisons, take root in them like diseases, and take over their bodies like zombies.
He has unlimited soul fragments because of origin energy so he can create as many spores as he wants. It is something that Malekite couldn't do.
The other thing that is probably the most important difference between him and Malekite now is that every spore creates a transcendent soldier. And each transcendent soldier is a vessel that can use the divine power that he acquires perfectly.
He didn't spend too much effort on creating the techniques needed for this and he certainly didn't need to stop fighting to train himself. He could have done both at the same time.
The major reason why he rested and continued to rest after acquiring the soul techniques is to silently spread his newly created soul poison. So the gods thought he was resting the whole time. They were wrong. The fight they were preparing for as already begun without their knowledge.
His spores spread throughout the realm and infected the living things. They entrenched themselves in their host but remained dormant. This continued for years.
He began the next round of attack after 10 years of spreading the soul poison. The gods were caught off guard immediately because a terrible plague erupted throughout the plane.
They don't even know that he is responsible for it much less consider that he is actually after the high god of death a far distance away from him and that he is just attacking everything between them.
All they know is that a zombie apocalypse descended on the plane. So even though the war had started, they all thought Malekite was still resting. After all, this war was not fought with the Malekites.
At first, the gods didn't take the plague seriously. But they had to when the high god of death died to the zombie plague. Legion-7 couldn't infect gods so he just made the zombies attack the high god directly.
Of course, transcendents can't threaten a high god. The best they can do is surround and distract the god. The killing blow came when one of them made contact with the god which created a stable and direct channel for Legion-7 to strike.
What others saw was that the high god of death was besieged by a million zombies and eventually died after being grabbed and submerged by the hungry undead. So they could only suspect every god with the domain of diseases and plagues.
Legion-7 grew rapidly in silence. His ability to infect living things from a far distance made it so that he could get close to the gods without them noticing. They couldn't see or sense him until he attacked them directly. By then, it was too late to escape.
He was growing silently and killing everything silently. The gods were looking for the source of the calamity but they didn't suspect him at all. They knew the domains he had but they didn't suspect him because gods can't fuse domains.
Only Celestials can fuse domains and use the divine abilities of each domain to assist each other. So they didn't think he would be able to create the zombies since at best, he could only create Malekites.
Their search was made extra difficult by the strange mechanism of transmission of the disease. People got infected, they turned into zombies and they attacked every living thing around them. Those who were attacked turned into zombies and the cycle restarted.
This method of proliferation was terrifying but it was still a smokescreen.