Thanks to his natural good looks, his request was granted by Zeus, and he stayed on Mount Olympus to avoid his enemies' pursuit. However, this man, unable to change his nature, soon reverted to his old ways, and his lustful eyes set upon Hera.
The radiant Queen of Heaven made him lose his senses, and he was audacious enough to brazenly flirt with Hera, hoping that the Queen would elope with him.
After being harassed, Hera imdiately reported Ixion's actions to her husband Zeus.
Zeus, who often turned others green with envy, naturally refused to believe that anyone would dare to cuckold him, especially soone who had survived only with his protection.
But, out of caution, and faced with his wife's convincing accusations, Zeus sent a cloud in Hera's shape to Ixion. The irreverent king, suspecting nothing, actually made love to this cloud in the garden, and it gave birth to a half-human, half-horse monster.
This was the origin of the Centaurs—four-legged beasts with savage and brutal natures, who, like their ancestor, had a passion for abducting won. Luo En and Artemis had once implented a form of population control for the overflowing Centaur population in Arcadia.
After witnessing how he himself was nearly cuckolded, an irate Zeus cast Ixion into the Netherworld, where he was bound to a perpetually spinning wheel of fire, which tornted and tore at his body incessantly.
The man before , holding a bow and arrow, with his face charred and his body full of traces from flas and great tearing forces, was clearly Ixion himself.
As for Tantalus, who followed with sword and shield, he was even more of a beast.
He was an early ruler of Mycenae, a distinguished son of Zeus, who could dine with His Majesty the King of Gods without having to avoid the conversations among the deities.
But insatiable and irreverent towards the gods' kindness, he not only divulged secrets of the gods' lives in public but also stole nectar and Spiritual dicine from their table, sharing them with friends in the Mortal World.
Furthermore, he appropriated sacrifices ant for the gods, stole the Temple of Zeus's beloved hunting dogs, and was guilty of countless cris.
His most outrageous act was to test whether the deities were truly omniscient by inviting them to his Royal Palace as guests, secretly having his son Pelops killed, and then prepared as a feast for the gods.
During the banquet, the distracted Agriculture God Deter, mourning her daughter Persephone who had been abducted by Hades, ate a piece without noticing.
The other deities, sensing sothing amiss, saw through Tantalus's ruse and threw the cooked human limbs back into the bowl, pleading with the Goddess of Fate, Clotho, to retrieve the poor child from the bowl and bring him back to life.
Because Deter had eaten a piece of flesh, the child had a defect on his shoulder, which was later repaired by the gods with ivory.
Afterwards, the gods, mocked by the ordeal, unanimously decided to tornt Tantalus, this living beast, with the harshest punishnt.
Thus, the cruel and arrogant king was cast into Hell by the gods, there to endure eternal divine punishnt.
The specifics of his situation were as follows: He stood in the middle of a deep pool, the water rolling just beneath his chin. However, he suffered fiery thirst, unable to drink a single drop of cool water even though it was right at his lips. Whenever he would bend down to drink from the pool, the water would imdiately flow away from him, leaving him standing alone on a parched piece of ground, as if a demon had magically drained the pool. At the sa ti, he was unbearably hungry. Behind him was the shore, upon which grew a row of fruit trees, heavy with rich fruit, their branches weighed down and dangling in front of his forehead. He needed only to look up to see the dripping sweet pears, bright red apples, fiery pogranates, fragrant figs, and lush olives. These fruits seed to be smiling at him, beckoning. But whenever he tiptoed to try and pick them, a gust of wind would sweep through, blowing the branches sky high. Beyond enduring these tornts, the most terrifying pain was the constant fear of death because a large rock hung above his head, which could at any mont fall and crush him to dust.
Under this severe torture, the once handso and tall king of Mycenae was now covered in cracked skin, his purplish rotten flesh and stark white bones exposed, deathly fus emitting from his mouth along with a strong stench of decay, and even the eyeballs within their sockets lted away, revealing hollow and grim flas of the soul, like a walking dead corpse.
Now, they must understand the value of food and that not everything is fit for the green, right?
With a sneer, Luo En raised the golden bough in his hand, the gold and white flas intertwining as they fiercely ignited.
The forrly unconcerned Tantalus, with sword and shield in hand, didn't take Luo En's movents seriously at first. However, as Luo En swung the golden bough, the gold and white blaze spread forth like a rain shower, adhering to Tantalus's weapons, skin, rotting flesh, and innards.
Imdiately after, bright and fierce flas raged, baking his soul and consciousness inch by inch, bringing with them acute pain.
"Ahhh! How could this be? Great linoe... save ... save..."
The screams stopped abruptly. Enveloped in the fierce flas, Tantalus didn't even have ti to cry out before his limbs twisted and disintegrated like burnt out kindling, turning inch by inch into drifting ash.
Watching the golden specks of light flowing back into the Magic Circle Diagram, Luo En shook his head regretfully.
The prohibitions and eternal punishnts of the gods were indeed formidable, granting Tantalus a whisper of immortality. Even using Hestia's "Fla" and Apollo's "White Horse" to create the Holy Fla that purifies filth and burns away evil, he'd only destroyed Tantalus's physical vessel, sending him back to his cell to continue his punishnt.
Yet for the two scoundrels, such an outco was more terrifying than eternal death.
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