Free Web NovelChapter 86: [Ding! The host has connected with the Abyss]
After finally recovering his strength, Evan was ready to leave, but before he did, there was one thing he had to take care of first.
Burying Reiner.
He couldn’t do it in BranLeaf. The city had ceased to exist, and what remained of it was little more than a crater. The best he could do was find a quiet corner of the nearby forest, somewhere undisturbed, and lay him to rest there.
He dug the grave himself, and when it was done, he stood in front of it for a moment, hands at his sides, and said what little he could.
"We didn’t know each other long. But it was good to meet you." He paused. "Rest in peace."
Reiner was more an acquaintance than a friend, but he was a person he had interacted with enough to grant him at least this level of respect. It was a shame that he had passed away so soon, but that was how life went.
In this world, life and death bent to the will of forces far above most people’s reach. If you weren’t at the top of the food chain, you were always in some degree of danger, small or large, it didn’t matter. The threat was always there, waiting for the moment you let your guard down.
Evan took one last look at the grave, then turned and walked away.
He released both of his clones as he left, letting them roam the surrounding territory on their own. They would hunt, accumulate ESS independently, and in turn feed some of that back to him. It wasn’t much, but every bit counted.
***
Five days passed quickly.
The distance between him and the royal capital had shrunk considerably, and according to the kingdom’s map, he was no more than two days away at his current pace.
That evening, in a cave tucked inside a forest near the outskirts of the capital’s territory, Evan sat cross-legged on the stone floor and turned his attention inward.
He hadn’t had much time to train his void energy recently. The chaos of BranLeaf, the escape, the days of recovery, it had all eaten into the time he would normally have spent on it. But during the journey he had carved out at least an hour each day, and those hours had added up.
[Ding! Your affinity with void energy has increased.]
[Ding! Your affinity with void energy has increased.]
[Ding! Your affinity with void energy has increased.]
The notifications came roughly once per hour of training. The improvements were small each time, barely noticeable at first, but after five days of consistent work, he could feel the difference. The energy moved more naturally now, responded faster, settled into place with less resistance than before.
The hunting had helped too.
Over the past several days he had used void energy in combat more than he ever had, and the more he used it, the more he understood what it actually did. It wasn’t simply a source of raw power. Striking a creature with it did more damage than a regular hit, considerably more, but the real effect came after.
If the creature survived, the void energy didn’t just vanish. It lingered. It spread through the wound like a slow rot, eating at the creature from the inside, and if left unchecked, it would corrupt the host entirely.
The end result of that corruption was a Hollow.
At first he had assumed the transformation was inevitable regardless of how much energy was used, that any contact with void energy would eventually turn a creature. But that wasn’t quite right.
The amount determined the speed. A larger dose corrupted faster. A smaller one gave the creature time to fight it off, or at least attempt to. Whether it actually became a Hollow depended on how strong the creature was to begin with.
He had experimented with this carefully. A precise, minimal injection of void energy, directed into a wound and sealed off before the creature could expel it, was enough to corrupt Rank F and E beasts if they lacked the strength to purge it. Stronger creatures needed a higher dose, but the principle held across the board. In either case, he collected the ESS.
The downside was the contamination. Any creature killed this way had its mana core corrupted alongside everything else, which made it completely unsellable.
The moment anyone tested the core and found traces of void energy, every adventurer in the vicinity would be on alert. Given what had just happened at Branleaf, that kind of attention was the last thing he needed.
So he kept the corrupted cores, in case they might be useful in the future.
He sat now with void energy circling slowly through him, drawing more in from the ambient air and refining it, stripping away the raw instability, making it usable. It was a slow process, more meditative than active, but it had become almost second nature by this point.
Then he felt it.
A bottleneck. The same sensation as last time, a wall just ahead, pressure building behind.
The last time he reached a bottleneck, he had nearly turned the entire manor upside down, and perhaps even all of Lirath, something that had almost gotten him killed and attracted the attention of the strongest authorities. He wanted to avoid making the same mistake because he was already very close to the capital.
But something was different this time.
There was no sense of danger. No warning instinct pulling him back from the edge. Instead, the closer he pushed toward it, the more his chest tightened in a way that didn’t feel like dread at all.
It felt like anticipation.
His heart rate climbed. His instincts, the deep, wordless kind that had kept him alive more than once, weren’t screaming at him to stop. They were pushing him forward. Whatever was on the other side of this threshold, some part of him already recognized it.
He wasn’t sure if it was only a vague feeling, but trying wouldn’t hurt, right?
So he continued, the accumulation of refined energy within him growing larger and larger until soon
his mind seemed to perceive something.
A sensation perhaps? He wasn’t sure, but he tried to reach it, and after a while he discovered that he could, so he did. Small step by small step, slowly he reached that thing, whatever it was, and soon his body trembled while his mind fell into a trance-like state.
[Ding! The host has connected with the Abyss]
[Analysis in progress....]
[Stabilizing connection in progress...]
[1%] [3%] [9%] .... [69%]
A series of messages exploded inside Evan’s mind, but his consciousness seemed to drift away while he felt the presence of a place on the other side.
He no longer paid attention to the system notifications that continued in the background.
His perception reached that place and soon he saw,
A city.
Vast and layered, built behind walls thick enough and tall enough to make the ones at BranLeaf look modest by comparison. Fifty meters, at least, maybe more, stacked stone and dark iron.
The city beyond them was enormous. Dense. Built upward as much as outward, with structures crowding against each other in a way that suggested centuries of expansion with nowhere left to spread. The sky above it was dim, pressed down by a haze that wasn’t quite fog and wasn’t quite smoke, a greenish cast to it.
The feeling the city gave him was hard to name. Familiar in a way that made no sense, given that he had never seen it before. And at the same time, deeply foreign, like recognizing a face in a dream and knowing, even as you reach for the name, that it doesn’t belong to anyone you’ve actually met.
[87%]
The connection deepened, and the image shifted.
The blurry outlines of the city sharpened slightly, and at its very center stood a castle.
It was strange.
Built in a medieval Gothic style, its towering spires pierced the sky like black spears, while massive walls surrounded it like an impenetrable fortress. Even from this distance, it radiated an oppressive aura that seemed capable of suffocating anyone who approached.
Yet amidst that darkness, Evan sensed something else.
Something hidden.
A faint trace of a different energy.
a trace of a different energy, not gloomy, but the complete opposite.
The moment he did, his eyes widened.
[99%]
’This... it’s life energy,’ he thought.
He recognized it immediately. It was the same warmth that had settled into his chest after he got his new Divine lineage, the same quality, the same signature. Whoever or whatever was inside that castle, they carried it too.
His heart was pounding now, harder than it had any right to, as though it wanted to leave his chest entirely and close the distance on its own.
Then he felt something. frёeωebɳovel.com
A single particle of life energy, small, but free, detached from the castle and rose upward. Drifting toward him. Crossing whatever distance separated his perception from that place.
He barely had time to understand what it was before it reached him and then-
[Ding!... ]
