The first thing he assessed was their strength. While he couldn’t Identify them without seeing them, there was more than one way to place their values in general. The reason he believed they were normally leveled rather than particularly powerful was how they dug at the wall, and how they acted.
The three monsters were short, fat, worm-like creatures that more closely resembled maggots than anything. The monsters were as tall as his middle thigh, but twice as long as he was tall.
Their digging at the wall was important in gauging their strength because they were not particularly good at it. The three were moving the rock by swaying their heads left to right, supposedly scraping the rubble away. The issue was that he couldn’t sense many vibrations from falling stones at all: if they were throwing rocks to the side, he’d feel the echoes of that.
Despite that, he could sense indents where the monsters dug. Rather than throw the rocks to the side, he saw that the stone was melting under their heads, except he didn’t sense any heat either.
It would be closer to say that the stones were disintegrating and, when he looked closer, he could sense the small trickle of sand-like substance falling to the ground. Somehow, the monsters were turning the surface of the stone to sand, then flinging that off to the side.
Initially he thought they were not strong because they struggled to dig the rubble, and now he was once more reassured because the sand that fell to the ground did so a short distance away from the worms. They didn’t fling the dirt against the far walls of the cave, instead just falling behind them. Frankly, they had the digging speed and force of an average dog.
The second point which reassured him of the creatures’ weakness was their targets. Lorpees were weak, the weakest in the area that anything could reasonably draw nutrients from. At the same time, there was little benefit in hunting them either, with negligible meat and little to no experience if you were even remotely powerful. Dei was able to defeat them when he wasn’t even level fifty, while they tended towards levels a hundred and fifty or more.
The Lorpees gave little meat and little experience, meaning that anything hunting them should be around the level of their natural predators- whatever would hunt gerbils for food, probably something along the lines of a dog or a cat.
He couldn’t find it in himself to be impressed with the strength of an average animal from Earth when he could fling explosions from his hands and punch clean through a stone wall if he really tried.
Dei started getting excited at the prospect of how, for once, this would be an unfair fight tipped in his favor. It seemed like everything in the area was either on equal footing to him, or unfathomably stronger. The last time he had a fight with little to no resistance was…
‘Actually, has that ever happened?’ he found himself wondering. ‘I mean there were times when I squashed bugs for experience but I wouldn’t exactly call that a fight. Even when I fought a literal swarm of bugs that were eating a corpse, I had to retreat before getting too far in. Everything’s been so deadly that this might be the first time I’ll actually clean-sweep the monsters, despite being unnaturally strong for a human.’
Still, he would keep his guard up. Even though they only dug at the speed of a dog, they were digging through solid stone. He couldn’t let his guard down, so he began to prepare instead by charging up heat in his body.
He didn’t have Fang right now, so he’d need a weapon. If Fang would genuinely leave his group one day, he’d need a way to fight. Before he had a blade though, it wasn’t like he’d never dealt damage, he just used unarmed combat instead. It was time to get back to his roots, with all the bonuses he now had.
He wanted to try and improve his punches. Whenever he used an explosion with Snap mana, he always literally snapped. While he didn’t think that was necessary, he also struggled to make the Snap magic react without a gesture in the first place.
It had to be more than just symbolic, it must mean that he had to make a rapid motion to get a response from the mana, a motion which took place within a snap so to speak. Instead of his fingers, Dei wanted to try punching so quickly that it was like a snap, which would let him explode whatever he punched as well.
As he built up a significant amount of heat, faster than ever before with how densely muscled he was and how he pushed himself, Dei finally laid eyes on his enemy after rounding the bend.
None too late either, as one of them finally managed to break a hole in the wall leading into the Lorpee cavern.
‘Let's see about that beastial communication,’ he thought, then flexed his unknown vocal muscles. His Slaughterer Achievement upgraded it, with whatever that would entail.
The growl that resounded was much more sinister than before, closer to what he imagined a dinosaur to sound like, and a clear challenge to any animals hearing it.
It seemed that Gem Dwellers weren’t the “roaring” type of animalistic, but the “deep growling” type.
Without even connecting to them or sending a message, his point was made. The three monsters turned as one, and he sent a quick Identify, only to be repelled. Trying again, he imbued it with his Wrath Curse, spending ten mana to Identify each.
[Lunar-Spawn - Level 83
Direct descendants of The Mother
Physical: 92
Spiritual: 92]
[Lunar-Spawn - Level 83
Direct descendants of The Mother
Physical: 92
Spiritual: 92]
[Lunar-Spawn - Level 83
Direct descendants of The Mother
Physical: 92
Spiritual: 92]
It felt too specific for it to be a coincidence, but Dei was just told about the descendants of Primordial Children, and those underneath them. Now, immediately afterwards, he runs into three? Aloran told him that Lunar Spawn were direct descendants of The Mother, and that is what he now saw. Setting that aside, he scanned over the information he was able to glean from them.
As he searched their souls, he ran into several uncomfortable issues. For one, they had no mind, instead he felt a connection to something far away- supposedly, The Mother. Without a mind, there was no Mental stat.
On top of that, they had no Magical stat either: for what reason he didn’t know. No Mental stat made sense, no Magic? Not so much.
There wasn’t even much to really gain from looking at their soul. Normally, he was able to see things like their weaknesses, diet, behavior, everything of the sort. A new weakness he discovered in his Skill was that these things had barely any soul, instead just the slightest of wisps to take advantage of. It wasn’t even a true soul either, just a marker telling the world what these creatures were.
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They were like puppets, without any knowledge or sensation of what they were. Souls recorded how the animal was created, but he couldn’t see even that. They had no form of reproduction, no mind, no magic, no way to even heal. Dei asked himself if they would even have DNA if they were tested, because these things had nothing.
Past their souls, he got a good look at them visually as well. They had rough brown scales covered in spikes, and their heads and tails had little difference. They had almost no features at all, except for the five lines that started at the tip of their head, and ended around a sixth of the way down their body.
They just sat there for a few moments, looking at Dei, when one of them opened its mouth. The lines he saw that started near its pointed head actually split and peeled back, like a blossoming flower except a hundred times more disgusting.
The inside of their blossoming heads held thousands of rows of serrated teeth, and he prepared for it to attack in some way as it opened its jaw.
It let out a piercing screech, but the noise was not imbued with any mana at all. After that, its skull closed and the three rushed towards him.
Despite the slowness with which they dug into the wall of the Lorpee’s cave, they were not slow by any measure. They did not slither like snakes, but twisted in a corkscrew spiral like nothing else he’d ever seen. Watching closely, he could see the stone directly touching them immediately turn to sand, letting them surf on it like a wave.
Raising his fists he prepared to strike out when he saw he might not be able to, because they were giving him a wide berth
Realization struck him that they did not intend to attack, just run by him and escape. Surfing down the stone in their weird moving way, they even went up the walls to give him more space.
“Should I stop them?” Fendrascora asked, confused as well.
“No, just let them run by. I’m not really sure if The Mother would take it personally if I killed some of her children, but I don’t want to find out.”
Like that, the Lunar Spawn just… left. He’d been excited to test out some new combat techniques and actually win by a landslide for once, but saw no reason to actually hunt them down.
‘I’m starting to understand why I haven’t ever fought something weaker than me. Everything in the wilderness has to have a way to gauge enemies in order to pick its fights, and will run from something it isn’t confident in surviving.’
He felt a burst of Kindness mana from both helping the Lorpee’s and sparing the Lunar Spawn, and his Wrath didn’t even complain. The creatures held no ire from him, and it was actually in his best interest to leave them be rather than hunt them down. His Pandora’s Box was full though, and he didn’t want to suffer the effects of it expanding right now, so he decided to just compress it all down to absorb it instead, concentrating his Kindness mana further.
Underwhelming ‘battle’ out of the way, Dei walked closer to the Lorpee caves. There was now a hole in the rubble, and he leaned down, looking into it and seeing the swarms of Lorpee’s going absolutely nuts. Last time he’d been here, they waited patiently on the branches for him to walk into their cave before attacking. Now, they crawled around like a swarm of irritated ants, looking for anything causing trouble. It was such a drastic behavioral change that he wondered where it came from.
“This cave feels like you!” Clever said excitedly, causing Dei to take a step back and look at the Korgonda questioningly.
“What do you mean?”
“The magic, it smells like you! Right, Fendrascora?” turned towards her peripheral body behind them.
“Hm… I wasn’t paying attention, let me check,” she told them, and sent a thin tendril towards the hole. “Huh, it does feel like this cave is strongly radiating your mana.”
Dei shrugged his shoulders and moved closer. He was already here, might as well check out what the Lorpees were up to. When he looked into the cave a second time through the tiny hole, he identified one of the Lorpees passing by.
[Juvenile Lorpee Screamer - Level 53
The Lorpee are small rodents. This strain has adapted to a particularly high Wrath mana to enhance its physical strength and augment its sonic abilities. Lorpee Screamers have natural Vibration affinities to use for both communication and attack purposes.]
His eyebrows raised as he took a few more steps away. He did not want to get hit by a Lorpee which used Wrath mana to “augment its sonic abilities” as he tried to consider this new change.
After his battle with the Alpha Lorpee, the air had been thick enough with concentrated Wrath mana that even his stunted senses could feel it. At its most extreme, he could feel it with his other senses too, tasting the mana in the air.
It seemed that, when he left and sealed up the cave, the residual mana hadn’t simply dissipated like he’d first assumed. Instead, it managed to affect the newest generation of Lorpees such that Wrath was imbued into their bodies.
Even if that was the case though, Dei felt like it should have gone away by now. Surely the first generation of Lorpees would have absorbed all the residual mana he’d left, maybe producing a small amount of their own. It’d been months since he’d been here, there shouldn’t have been a thick enough to “strongly radiate his mana” as Fendrascora had put it. More than that, it was his mana that was exiting the cave, not just the Lorpee’s mana.
Something happened that allowed his mana to persist even now, and he was quite curious to see what.
Quickly checking how much Soul mana he had, he felt relief.
[583/10920 Soul]
That would be enough for a Projection. While he didn’t want to face their vibrational attacks, his Projection suffered from no such weakness, and was much more mobile than Dei ever would be normally.
Quickly telling Fendrascora and Clever his plan, asking them to watch over his body, they moved a further distance away as Dei poured three hundred and eighty six Soul mana into the spell, using his MP to cover the rest of it. He didn’t exactly need this projection to be powerful, and wanted to save the Soul mana if he could.
Leaving a singular normal mind in his body, most was placed into his Projection, and Dei felt his Identity split in two.
Looking down, he saw that he was now the pale white of a ghost, and turned around. He was almost startled by his own appearance as he looked rather terrifying.
The jagged scar on his cheek from when his jaw was ripped open looked more pronounced than he first assumed, and his eyes had taken on a more piercing quality. His left eye was still ruby, while his right eye was still amethyst. Both sparkled in the dim light of the surrounding crystals, helping bring attention to their unique look.
‘Who’s that handsome devil?’ he thought jokingly, and his physical body grinned.
Turning back to the Lorpee cave, Dei dropped down into the spirit realm. Luckily, he sensed no spirits around, so he didn’t delay any longer as he floated up into the air, easier than ever, and phased through the stone wall, into the familiar mini jungle he’d first begun his path to Slaughter.
[You have entered the Convergence of Wrath]
Dei froze as he read the notification, several things clicking into place.
‘I made a Convergence? More than that, it smells like me. This isn’t just a convergence of Wrath, this is a Convergence of MY Wrath. My affinity is imbued into each of these Lorpees’
Every Convergence supposedly had an anchor though, and he looked for this one now. It would be very bright to anyone with even a slight mana sense, but he was not one. That didn’t mean he couldn’t sense mana, just nothing outside of his body.
Dei felt as some of the Wrath mana in the air phased into his body, giving him a good sense for how dense it was. He flitted from one branch to the next, moving around the Convergence and sensing as more or less mana passed through him depending on where he went.
It wasn’t nearly as efficient as just sensing it in the air, but it wasn’t impossible for him to triangulate the densest source of it all as it was somewhere high above in the air, only slightly off-center for the Cavern.
Moving up the vines and branches, Dei kept a careful eye out, and knew the moment he spotted the Anchor.
It was… a leaf. A random leaf, with a bloodstain atop it. As he got closer, he could feel as waves of Wrath mana passing through him, and felt his mind become affected, though only slightly.
When he was around ten feet away, he decided to stop and study it a bit closer. The plants in the Lorpee cave were green, one of the few places he’d actually seen such plants because normally they tended to grow red underground. If not for this fact, he felt like he would’ve had a much harder time picking out the red stain.
The blood was still glistening, slick as though it were dripping down the leaf. As he watched it though, the liquid did not move, staying exactly where it was. Though it looked like a wet red leaf, it seemed to be that only in appearance.
Dei’s Identify could only look into the Soul Signatures of things. Last time he’d tried to Identify an Anchor, it failed completely. Now though he tried again, as it seemed this Anchor was based on living material.
[There was once a battle between two beings. The first seeked to guard his people, the second seeked survival. Neither could reconcile with the other, neither seeked to communicate for there was nothing to be said. They clashed, and the battlegrounds they fought upon became blessed with the fury and intent of both. The blood spilled becoming an eternal stain to life, an echo of their struggles.
In the quiet aftermath, the victor questioned if his spoils were worth their price.]
