The most interesting thing among many interesting things was Lion Prince.
Zarian’s real tail remained unchanged while grafted to the back of his spinal cord at the armored nape of his monster neck. There was a hollowed space there where his real body existed in the nape. Nerve links were sprouted from him like fungal plant matter made of aty fibers, connecting his true body to his monster body.
Yeah … he was so sort of titan shifter or whatever from that one ani show.
Or so deeply weird bio ch.
It was kind of freaky.
Granted, that wasn’t even the weirdest part.
His monster body was sitting in the middle of a bloody field, and it was chewing on a legendary spear. There was a pile of other legendary items gathered in front of him that Para hadn’t consud herself.
She’d stripped the stuff off the already dead bodies left in the field before her giant flesh-and-bone tentacles masquerading as fox tails gulped down each corpse.
At this point, was the fox identity really accurate enough?
He’d done it for the Naruto potential.
He could kind of fit it still.
But his and Para’s fox monster interpretation was far more horrifying and grisly than Kurama.
Whatever, that wasn’t the point. The point was Lion Prince was bending reality actively for Zarian and Para’s sake.
Lion Prince made their monstrous form easier to maintain as long as he kept playing gas.
It turned out that by actively placing a winning condition – a carrot – in front of other contestants, Lion Prince worked a little more toward Zarian and Para’s favor. Not by much, but enough for this one-hundred-foot body of theirs to remain stable.
They also had the unfair advantage of being able to use all of their abilities and lesser known power chanics, despite the Darkrun Debuff and the lack of a wizard hat.
They could promote more of Para’s curse magic this way.
This form of theirs, along with the extra aura and power from having a nuclear core, lent Para more creativity for producing curses. And those curses could bypass high quality defenses, sapping both vitality and aura while leaving their victims starved.
It took a while for the curses to perate and work on their victims, but anyone who survived the gas long enough would get heavily affected by the curses and would rarely survive any further. Once the curses struck, they struck hard.
Though Zarian imagined if Para applied Aura Mastery, sorcery, and her curse magic with more intention, she could make the curses stick faster and harder. It was another thing on a laundry list for them to practice.
The legendary spear snapped apart after Zarian’s monster teeth, aura, and sorcery chewed through the weak points in the material and the enchantnts. A burst of various elental magic tried to escape with a violent eruption, but just couldn’t.
Zarian’s hunger for knowledge and his purification trait stifled the flashy death wail of the legendary item, feeding him with little consequence.
Imdiately, he grabbed a large war hamr and tossed it into his mouth.
His monster teeth cut into the legendary materials while the edges of his sorcery sliced apart the enchantnts. He gnawed free the runes and slobbered over the aning of each symbol before he tore them down into sothing too indistinguishable to interpret.
Another impressive implosion of violent magic tried to escape him and just couldn’t. The remaining pieces ended up swallowed as Zarian cross-referenced all he learned from his latest al with his tutelage from under Ruvaria.
There was still so much he didn’t know.
Many of these legendary items ca from other worlds, and those worlds had alien runes. They had different ways to organize runes and different ways to put all of that into effective enchantnts.
They also had different ways to connect enchantnts into a series or network of enchantnts that one legendary item could carry.
But even then, runes and enchantnts from the Star System had so similarities. Items from outside of the Star System were even more alien. The functions, at least, were still mappable once he chewed enough. But how they connected runes into enchantnts was like learning a different language again and again.
It was almost ntally exhausting even for his free evil 11.
The spear alone had twelve different minor enchantnts before Zarian had gnawed his way through all of them. That many could beco greater than the sum of their parts or provide multiple magical benefits that most adventurers would love to have.
However, Zarian knew Hannah had found it more effective to enchant items with fewer abilities that were extrely potent than to cover items with as many little enchantnts as she could get away with.
Zarian could tell which items followed the tighter, leaner, and more potent designs compared to others regardless of the worlds or universes they ca from, which made it easier to study them based on those two categorical distinctions.
The leaner enchanted items had a stronger identity and held up better to his gnawing. The more jack-of-all-trade items ca with so surprises and unique complexities, but they broke easier, and their enchantnts seed shallower to his sorcery taste buds.
He found himself more satisfied with the leaner and more focused gear, since their stronger flavor made learning from them easier even if they ca from another universe.
“I wonder what Ruvaria would think of eating legendary stuff for more sorcery?” Zarian asked aloud. “I bet Reiki would find it interesting. Am I like a dungeon now? I’m not sure if I’m growing new stats from eating this stuff. Hannah would want to study and Para for sure. What if we can create legendary items from our body? They’ll be cursed … but a badass bone blade is undeniable even if it’s cursed.”
All these questions were fun to think about, but creating legendary items wouldn’t be that simple for him. Zarian and Para would need their shapeshifted constructs to maintain a legendary quality to produce legendary materials consistently.
Then they would have to focus on enchanting and nothing more to produce real legendary gear that Hannah could do far, far faster. So maybe he couldn’t beco an enchanted gear factory of legendary proportions.
But he and Para could be a badass self-producer for the infrequent occasions, couldn’t they?
There was a lot to consider with his wildly flexible and terrifying profile. Para’s multiple powers within one skill added more layers to Zarian’s already complex Ultra God adventurer existence.
Thankfully, he could chew on it even if he wasn’t really eating the stuff himself.
His monster body existed because of Parasite Phantom 2. It was his will and fronted monster mouth that did the chewing and the sorcery work while Para handled the actual digestion of the chewed up materials.
It was for this reason Zarian could keep lying to himself about his technical cannibalistic habits. So things weren’t worth exploring, and Para would gladly take the bla for that.
“What do you think, Para? Will we grow our profile by eating stuff like this and eventually be able to create an armory of legendary cursed gear? Maybe not as fast or plentiful as Hannah, but maybe enough to outfit others in a pinch when Hannah’s not around? What if we eat the crown? Then again, that was a personal gift from Ruvaria. I wouldn’t want to eat that. We’ll have to find other mythical items to eat to see what happens.”
So many things to do and explore.
So many things to consider.
He hadn’t been this chatty in a while, but two weeks of being a frenzied hunter of gas and at would do that. Maybe he should go find a dungeon to test stuff further. Or he should wait for Para to recover.
Para hadn’t responded to any of his words. She didn’t shout ‘at’ either. She was still trying to regain her sense of self after two weeks of going berserk from Valin’s escape.
Ugh.
Valin.
Both Zarian and Para growled from multiple mouths, with one on Zarian’s shifted face and the others on the ends of Para’s nine at-and-bone tails.
Neither had gotten over Valin’s escape. But there was nothing they could do about it other than feast, grow, collect points, and make it to the Final Round.
Zarian looked around for the first ti since the tournant started and took in the Super World of Steam, Jungles, and Claws.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Steam clouds covered the skies, diffusing the light of three suns, one being from the Star Core and two others belonging to the Super World.
Every jungle tree had claws growing from their bark, claws growing from their leaves, and more claws extending from their branches. The fruits had claws. The bushes, vines, and roots had claws. The insects had claws on their eyes and wings.
Wriggling his monster toes, Zarian dug into the moist earth and found rocks … that were shaped like claws.
When he focused his hearing, both physical and supernatural, he noticed all the steam vents surrounding him.
Most contestants had to move along trails between major steam vents. The faster and louder the hissing vents, the hotter the steam, and only the scrappiest of jungle trees and toughest creatures could live near those powerful vents.
Zarian noticed the plant life here had adapted to the reduced light by having dark leaves on the verge of being black. And they used subtle magic that dug tunnels through the steam fogs and clouds above to let in more light from the three suns.
It was a mighty world. A world that was certainly not lesser.
Zarian was certain a Super World was a fancy na for a Master World brought down from a Greater Realm to a Lesser Realm. He could tell through his devourer trait and wondrous senses. It wasn’t one hundred percent, but it sounded about right to him.
Instead of moving on to explore the world further, Zarian kept eating the legendary gear and waiting on Para to recover her sense of self. As he ate, he checked on his Super Shade Spider System 2 and noticed that half of his spider army remained alive.
The skill was one of the more comprehensive skills Zarian knew, living up to its na as a ‘system skill,’ which ant he had two weeks’ worth of stored information and SITREPS from his spiders.
They’d sent him a huge log of updates, almost to an overwhelming degree, which he absorbed in a few seconds – all two weeks of militant shade spider violence in the sweaty and snatchy jungle.
Updated fully, Zarian was amazed by how much work they’d done. The shade spiders had taken on high-level monsters, Master Ranker monsters, and other Master Ranker contestants.
They’d even tested themselves against Super Dungeons, taking on deadly traps, unique monsters, and labyrinthine dwellings of a twisted nature. Unfortunately, they had no wins over Super Dungeon Bosses, but Zarian was impressed by how far the shade spiders had gone while handling multiple objectives.
Now the biggest question remained: how many Tournant Points had he collected so far?
Zarian didn’t imagine too much. He and Para hadn’t focused on those points as much as they should’ve.
Tournant Points: 3,934,234,789
Zarian blinked at the numbers.
He checked so notifications, specifically the ones that gave him the most.
When he found what he was looking for, his teeth snapped down too hard on a legendary item he wasn’t ready to finish. He lost chunks from his shifted monster mouth from the surprise eruption.
The damage disappeared fast with new growth as Zarian sat flabbergasted in the bloody field.
Apparently, the shade spiders had done the smart thing when facing contestants. They’d forced most contestants to surrender, and by accepting their surrender as extensions of Zarian, they sent contestants ho and took their points.
Enough of those ca with the largest gains compared to killing contestants or the local monsters.
The tournant design was brilliant for a pacifist. It pushed for contestants to survive and head back ho instead of being outright slaughtered.
A part of Zarian felt ashad that he and Para hadn’t accepted surrenders from their victims the past two weeks.
They would’ve had more points.
Granted, he vaguely recalled scenes where adventurers were outright attacking and killing other adventurers despite the ‘surrender’ chanic.
It seed like they’d stopped caring about collecting Tournant Points. Zarian figured it was his fault sohow and shrugged his monster shoulders, letting it be.
He kept chowing on legendary items until there weren’t any more. By that point, Zarian noticed his monster body was tougher. It was more than just flesh and at. All of those legendary materials beca a part of the body like added minerals hardening his monster bones and muscles.
When Zarian stood fully to his one-hundred-foot height, he felt weighty and dangerous. And he wasn’t talking alone to himself anymore.
“I am back,” Para said. “I am , though that is dubious at best.”
“You are you. You will always be you. Even when you change, that new you is still you,” Zarian said.
Para sighed. “I’m almost too afraid to ask for more food. This form of ours is…”
“Demanding, I know.” Zarian smiled. “Go ahead and cast Void Paradise through the shade spiders.”
“Thank you.”
Zarian felt Para channel magic through him. She cast the complicated and nightmarish spell without too much trouble as the shade spider bards danced over the corpses of the defeated many miles away.
The air darkened above the wizard phantom duo before a corpse half as large as their body fell through.
Para’s tentacle-tails whipped up, multiple mouths gaping open and ripping the corpse apart for fresh sustenance.
anwhile, Zarian updated the wards and arrays containing the nuclear cube. He added new aura sorcery cables that directed the irradiated magic into purification fields, increasing their aura supply.
They needed the extra energy for what was to co. But that ca with surprisingly real drawbacks.
All the magical transmutations created excess heat that sapped so much of their efficiency that even Zarian’s Aura Transcendence struggled a little.
So instead of magicking that problem away and worsening their efficiency, Para opened up vents along the ribs and behind the shoulders and vented the excess heat out as aty and smoky steam that would lt non-rankers into soup.
Zarian found his and Para’s combined monster body becoming more efficient, more energetic, more united. He thought of a new ga to keep Lion Prince happy and bend reality further to favor this monstrous form and all of its unfair advantages.
Then, as an added touch, he unlocked One Percent Darkness.
The eyes of his half-flesh, half-fanged, half-masked monster face turned darker than dark, like the bottommost layer of the void. Lines of darkness flowed down the edges of his and Para’s dark crimson and monstrous form while reinforcing the interior.
It was a risk to use his darkness like this, which was why he used a fraction of One Percent Darkness. This was part of a new philosophy he’d workshopped with Ruvaria prior to the tournant.
If he were to have a dao like Naomi, it would be one of control. He needed to practice that control, even in small ways.
If he could still use his Overwhelming Darkness without others noticing or thinking him the Dark Emperor, then his mission to control his darkness would gain further ground at a faster rate. Through better control, he could grow stronger and faster.
“Ready, Starlight?” he growled.
“Let us explore, Isaiah. It would be a nice change of pace.”
Zarian took his first conscious step in exploring Jumunja, the Super World of Steam, Jungles, and Claws. He knew where to go after having so much observational data sent by his shade spider army through their system skill.
He had a few interesting vistas in mind to see, though he wasn’t sure what he would do if he ran into other contestants. He might decide to play so gas for the sake of Lion Prince. And Para might still decide to eat them just because.
But at least they would be more thoughtful about it.
In the anti, Zarian and Para turned further inward to make further improvents to their monstrous body. It didn’t take long to shift around things, add more arrays, add more enchantnts where applicable, and work on whatever crazy ideas that their free evil 11 minds could co up with.
Zarian even went as far as looking at his profile to refresh himself on what was possible.
Origins: Zarian Sainte-Darkrun, 23 yr-old Human, Born Late Winter, Dreaded Outsider, Dungeon Master, Freedom Leader, Aura Master, Alpha Gnoll Elder, Wizard Hunter, Hell Eater, Shadowfell Husband, Master Ranker, Dark Saint, Ultra God, System Defender, Dark Emperor, Sorcerer Prince, Carrowmore Tournant Contestant
Level: 136
Class: Conquest Wizard (Mythical)
Rank: Master (9th Mage)
Alignnt: Free Evil 11
Tournant Points: 3,934,234,789
Traits (13 Total): Dark Affinity (Rare), Thematic Law/Floridian Mindset (Divine), Aura Mastery (Legendary), Overpowered Tis Two (Legendary), Devourer of Secrets and Stories (Legendary), Eldritch Existence (Legendary), Outer Planar Scourge (Mythical), Aura Transcendence (Legendary), Breaker of Realms and Immortals (Mythical), Aura Purification (Legendary), Long Live The Emperor (Legendary), Adaptive Sorcery Master (Legendary), Twenty Master Locks Sealing Style (Mythical).
Alpha Skills (6/6): Overwhelming Darkness (Level 100), Lion Prince (Level 77), Parasite Phantom 2 (Level 45), Super Shade Spider System 2 (Level 38), Super Speed Force 2 (Level 35), Force of Sorcery (Level 7).
Beta Skills (6/18): Wizard Body Conversion 2 (Level 28), Intense Arcana Hat 3 (Level 67), Advanced Grimoire of Black Magic 3 (Level 99), Advanced Grimoire of the Voidling Exile 4 (Maxed), Advanced Grimoire of the Hell Gator 4 (Maxed), Advanced Grimoire of Freaky Morphs 4 (Maxed).
Black Magic Spells (3/4 Learned): Unfinished Gravity Spell (Unknown), Hellbent Skeleton Legion (Mythical), ga Desolation Blood Inferno (Mythical), Atmospheric Torture Cannon (Mythical).
Voidling Exile Spells (3/3 Learned): Void Sword (Mythical), Void Paradise (Mythical), Void Storm (Mythical).
Hell Gator Spells (4/4 Learned): Hell Gator Death Swamp (Legendary), Super Dreadnought Hell Gator (Mythical), Violent Hell Gator Evolution (Mythical), Hell Gator Sacrifice (Mythical).
Freaky Morphs Spells (4/4 Learned): Grand Sli Transmutation (Legendary), Big Bad Berserk Polymorph (Mythical), Summon Lesser Nephalem (Mythical), Eldritch Mutilation Hive Infection (Mythical).
Stats Per Level: 6 Willpower, 2 Wonder, 3 Mysticism, 12 free
Willpower: 1246
Strength: 535
Agility: 762
Wonder: 1559
Mysticism: 1325
Free: 0
Total Stats: 5,427
Achievents (62 Total): Honored Outsider (Divine), SSS Dance with White Silk Reiki (Epic), Heroes of the Eternal Garden Kingdom (Legendary), Divine Knock Knock (Divine), Junior Manslaughterer (Uncommon), Initial Pacifist Gauntlet (Rare), First Human Gnoll Elder of Corma (Epic), SSS Genius Beyond the Lore Eater (Epic), Boon Wrecker (Divine), Befriending Gods (Divine), Rare Dungeon Master (Rare), Lizard Slayer (Uncommon), Divine Enemy (Divine), Dreaded Outsider (Divine), Freedom Leader (Divine), Master Breaker (Mythical), Attrition Warfare (Legendary), Lesser World Boss Killer (Divine), Arch Cherub Silencer (Divine), You Got a Friend in (Epic), Make a God Cry (Divine), Keep Infinita Safe (Divine), Legendary Lair Conquest (Legendary), Greater Boon Avatar Domination (Divine), Foundational Cultivator (Rare), Head Pats for Gnolls (Epic), Imnse Training Obstacle (Epic), Troll Drinker (Uncommon), Bringing Aura to a Wizard Duel (Epic), Crossdeath Conqueror (Mythical), Immoral Conventions of Mass Destruction (Legendary), Hell Gate Crawler (Epic), Hell Gate Closer (Legendary), Hell Gate Leader (Epic), Hell Gate Boogeyman (Legendary), Hell Gate Genocider (Legendary), Hell Gate Devil Destroyer (Legendary), Main Quest Success (Legendary), Level 100 Success (Epic), Enter the Master Ranks (Legendary), Unlikely Retreat (Epic), Lesser World Wizardry Breakthrough (Legendary), Planetary Terraforr (Mythical), Moon Wrecker (Mythical), Civilization Terrorizer (Mythical), One Thousand Willpower (Epic), First Killer of Corrupted 1 (Mythical), Shaker of the World of Castles and Caverns (Mythical), Survivor of a Champion Regressor (Mythical), Peak Lesser World Massacre (Divine), First Star System Defenders Against Invaders (Divine), Ultimate Team Destruction Maneuver (Legendary), Mythical Wolf Dragon Conquerors (Mythical), Lesser World Imperial Rulers (Epic), Dark Ritual Avatar (Mythical), One Shot Ka-Boom (Legendary), First Star System Counter Invader (Divine), There’s An Apocalypse Wherever You Go (Mythical), Dragon Army Crusher (Mythical), The Dark Emperor (Mythical), Survive Your First Sowhat Serious Fight With The Dragoness (Divine), Brutal Absolute Trainee (Mythical).
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