Chapter 335: The Privals’ Powers
No fragnt of the monsters remained. No limbs, blood, or breath. Only the blue cores humd beside , my senses fuzzy and strange. Everything unveiled around as gravitation or mana, no physical feelings rushing in. Turning my awareness inward, I found no physical body. I existed as my dinsional wake alone, having disintegrated into nothing.
And from nothing, I returned.
My body reconstituted, phasing into existence. I stood among the liquid pit of dead behemoths and privals. I soaked them in while turning in every direction. Nothing nearby dashed or darted around, so I pocketed seventeen more blue cores. Other monsters in the distance stared at . From their gazes, fear replaced hunger as their perspective changed.
My fight left a scar over this slice of their ecosystem. It tore entire miles of plant life to nothing, leaving in an empty patch of cleared kelp. Above, Leviathan bead down with its radiance. In its glow, I spread my arms and bood for all to hear.
“I’m the Harbinger of Cataclysm.”
Mana crystallized around , siphoning into a chaotic storm of violence and energy and power. I seethed,
“This is where I’ll prove it.”
My supergolems dashed overhead, each of them vaporizing patches of the algae. Behemoths crashed against them, the giant monsters charging into my supergolems. Each crash added a cacophony of booming echoes while teeth, claws, and bone slamd into runes, tal, and mana. As clouds cleared, my golems showed their worth by purging the behemoths above.
With a patch of the algae-laden sky opened, I let out a warcry. My large body and tal makeup turned my human howl into a tallic roar, one that stretched out for miles. The prival eldritch stord over, and they gouged the dirt and our surroundings to attack. I funneled mana through every inch of my body, energy crystals delineating and filling out over .
They surged with flashes of light before crumbling into powder. The powder charged further, lting to plasmic streams. A miasma of energy floated off of , responsive to my will like an energetic expansion of my mind. Amassing a large pool of this dense plasma, I reached out my hands and rained singularities in all directions. Incoming privals vaporized.
From my hands, frenetic explosions expanded. Light and darkness filled the skyline. Surging echoes rained. Dollops of darkness consud patches of my vision, chaos surrounding . It all drained into the siphoning quiet. My blood and bones ignited as colossal flows of mana flooded through my body.
The runic marks sizzled and humd as the sheer volu of energy overwheld all in my sight. Whether it was living or dead, it didn’t matter. It all fell, the privals included. They crushed and pulped. They perished in a symphony of darkness and light, and my horizons shattered into fragnted, white ignition points.
It culminated in a kinetic harmony, a sonic wave that vaporized my surroundings. Dozens of massive craters ford in the rainbow bone field below. It was like an angry god scooped out the earth in a fit of rage. Awash in bloodthirst, the privals darted and rushed around the leftover, hissing destruction.
They flowed over with elental shockwaves ushering off their bodies. Embodying dozens of elents, they equaled my physical strength but not the will of my mind. Wielding my advantages, I lunged to a knee and primordialized myself. In silent pulse, I sent out a psionic ripple through the unguided mass of opal bones beneath .
The enormous, ancient consciousness roared out in anger. The fields of shining bones gained life, lding into a fluid mass that writhed and billowed like a shining sea. I peered up as the first prival arrived. IT was a monster of mana, its plasma engulfing my body.
Pure energy converted matter to a vacuum. Another beast rushed forth. A root mass crawled through my flesh and bones, trying to sap of life. It planted seeds in my body before a void ice monstrosity froze us both. Encased in the hardened mass, a sonic monster humd into the capsule and shattered into tiny fragnts. I clattered onto the bones as they gouged each other for my remains.
The butchery continued. The prival eldritch smothered from all angles, and I stayed in the mass of enraged bones. Energy amassed below us all, the iridescent remains enraged. This ancient monster pooled planets worth of raw power, the bones shimring. Above the ticking ti bomb, my body disintegrated from a dozen different angles, everything in my sight becoming teeth, stomach, acid, and drool.
I turned into a rippling ocean, my entire being a wave amongst primal forces. Ripped. Torn. Rived. Pulled into pieces and chewed on. Bitten and swallowed. My whole being fueled the hunger of many, my body’s energy turning into a culinary delight to the monsters swarming . They engulfed in a fury that overwheld my senses from all angles.
And yet, I ca no closer to death. They feasted on an immortal.
The bone below supercharged into liquid light. I warned my supergolems to hide within their enemies as protection. Below , the rainbow bones snapped out. A layer of spines wrenched into the primordials like roots from a tree, piercing those below. Those iridescent spines humd with reality-warping violence. Just before the abyssal below detonated, I recollected my body and thinned it down to the size of a needle.
Flowing out and around the elental constructs, I rushed above the horde. After a few seconds, an engulfing, absolute, and destructive plu of energy expanded. Radiation erupted, and a gamma burst fired off from the bones. As it passed, it decimated everything it touched. Once more, I hid behind my dinsional shield. Blocking a direct hit, the side burst still made contact.
It wrapped around , an invisible wave that expunged all life. It stripped and bubbled my skin before scorching my bones. The raw radiation heated every shard of tal that made . It disintegrated my exposed innards. It cooked my body. My golems fried within opposing behemoths, but those giant flesh shells absorbed most of the radiation.
As the burst of energy passed overhead, Leviathan’s radiance bead down above . With my surroundings quiet, I pulled my shield down and admired the destruction below. A dozen ancient eldritch died, glittering blue cores sizzling above the opal ossuary. Those orbs cackled and humd over the eerie silence.
As did three privals, three different star variants of the privals remaining. They soaked in the lingering radiation to restore their bodies, becoming whole once more. Before they restored to full force, I reached out with my arms, ripping more singularities through the eldritch masses. They dispersed and refocused on regeneration, giving valuable ti. Slicing through the air, I bolted from blue core to blue core, scooping up dozens in the blink of an eye. I tossed them into my personal dinsion like a greedy child pocketing their favorite candy. While I flicked the last core into storage, a star eldritch rejuvenated.
Its form billowed rays of light, each wave like solar flares scattering into the distance. Those light flows expanded over the sky, particles erupting in different colors of light. Aiming itself at , the prival fired towards in a violent, ripping dash. I reacted to it after it happened, the monster faster than my eyes could see.
I stared down, a glowing hole remaining in my chest. The creature whirled around and pulsed through once more, another gaping chasm forming in my body. It turned into an explosion of light, each pass leaving glowing singe marks through . Like gleaming swiss cheese, the star eldritch left impaled from all sides.
I stood, a glowing titan, as shockwaves erupted from each impact. Each collision colored the sa shade as the prival. The red hues molded with the sparked remnants, turning into a fireworks display. The other privals joined, and the destruction multiplied. Orange and yellow hues culminated with the red, and a vibrant sunset of sparks erupted from each passing second.
Unperturbed by the onslaught, my body regenerated with absurd vitality, each second containing a millennium’s worth of healing. I observed the intensity of the light swarms enveloping when my eyes allowed it. My death would’ve been beautiful, at least. As I tried swinging my arms, the privals ignored my physical attacks. I let out a ntal sigh, wondering why I even attempted such a simple solution to such a complex problem.
After all, these monstrosities were more than a handful. I took a second to think and shifted back to the Rise of Eden. Wielding quintessence, I generated a liquid coating of shining, polished tal over myself, and I hoped to reflect the monsters. The lustrous layer left no impact on their piercing attacks, the light creatures impaling through my shields with ease.
Trying a different strategy, I surrounded myself with a dense sphere of lead. The privals still ignored the shield, but I found a separate utility from my approach; the globe cloaked my movents. While piling the lead high, I psionically wielded this section of rainbow bone. The ancient, unford mind rumbled beneath , annoyed but not enraged.
Well, not yet, at least. Wielding the shining landscape, I wrapped a layer of bone over . The star beasts bounced off the illuminated surface, struggling to pierce the outer layer. I piled the opal shards overhead, and the privals bounced, thrumd, and pulsed over the shield of shining bones. They couldn’t beat while within here.
Sitting inside the protective bubble, I collected more mana. Planning on a ntal onslaught, I shifted to Event Horizon. I filled my refuge with crystallized ascendant mana. Minutes passed, and more layers of bone rushed over to keep isolated from my surroundings. I kept piling more and more mana on myself, turning the mana into dense plasma.
The wafting energy compressed down, becoming a writhing liquid of sentience. Using my primordial form, I turned the newly ford, chaotic mana into a thoughtful servant with mind magic. Taking a breath, I opened and closed holes in the rainbow bone shield at random. These tiny pricks allowed only one star beast to enter at a ti, ensuring a one on one scenario.
A few minutes passed before one of the star monsters squeezed into this tiny rainbow cave. I shut its exit behind it right as it snapped inside. Once within, the prival zood around inside the bubble, bouncing around from all angles. Cracks ebbed in the rainbow bones as intense forces erupted in the tiny cage. It vaporized like we lived in a miniature stellar core.
I tolerated the exposure, the mana-lit gloom turning into a fury bright as a blinding sun. I linked with the star beast and wailed at its mind from all directions. In tandem, the mana plasma soaked into the monster. The star beast writhed back with intense, overwhelming waves of psionic strength. It lacked any understanding of what it did, but its mind still carried a primal power.
Supporting my mana minion, I took on those crashing waves of the prival’s conscious. Other minds of mine slamd into the beast with my own psionic strikes. The ascendant plasma kept oozing in, and the star beast lost control over fractions of its body. With each piece that saturated, the prival lost more and more cognition.
But it died in a blaze of glory. It pounded, howled, and raged like a hurricane. We tore each other apart like three honey badgers locked in a cage. We gouged and gashed and ripped each other apart in a frenzy, but
as the psionic dust settled, we were winning. After a few hours, the prival beast’s control faded.
The monster’s ebb and flow of control devolved into the steady descent of this monster’s ego. Its orange fury gave way to the chaotic lightning of my ascendant mana. The star beast turned into an ascendant celestial, one controlled by . Taking a mont to observe, I looked at it while keeping our opal shield intact.
The star eldritch was the sa as before, a red sun with waves of energy erupting at all tis. However, the hum and crackle of ascendant lightning showed its ntal change. It oozed a darker crimson light as well, the beams almost soaking sunshine inwards instead of emanating it. The arcs of electricity even gave the monster an electric charge, and as a final touch, it opened a jaw mirroring my own helm’s toothy maw.
Satisfied with the results, I stuck with this capturing technique. I saturated the inner bone bubble with mana once more. After gaining control of another mana blob, I opened other pockets within the bone sphere around us. More minutes passed before I snagged the next star eldritch. With , the ascendant star beast, and the mana against it, we dog piled the star eldritch and converted it over the next hour. The last and final star eldritch lost its will the sa way.
With the three star beasts converted, I pulled the rainbow bones off of us. Our group stood in the only desolate zone for thousands of miles. The kelp grew towards our open patch, but my surviving supergolems wiped out the algae as it returned. Peering around, these monts were precious downti, so I used them to handle critical business.
I sent my converted star beasts towards the surface, having them assist my super golems with destroying the kelp as it grew closer. At the sa ti, I needed so peace and quiet to work, so I created an overhang of opal bones before encapsulating myself. Under Leviathan’s dimd radiance and surrounded by dead behemoths, I opened my grimoire and got to work.
And I stared at the pages, a blank sensation coming over . What was I supposed to work on? Sothing primordial, surely, but I lacked faith in my current direction of building cities and fighters. While overwhelming under most circumstances, my golems lacked the oomph to survive here. It left stunned.
On Leviathan-7, my super golems required constant maintenance and guarding to keep alive. Even with my intervention, a quick telepathic check showed just that, a golem’s silence aning a golem’s death. I winced at the loss, the ti invested in them wasted. They died because the enemies here overwheld even at tis.
In fact, each of these eldritch could destroy entire planets on their own if unleashed sowhere normal. To have my soldiers fight back, they needed that kind of world-ending power as well. While considering their next upgrade, I pulled out one shining blue core from storage, which would be the key moving forward.
Inspecting the ball, the perfect sphere mirrored a tiny gas giant with many strata spiraling around it. It was a tiny, electric-blue Jupiter in my palm. It even turned and cycloned like Jupiter, mana storms littering its surface. It reminded of the energy stored within my mana crystals, but these storms set into inviolable forms. In a sense, they seed…incorruptible.
As a comparison, mana crystals blew up if a person bumped them wrong. By contrast, the energy in these cores felt like they’d survive the death of stars. Hell, studying these things could help take my mana manipulation up a notch. That stability could make an excellent foundation for a golem’s mind since it reduced the risk of bloodthirsty insanity.
The cores even granted an endless power source, though my golems didn’t lack in that departnt. Those factors culminated until the dungeon hearts looked like perfect golem cores. Etching the cipher on an ever-shifting surface was a problem, however. Taking a step back, I considered my other prospects before continuing my research.
On my arrival to Leviathan, I wanted to establish control of the planet to co back. That was still my number one priority, but other concerns surfaced since I arrived. If I kept brute-forcing my initial goal, I’d just slow myself down. Instead of plowing ahead, I realigned my priorities, which ant studying ti magic.
If I gained ti magic soon after arriving, I could make the most out of every second afterward. Ti spent on learning about ti magic might end up being ti saved. Another priority would be creating a growing boundary for my cities. A defended zone wouldn’t be enough; my claim here needed to be absolute.
Taking a mont to consider those possibilities, I decided to take a risk by learning ti magic first. Since I understood this planet to so extent, I also had a good idea of what I needed to do going forward. I thought I’d get a few golems up and running to conquer this place, but that wouldn’t work. I’d expand after learning how to compress ti.
To that end, I set myself up for success. I made a set of thinking chairs, an obvious necessity. I also installed a workbench with a pile of steel plates beside it. I lted words into the tal slabs, and they recorded details about the dungeon hearts, Leviathan-7, and the weaknesses of certain eldritch.
I also established nas for everything here. I kept the terms I used in my head for the most part. The newly spawned eldritch from the sky were called behemoths, and the ones below were privals. For the kelp overhead, I nad it spawn algae, and the rainbow bones kept that na too. I also created divisions for the zones.
The top zone beca the void because life thinned to nothing above the spawn algae. The first layer below the algae beca the breeding grounds. As for the bottom layer smothered by opalescent skeletons, I nad it the ossuary. It held the bones of the dead, so the na fit. After getting everything set up and recorded, I stared around .
This was, by far, the most comfortable I’d been since I arrived. With information recorded and my priority list squared away, I sat down and contemplated my lessons from Chrona. Based on what Chrona explained to , ti manipulation required grasping at my surroundings and bending space.
I tried that before, and I failed each and every ti. These weren’t subtle failures either – each attempt was like smashing my face against a taphorical wall. Having thought about it for a while, I struggled because I was a separate dinsion. Since I existed outside of my surrounding space, I played by different rules.
Everyone else, including Chrona, blended into this ‘other’ surrounding . This caused so kind of rejection when I attempted to wield ti. This resistance mounted more and more as I developed my armor and myself. Every bottleneck I experienced had a familiar culprit behind it.
.
I an, yeah, it’s kind of obvious, but it wasn’t a limit in my abilities, talent, or understanding. In reality, I’d systematically stifled myself to retain so semblance of humanity. Tapping the edge of my head, I rembered my fighting style and different kinds of magic. Fighting with my fists didn’t even make sense anymore, and neither did keeping a human form.
But…I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t move on from who I was to who I had to beco. All this ti, I was afraid of sothing. I always thought it was of my power and potential, but that wasn’t it. It was the absurd changes that bothered . I had an idea of who I was, but I wasn’t that person anymore. I couldn’t be that person anymore.
The simple-minded Daniel that beat monsters into submission, it was fun being that guy. Hell, I built a lot of confidence and progress with that persona. I stood by my guns and plowed forward without looking back. I made mistakes, but I did my best to fix them. That was the issue. I couldn’t afford to miscalculate anymore.
In my hands rested the lives of billions. A quick squeeze and they’d die.
So…I couldn’t live a simple life with simple dreams. Beating monsters apart didn’t make a galactic empire great. I needed to be soone else entirely, which I’d made great strides in. I’d amassed the skills to use my abilities, but I never recognized the personal sacrifice required.
I’d never go back to being a child in Springfield with small worries. My concerns would expand and grow. In many ways, I ca to a crossroads in life. On one road, I could grow with my worries. On another road, I could watch my anxieties slowly overwhelm . If they ever did crush , I’d like to know I put it all on the line with no excuses left. Otherwise, my own guilt would outweigh any burdens I bore.
Because whether I wanted those burdens or not, they would co.
Staring down, the signs of what I changed into manifested in many ways. For instance, I no longer lost my senses when destroyed, even down to a puddle. When Eonoth roared and saved Lehesion from the Spatial Fortress, I uncovered that fact. The Old One created a dinsional wave, one I wasn’t a part of. As those tilines collapsed into one, I existed outside of them, so the dinsional ripple smashed from all sides.
Being mushed and living was one thing, but it hadn’t even knocked unconscious. I remained fully aware without a body. Staring down at my hands, a shiver raced up my spine. No human could do sothing like that, and the longer I ran away from that reality, the less I could do in the anti. So taking a mont, I accepted that I wasn’t this body anymore. I was the dinsional wake around more than anything else.
Blegh.
So, to master ti, I had to master this…space I’d evolved into. I crossed my legs, placed my hands on my knees, and closed my eyes. I stretched out my primordial wake, the aura enveloping my surroundings with a sense of cognition and control. Going further, I took a breath before pulling my consciousness out of my body, and I responded in kind.
To my chagrin, my awareness trickled out from my physical shell and into the space around . Despite that subtle expansion, most of my perception lingered in my head, aning I couldn’t escape my physical confines just yet. ditating on the exercise, I fell into a pattern of reaching out my awareness. With each attempt, I gained greater control up to a point.
Eventually, my brute force approach quit giving gains. I smiled at myself, rembering how I tackled my way through my early ventures without having to overthink. That wouldn’t work here. Taking a more cerebral approach, I tackled the issue from a different angle. I detached from my physical senses, as much as I could, at least.
Touch, sight, and sound all faded into nothing as my psyche floated outwards into the ether around . Like a fog of consciousness, I dispersed into my dinsional wake. I maintained awareness through my mana and gravitational senses. They didn’t co from physical organs or anything, so I kept them even without a physical body.
Those senses gave a different, strange view of the world around . Tiny fluxes rippled about while moving objects created subtle shifts in an endless void around . I interpreted these ripples, converting their esoteric machinations into a more visual understanding. Below, the planet stamped a gravitational blip on this place.
In the distance, the gravity well of Leviathan caved inward to a bottomless pit. It acted as a landmark, easing this visualization process. Gazing at the nulled center, gravity stopped holding aning near the black hole. By becoming infinite, it stretched beyond the limits of interpretation.
Weird.
Surrounding Leviathan’s pit, colossal strands of space rippled out in destructive waves. Sensing below that madness, this planet orbited the black hole at a breakneck pace, traveling on a stretched avenue of space. It mirrored how a satellite orbited the earth. We fell towards Leviathan at an absurd speed, but we also circled faster than we fell despite being in the Event Horizon.
Well, sort of.
The planet traveled a bit slower based on our ti’s standards. Still, with how stretched ti was here, we ended up experiencing that acceleration several tis before the outside world experienced it once. If I guessed right, that’s how Leviathan-7 was this close yet not within the black hole. However, I wasn’t a physicist, so this was my simple observation.
Regardless, this planet was a bullet in an endless vacuum, finding an equilibrium in the utter destruction around us. Back in the physical world, my hulking body stayed stationary and lifeless below. The runes dimd, and all motion ceased.
I took a mont before trying to rematerialize outside of my actual body. Instead of making a new body, I snapped back into my own shell, giving the husk life once more. As my eyes snapped open, I winced. I suppressed the urge to vomit, and a splitting pain pierced my head. It faded as quickly as it ca while I gasped at the surreal experience.
I waved off so lingering motion sickness, and I shook my head before resolving myself once more.
Again.
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