Dark crystalline wings swept in deadly arcs, every swing cutting down countless lives and dyeing the falling rain a deeper shade of red.
Each torn body, each organ scattered across the blood-soaked ground seed to feed sothing. From those wings, a dark, smoke-like substance spread thicker and wider with every kill—a suffocating fog of corruption swallowing the battlefield.
Adyr didn’t notice. He wasn’t thinking. He was enjoying it—the slaughter itself. And just like him, his Malice was feeding too. Growing wilder. Expanding faster. Every second he kept killing, it grew more, beyond control.
Because this ti, he hadn’t held himself back.
The monster inside him—the bloodlust he usually forced into silence—he’d let it loose. He’d allowed his dark aura, his grim Presence, to rge with the spreading Malice without limit.
And this wasn’t just an aura anymore. It had beco a real phenonon. A deadly influence. Right now, millions of people, safe behind their screens, were unknowingly exposed to it. Many had already died. Not from his physical attacks, but from the sheer psychological pressure radiating from his Malice. Their minds simply collapsed.
Adyr didn’t know how far this effect had reached. He didn’t know how many innocent lives were lost because of him. But even if he knew, it wouldn’t change anything.
If anything, he’d find it amusing. Maybe even satisfying. Another broken record: how many lives are killed indirectly, just by existing.
Killing hundreds, thousands of mutants? That was expected.
But killing thousands of humans—by accident? That felt like a personal achievent.
And as for what people thought of him? Whether they saw him as a psychopath, a monster, a threat to the very society he was supposed to protect... He simply didn’t care anymore.
Because he understood one simple truth:
They needed him.
It didn’t matter how dangerous he was. It didn’t matter how many died because of him.
He was powerful, and in the eyes of rational people, power itself ant safety, no matter the cost.
Also, Adyr wasn’t just killing and enjoying the carnage—he was training.
Specifically, his Sword Art of Existence talent.
He wasn’t holding any sword, yet every movent of his dark crystalline wings was deliberate—each arc, each strike, executed like a sword technique.
After evolving his Architect talent into Maleficent Architect, a Genesis-ranked talent, he’d understood sothing fundantal: bloodline talents were different. Unlike normal talents, you couldn’t develop them through conventional thods. To unlock or advance them, he had to think differently. He had to reshape what already existed—mold it according to his own understanding.
And now, applying that sa logic, he believed the key to advancing his bloodline talent lay in redefining his swordplay itself.
So, instead of using actual swords, he was treating his wings as swords.
It was unconventional, but it worked.
He’d already grasped several insights—concepts he couldn’t reach even when training with physical blades. The system hadn’t confird his advancent yet—no ssage acknowledging Level 2 had appeared—but he was sure it wasn’t far away.
It would take ti. But that was acceptable. The mutant army surrounding him didn’t look like it would be wiped out anyti soon, so he allowed himself the luxury of patience.
Seconds blurred into minutes. Minutes bled into hours.
"Hours? Oh, fuck." Adyr froze. His expression tightened as he abruptly deactivated the Crystal Husk skill, causing his wings to return to their pristine white form.
The battlefield around him was drenched in crimson—mangled, disfigured body parts strewn across the ground. He glanced down at his wrist device to check the ti.
He had always tracked ti with near-perfect precision, a mind wired to follow the passing of seconds like clockwork. But now... after indulging himself, after surrendering to the buried hunger he had kept chained for so long, he had lost track. As if drunk, he had let the mont consu him.
"56 minutes?" He muttered, stunned.
He had been slaughtering mutants for 56 minutes straight. And that ant Duskrend Spark’s Crystal Husk skill had remained active the entire ti.
A simple calculation followed. At a burn rate of 0.1 energy per second, 56 minutes translated to 336 energy spent.
Normally, his energy reserves remained stored in crystalline form back in Twilight Land. Though his energy body could function separately from his physical form, even a stray thought allowed him to convert his crystals into usable energy near-instantly. What he once considered an advantage had now turned against him.
It had cost him.
Opening his status panel, Adyr exhaled sharply when he saw the result. His remaining energy reserve was down to 20.
"I fucked up. When was the last ti I lost control like this?" The thought cut through the haze as he scanned the battlefield.
Yet... relief crept in.
Around him lay over a thousand dead mutants—each one modified under the Spark’s influence, each carrying a Level 2 crystal embedded in its skull. Scattered further out were hundreds more, frozen in terror, waiting to be harvested.
Rough estimation: around 1,500 units of energy ready for collection.
"Okay... I didn’t waste everything after all," Adyr muttered, half in self-reassurance. And then he rembered—the system ssage he’d received monts earlier.
[Talent Recognition: "Sword Art of Existence (Lv2) (Genesis)" confird.]
- Wielding life in one hand, swinging death with the other, you are the judge of worth, the lawgiver of existence.
- Proceed with registration to the Status Panel?
- Cost: 800 Energy
- Rewards: 160 Free Stat Points
Another "Fuck" escaped from his lips when he saw the cost.
The Level 4 Observer talent had cost him 400 energy, and now the Level 2 bloodline talent was nearly doubling that.
He also realized sothing—there was no extra reward this ti besides free stat points.
"Looks like no upgrade to Presence," he muttered, understanding settling in.
Presence did not seem like a skill improved through leveling, he concluded. While butchering the mutants, he had felt his Presence and Malice sohow growing, though he had not lingered on the thought at the ti. Now, recalling it, the sensation seed intriguing.
As if these two skills—whatever they truly were—were evolving alongside him, growing in step with his ntal and physical self.
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