Chapter 102: Beast Beyond The Mortal Realm [100 PS Bonus - ]
Chapter 102: Beast Beyond The Mortal Realm [100 PS Bonus Chapter]
The cosmic essence within his body began to pump rapidly, moving in tight, hyper-accelerated cycles that charged his muscles and flooded every part of his body.
He violently forced his earth magic downward into the ground beneath his boots, releasing heavy, rhythmic pulses of energy that made the tracking serpent lock its focus entirely onto him.
At the same time, his metal magic flared, causing the star-metal battleaxe in his hands to vibrate with high-frequency intensity. To top it off, Uhtred activated his heat magic around his entire body.
The ambient air warped with blistering, distorted heat signatures, and the red sand beneath his feet instantly calcified, turning into shards of jagged glass. He was burning his cosmic essence without a single shred of care for his reserves.
To an outsider, Uhtred’s actions would seem like nothing but pure suicide. It went completely against his usual behavior. He was not a savior who sacrificed himself for others, and he was not someone who made pointless moves that led to a dead end.
But Uhtred knew exactly why he was doing this.
The exact instant the giant serpent had burst out of the desert sand earlier, Uhtred had used his inspect skill on it. Noticing its Level 25 status, he knew this thing had officially passed the boundary of the mortal realm, entering into whatever advanced realm lay beyond.
But that wasn’t even what had driven Uhtred’s intense interest. Rather, it was the body of the serpent itself.
It was brimming with thick, compressed cosmic essence. The energy circulated beneath the thick scales of the monster, held tightly within its flesh without a single drop of leakage.
This beast was a living, breathing essence battery packed chock-full of energy.
Through his perception, Uhtred had sensed not just one, not just two, and not even three independent congregations of cosmic essence trapped underneath the creature’s skin.
There were several of them... At least five.
It made absolutely no sense based on standard system biology, but this beast possessed at least five separate essence cores within its body, yet there wasn’t a single trace of leakage into the environment.
Throughout the afternoon, aside from developing the clamp technique to temporarily stall the flow of his cosmic essence loss, Uhtred had been trying to decipher the true underlying motives of the System for this specific trial.
The trial was explicitly called the "Age of Hunger". And from everything he had seen — the lack of environmental essence, the rapid breakdown of their reserves, and the inevitable starvation every single participant in this trial was going to face within a day or two at the very most — it pointed to one fact...
The System was testing which strain of man was truly adapted to handling cosmic essence under absolute scarcity.
This trial wasn’t just about killing beasts, and it wasn’t about hiding. The System was forcing them into a corner to see if they could create techniques and methods to manipulate cosmic essence regardless of the barren environment.
Case in point, the moment Uhtred had created the clamp technique earlier in the afternoon, his cursory glance at the trial rankings later had made him raise his brow in surprise.
His name had shot up from number 69 all the way to number 31 on the leaderboard, just from creating that single technique alone.
Uhtred’s focus returned to the present and his eyes locked onto the charging mound of sand about to reach him.
The ground beneath his feet trembled madly. He raised his battleaxe into a high ready position, closing his eyes for a brief, calculated moment.
What he was about to do next was nothing short of a gamble, but he knew it needed to be done.
No... more accurately, he wanted to do it.
Aside from giving his teammates the opportunity to break away, he was genuinely and deeply curious about this creature.
He wanted to see for himself what made it run and what made it tick. He wanted to learn from the one entity he had encountered that leaked absolutely no essence... and copy its method.
With a sudden, violent burst from below, the ground beneath Uhtred’s feet completely gave way, and he felt himself entering a freefall.
His eyes remained closed as his senses spread out to their absolute maximum limit, his fingers tightening around the handle of his axe as he waited for the exact microsecond of impact.
Then, his eyes snapped open.
He was smack-dab in the middle of a fall directly into the pitch-black darkness of the serpent’s open throat. The large, curved teeth of the constrictor were coming down on him with terrifying physical force, intending to crush his body to splinters before he would fall into the depths of its bowels.
But everything Uhtred had been preparing for was for this exact moment.
Channeling both the heat and metal aspects of his cosmic essence through his arms, the blade of his star-metal battleaxe morphed, expanding into a wider, razor-sharp edge coated in a layer of boiling thermal heat that deformed the air.
In that moment of absolute focus, Uhtred had extended his heat manipulation directly onto the physical tips of his blade, a technique he had just come up with on the spot without any prior practice.
His arms came down with brutal force just as the razor-sharp teeth of the serpent closed over his body to sever him in two.
The superheated star-metal blade crashed directly into the rows of teeth, cleaving through the solid bone with immense force. An entire tooth shattered out of place, releasing a muffled, pained howl from the depths of the serpent’s throat as its massive head snapped wildly from the impact.
The shattering bone created a small, vital gap in the closing jaws, providing enough space for Uhtred slipped cleanly through the space as the mouth to slip through cleanly as the jaws closed shut behind him.
Because he was no longer caught between the grinding surfaces of its teeth, his body fell whole and unbroken directly into the deep, suffocating darkness of the serpent’s bowels.
He could feel the internal muscles of the creature constricting violently, attempting to compress him and force him out of its stomach channels, but it was already too late...
Uhtred turned his body in the air as he free-fell into the pitch black below, allowing the deep darkness of the titan to claim him completely.