Chapter 8: First Evolution

Koda had barely crawled into a narrow cave a mile from where he’d landed, looking for somewhere quiet to let the harvested essence settle, when his scales started to crack.

The scales split like old paint peeling off wood, dark flakes falling away from his forearms and shoulders in brittle sheets. Underneath, dark and denser new scales pushed through. Though they were still soft and raw where they met air for the first time.

’This is; this is not what I expected.’

The process was painful. Koda gritted his teeth and pressed his back against the cave wall, riding it out. His bones ached next, a deep, grinding pressure settling into his shoulders and spine as something inside him densified. Then it drew tighter, rebuilt itself into a sturdier frame. His whole body felt like it was being poured into a slightly different mold.

It hurt. But it wasn’t the kind of hurt that made him afraid.

’This is significant growth. I have to endure it,’ he thought.

He held onto that thought and let the process run its course.

Somewhere beneath the pain, the Devouring Origin was working too.

He could feel it, a distant sorting process happening in the background of his awareness. The pale and silvery human soul essence he’d absorbed in the basement, wove itself into the dark Infernal foundation already burning behind his ribs.

The dense and aggressive demonling essence from the Imp also settled in alongside it, reinforcing whatever the human essence had started.

’It’s not just adding power. This is purely refining it, sorting through what’s useful and building with it.’

The ember behind his ribs swelled steadily through the night, pressing outward against something he hadn’t noticed before; a small, dense point at the very center of his chest. It was cool and solid compared to the fire surrounding it.

He didn’t know what that was yet. He’d only known that it hadn’t been there yesterday.

Exhaustion eventually won out over curiosity, and Koda’s eyes slid shut in the middle of the transformation, his body still working on itself even as his mind gave out.

What seemed like hours later, he woke to a body that didn’t feel entirely his own.

Koda flexed his fingers first, testing them the way he had after his very first kill. The response was faster this time, sharper, with none of the sluggish delay he’d grown used to. He sat up slowly, and the movement itself told him something had changed significantly; he felt less strain and effort when moving, like his own weight had gotten easier to carry overnight.

He looked down at his arms.

The gray-black scales covering them had darkened further, packed tighter together, with none of the faint gaps he remembered from before. His dorsal ridges, when he reached back to touch them, felt firmer under his claws, less like flexible spikes and more like something closer to armor.

His tail had changed too. He gave it an experimental swing, and the arrow-shaped tip cut through the cave’s stale air with a faint hiss, noticeably sharper than it had been.

He clenched both fists.

KRRRSHK.

The three bone talons on each hand slid free with a distinct grinding crack, longer than before, the edges catching what little light filtered into the cave with a dull, wicked gleam. He turned his hands slowly, studying them, watching the talons retract and extend again at the tension in his fists.

’Peak Stage Demon Awakening Realm,’ he thought, ’I’ve hit the top of this realm.’

He didn’t need to guess at what came next. Beneath the fire behind his ribs, that small, dense point he’d noticed during the transformation still sat there, dormant.

’A seed. Something that’ll become a real Core, eventually.’

Not yet though, since forming a core would take time. A lot of it, probably, going by how much effort just this one stage had taken. He filed the thought away and pushed himself to his feet, testing his balance in the new body.

He hurried out to test his newly gained strength. After much search, he found a scavenger demon an hour later, picking through the bones of some half-eaten carcass near the mouth of a ravine.

It looked up at him and hesitated whether to run or stay, head tilting. Koda recognized the type of demon immediately; it was roughly his own size and at the late stage Demon Awakening Realm, a level below the peak stage. This kind of creature would have sent him running for cover only a day ago.

The demon didn’t run. It bared its teeth instead, deciding, apparently, that Koda still looked like an easy meal.

It lunged.

Koda didn’t bother dodging.

He caught the scavenger by the throat mid-leap, one clawed hand closing around it with enough force to stop its momentum dead in the air.

The creature thrashed, claws raking uselessly across his forearm, barely scratching the newly hardened scales beneath.

’This claw strikes would have tore open my hands up to the bone yesterday.’

He drove his other fist forward, talons extended, and ended it in a single strike. The scavenger demon went limp before it even finished falling.

Koda stood there for a moment, staring down at the body, waiting for the rush of relief or triumph he expected to feel.

What he felt instead was simple, practical understanding that the balance of power between himself and this particular corner of Hell had shifted, and shifted enough that he no longer had to think twice about a fight like this one.

’It’s easier to decide things when dying isn’t the most likely outcome.’

Koda didn’t reach for the scavenger’s essence. At his current level it was ordinary for him and wouldn’t improve his power in the slightest, barely worth the effort after everything he’d absorbed the night before. What he needed now was the essence of peak stage Awakening Realm demons.

Koda stepped over the body instead and kept walking. He’d spent his first days in Hell reacting to the situations he encountered. Fleeing, hiding, scrambling to survive whatever came at him next. But now, he had the capabilities to start making decisions instead.

’Peak Stage Demon Awakening Realm gives me more room to think and act accordingly. That’s worth more than anything right now.’

The next realm wouldn’t come easily. He understood that much already, even without knowing the exact shape of what waited past Demon Awakening.

Whatever, that seed core in his chest needed to finish growing into a proper Infernal Core before anything else. And from what he could tell, it wasn’t going to come from a handful of scavenger demons.

That was a problem for later. For now, his combat instincts had sharpened along with his body, and the ordinary predators of Outer Hell had stopped being a serious threat.

As he walked, a shift in the wind carried a faint smell past him. It smelt like the coppery tang of blood and sulfur, and beneath both of those was something else that he couldn’t identify.

Smoke that had the same smell as it came from controlled fires rather than the wild, sourceless burning that hung over most of the wasteland.

Accompanying the smell was voices. Faint and distant, carrying the rhythm of speech rather than snarling.

Koda stopped, lifting his head, tracking the scent back toward its source.

Past a ridge of black stone, the ground sloped down into a wide basin, and there, spread out across the valley floor, stood something he hadn’t expected to find this early; a sprawling cluster of makeshift structures, like a settlement of sort.

Bone, iron and dark stone stacked into walls and rooftops, with smoke rising from dozens of separate fires, and figures moving between them in numbers too organized to be a random gathering of scavengers.

"Finally, an outpost."

Koda’s talons slid quietly back beneath his skin as he studied the settlement from a distance. Curiosity finally outweighed the caution that had kept him alive this long.

He started walking toward it.