FREE USE in Primitive World - Chapter 300: Back In The Jungle

Chapter 300: Chapter 300: Back In The Jungle

The Great Orrath did not care about the political maneuvering of human tribes. It did not care about alliances sealed with the tears of innocent girls, nor did it care about the despair hanging over the Veynar settlement like a suffocating shroud. The jungle only respected one universal law: the strong devoured the weak.

And Sol fully intended to be the one doing the devouring.

For three days following the disastrous meeting in the High Hall, the anticipated joint attack by the Zerith coalition and the Marauder packs did not happen. Instead, there was a calculated, agonizing silence. The enemy forces were massing just beyond the visual tree line to the south, their presence forming a heavy, sickly yellow bruise against the sky.

The Layer 4 Zerith warlords were playing a psychological game, letting the suffocating dread of the impending siege slowly grind down the defenders’ nerves before a single spear was thrown.

The atmosphere inside the petrified walls was brittle enough to snap. The air smelled perpetually of fear-sweat, grinding whetstones, and the acrid smoke of watchfires.

Sol ignored all of it.

He didn’t sit on the walls staring into the dark. He didn’t participate in the frantic, desperate logistical meetings in the High Hall. Instead, every morning, right after standing on his balcony and perfectly executing the Breath of Dawn

to condense those precious, hyper-dense purple drops of pure essence into his golden core, Sol grabbed his Void-Oak spear. He slipped through the heavily guarded outer gates and vanished into the perilous, rotting depths of the jungle.

He treated the impending apocalypse as his personal, high-yield training ground.

He was not a weak man desperately trying to catch up. Even before he had anchored the two Lord Blood Sovereign spirits in his chest, Sol had possessed the raw, anomalous physical strength and combat instincts to hunt down and kill Layer 2 Essence Born beasts. But Essence Born were the bottom tier in this jungle.

Now, with his core saturated with dawn essence and his veins continually widened by the sheer pressure of holding the Dreadwing and the Great Badger, Sol bypassed the common beasts entirely. He actively sought out Layer 2 Omen Bloods.

On the first day, he ventured deep into the western scrublands, far beyond the territory designated as safe by the Veynar scouts. His silver-crimson eyes picked apart the dense, thorny undergrowth with microscopic precision.

His first major target was an Iron-Spine Centipede. It was a terrifying, sixty-foot-long monstrosity, an Omen Blood predator whose carapace was infused with heavy metallic essence. It moved through the rocky terrain like a subterranean train, its mandibles dripping with a neurotoxin that could paralyze a Spirit warrior in seconds.

Before acquiring the Sovereign spirits, a beast of this caliber and lineage would have forced Sol to rely entirely on traps, environmental hazards, and an exhausting war of attrition.

This time, he met it head-on.

When the massive centipede burst from the loose shale, its dozens of scythe-like legs carving gouges into the stone, Sol didn’t retreat. He planted his boots, tapping into the dormant, heavy gravity of the Great Badger resting in his core. He didn’t have access to the spirit’s active aura yet… he was still fundamentally at Layer 0… but the passive physical density it provided was staggering.

He ducked beneath the snapping, venom-dripping mandibles, the sheer speed of his evasion fueled by the latent lightning of the Dreadwing. He stepped directly into the centipede’s guard, twisted his hips to generate maximum torque, and drove his Void-Oak spear upward.

The impact sounded like a cannon shot. The obsidian tip didn’t just simply pierce the metallic carapace, the kinetic force behind Sol’s thrust shattered three of the beast’s armored segments simultaneously. Black, corrosive blood sprayed across the rocks as the centipede shrieked, twisting its massive body to crush him.

Sol was already gone, blurring ten feet away before the heavy tail slammed into the earth where he had just been standing. It was a brutal, hyper-efficient dance of violence. Every thrust of his spear carried tectonic weight, every dodge possessed aerodynamic perfection. In less than three minutes, the massive Layer 2 Omen Blood lay dead, its skull caved in by a final, devastating overhead strike.

Sol stood over the carcass, his chest heaving, a dark, exhilarated grin spreading across his face. He placed his hands on the beast, drawing its chaotic, earthy essence into his core, letting the golden liquid purify the energy and feed it to his starving phantoms, and continued his adventure.

His next target was a pack of Rot-Hounds… Layer 2 scavengers that hunted in groups of a dozen or more. They were horrifying amalgamations of canine anatomy and fungal infection, their bodies covered in thick, pulsing yellow pustules that leaked highly acidic sap.

And like before he didn’t hide or flee, Sol simply dropped from the petrified canopy directly into the center of their pack.

The Rot-Hounds snarled, lunging with terrifying synchronization. As the first hound snapped its fungal jaws toward his throat, Sol twisted his hips and thrust his Void-Oak spear.

Crack.

The sheer, unrestrained kinetic force almost broke the sound barrier. The shockwave of the impact practically vaporized its upper torso, sending a spray of black blood and yellow acid in a ten-foot arc.

The acid splattered against Sol’s bare arms, but it didn’t burn. His skin, fortified by the passive, earth-aligned density of the Great Badger, barely registered the corrosive fluid as a mild itch.

He didn’t use flashy martial arts or waste energy on unnecessary movements. Every thrust of his spear, every sweeping strike of the heavy oak shaft, carried the concentrated, tectonic mass of a falling boulder.

He shattered ribs, crushed skulls, and cleaved through fungal armor with terrifying ease. In less than a few minutes, fourteen Rot-Hounds lay dead in the mud.

He placed his hands on the largest of the corpses, drawing the residual, chaotic essence into his core, feeling the golden liquid in his solar plexus churn as it purified the raw energy and fed it to his starving Sovereign spirits.