Chapter 753: Testing out the Pseudo-Legendary Skill

As he was about to read the skill’s details, Moon stopped himself.

A sudden urge took hold, he wanted to test it out himself first, to feel the effects firsthand before reading a single word of the description. In a way, he wanted to surprise himself. To discover what eighty-one thousand Lives had bought him through first-hand experience.

He looked around the clearing for a target, but found nothing suitable.

During his long stretch of merging attempts, Honeybun and Mirage had finished their meals, and now the two of them simply watched him curiously, waiting to see what he’d do next.

Moon smiled softly.

"Let’s move, guys. Our job here’s done. Time to find something new to hunt. And this time..." His smile sharpened. "It’s my turn."

He leapt atop Mirage, Honeybun trailing alongside them, and the three set off toward their next destination.

It didn’t take long to find a victim.

A Five-Star dotted leopard was treading across the island’s terrain in peace when Moon crossed its path. The beast’s coat was sleek, hiding beneath it a mountain of muscles, and it immediately registered the intruders in its territory.

It released a warning growl, baring its fangs, hackles rising.

Moon ignored the warning, feeling excitement rather than any fear.

A Five-Star beast was the ideal test subject. Surpasser-rank prey was rare and could take hours to locate, but a Five-Star was strong enough to meaningfully gauge his new skill’s power without being so weak it told him nothing.

He leapt off Mirage and summoned his sword, walking slowly toward the leopard, his eyes fixed on it in anticipation.

Their gazes locked. The leopard crouched low to the ground, watching the human approach, unsettled by the grin spreading across his face, by the complete absence of fear in a creature that should have been wary of a predator like itself.

"Rrraaaah!" The leopard snarled, defiant, ready to defend its territory against the intruders who had dared to cross it.

Cryothunder-Assimilation.

Moon activated the skill, and the sword responded.

His aura surged, swelling far beyond anything his old assimilations had produced. The temperature of the surrounding region plummeted several degrees in an instant, frost crystallizing in the air around him, and beneath the sudden cold came a low, terrifying crackle, the sound of contained lightning straining against its bindings.

His sword began to transform.

From hilt to tip, the blade changed. A pale, icy texture crept across the metal, frost forming on its edges, the weapon taking on the look of forged glacier-ice. And through that ice, jagged purple lightning crackled and danced, veins of violet current threading through the frozen blade in a continuous field.

The sword looked beautiful, ice and lightning, living together in harmony, perfectly assimilated into a single weapon, the two opposing elements coexisting in a way that should have been almost impossible.

Moon stared at the transformed sword in his hand, the frozen, lightning-laced blade radiating waves of cold and crackling energy, and his grin widened.

He hadn’t even struck yet, and he could already feel the power behind his strikes. This was no ordinary transformation.

The leopard, sensing the sudden, overwhelming change in energy around Moon, hesitated, its growl faltering as instinct screamed at it that the thing in front of it was far more dangerous than it had realized.

Moon raised the blade, frost and lightning blazing along its length.

"Let’s see what you can do."

Moon charged.

He crossed the distance at insane speed, and the leopard’s eyes flew wide, caught completely off guard by how fast the human moved. It tried to dodge, twisting its body to spring aside, but failed miserably, Moon closing the gap and coming face to face with it within a heartbeat.

Realizing flight was futile, the leopard committed on instinct, abandoning the dodge mid-motion and lashing out with a claw aimed straight at Moon’s face, a desperate counter from a cornered predator that had no other option.

~Whoosh! Whoosh!~

The air split twice in an instant, two blurred strokes, one the leopard’s claw cutting toward him, the other Moon’s blade answering.

~Thud!~

The leopard hit the ground.

Moon stared down at it, the beast sprawled lifeless, the light quickly leaving its eyes. The wound across its neck still crackled with purple lightning, the current chaining through its nervous system, while cold spread from the cut, ice crawling into the flesh and freezing its blood vessels solid. The two elements working in concert, lightning searing and cold shattering, from a single clean stroke.

Moon blinked, surprised at the result.

"I killed it with a normal strike that used no physical skill," he murmured. "One strike is all it took. I didn’t even use Tempest Symphony."

That made him pause.

He was powerful, exceptionally so for his acupoint count. With only ten acupoints filled, he’d been able to rival Evolvers at the start of Five-Star. As he’d grown, he’d climbed to rival even those at the peak of the tier. But even at his strongest, he had never been able to one-shot a powerful Five-Star beast with a single casual sword stroke. Killing one that fast had always required several committed attacks, Tempest Symphony’s layered strikes, a thunderclap-raiju, and what not.

A single ordinary swing, and the leopard was simply dead.

"If I can do this with a normal strike," he said slowly, "then once I combine Cryothunder with Tempest Symphony... with Phantom Strike layering on top... I might actually be able to go toe to toe with a Surpasser-rank fighter."

Till now, Moon had only been able to survive against Surpasser rank opponents, never having the ability to truly pose any real threat to their lives. The only exception was when he used Life Burn, but that skill didn’t count, it was a double-edged sword that he couldn’t use often.

The thought sent a thrill through him. He already had a Surpasser-tier Beast Soul and a Surpasser-tier turtle. If his own raw combat output could be pushed into that same bracket through this skill, his personal strength would take a monumental leap forward.