"It's the value."
"Huh?" Vikram blinked, confused. That didn't stop him from lunging forward, trying to grapple Brunus in a chokehold.
Brunus didn't even flinch. His bored voice carried on as if Vikram's efforts were as irritating as a buzzing fly. "The reason the Living Kind still exists. When you asked how we've endured against innumerable odds… it's because of the value Dimensional Beings carry in their bodies. The Dimensional Cubes."
Vikram's grip trembled. Brunus' eyes didn't even bother to meet his.
"They're worth so much even gods can't ignore them. Where there's profit, the strong will gather."
Brunus tilted his head, exhaling as though explaining something obvious to a stubborn child. "Cubes accelerate proficiency. Intents. Will. Laws. Battle Arts. Cultivation. Everything. Absorb one, and you leap forward. The higher the class of the Dimensional Being, the greater the Cubes they hold, and the greater the effect."
That memory lingered as Vikram now sat cross-legged in the desert, the Cube clenched in his hand. He breathed once, hard, then pushed it into himself.
Energy surged. It wasn't violent, it seeped into his marrow, threading into his flesh and bones. His strength swelled, but not in the crude sense of added power. No, it refined him. His blood thickened, his muscles tightened, his frame edged closer to the peak of Blood Refinement's early stage.
Vikram's eyes snapped wide.
This… this was the same as the Souls in the Game. Refinement, progression. But what about enlightenment? He had never tested Cubes for that.
His thoughts chilled him. Wait. Could the reason my enlightenment is so monstrous be because of these Souls?
Maybe. At least, a part of it.
He shook his head, pushing the thought away, and stood. Souls refined body, mind, and spirit. For him, it was a crutch, maybe even a secret advantage. For others, Cubes were the only road to such leaps.
No wonder Dimensional Creatures were hunted with such frenzy, no wonder their existence was both a curse and an existential threat. Kayala and Brunus hadn't been exaggerating.
He brushed sand from his legs and turned toward the Tower. Then, his spine went cold.
The wind shifted.
He looked back and his breath caught. A storm was rising.
A sandstorm.
But the instant he peered into it, his danger sense howled. His skin prickled, his lungs tightened. That was no mere storm. Something inside it was watching him.
The Tower was his only hope. Vikram bolted, legs pumping with everything he had. He cursed every moment that he was stuck with only two human legs instead of four beastly ones. Whatever was behind him, its presence was no weaker than the Desert Lord he had barely survived in his First Walk.
Heart hammering, he dove behind a massive dune, then clawed at the sand like a desperate animal. He buried himself deep, compacting the grit over his body, leaving only a pinhole slit to glimpse the outside.
He regretted looking.
The sand shook. The sky itself seemed to groan. Footsteps, or was it movement?, boomed through the desert. It was like a Titan was passing. The storm's winds shrieked, a sound so sharp it tore at his nerves, and beneath it lingered a note of grief. As if the desert itself was… mourning.
Vikram curled tighter, making himself as small as possible. His teeth sank into his lip until he tasted iron. He didn't dare breathe too loudly.
The sandstorm swallowed him whole. It was as though he had been gulped into the belly of some vast beast.
He didn't move. Didn't whisper. Didn't even twitch a muscle.
Because the smallest sound could mean death.
He knew that deep within his bone. Or rather, deep within his arm.
Vikram was scared out of his wits. He had almost forgotten what this feeling was like.
Back when he had cancer, death had stared him in the face every day. He had long since stopped fearing it. Back then, the only thing he had truly been afraid of was the one fear every influencer dreads.
Irrelevancy.
The thought of fading into a meaningless blip in the endless stream of fate had terrified him. But once he clawed his way back into relevance, that fear had died out with the cancer.
'I wonder how my platforms are going right now…'
The stray thought flickered, then reality slammed him back down.
Damned hell!
Grains of sand stung his eyes. His body twitched involuntarily. Cold sweat drenched his back. Something had stopped above him. A presence. A suffocating weight pressing down on his skull. Whatever it was, it existed on a scale he had no right to even comprehend, let alone contest.
For an eternity, the pressure lingered. Then, it shifted, moved.
Vikram dared a glance through his pinhole slit. His heart lurched into his throat.
The storm wasn't just wind and sand. Hidden in the howling chaos were shapes, outlines of bodies gliding through the storm. He squinted harder. His stomach dropped.
Foes.
Their cloaks were the storm itself, their forms encased in shifting sheaths of sand. Each held a scythe sculpted from particles that spun and slashed as though alive. He wouldn't have noticed them at all if he hadn't stared long enough to catch the unnatural rhythm in the storm.
And their aura...
Their freaking aura.
Enemies were one thing. Foes were a different category entirely. They were what Enemies became when they transcended, just as a [Pre-Existence] could ascend to become [Perma-Existence]. These creatures weren't just alive. They were more existent than him.
He had no business even being near them.
His chest tightened. His gut screamed at him to stay buried, unmoving. But then,
"Ghkk!"
A sharp pain stabbed his abdomen. He looked down in horror.
A critter, the same kind of hard-shelled worm he'd felled earlier, Tu Lang, was gnawing at his flesh, trying to burrow into him.
'For all that is holy and pure…'
He bit down on his scream, veins bulging in his neck. Both hands clamped down on the squirming thing, holding it still. He couldn't make noise. Not now. Not with those things above his head.
Every second was agony. He could feel its mandibles scraping his flesh, feel warm blood slick his skin.
He endured. He waited.
Finally, when the shifting Foes drifted away with the storm, he exploded out of the dune, sand flying, the critter writhing in his tattooed grip.
"Die!"
The crimson patterns on his arm ignited, the aura of the Primordial Tattoo flaring like a slaughterer's brand. The worm convulsed once before bursting apart in a spray of yellow ichor.
Vikram stood panting, sand sliding off his skin, his abdomen already knitting back together. The pain dulled into heat as his body healed at an unnatural pace.
He spat, eyes narrowed at the storm's fading tail.
Things were about to get very, very annoying.