Without hesitation, he directly took the Life Essence from the Misery and directly put it in his mouth.
Zarek, finally realizing, tried to stop it: "Nooo, my money..."
But it was too late. If he had been a little faster, he might have been able to stop Misery Prime in time.
In the end, Zarek could only sigh. "So be it. Misery Prime had worked hard—the poor guy deserves at least that much."
Now that the situation was like this, he also wanted to see just what would happen.
So he watched Misery Prime with anticipation in his eyes.
However, moments passed and nothing changed. Slowly Zarek realized something was not quite right.
Not just him—even Misery Prime seemed to have realized this as he looked around with his eyes filled with confusion.
Just as Zarek was wondering what had happened, suddenly he felt a tingling sensation in his head.
He was confused at first, but soon he realized where this tingling sensation came from.
So without wasting his time, he closed his eyes and immediately appeared inside the dark space.
The same dark space from before, where Misery's original DNA was stored.
Indeed, when Zarek opened his eyes he was in the dark space once again. Misery Prime was still here.
However, there was something else other than him.
Life Essence... In the void surrounding Misery Prime floated the red Life Essence from before.
"How did it get here?"
Although Zarek didn't realize it at first, now he was absolutely sure this was his spiritual space.
When an individual awakened a class and became an Awakener, they not only awakened the class but this spiritual space as well.
According to established conventions, it was this place which housed all the skills learned by an individual.
The size of the spiritual space decided how many skills an individual could learn in their lifetime.
But all of these things didn't matter for now. What really mattered was how the Life Essence actually got here.
At first he thought maybe it was because of some accident, but he quickly ruled it out.
Zarek's thoughts continued to move like lightning, but he couldn't come up with a reason that could explain this phenomenon.
But still, he had a guess in his heart. Although he wasn't absolutely sure, he had a feeling it had something to do with Infinite Summon Link. As to how it worked, he wasn't sure.
Zarek continued to think and wanted to examine the spiritual space. His spiritual space looked large—he wondered how many skills he would be able to learn.
Thinking of this, he started wandering through the dark space, trying to find the location of his skills.
However, no matter how he searched, he couldn't find them.
Unknown to him, at some point the Life Essence had also disappeared.
Zarek also finally noticed its disappearance. He looked at the Misery with a doubtful gaze.
However, the poor fellow immediately shook his head in denial and pointed to the north.
Zarek followed the fellow's gesture but saw nothing except darkness.
With a moment's thought, he shook his head. He was still in a hostile environment—spending too much time here might put his life in danger.
With that thought, he once again focused back on reality.
In the distance, Misery Prime looked confused. He clenched and unclenched his fist again, as if trying to understand why he didn't get stronger.
Zarek looked at this and didn't know what to say.
The poor guy didn't know that the Life Essence he swallowed wasn't even with him.
Moreover, it's not like he could evolve with just one Life Essence, could he?
Still, he felt a little bad for taking away the poor guy's Life Essence.
Thinking of something, he summoned Misery's stat panel:
[First Sequence Summon – Misery]
[Grade: Regular]
[Infinite Origin: 823]
[Strength: 4.6] +
[Agility: 1.3] +
[Perception: 0.9] +
[Physique: 1.4] +
[Mana: 0.1] +
[Skill: Prey Sense (Level 1)]
After clearing almost five floors in a row, the amount of Infinite Origin that Misery had managed to gather was close to one thousand—enough to push Misery's strength by a large margin.
So without thinking, he went ahead and dumped all of them on strength.
Immediately the number jumped from four to twenty-five directly. However, when he tried to increase the strength again, a prompt hit him:
[The strength of summon has reached the biological limit. If you want to increase the strength further, please help your summon evolve to a higher grade.]
This prompt caught Zarek by surprise. He wasn't expecting to encounter a limit like this, but upon some thought the limit made some sense.
Not willing to think about it, he focused on checking the stats of Misery:
[First Sequence Summon – Misery]
[Grade: Regular]+
[Infinite Origin: 613]
[Strength: 25]
[Agility: 1.3] +
[Perception: 0.9] +
[Physique: 1.4] +
[Mana: 0.1] +
[Skill: Prey Sense (Level 1)]+
From earlier, Misery's strength had quadrupled in an instant. It was then Zarek also noticed the plus sign behind the strength stat had really disappeared. If he wanted to continue increasing the strength, he had to find a way to evolve Misery.
Other than these obvious changes, he noticed two other changes, like the plus sign which had appeared behind the summon grade and Misery's only skill.
Could it be that using Infinite Origin, Misery could be evolved!
Zarek couldn't stop himself from feeling excited at this discovery. Unable to contain himself, he immediately clicked on the plus sign behind "Regular" and immediately another window filled his vision:
[Your first sequence summon has reached the biological limits and is ready to evolve]
[Infinite Origin - 113/1000]
[Life Essence of red color or higher - 0/1]
[Two level 1 skills - 1/2]
[Defeat or kill ten enemies of higher grade - 0/10]
Just one look and Zarek's face darkened. The first two conditions were somewhat acceptable, but the last two conditions didn't make any sense at all.
Moreover, why were there conditions to begin with? He had never heard about meeting conditions to evolve in the original novel.
This wasn't fair!!