Two pieces of news for my lovely readers, one good and one bad, lol.
First, the good news, is that until tomorrow I'll be releasing 4 chapters, bringing the total to 20 chapters for this story.
The second, the bad news, is that starting next week, the webnovel chapters will be reduced to 2 per week, while the Patreon release will remain at 5 per week.
...
--x--
Over the next month, Ringo repeated the process of sinking deeper and deeper into the lava, with the temperature and pressure increasing, but he barely noticed. He continued to evolve while doing so, but his cells were finally saturated. He felt he could have advanced much earlier, but when his cells were saturated, he felt it would be more beneficial for him. It was a strange, instinctive feeling, but he believed it.
Now thousands of kilometers underground, with pressure and heat that would crush any human, his naked body remained motionless, only the movement of the lava seemed to move him.
Suddenly, his eyes opened. Even in the hot lava, they were unaffected in the slightest, but at that moment, his eyes seemed to emit a brighter light than the lava around him.
-"Finally, my body can't take any more energy." - He mentally sighed.
With his energy saturated, he didn't even choose to leave. Releasing the restraint, he let the energetic current flow through him. In the next moment, all that stored energy was devoured by his own cells. The cells that seemed ten times their normal size were shrinking rapidly, but they didn't become weaker, but stronger, all that energy being refined.
It was at that point that he sensed something, while a vague sensation left him dubious, he felt a pull and quickly used his energy to connect with it.
The next moment, he found himself floating in an infinite void. Around him were countless sources of light. They emitted light of different colors, different sensations, even different emotions, each one seemed unique.
Some were lit, some were dim, some seemed free, and others were connected to others by threads of energy.
While he was confused, his own gene was not, urging him to hurry. He did so. Using his consciousness, he tried to touch those stars. That's when he understood. As soon as he touched one, he seemed to gain information about it.
Demon race, black fire demon, good at destruction and able to conjure black fire with spiritual damage...
He looked around with understanding. This seemed to be the evolutionary source. Endless races were there, and... he seemed to have a choice!
It wasn't like Han Xiao. He wasn't given random options, far from it. He was directly given the entire grid available to him. In this place of high evolutionary information, any creature with an evolutionary percentage above 0 was there, available to him.
Looking around, he tried to touch more stars, his gene urging him to hurry. He didn't have much time.
His consciousness advanced steadily through this space, spreading like a shapeless dome. Each time he touched a star, he sensed its general information, information hidden in high-dimensional forms, 10... 20... 100... 1,000... 100,000...
He continued searching. He had a sense of what he wanted. He preferred survival to improving damage. Of course, damage was important, but his survival was more important. So he knew he could become stronger by strengthening his body. But even if he improved his spirit, he couldn't attack with it, just as a mechanic, even with millions of bullets, without a gun, would be useless.
Therefore, he wanted a race that would cover his weaknesses, preferably spiritual!
He began using selection criteria.
The race should focus on the spiritual attribute.
The race should have a powerful final evolution.
The race should have a useful initial evolution.
The weirder and harder to stop, the better!
After he divided all this, he began looking for options. Even the Void Race was there, but he ignored it because there were better spiritual options, and the Void Creatures weren't focused on the spiritual aspect.
He could feel his time was running out, he only had a few minutes before evolution became random.
So, after mulling it over at high speed, he finally decided. He chose the Nightmare Race. It's an extremely spiritually focused race. From what he saw of the options, they are extremely powerful. Even though he can't yet see the higher levels, he can see that there are many later evolutions for this race.
He quickly began choosing, ignoring the lowest-ranking ones like Nightmare Spirit and Nightmare Embryo, also passing through the intermediate ones like Nightmare Hunter and Nightmare Instigator. He finally focused on an evolution from the Nightmare Spirit line, the Nightmare Devouring Spirit.
Even with a near-zero compatibility rating due to choosing a different intermediate race, not a starter, he still chose. Confident in his own evolutionary power, he managed to directly pass the Nightmare Spirit and the Nightmare Wandering Spirit to the Nightmare Devouring Spirit.
He couldn't see the exact abilities, only a general context of Nightmare power with spiritual focus, but from the name and energy level, this seemed like the best option.
But it was only after choosing that Ringo remembered a problem.
He ended up so focused on choosing a good race that he forgot that racial evolution has many different forms, energy beings, spiritual beings, high-dimensional beings, hybrid beings, bestial beings, mutant beings...
There was no description of this, after all, this isn't a system. His ability only helped him choose an evolutionary line from millions of possibilities. Having the species name and some information was already a very good thing.
Perhaps there would even be more information in the future, but with his current energy level, all he could "see" was this.
It was at this point that he knew he'd screwed up, because his body began to break down. It seemed he'd chosen an energy being!
The pain was intense, but he ignored it as he turned off his sense of pain and focused on using his energy to try to change his transformation. At the very least, he didn't want to be an energy being! Unfortunately, only his physical pain could be denied, the pain in his soul was anything but light.
So he used everything he could to force his permanent evolution with evolutionary energy.
Under normal circumstances, his energy level would never have allowed him to transform an energy being into a physical being so quickly during the short period of time evolution had given him, it would have taken much more time and energy. But this was no normal situation.
His DNA was changing at an absurd rate. During this period of genetic enhancement, a super's body became extremely volatile, very different from a normal one, where it seemed to be trying to reforge steel, now it seemed to be shaping clay.
A normal super, no matter how good, couldn't reshape clay because he didn't have the necessary tools. But he did. His skill made him like a sculptor with the knowledge and tools to sculpt whatever he desired.
Then his body, which was separating into luminous purple particles, stopped and reformed again. Instead, his flesh seemed to be constantly phasing, shifting between reality and illusion.
His illusory form had purplish skin with a soft glow, as if his own skin were a representation of the star-filled night sky, completely black eyes, and light lilac hair.
He managed to mitigate some of the pain by removing it from his body, but the pain in his soul wasn't easy to remove, it hurt even more. Every microscopic part of his soul acted like a nerve receptor; he had millions of times the receptors he had in his human form. He could only grit his teeth as he was being transformed from the inside out.
It took several long minutes before his energy finally calmed down.
Still naked in the hot lava, his hair, which had adapted to the temperature, floated ethereally. Even in his illusory form, he felt his body.
His strength had grown greatly, he was still at the same rank, but if before he could run over a Tank, now he could run over ten in a row!
Sighing lightly and feeling this new form, he seemed to understand something as his body returned to human form, then returned to ethereal form.
He gained much more information now, his Esper power could "read" information about his own species much more easily than when he was in that void.
The information said that nightmare beings are likely almost always spiritual creatures. This information came from the fact that there was no gene that showed any physical aspect, but he couldn't be certain.
He wasn't even surprised that energetic and spiritual lifeforms in this world had genes. He vaguely remembered this from the original novel, but he couldn't be sure, until now.
His current form is probably an exception among nightmare creatures. He could be considered a hybrid of human and nightmare, something that should be unprecedented for this species. After all, who would say a nightmare would want to mate with a human? According to current data, other living beings are almost exclusively seen as "food" by them.
The upside of this transformation is that the form he assumed would have consumed energy to maintain and had a cooldown, but due to his evolutionary power, this form became completely part of him and he could phase out at any time without any damage or cost.
He gained five abilities. Additionally, in his Nightmare Devouring Spirit form, he would have physical immunity, 75% mental resistance, and 50% energy resistance! Even in human form his mental and energetic resistance did not diminish!
--x--
Patreon: March_Rain