As it turned out, his hopeful guess had been correct.

As each section of the new arm was completed, the rigid structure of the crystal warped and quivered as it morphed into smooth, healthy skin until everything to the tips of his fingers appeared to be just as organic as it had been before the bloody severance. It had turned into an exact copy of the limb he'd lost, miraculously enough.

He breathed a sigh of relief. For a few minutes there, he thought the arm was gone for good. Surely there were powerful healers within the Nidafjeld Alliance who could have regrown a limb for him, but it would undoubtedly be ridiculously expensive, and more than anything else, he just really needed all the limb he could get to get out of this culty hell hole.

Without wasting another moment, he ran out onto the middle of the platform that made up the main structure of the Stirring Cradle as he let the burning messages appear on his forearm.

[Acquired Movement Boost — Lv. 56]

[Acquired Movement Boost — Lv. 57]

[Acquired Movement Boost — Lv. 58]

He hadn't really used Living Manifestation much in the fight—a mistake on his part. He was still getting used to utilize the little troopers fluidly in a tough fight. If he gave no orders, they would just face roll whatever he was up against, but to use them strategically required a mid-fight tactical overview he just wasn't sure he possessed quite yet.

Well, practice made perfect, and he was going to practice the hell out of using them. They probably had the highest potential of any of his abilities besides Profound Toxin itself.

[Acquired Profound Toxin — Lv. 114]

[Acquired Profound Toxin — Lv. 115]

[Acquired Profound Toxin — Lv. 116]

[Acquired Profound Toxin — Lv. 117]

[Acquired Profound Toxin — Lv. 118]

[Acquired Monarch's Will — Lv. 63]

[Acquired Monarch's Will — Lv. 64]

[Acquired Monarch's Will — Lv. 6…]

[Acquired Monarch's Will — Lv. 71]

[Acquired Monarch's Will — Lv. 72]

Oh, the sweet, sweet levels. He was happy to see that, despite his rank up, the system still considered him an inferior Awakened in front of the A-ranker and thus rewarding him this much for defeating them.

A realization struck him then. When he went home now, having gone through what he had here, he would, without a doubt, be the most powerful man in Forest, probably in every aspect of the word.

The Great Raid at the lake, where the combined force of Forest's Awakened had vanquished the Lake Serpent—a lone A-ranker—could have been carried out solo by him at this point. Would there even be any monster on Earth that could rival his might at this point?

An unintentional grin split his face as he knelt down and began to pull up the stone floor tiles one by one. They were stuck in there really good but a shot of Backflow now that he had hit the B-rank equivalent rank of Inheritor of Toxin allowed him to rip them straight up. Tiny, slender hooks of solid toxin extending from his fingers dug under the tiles so he could brute force the task.

Once he had laid bare a considerable space, he conjured shovels from each had and started to dig down through the soil foundation until he hit something that gave off a hollow clunk. A large ceramic urn was buried about a meter down. Or, at least it looked like ceramic. However long it had been there, it seemed to be in great condition.

With a compact spike, he cracked it open. An urge to vomit came over him as his nostrils were assaulted by possibly the worst stench ever. He reeled back from the opening and drew in a deep breath before he went back in and dumped in Profound Toxin until it reached the rim.

He didn't know what it was, only that it was crucial for the ritual to reawaken the Lord of the Moon, and that it was very sensitive. Next, he dumped several handfuls of dry soil into the urn and then stood up and took a piss in it, just to make sure that it was properly contaminated. Then he refilled it with soil completely and buried it again.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Carefully, he replaced the tiles as well as he could and ran to the corner of the platform. Here he also pulled up the tiles and dug until he uncovered an array of intricately carved glass rings. With a gauntleted fist, he crushed them all to dust.

This he repeated in the other three corners, replacing the tiles at all sites to hopefully lengthen the time until discovery. At the last dig, he also buried the remains of the A-rankers and used Profound Toxin to clean up the mess of blood.

The trip back up the stairs gave him that same feeling of time passing in a strange fashion, and now that he was distancing himself from the Stirring Cradle, another odd feeling settled in the back of his mind.

The feeling of no longer being watched. A shiver ran down his spine. What the hell?

Unable to resist the pull of curiosity, he backtracked down the stairs a bit, despite the time pressure. As he neared the Stirring Cradle again, the sensation of being watched definitely intensified. Only now that he was focusing on it had he even noticed. The Lord of the Moon?

But it wasn't supposed to be present in the world. Not yet.

Fuck. Pushing Backflow through his system, he activated Movement Boost on top and flew back down the stairs. Coming to a skidding at the edge of the massive platform, Eik's head was on a swivel as he searched for the origin of the sensation.

Now that he had come back down here, he was wondering if it was just his mind playing tricks on him. No matter how you twisted and turned it, there was nothing here, right? He was wasting his time.

Turning on his heel to head back to the staircase, Eik froze in his tracks. In front of him, about ten meters above the floor, a large, semi spectral eye hung freely in the air, staring intensely at him. Cold, silvery irises on black sclera gave the eye the same otherworldly disquiet that had emanated from the oracle's third eye.

"Oracle?" Eik asked into the piercing silence. "Oracle, is that you?"

When no response was forthcoming in any sense of the word, he swallowed. Beads of cold sweat emerged on his brow and before he even realized it, he had taken an involuntary step backward. "Lord of the Moon?" he tried.

Whether it could be called anything like a response was up for debate, but there was no doubt that it twitched ever so slightly, its stare seeming to grow even more intense than it had already been.

All of a sudden, Profound Toxin seemed to almost explode out of his chest. He gasped and clutched the burnt robe as he fell to a knee, thinking for a moment that he was having a heart attack. Then, like lightning from a cloudless sky, an immense sense of indignation and anger welled up from deep within.

"Wha— Hey, what the hell do you think you're doing, you asshole?" he shouted out loud. "That hur—"

Once more it tried to rip its way out of him outright. And the rage intensified threefold. Before he could stop himself, Eik, in spite of the fear he had been gripped by just moments earlier, leapt at the eye floating above, every boost and power up at his disposal going off at full throttle.

A bestial howl tore its way up his throat as three crushing torrents of Profound Toxin relentlessly washed over the eye. Countless tiny blades mixed into the liquid sliced the orb to bloody shreds and immediately invaded.

Seeing red, Eik triggered Accelerant, even as poison continued to flood the foreign system. Now that he was inside, the eye definitely lacked a physical stability that led him to guess that it was only partially present in this world. That didn't stop Profound Toxin from utterly demolishing even the tiniest iota of existence.

Before the first activation of Accelerant had even properly ignited, he had already set off the next wave. Again and again he triggered it, a high pitched screech echoing from somewhere unimaginably distant, the sound originating from within his own head somehow.

The Lord of the Moon was screaming in agony. And ooh, what lovely music it was.

As Accelerant continued to ravage the eye, the unending shock waves tearing it apart tiny speck by tiny speck, a gleeful giggle escaped Eik without his notice. He felt almost mad with blood lust. Against this entity he had never met and not even known about until days ago, he felt such bottomless hate that it was driving him insane.

Were he and Profound Toxin really becoming one? This mindless malice was not originally his. The assault on the eye that he had initially mistaken for mind control was an act of his own will. His mind and body were not controlled. Every act of violence came from his own heart, affected by the insuperable emotions of a million-year-old grudge.

For whatever reason, the Lord of the Moon, wherever or however it existed, must have been unable to release its scrying eye, because it wasn't until the orb was almost entirely obliterated that the Primal Entity finally seemed to let go. Eik had felt the suffering throughout and enjoyed it.

Once the presence of the Lord of the Moon was gone, the anger dissipated almost as quickly as it had appeared, leaving him breathless and exhausted. Despite his B-rank equivalent physique, it took several deep breaths to calm himself down enough to get his head to stop spinning.

"What the hell do we have against this guy?" he asked out loud.

Wordlessly as always, Profound Toxin simply shivered with anger that still seeped into Eik, planting a flame in his stomach.

"You know the Lord of the Moon then, I take it?" A tendril of toxin snaked out of his arm, wiggling up and down in a simulation of a nod.

"Did you clash in the past?" he continued. Energetic nods.

"And you won?" No response to that one.

"The Lord of the Moon won?" An indignant shake.

"Fifty-fifty, eh?" Eik tried, but got a hesitant wiggle back.

"Eighty-twenty to the Lord of the Moon?" The tendril slapped him on the wrist in admonishment.

"Okay, then, what?" Eik asked, getting annoyed as he headed for the stairs again. He really had to get going at this point. There was no guarantee of how long the oracle would be able to keep the cult high-rankers at bay. "Seventy-thirty to you?"

The tendril squiggled from side to side as if to agree that that was a fair assessment.

"Cool," Eik said as he took the stairs ten steps at a time. "You can tell me all about it when we get the hell out of this creepy ass cult compound."

A minute later he was at the inner side of the secret door, putting his ear to the reinforced wood. Nothing indicated the presence of people on the other side.

He pulled the latch to release the mechanism of the door and stepped back into the supply room, finally breathing surface air again. He took a moment to collect himself. A glance down at his burnt uniform made him wince. It was in rags but there was no time to go back down and reassess the condition of the A-ranker's uniform.

Clicking his tongue, he slipped out into the hallway and looked around. Now came the tricky part.

He had to get out of the temple and find his way to their fracture hall…

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