Chapter 600: 423
As the skeletons approached the ancient creatures in the forest, the creatures burst out of their nests and bit off the neck of a skeleton that came near.
Then, only the ’crack~ crack~’ sounds of shattering bones could be heard as the ancient creature chewed up the skull it had bitten off and swallowed it into its stomach.
Observing from the sky, Zachary never expected such a situation to unfold below. While he was still shocked by the scene he had just witnessed, the ancient creature didn’t pause. After swallowing the chewed-up skeleton head, it immediately turned to bite at the other skeletons around it.
This ancient creature was far stronger than the attacking skeletons, able to bite off a skeleton’s neck with each attack and devour their head.
Though the ancient creature possessed the power to kill skeletons instantly, as more and more skeletons converged on it, an increasing number of skeletons gathered around it.
Unlike movie heroes who might be surrounded and yet fight enemies one by one, the skeletons encircling the ancient creature didn’t fight fairly. Like army ants hunting, upon finding their prey, all the skeletons mindlessly lunged onto the ancient creature, their sharp fingertips piercing its skin followed by their teeth tearing at the flesh.
As the skeletons gnawed on the head, the ancient creature’s tough skin seemed to corrode as if something was eating away at it, making it easy for the skeletons to bite off large chunks of flesh.
As the flesh bitten off by the skeletons traveled down their throats, it transformed into thin lines of blood that adhered to the skeletons’ previously hollow bones.
The more flesh the skeletons tore off the ancient creature, the redder those skeletons hanging onto it became.
As Zachary had predicted, the ancient creature, despite having swallowed several skeletons’ heads, ultimately got consumed to nothing by the surrounding attacking skeletons.
When the skeletons left after devouring all the flesh of the ancient creature on the ground, leaving behind only white bones, the scene was left with only the skeleton of the devoured ancient creature and a few headless skeletons that had their skulls bitten off.
Watching the skeletons chase after other beings, moving further and further away, Zachary quickly descended to the ground. He then collected the cleaned bones of the ancient creature and the bodies of the headless skeletons into the Cave.
After taking these into the Cave, Zachary rose into the air using Sword Control and, ensuring that he was in a relatively safe environment, he then turned his focus into the Cave. He began to disassemble the newly acquired skeletons, curious to see what the Cave would gain after the disassembly.
The first thing to be disassembled was, of course, the bones of the ancient creature whose flesh had already been eaten by the skeletons. As the bones were taken apart in the Cave, Zachary felt a barely perceptible trace of Origin Power flowing into it.
Although Origin Power was very helpful for the evolution of the Cave, it was a substance that was easily obtained. Simply put, decomposing the bodies of living beings would always yield more or less Origin Power.
However, the number of bodies required to upgrade the Cave relying on Origin Power is not small at all, just like the poem says,
"To kill one is sin, slaughtering thousands makes one a hero, but to slay nine million makes one the supreme hero."
To elevate the Cave’s level using Origin Power obtained by decomposing bodies, the number of corpses needed would far exceed the nine million mentioned in the poem. This was one of the reasons why Zachary had previously abandoned this approach.
Just when Zachary thought that disassembling this skeleton was no different from that of other ancient creatures, he suddenly felt a trace of a new, unidentifiable energy form within the Cave.
If it weren’t for the Cave being completely under Zachary’s control, if this kind of energy had never appeared in the Cave before, Zachary would have been unable to detect this nascent energy.
Zachary tried to gather the energy in his hands to observe it within the Cave, but there was so little of it that, even when he gathered it all in his hands, it was invisible to the naked eye.
Using his Divine Sense, Zachary scanned and discovered that these traces o energy emitted a corrupting aura, which was continuously consuming and corrupting the surrounding energies.
Realizing the peculiar nature of this energy, Zachary sectioned off a part of the Cave, isolating it and pouring other energies into the area, curious to see what changes would occur after this sinister energy consumed and corrupted more.
After handling these matters, Zachary continued to disassemble the other headless skeletons’ bodies. When he finished disassembling all the headless skeleton corpses, he found that in addition to gaining some Origin Power like from other corpses, there was also special energy obtained similar to disassembling that ancient creature’s skeleton earlier.
