Chapter 2978: Memories of the Fallen
Five Days Earlier,
When Parasite X crashed down upon Baeldum, it was Supreme Marc’s advance team that responded first.
Twenty strong, half of them Grand Magus cultivators, the Hunter Supreme’s personal strike force descended upon the impact site and attacked the massive worm-like giant without hesitation. At Marc’s side stood his two most trusted subordinates: Colonel Garran, his closest aide, and Special Officer Lirien, a spirit master prodigy whose talent had earned recognition throughout the Alliance.
Both were Three Cosmos experts.
"Lirien! Hold on—keep its mental attacks suppressed!"
Marc’s voice thundered across the battlefield.
"It’s trying to escape underground!"
"Garran, lead the pursuit!"
"Yes, my Lord!"
The battle lasted only minutes.
It went wrong almost immediately.
The repellent pills available at the time had not been strong enough. Their protection weakened with every passing second as the corruption spread through the battlefield. Realizing this, Marc pushed himself harder and harder, determined to end the fight before the situation collapsed completely.
Again and again, his attacks tore through the giant worm.
Again and again, the abomination shrieked in pain.
Yet it refused to die.
Instead, it continued burrowing deeper into the earth, dragging the battle underground where Marc’s greatest advantage—his overwhelming speed—became increasingly restricted.
The corruption spread.
The underground battlefield had become a graveyard. The tunnels had collapsed in dozens of places, leaving behind a shattered labyrinth of broken stone and corruption-soaked earth. The bodies of Marc’s strike force lay scattered across the cavern floor, many so heavily infected that they were barely recognizable. The air itself felt poisonous, thick with parasite spores and lingering mental pressure.
One after another, members of the strike team fell.
By the time the creature finally began to weaken, only three of the original twenty remained standing.
Supreme Marc.
Colonel Garran.
Special Officer Lirien.
Yet after paying such a terrible price, they had finally cornered the creature.
Garran stood at the forefront of the battle, blood streaming from countless wounds as he forced his earth-element domain beyond its limits. Massive stone pillars erupted from every direction, intertwining around the giant worm’s body like chains. Entire sections of the cavern wall were torn apart and reshaped into restraints, locking the abomination in place whenever it attempted to burrow deeper underground.
"Lord Marc!" Garran roared, his voice echoing through the cavern. "I’ve locked down its movement! It can’t escape anymore!"
The colonel slammed both palms against the ground.
The entire cavern shook violently.
Another ring of stone restraints erupted upward, wrapping around the creature’s body and pinning it against the cavern floor. Veins bulged across Garran’s neck as he poured every remaining ounce of spiritual power into the technique.
"Kill it now!"
At the same time, Lirien continued to support from the rear.
Above her floated a magnificent seven-story pagoda radiating brilliant spiritual light. Layer upon layer of soul-suppressing energy descended upon the giant worm, weakening its mental attacks and preventing it from overwhelming their minds.
The combination of Garran’s restraints and Lirien’s suppression was the only reason the battle had not already ended in disaster.
Unfortunately, both of them had already reached their limits.
The corruption had been silently eating away at them for the entire battle.
Marc noticed it too late.
Dozens of yellow eyes suddenly opened across the giant worm’s grotesque body.
Instead of looking toward him, they focused entirely upon Lirien.
The spirit master’s face instantly turned pale.
The pressure crashed into her sea of consciousness like a tidal wave.
Above her, the seven-story pagoda trembled violently.
Cracks spread across the first floor.
Then the second.
Then the third.
Within moments, fractures covered the entire structure.
"Lirien!" Marc shouted.
Then the seventh floor shattered.
The entire pagoda exploded into fragments of soul light.
For a brief moment, the cavern was illuminated by thousands of sparkling motes drifting through the darkness.
Lirien looked toward Marc.
"...I’m sorry, my Lord."
The words barely escaped her lips before she collapsed.
The instant her suppression disappeared, the worm’s full mental assault erupted outward without restraint.
The attack struck Garran first.
The colonel screamed.
His earth restraints immediately began to crumble as he dropped to one knee, clutching his head. Veins bulged across his face while blood poured from his nose—the stone prison surrounding the giant worm fractured and shattered as his concentration collapsed.
And in that ruinous moment, Supreme Marc unleashed the full extent of his power.
The Hunter Supreme moved with fury. Robbed of room to run in the cramped, dark underground, he reached for the mightiest of them all: the spectral shape of a great cosmic bear rose behind him and sank into his frame, and his body swelled with its borrowed, monstrous strength. His arms thickened, his hands curled into something closer to claws, and the very air groaned beneath the physical weight now pouring through him.
He crossed the cavern in a single stride and seized the giant worm in his bare hands. The creature shrieked and thrashed in desperation, but Marc ignored all of it. Flesh tore. Bone snapped. Corruption burst outward in every direction as he ripped the abomination apart piece by piece, prying its armored segments open as easily as a bear splitting a rotten log.
The worm fought.
Marc tore harder.
The cavern shook.
Entire sections of the underground chamber collapsed around them.
When it finally ended, nothing remained except a mangled corpse sprawled across the shattered ground.
Marc stood above it, breathing heavily.
Half of his left side had been burned away by corruption. Deep wounds covered his body. Blood dripped from his fingertips.
Yet the battle was finally over.
Or so he believed.
His gaze shifted toward his two fallen aides.
Both lay unconscious.
Marc immediately reached for another repellent pill.
Then something moved within the corpse.
A small figure slowly climbed out from the remains of the giant worm.
Marc froze.
Then it vanished into a spatial rift — and reappeared atop Lirien, sinking into her.
What followed was a blur.
###
That was the memory left behind in Lirien’s corpse — and Duke Damien, the Alabaster spirit champion, felt all of it as his soul-seeking art drew it up from the dead.
Not only the facts. The feeling. Grief. Regret. And beneath it, love — Lirien’s love for the Hunter Supreme, and his for her. The two had been bound to one another, and in that single buried truth lay the answer to everything that had gone wrong afterward: why a Supreme had faltered, why the mission had failed, why a whole Baeldum planet now burned
Damien drew a slow breath and pressed deeper — past the woman.
Toward the thing that wore her.
For an instant, the spirit master saw it — truly saw it — the shape curled at the center of Lirien’s stolen body.
It was humanoid, no larger than a human infant. Its body appeared frail and shriveled, almost pathetic at first glance, yet its head was monstrously oversized. An insect-like face protruded from a swollen skull covered in glowing purple runes that pulsed rhythmically, like a living heartbeat.
It looked less like a creature and more like a cocoon that had somehow learned to walk.
And as Damien’s consciousness brushed against it, the truth of what it had done bled into him in cold, deliberate fragments.
It had stood over the three fallen experts, and it had chosen. Not the Supreme — for all his might, Marc’s body was a fortress of raw physical power and a poor cage for a thing of mind and soul. Not the broken colonel. It had taken Lirien, the spirit master, the soul-cultivator, because a vessel of the mind required a host of the mind.
Marc and Garran, it had not wasted. It had sealed them both within cocoons of corruption, to be slowly unmade and remade — their power harvested, their bodies and souls converted into its servants — while that same festering process was bled back into the ruined worm, knitting a new vessel from the corpse of the old. A new body grown from the old, and time enough to grow it, all while the parasite waited unseen inside the woman it had stolen.
Until it finally fell beneath their combined assault.
Yet Duke Damien was not finished.
The Alabaster Spirit Champion continued pushing his soul-seeking art deeper into the creature’s remains.
He sought its real identity.
Then the deeper memories came, and these were never meant for any mortal mind.
They appeared only as fragmented flashes—worlds burning, civilizations collapsing, corruption spreading across continents before consuming entire planets.
Amidst that endless destruction, Damien saw a world filled with colossal worms.
Each one shrieking in agony as the same small runed creature burrowed into its flesh and hollowed it out from within, transforming it into nothing more than a puppet.
The realization struck him like a bolt of lightning.
The giant worm was never the parasite. It was only a vessel—one of countless many.
This small creature was the real Parasite X.
As that truth revealed itself, Damien felt his consciousness sink deeper into the darkness hidden behind those memories.
Into the abyss.
And then the abyss saw him.
Every yellow eye in that buried memory snapped toward his intruding consciousness at once, and a bolt of pure malice drove into his mind like a lightning strike.
Duke Damien threw back his head and screamed.
The corpse beneath his hand burst apart.
From the shattered remains, a small figure shot forward with terrifying speed and landed atop the back of Duke Damien’s head.
In the next instant, it sank its will into him, burrowing toward the soul of a Spirit Champion—the perfect host.
.
