Chapter 41: A New Discovery
The mana left him in the same familiar rush — thick, steady, drawn from the same reserves he’d already tested once tonight. He braced for the same violent pull that had staggered him during the Queen’s second evolution.
It didn’t come.
Fenrir’s shape didn’t disappear into a cocoon the way the Queen’s had. Instead, shadow gathered around him from every direction at once — not wrapping, not weaving, just condensing, folding inward until the wolf’s outline vanished entirely inside a dense, perfectly spherical mass of black. No silk. No visible surface tension. Just shadow, compressed into something that looked less like a chrysalis and more like a hole cut directly out of the world.
Malrik watched it settle into stillness and did the math before he’d even consciously decided to.
The Queen’s Epic evolution took three hours. If this follows the same pattern...
He didn’t love the implication, but he trusted it more than he wanted to.
Then I should spend that time doing something useful instead of just sitting here staring at a ball of darkness.
He settled into a cross-legged position against the cave wall and closed his eyes, focusing inward on the slow, steady work of pulling his mana core back toward full. It wasn’t instant — nothing about mana regeneration ever was — but with Constitution and Intelligence both freshly reinforced, the process moved considerably faster than it would have that morning.
If Fenrir takes as long as she did, I want to walk into Lilith’s evolution at full strength, not running on fumes.
An hour passed in that position, mana threading itself back through his core in slow, patient loops, the sphere of shadow across the chamber showing no sign of change whatsoever.
By the time he judged his reserves close enough to full, he stood, rolled the stiffness out of his shoulders, and turned his attention toward the last soul on tonight’s list.
"...Lilith."
The crack split open the way it always did — deliberate, unhurried, like she found the act of arriving somewhere to be worth savoring rather than rushing. She stepped through with that same wicked little smile already in place, hands folded.
"You called me, master?"
The word carried its usual weight — half honorific, half provocation, delivered with just enough emphasis to make clear which half she preferred.
Malrik didn’t answer.
He hesitated instead, just for a beat, some part of him aware that whatever came next with Lilith wasn’t going to behave the way the Queen’s evolution had, or Fenrir’s. She wasn’t a soul he’d raised from a corpse. She wasn’t even fully his to begin with — sealed, contained, a fraction of whatever she’d once been before that seal existed.
I don’t actually know what this does to her.
He decided not to voice the uncertainty.
He raised his hand instead and let the mana gather.
"...Show me your strength,""Let’s see what you’re capable of once you’re actually in the Epic Rank."
The mana began gathering around her almost immediately — not the familiar emerald-black spiral he’d used on every soul tonight, but something else entirely, coiling into a slow, deliberate vortex the color of a moonless sky.
He stared at it, momentarily forgetting to be worried in favor of simple confusion.
I’ve never seen mana like that.
Black, but not the black his own spells produced — deeper somehow, denser, like it was absorbing the ambient light of the chamber rather than merely being the absence of it.
Demonic mana.
The realization landed with a small, uncomfortable jolt. He’d read about it in passing, some footnote in one of Cedric’s old texts about the war between the daemons and the gods, but reading about something and standing three feet away from it turned out to be very different experiences.
Lilith’s expression had changed too.
The smile was gone.
Completely gone, for the first time since he’d summoned her — not faded, not restrained, simply absent, replaced by something taut and unreadable as the vortex thickened around her. Whatever was happening to her clearly wasn’t purely physical. Her crimson eyes had gone distant, fixed on nothing, the particular stillness of someone experiencing something from the inside that had no comfortable outward expression.
The vortex swallowed her shape entirely.
The pull against his own reserves sharpened almost immediately after — mana draining out of him in a steady, aggressive current that had his vision narrowing at the edges within seconds.
This is worse than the Queen’s evolution. Considerably worse.
He gritted his teeth and refused to let go, though a very loud, very reasonable part of his mind was suggesting that letting go might, in fact, be the smart move here.
If I’d rushed this — if I’d tried this the moment I got back to the cave, before redistributing my points, before recovering from Fenrir.
He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t need to. The headache building behind his eyes finished it for him.
I’d be unconscious right now. Maybe worse.
The drain finally began to taper, easing from a flood into something merely uncomfortable, and Malrik allowed himself a slow exhale, forcing his grip on the spear to loosen from whatever white-knuckled tension had crept into it without his noticing.
He looked toward the sphere of shadow across the chamber — Fenrir, still sealed inside it, still showing no sign of stirring.
A thought surfaced, unrelated at first glance but nagging at him regardless.
He turned the question over slowly, working backward from what he actually knew instead of guessing forward.
I’ve been so focused on the Queen’s evolution... and her new skill... that I completely overlooked something.
Malrik’s eyes shifted toward the Spider Queen, who stood silently beside the rest of his army.
His expression slowly changed.
...She’s not consuming any of my mana.
He frowned.
Ever since she had evolved...Not a single strand of mana had flowed from his core into her.
The realization caught him completely off guard.
Until now, every manifested soul constantly drew mana from his reserves.
Fenrir did.
Lilith did.
Even the ordinary wolves and spiders did.
But the Queen...Nothing.
He remained silent for a long moment.
Could it be...do Epic-rank souls possess their own mana reserves?
If that were true...
Then they wouldn’t need to rely entirely on their summoner to remain manifested.
The implication made his heartbeat quicken.
If that’s really how Epic souls work...
Then every Epic soul I obtain won’t just become stronger...
It’ll also reduce the burden on my own mana.
It made a certain amount of sense, if he squinted at it right. Everything about the jump from Rare to Epic had behaved less like an upgrade and more like a transformation — new bodies, new minds, new capabilities that had nothing to do with simply scaling up existing numbers. Why would their relationship to his mana pool be any different?
A theory. Nothing more, yet.
But if Lilith and fenrir come out the other side of this and doesn’t cost me anything either, that’s not a coincidence anymore. That’s a rule.
He filed the thought away and settled back against the wall to wait, watching the black vortex hold its slow, patient shape.
Roughly two hours later — long enough that his legs had gone half-numb from sitting, long enough that the light outside the cave mouth had shifted several degrees toward evening — the sphere of shadow around Fenrir finally cracked.
The notification arrived a heartbeat after.
[Your Rare★★★★★ soul Shadow Tyrant Wolf has evolved to Epic★ Eclipse Wolf.]
[Your Eclipse Wolf soul has gained the skill "Shadow Clone".]
Malrik pushed himself upright immediately, the numbness in his legs forgotten.
What stepped out of the collapsing shadow was smaller than he expected — smaller than Fenrir had been even before tonight’s evolutions, barely a meter and a half at the shoulder now. But the size did nothing to soften the impression. His fur had gone a black so complete it seemed to swallow the faint emerald glow of the chamber around him, each individual strand catching no light at all, like standing too close to him meant standing too close to an absence rather than an animal.
Every line of muscle beneath that coat looked deliberate. Purposeful. Built for exactly one function.
"...Master."
The word came out in a voice that landed somewhere entirely unexpected — light, almost childlike, absurdly at odds with the predator standing in front of him. If Malrik closed his eyes, he’d have guessed the voice belonged to something considerably smaller and considerably less capable of tearing an Awakened-Rank Morveth apart.
He huffed out something between a laugh and a sigh, rubbing at his temple, and pulled up the new skill.
[ Skill: Shadow Clone ]
Creates shadow clones identical to the user.
Each clone possesses 50% of the user’s attributes and can utilize the user’s basic combat abilities.
The clones cannot use active skills.
The number of shadow clones and their attributes increase as the user’s Rank rises.
Current Clone Limit: 10
Cooldown: 30 Minutes.
Ten clones. Right now, at Mortal Rank. Weak versions, probably — half his stats, no active skills — but ten of them, all at once, all fighting.
This is a skill that gets terrifying the moment he stops being Mortal.
He could already see the shape of it — a scaling weapon, useless-looking on paper today and genuinely horrifying three or four Ranks from now, once "fifty percent of Fenrir’s attributes" started meaning something considerably larger than it currently did.
Every new skill pointed in the same direction.
Ambush. Command. Shadow Clones.
Fenrir’s evolution wasn’t creating a warrior...
It was creating an assassin.
If he were human...he’d undoubtedly be a first-class assassin.
The thought hadn’t finished settling before his attention snapped back toward the second vortex, still spinning slow and patient across the chamber, the black mana inside it giving no outward sign of how close it might be to finishing.
He watched it for a while, arms crossed, waiting.
Roughly an hour later, the vortex finally began to collapse inward on itself.
[Your Rare★★★★★ soul High Demon has evolved to Epic★ Arch Demon.]
________________________________________
Author’s Note :
The contract signing process is almost complete. Once everything is finalized, I will begin uploading daily Chapters.
Thank you for your patience and support!
Comments