Ultimate Gacha System: Reborn As A Mob in My Favorite Game

Chapter 130: Trial Complete

The vision of the teenager shattered into soft light, fading away completely into the white expanse.

The mental integration was completely, one-hundred-percent permanent.

The divided mind was healed... The paralyzing regrets were gone.

Klaus still had the memories, but they didn’t own him anymore.

For the first time since he had woken up that morning when Taula left, Klaus didn’t feel like a walking bleeding open wound.

The crushing guilt that had dictated every single one of his actions, everything... it was all just gone.

It was like finally dropping a hundred-pound rucksack after carrying it for years.

He remembered the fire and he remembered his mother but it didn’t feel like a knife twisting in his gut anymore.

It just felt like a scar... an old faded scar that he could finally live with.

’I can’t do anything about my past regrets but if I live my life to the fullest, I can prevent more regrets from happening.’ Klaus thought

"Good job, Boss," Valeria’s voice echoed softly in the void.

The Chibi sniper didn’t linger.

She dispersed into a fine red mist, flowing seamlessly and comfortably back into the center of his chest.

The crackling volatile energy of the Lightning Spirit followed suit, buzzing happily as it recalled itself back into the deep depths of his Soul Vessel.

They were clocking out... They had done their part, and they were going back into his soul.

Klaus floated alone in the center of the blinding white void.

The trial was officially over. He had won.

He kept his eyes closed, floating in the nothingness and just preparing for the violent, jarring ejection back into the real world.

He knew exactly what was coming.

Klaus was going to wake up on the hard, freezing obsidian floor of the Endless Tower.

He was probably going to be lying in a massive pool of his own congealed blood, and the very first thing he’d have to deal with was the agonizing white-hot pain of his dead paralyzed left arm and his shattered ribs.

He was exhausted but he was alive at the very least.

However before the realm could pull him away, a sudden warmth enveloped him.

It didn’t feel like magic... It didn’t feel like healing aura or a raw stat buff.

It felt strangely familiar.

Out of the blinding featureless white light directly behind him, two gentle glowing white arms reached forward.

They didn’t grab him aggressively nor did they try to pull him or try to force him into a position.

They wrapped softly and securely around his chest.

The hands gently pulled his head back to rest against a soft unseen shoulder in a brief loving embrace.

A familiar scent completely washed over him. It was the scent of cheap vanilla lotion and soap.

It was a smell he hadn’t experienced since he was eighteen years old.

Sitting in a sterile freezing hospital room, staring blindly at the white linoleum floor, holding a frail hand and watching a heart monitor flatline.

A soft feminine voice whispered gently directly into his ear.

It was a voice he hadn’t heard in years. .

"I’m so proud of you, Klaus."

Klaus’s breath hitched hard in his throat.

It felt like someone had just driven a sledgehammer directly into his stomach as his eyes snapped open.

A lump the size of a golf ball formed in his throat.

The emotion in that one single sentence he had spent his entire miserable fractured life desperately waiting to hear hit him so hard his vision actually blurred with tears.

Before he could even turn his head, before he could reach his functional right hand up to try and touch the glowing arms holding him, the embrace dissolved into light but the feeling didn’t leave.

A massive rush of pure invigoration flooded his veins.

The hands let go and the exact second they did, the white void collapsed completely.

The realm shattered into absolute nothingness.

The pocket dimension that Ryoki had hijacked was destroyed.

Because the space was gone, all of the stored hoarded Soul Mana that Ryoki had siphoned from Ilyana over the centuries... an astronomical ocean of refined divine energy had nowhere left to go including his own.

The battery had been cracked wide open, and the only vessel left in the vicinity was Klaus.

The energy warped violently into Klaus’s body.

BOOM!

It wasn’t a gentle process at all.

It was a simply a massive flood of pure soul mana entering his body.

"Augh!!!!!"

It hurt... It hurt so much...

Klaus physically felt his paralyzed left arm violently twitch as the raw energy flooded his crippled severed nerves.

It jumpstarted his deadened system like a massive shot of adrenaline directly to the heart.

He could literally feel the torn muscle fibers knitting together... The shattered bones in his ribs snapped back into perfect alignment with a series of loud pops.

The severed soul connections which were the state that Ryoki had cut away repaired themselves instantly, flushing his core with a surplus of power.

He was violently pulled back into the waking world.

...

The ground floor of the Endless Tower was a suffocating tomb of silence.

The makeshift campfire that Mirela had desperately built from the splintered, ruined wooden remains of the Snow Caravan had long since burned down.

It was reduced to a meager pathetic pile of glowing orange embers that barely cast a shadow against the dark.

The heat it provided was practically negligible against the unnatural chill radiating from the massive black obsidian pillars supporting the towering ceiling above.

Mirela paced.

She didn’t just walk... she marched frantically back and forth across the polished black stone.

The hard heels of her boots struck the obsidian in a sharp click-clack, click-clack that echoed endlessly up into the dark unseen upper reaches of the tower.

She had been walking the exact same tight line for so long she had worn a visible dusty path into the floorboards near the base of the colossal spiral staircase.

Her goat ears were pinned completely flat against her head with her horns twitching.

"F-fuck..."

She was chewing violently on the thumbnail of her left hand with her teeth grinding against the keratin until it almost bled.

Her striking silver eyes darted toward the dark silent landing high above the staircase every few seconds.

She kept waiting to see a flash of magical light.

Mirela kept waiting to hear the sound of heavy boots on the stone.

Nothing...

It had been hours.

Or maybe it had been days.

Time in the Endless Tower was an abstract meaningless concept.

It was severely distorted by the dense, heavy spatial magic sealing the perimeter of the structure.

You couldn’t tell if it was day or night outside... You couldn’t track the sun...You just sat in the dark and waited...

All Mirela knew for a fact was that the man she loved had walked through those glowing white double doors looking like a withered, frail, dying husk of a ninety-year-old man.

He had barely been able to stand on his own two feet.

His lungs had visibly rattled with every single breath he took.

His skin had been gray and paper-thin. He had looked like a stiff breeze would snap his spine in half.

Her mind was running through a hundred different detailed nightmare scenarios.

What if he had just collapsed on the stairs from sheer exhaustion before he even reached the inside?

What if his heart had just given out?

What if the Second King had simply materialized from the shadows and snapped his fragile neck the exact second he crossed the threshold into the trial room?

What if he had failed, and Klaus’s soul had been entirely digested while they sat down here doing nothing?

If he died up there, it meant they were completely trapped down here in the dark with a victorious parasitic god who now owned Klaus’s body and had all of his memories.

At least that was what Anya told her.

"Mirela, please," a small calm voice interrupted her rapidly spiraling panic.

Anya was sitting cross-legged on the dusty, stained mattress they had managed to drag in from the ruined caravan outside.

The six-year-old Shinigami had her small pale hands resting neatly in her lap.

Her posture was completely perfect with her back straight.

Her striking ancient purple eyes tracked the demi-human maid’s frantic pacing back and forth with a mixture of analytical observation and thinly veiled tension.

Anya didn’t look like a normal kid waiting for her dad to come back.

She looked like a tiny ancient scholar watching a caged animal stress itself to death in a laboratory.

"You are expending unnecessary caloric energy..." Anya stated.

Unlike Mirela, she was a lot calmer but that was because she didn’t know how to show human emotions.

"Pacing will not alter the flow of time within the dimension of the trial room... Nor will it influence the outcome of the psychological warfare currently occurring within Father’s mind. You must calm down."

Mirela stopped pacing.

She froze mid-step with her boot hovering above the obsidian floor.

She whirled around to face the little girl. Her lips were pulled back in a fierce terrified snarl, exposing her slightly pointed canines.

"How can you be so calm?!" Mirela demanded.

Her voice cracked under the immense, crushing emotional strain.

She didn’t mean to yell at the kid, but she couldn’t stop the words from tearing out of her throat.

"He was dying, Anya! His bones were turning to glass! I broke his wrist just by trying to lift him off the damn floor! He went in there to fight a monster that has lived for centuries according to you, and he didn’t even have his sword! He didn’t have any of his gear! He didn’t have anything!"

Mirela turned back toward the stairs.

She reached down and grabbed her moon-crystal staff from where it rested against a pillar.

She clutched the smooth wood so tightly her knuckles popped, turning stark white under the strain.

"If that... that thing comes down those stairs wearing his face," Mirela whispered.

Tears of dread welled up in her striking blue eyes, spilling over her lashes and running down her pale cheeks.

Her voice dropped to a serious hiss.

"I am going to shatter its core. I don’t care if it’s a god. I don’t care if it’s immortal. I will kill it."

Anya watched the demi-human maid.

Despite her cold Shinigami exterior, Anya’s own small hands were trembling slightly where they rested in her lap.

Her small fingers dug into the fabric of her dress.

She was just as terrified as Mirela... She just hid it better.

As a being born from death magic, Anya had felt the massive violent fluctuations of Soul Mana echoing through the ether.

The sheer volume of spiritual violence occurring in the dimension directly above them was staggering.

It felt like standing outside a vault while a bomb went off inside.

"He will not fail..." Anya said softly.

She was trying to convince herself just as much as she was trying to convince Mirela.

She squeezed her small hands into fists.

"He is the Soul King. He is—"

Before Anya could finish her sentence, the entire architecture of the Endless Tower reacted.

There was no sound...

It was a massive foundational shift in the atmospheric pressure of the world.

The heavy suffocating density of the dark obsidian that had plagued the tower for centuries suddenly vanished.

It felt like a massive vacuum seal had just been broken.

The toxic air was entirely replaced by an ocean of pure light divine energy.

VWOOOOOOOM!

A massive white glow erupted from the very center of the stone altar at the back of the room.

It was the exact spot where the original Shinigami had been chained, bled, and tortured for centuries.

The light didn’t just sit there.

It rushed outward like a tidal wave of pure luminescence, sweeping violently across the polished black stone floor.

As the light touched the base of the towering obsidian pillars, the ancient, dormant runes carved deep into the rock violently ignited.

For centuries, they had been dead and dark, suppressed by Ryoki’s corruption.

Now, thousands of intricate, glowing white magical glyphs flared to life all at once.

They spiraled rapidly up the massive columns, illuminating the ground floor with the sheer, blinding brilliance of a midday sun.

Mirela gasped, throwing her arms up and squeezing her eyes shut, shielding her face from the blinding glare.

Anya stood up from the dirty mattress.

She didn’t shield her eyes... Her purple eyes widened in paralyzing awe as the ambient mana of the room fundamentally altered its signature.

The toxic stagnant aura of the Second King was completely gone.

It had been scrubbed from the stone...

The Endless Tower was rejoicing.

It was actively resonating with a new overwhelmingly powerful spiritual gravity.

The true Soul King had awakened!

Mirela slowly lowered her arms as the initial, blinding intensity of the light settled into a radiant glow.

The new light banished every single shadow from the massive room, making the obsidian floor look like a mirror of pure white energy.

She stared at the base of the colossal spiral staircase.

Her heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs.

It beat so hard she felt like it was going to crack her sternum.

She didn’t relax.

She didn’t assume they were safe.

Mirela gripped her moon-crystal staff with both hands, planting her boots wide and lowering her center of gravity into a rigid defensive combat stance.

The heavy silence of the illuminated tower was finally broken by the sound of footsteps.

Step! Step! Step!

They weren’t the erratic scraping footsteps of a dying old man shuffling toward a grave.

They weren’t the frantic uneven steps of a terrified boy.

They were slow and despite no power being pulled into them... there was weight to it

Every single time a heavy boot struck the obsidian stairs, a visible ripple of white Soul Mana dispersed into the air, echoing outward like a drop of water in a still pond.

It was as if the very stone of the tower was struggling to contain the concentrated density of the entity currently descending upon it.

Mirela held her breath with her throat was entirely dry.

A figure stepped out of the shadows of the stairwell and into the radiant, blinding light of the ground floor.

Mirela’s eyes widened to the size of saucers. Her grip on her staff faltered.

Her jaw completely dropped.

It was Klaus.

Or, at least, the entity possessed the fundamental, underlying facial structure of the man she loved.

But he had been fundamentally overwhelmingly changed.

The withered, sagging, paper-thin gray skin of the dying old man was completely gone...

And that body was replaced by that of a god.