With a decisive sword strike, Axl stabbed at the sphere, and the kobold's body went limp. Having the moment to pause, Axl stored his sword and re-socketed his limp left arm back in place, activating a healing potion to deal with that arm's damage. He then lifted up the kobold's body and managed to put it into his ring, confused since he didn't get any Karmic Energy, and living things couldn’t be put in dimensional storage.
This meant that the kobold wasn't alive at all, but somehow a tool or construct. Even another Skill from the healer? Axl shook his head at the impossibility of this. How many Skills was he dealing with, then? Seven or eight?
Taking a breath to re-center himself, he slashed at the canvas covering of the cart, letting the force of the motion blow the remaining cheap material away. The wheels of the cart had given way in the battle at some point, and the small cart's bottom rested on the ground. A clump of boxes was strewn about the corners, but the center was dominated by a large pillar of glass. It looked like a terrarium, holding a large array of plants and flowers, even hand-sized insects buzzing about around odd stones and minerals. It looked like a verdant explosion of life, as if the diversity of an entire lush forest were condensed into an enclosure barely large enough to fit an average elf within. Somehow, a dense sense of Undeath emanated from within.
At the base of the terrarium, near the solid stone slab flush with the glass enclosure, a naked, diminutive elf dragged his body, slowly placing talismans around the enclosure. It took Axl a moment to figure out what he was looking at, eventually realizing the slight figure had faces stitched all over his body. Most were elven or kobold, with a spattering of Lineages he couldn't place. Most were slack-jawed with closed eyes, as if sleeping, but some looked around as if still alive, faces contorted in pain or burning with rage.
"Wait," the elf turned, raising his hands. "I'm the Wailing Blight's youngest son. My patriarch will pay a large ransom for my return. Enough to fund an ascension into the E-Grade."
Axl clenched his sword and took out a [Venombite Fang] as he walked over, carefully watching the undead elf, expecting a trick. There were a pair of traps near the entrance to the cart, but he sidestepped those, the undead's jaw tightening as he did so.
"What are those faces?" Axl asked.
"An undead Skill unique to my Lineage, the result of centuries of accumulation that my patriarch committed to my birth."
"Is that how you managed to use so many Skills? Each belonged to somebody whose face you took?"
The elf nodded, his face looking young, like how elves looked before they started to level. He barely even looked undead at all. "Largely accurate, fellow cultivator. I take the strength of the living and turn it to mine. Such is the craft of the Archlich. Imagine the wonders he could offer you as well."
One of the faces was staring at Axl, quietly mouthing words over and over. It didn't take much Charisma and Perception for him to realize she was asking to die.
A surge of contempt and rage filled Axl, Roken's memories of his city and their people overlaid on these squirming, consumed faces. Axl couldn't do much for the dead elf whose body he inhabited, but he certainly had enough vengeance in him to spare some for Roken's memory.
Axl threw a dagger at the elf's face, breaking through a thin Mana barrier around him, and just to be sure, he kept throwing his daggers, unloading all he had. One of the faces grew limp as a surge of healing struggled to close the wounds, but Axl stabbed the elf in the brain with [Webcutter] then crushed his chest cavity with his boot, destroying both hearts in his chest.
Even then, the elf struggled, a ringed hand taking out an incredibly densely inscribed talisman, but Axl managed to grab it before the undead had the chance to activate it. Moments later, Axl felt a massive surge of Karmic Energy, his eyes widening as he realized he had gained not one but two levels.
Setting aside his notifications, he took the elf's body into storage, relieved at the implicit confirmation that all the faces were dead. He willed the storage device to be left behind, the single ring on the undead's finger, which Axl placed inside his boot, starting the process of infusing it with his Mana to break it open, also taking out the archer's ring and doing the same.
Looking around, Axl noticed the rest of the convoy had started running away quite a while ago, most not even heading towards the siege, but trying to get away from him as quickly as they could. He even suspected most started running well before the battle was finished, given the distance they'd managed to clear.
Thinking the best gear would likely be in this more heavily defended cart, Axl quickly took all the crates from cart, but realized this haul wasn't particularly great, most F-Grade stuff at the middle of the tier, with smaller boxes of high F-Grade things. This was not to mention that most likely the material would be more useful to the undead than the city defenders. Still, he had plenty of space in his rings, so in they went.
Lastly, he turned to the terrarium, the source of Undeath. Clearly, this was the most valuable thing they carried, to the extent that the face-stealing undead scion tried to protect it with his final flailing defenses and tricks, as opposed to focusing on running away when the fight fully turned.
As Axl stared at the thing, he was transfixed by its rich Mana. It was far more vibrant and clashing than what the vale produced, all of it churning and building into a genuine manifestation of dense life and nature, in addition to many concepts and attunements he didn't couldn’t identify. Unfortunately, very little of it was metallic, but the little bits of it that were also incredibly rich, at least a dozen metallic attunements he hadn't seen before.
He also immediately realized why something so intricate and valuable couldn't be transported in a dimensional storage, since so much of it relied on the living trapped inside. And this also posed a question for Axl—he couldn't just toss it into his dimensional storage, as that would most certainly break it, but he also didn't see himself hauling the huge thing strapped to his back.
As if offering an answer to his conundrum, he got a quest notification.
>>Siege of Valioon challenge update:
>>Destroy sources of Undeath (0/8 destroyed)
>>Reward: Improvement of rewards obtained from Law of Succession challenge, proportional to number of sources destroyed.
There it was. As much as it was a shame to destroy something like this, if there were others like it, chances are he'd have the chance to capture one intact, and if not, at least destroying them would further his fief-establishing challenge. But a second notification he'd gotten was modified, brought to his attention with another option provided to him.
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
>>Achievement Obtained (consumable):
>>Grand Slayer of the Heavenly Chosen.
>>Kill an F-Grade cultivator holding an Epic combat skill while still in the G-Grade.
>>Reward: Call of Undeath becomes consolidated into either 1) Bodyplan improvement (Life-draining fangs), 2) Meridian infusion (+10% refinement, Undeath attunement), 3) Body-weaving (F-Grade technical art, together with E-Grade artistry manual) 4) Quest for Grand Undeath (reward proportional to sources of Undeath absorbed)
>>Accept? Yes/No
>>WARNING: Fourth option must be accepted with Achievement consumption before Law of Succession challenge is completed.
Axl contemplated the Achievement, allowing himself a moment of pride at killing somebody with an Epic skill, even if it was a rather young cultivator that had likely just reached the middle of F-Grade. Not that he felt bad about that, the little bastard was clearly torturing people so he could use their Skills, so he was hardly innocent, and probably deserved far worse than he got.
Still, Axl realized he couldn't just bank this achievement like he'd been doing with so many of the recent ones he got. Maybe the system wanted to nudge him away from that sort of hoarding, for whatever reason. Luckily, it wasn't a particularly hard choice, since he certainly didn't want his Meridians to get aligned to Undeath, he already had enough to do on the artistry side with his glyphic alchemy to bother with another technical art, and becoming a blood-sucking vampire didn't seem that appealing. Plus, he'd seen so far that going for the rewards that took more work yielded the best stuff, so option four it was.
>>Quest: Consume Undeath and Rise above the cycle
>>Absorb as many sources of Undeath as you can into your seed within 100 days.
>>Reward: Proportional to sources of Undeath absorbed.
A small pressure formed on the palm of his left hand, and Axl felt a small seed within, weak and frail, more in his soulspace than his body, in fact, but still firmly in his hand. Feeling the small seed's hunger, he brought his hand to the terrarium in front of him, and over the next minute, the Undeath was drained from within.
Very little else changed inside the container—some of the insects became more active and condensation started to form inside the glass, but the change was less drastic than he expected. The seed in his hand was now more hefty and substantial, and seemed to hold the Undeath previously churning in the terrarium.
He felt a ping in his Irialith nobility title and noticed that it also forwarded his challenge.
>>Siege of Valioon challenge update:
>>Destroy sources of Undeath (1/8 destroyed)
>>Reward: Improvement of rewards obtained from Law of Succession challenge, proportional to number of sources destroyed.
Now that was convenient. Still, Axl was not one to waste, so with more effort than he expected, he lifted the terrarium from the ground and placed it in his ribcage storage, needing to use a hefty amount of his Internal Mana as all the life inside was killed by the forced placement.
Certain that reinforcements from the siege were going to come at any moment, Axl charged into the forest. He masked his Mana and changed directions often, careful not to leave a trail, taking a long, meandering path to the siege, roughly towards the other sources of Undeath.
On the way, Axl looked up his status, noticing [Minor Telekinesis] and [Bolting Motion] both advanced one step to the 4th of the G-Grade. The former likely came from his straining to apply the Skill to liquids when attacking one of the undead with a vial of poison, which he didn't know he could do, but was a very welcome surprise. He'd have to experiment with other ways to work the Skill with his poisons, say together with [Venombite Fang].
His movement skill likely improved from using it in mid-air, together with creating lightning to form a path. That was clearly the intended use for the Skill, letting him skid through lightning as if it were a natural extension of his body. The movement was in fact so smooth and fast, he now itched to activate it like that again. Even walking normally felt like a chore in comparison. This was, obviously, a very clever trap from the system to get him to use lightning more often, which Axl would've happily indulged, if not for the substantial tribulation pressure it added.
Lastly, he savored opening the notification of his levelling up, the single battle finishing his progress through levels 18 and 19 entirely.
>> New Level Obtained: Level 20
>> Class: Usurpation of Balance (Rare): +3 to all Attributes, +0 Free Points, +0 Free Boons
>> Title: Oocile's Chosen (Oocile, updated): All Attributes +20 (scales with level)
This one felt sweetest of all, a relief that levelling up with his Rare class and other chosen power-ups would make it easy to get stuck, but that single fight got him so very much. And while his enemy was some sort of young prodigy with that Epic skill, which certainly seemed to have provided an extra windfall of Karmic Energy, honestly, the fight wasn't that bad. He had to use more of his Skills than he'd have hoped, but he didn’t even need to touch [Filial Deathshroud] or even attack the souls of the undead with his normal attacks. Most importantly, he didn’t have to take out any of the nasty fire-based explosion talismans he'd prepared for a real emergency.
Getting to level 20 wasn't enough to give him an option to ascend to the F-Grade, however, his cap being at level 22 since he had an F-Grade Lineage. And with the realization that leveling up wasn't quite as bad as he hoped, Axl dared to consider a far, far riskier plan on that front. He went from worrying about expanding his cap too much by furthering his Skills to coming up with a wish list of those he wanted to push into the F-Grade.
Top of the pile was, of course, [Mana Shroud], his core skill that he now basically used every waking moment, then [Gastric Cauldron], [Attuned Drill Strike], and, lastly, his still-unformed Cultivator's Core. With his Lineage already being F-Grade, all these together would raise his cap to level 30. A genuinely irresponsible cap, but as he read Oocile's accounts of his own ascension, Axl simply couldn't imagine doing so without those aspects of his cultivation shaping his options on how to ascend.
He, of course, was ready to compromise on some of this, if he needed to cut his losses to get Terrania's Nexus established, say if he needed to face the metal dryad quickly. But until then, he had an army of undead to pit himself against, and that could help bridge the gap.
As he charged to his next challenge, he opened up his full status, savoring his growth and looking forward to the next.
Name: Xel-389b (Roken)
Level: 20
Grade: G
Class: Usurpation of Balance (Rare)
Core: (none)
Spiritual Organs: Gastric Cauldron (branch G)
Lineage: Alchemical Vessel in the High Elf (root F)
Meridians: 20% refined
Bodyplan: Gills (removed), poison-clearing larynx (damaged), Metal-hewn body of Grand Profundity
Attribute points: 270 (base: 137, flat modifiers: 70, percentage modifiers (30.5%): 63)
Attributes (12): Strength, Endurance, Vitality, Agility, Bilesong, Mentality, Perception, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma, Limerence, Luck
Free Points: 0
Free Boons: 1
Dao: Glimpse of Lightening
Skills: Mana Shroud (Rare, Proficiency G.8), Mind-Soul Bulwark (Rare, Proficiency G.4), Attuned Drill Strike (Rare, Proficiency G.2), Bolting Motion (Rare G.4), Mental Map of Irialith (Common), Minor Telekinesis (Uncommon, Proficiency G.4)
Technical Arts: Glyphistry: Glyphic Alchemy (G.8), Glyphic Spellcasting
Titles: Last Human of Luna (Terrania), Oocile's Chosen (Oocile), Geas of the Weak (Shrouded Crescent Valley), Perennial Prey (Predatorial Conclave, Shrouded Crescent Valley), Irialith Nobility (Shrouded Crescent Valley)
Quests: Establish the Terrania Nexus (Terrania), Void Tribute (Nox of the Void), Core Formation (Oocile), Body tempering to metal (System, Completed), Consume Undeath and Rise above the cycle (System)
Achievements (Consumed = 7): Karmic Enmity (Vikam Elves), Class Rebirth, Earliest Rebirth, Grand Slayer, Upward-Gazing Warrior (Consumable), Solitary Conqueror of the Greenhouse Crossroads, Patron of Undeath, Total di-millennial grounding (Consumable), 17-fold Metal-Forged Meridian Base (Consumable)
Soulspace Manuals: Selsin Clan Glyphic Compendium (F-Grade), Elided Tome of Equanimity (F-Grade), Keystone pendant of Pelitrel's legacy (E-Grade), Fleshsmith Bokal's Hammer (?), Seed of Undeath (G-Grade)