Alix was now crawling in the tunnels on his four limbs, advancing hanging from the ceiling of the tunnel, his nails embodied in the hard stone as if a hot knife cutting butter. Up or down didn't make a difference for him anymore, what was counting was to kill, to eat, to become stronger!
A Primal desire was taking place of his now absent awareness. It could be said to be the desires Alix had developed in wanting to survive in this ferocious environment. It was three months ago that he was a young student soon to be graduated but it feels as if he passed ten years in this place without any light, surrounded by nothing but creatures wanting his death.
It was natural that an already proud young man didn't want to lose against this harsh setting and developed such strong instinct. Coupled with his absorption of Emanations and of the strange green blood, his body had completely taken a new shape.
Not really similar to a human anymore, if you could see through his dark red aura, you could see a black body, with red veins pulsing, red eyes shining as incandescent charcoal. There wasn't any trace of the previous green blood and green light, it had retracted profoundly in the body, maintaining the basic survival function of the body and its memory.
Quickly speeding in a tunnel, he killed creature after creatures he encountered. He had now met with two more species that he didn't bother to give a name, his mind focusing on how to eat them. There was a slithering abyss creature, hundreds of meters long, with a mouth capable of swallowing him whole, and in fact, it had. Alix had killed it from its inside, protected by his powerful aura from the digestives juices.
He didn't bother to slice him up, just munching inside its meat, slowly devouring it alive. The Slithery, which could have been named like this if Alix awareness was here, had died in excruciating suffering. Not bothered by it, Alix had lived here for a good week to finish eating it whole. The food was absorbed, disappearing as if it didn't exist in the first place, actually nourishing the reconstructed body.
He encountered another monster, this one a lot more tricky, it was actually a rat or more to say an incredible amount of rat. He killed them to its heart content but was eventually surrounded, finishing his killing spree to end up fleeing for his life. He was projecting instinctively to take his revenge and finished to eat all of them, emptying the tunnels of all life forms.
Using the tactic of killing and running, he progressively reduces the mass of rats that were teeming in the sixth level. Day by day passed, one the same one than the other with a little difference like the number of rat creatures, sometimes another species falling under his teeth...
A month had actually passed without Alix even realizing it. The population of abyss creatures had drastically decreased. They now lived in fear for their lives, not wanting to go out of their safe place anymore, but unable to escape to the seventh level.
A thick metal door was indeed blocking the sole path going downward. Alix had already visited it, but unable to make it budge a single bit, he quickly retreats, his Emanation not strong enough by a large margin to attack something like this.
An inherent fear was even developed by the two Emanations lying in his body when trying to look past the door as if gazing at a powerful foe, able to reduce them in ash with just a glance. Retreating, the trio, Blood Emanation, Dark Emanation, and Alix's body continued their hunt.
Another month passed, and the population of abyss creature was nearly extinct. In fact, Alix didn't see one creature since three days ago. He had to climb up to the first level again, executing his killing spree again, the abyss maze didn't have any secret anymore for him. With his speed, he was able to explore the totality of it.
He had to run for almost three days without a stop to roam from one side to the canyon to another and it was just for one level. Giving up the idea to search for the scarce survivors, Alix once again went to the door of the seventh level, it hadn't moved at all during the entire month, but just as he was approaching it, it cracked open, creaking on its massive hinges.
Powerful Darkness Emanation was going out of it, its black tendrils surrounding the walls of the tunnels, circling around Alix. A voice could then be heard.
"Hehehe, here his our little friend! You did a good job, refining these many creatures in such a short time. I did help you a little, but without your thirst for blood, it would have taken forever..."
Alix could not move at all, as if nailed to the floor, the Dark aura and the eerie voice making him want to collapse on the hard soil. The Emanations was maintaining the body up but with great difficulty.
"Don't worry, I don't really care for your hunting of my little creatures, but you understand that you have a price to pay in exchange for your consuming of my experiences... I won't ask for much, just to experiment a little on your body and its special condition..."
The voice came clearer and clearer and soon a dark figure could be seen surrounded by Darkness. It was tall, five-meter at least, with graceful motion it was slowly approaching Alix.
"You don't have much of a choice, sorry, I must harvest my investment little friend, I'm sure you agree, even if you can't really hear me do you? It seems you were consumed by these two powerful Emanations, but somehow I can feel a little of your consciousness. To be able to survive this, you are indeed quite extraordinary, young descendant of the Humi!"
His dark lips were moving on a pale face framed by long black hair, glistening in the dark. His earnest expression contradicting with the word escaping from his mouth. With a quick hand motion, Alix's body was completely immobilized and began to levitate.
The Two Emanation were even restricted, not budging at all having met one of their nemesis, a god.
Kuk was especially pleased. Everything had gone as he wanted, The young boy refining the quasi totality of his experimental specimens, increasing the Emerald stone concentration in his body at a level he didn't even know was possible.
His previous experiment showed that you couldn't increase the concentration of Emerald stone energy unlimited. Each one of his creatures had a level of its own. But this tiny young boy had achieved even if he finally fall in the process.
"That's not really my problem if he can't take control of his body anymore. What I'm more interested in is if I can really extract this thing! "
With eyes shining in anticipation and his tongue caressing his lips, Alix could see that he was taking great pleasure in his misfortune. Even if it wasn't conscious, his body was, and all that was happening was saved in his memory.
"Time to begin, follow me, young man!"
As he was saying this, he began to walk at a slow pace, going downward, Alix's body following while levitating, without much he could do about it.
The trip lasts for an entire hour during which he could make the landscape of the seventh level, quite different from the others. Caves after caves were placed against a long corridor which seems without end. Strange creatures, ones he didn't know, other, he could not think they could exist were living in these caves.
It was Kuk's experimental game that, bored, he did during his long-time passed sealed in this Never Canyon. Arriving at least at the end of the corridor, a gigantic cave appears before Alix's eyes. The dimension was so vast, you couldn't see the other side nor the ceiling. The Darkness was omnipresent, almost tangible.
"Here we will be fine, just lay here still !"
He pointed to the center of the cave and Alix's body automatically went here, laying on the floor.
"So, what do we have exactly, I could see that everything didn't go well for you, what is even this thing?"
Kuk seems really surprised when looking in details, his perception completely wrapping Alix.
"I have never seen anything like it! Two Emanations gaining sentience working together, and one of it my own Emanation !? How could they fuse so well? And the other is a Blood Emanation, so pure...It could happen for an Emanation to gain sentience, and it would be a frightening perspective but nowhere serious enough for gods to mind much... But this! It developed on an already sentient life form and two Emanations are coexisting on it, I don't even know how it's possible !"
He was clearly pleased when saying this, the more the merrier as we say. His front was a little wrinkled in his intensive thought process, trying to make sense of what he was seeing before him. To know two Emanations are coexisting together is one thing, but to understand why is another!
"And I didn't even begin to look in his Emerald stone energy, so many surprises in one boy, it 's been quite some times that I had such an interesting specimen."
Gathering his Dark aura, he sliced open Alix's stomach to look more in the depth of this mystery.
"AAAAAAAAAAH"
A pained cry echoed in the cavern, Alix's body much aware of it, even if his consciousness was not here. The pain system of the body was linked to its instinctive reflex but the Darkness god didn't seem fazed by it, continuing his exploration as if nothing happened.
The experiment and the torture that goes with it continue for a day before Kuk stopped, gazing in the void as if trying to understand what he just saw.
"So it's like this... His body can indeed absorb a large concentration of Emerald stone energy, but it seems to me that with what he had already absorbed is nowhere closed to its limit. Such a fearful body, I think there were actually more than ten thousand of abyss creatures that he killed and ate...To not even fulfill its limit..."
Slicing one more time in the Heart region, surrounded by more than a hundred surgical wounds, he looked, his nose practically in Alix's body.
"Yeah, the Emerald energy has been refined to the extreme and had nourished his body, creating practically a new one. So it's as if actually his body in a single Emerald stone with a purity never seen before..."
Extracting a blood sample with a syringe, he looked at it with a gaze full of wonder.
"The entire reconstruction of his body allowed him to absorb Emanation, protecting the body from its powerful after-effect. But one Emanation seemed to be the limit, and when the second one appeared, it broke the equilibrium, making this strange cohabitation between two Emanations possible."
Storing the sample with a thousand others consisted of blood, muscle, skin, nails, hair, bits of organs... he was organizing his thoughts.
"One mystery solved. Now, why would my own Emanation gained sentience, how could he developed this quickly a second one and one of the more powerful and the purer I saw in all of my long life at that! Why did his consciousness survive this crisis, and wherein all of the f*cking Seven did the Emerald energy go??!"
Taking a deep breath, he resumes his activity, torturing this mysterious body without caring to reduce the pain to unveiled this questions. The days passed one after the other, and when two weeks of intense torture passed, putting his arms in the body searching for mysterious organs, trying to reveal something with spraying acid on it or even burning parts of the body, Kuk seems to have enough conclusions to stop.
" OK, that was intense, and he didn't even die, what a powerful life force and healing factor! Fortunately, with all my creatures he ate, the nutrients are abundant in his body, even if he already absorbed a good part of it!"
Kuk was truly glad to have found this little one, he was extremely fond of it now, even with the little disappointments he had.
"Truly a shame that I can't extract this Emerald energy, it has fused with his body at a molecular level, it is now a part of it. His body can even produce more with time, increasing his concentration gradually, such a good fortune for him. It seems like I won't be able to understand this peculiar energy in my life. It explains why without having begun his Condensation, he was able to fight against Liquid level life forms...But fortunately, I could extract the sentience of my Darkness Emanation and fused it with my own, making it gaining sentience."
Dark tendrils were now playing around his body, turning around it as if whispering something to him.
"Yeah, don't worry, with you by my side, I should be able to exit this damned place when you will be mature enough."
His mood was good, thousands of years trapped here, and with the help of this little man, he could now escape in a not too long future.
"And this Blood Emanation is such a precious thing, I think I will take it as payment for your entire absorption of my painful made abyss creatures. I'm a generous god after all, and it seems normal for you to give me something in return, equilibrium must always be respected, hehehe!"
Conjuring a complex matrix of Darkness, he pulled out the red aura of Alix Body without much effort.
"As I previously deduced, such a pure Blood Emanation, you must have been pretty pure before your massacre, which must have been done for rightful reasons. It's pretty unusual, to say the least, normally Blood Emanations are found on psychos or murderous people, making it tinted with their madness!"
Putting the Blood Emanation in a bottle as if it was a vulgar liquid, he then proceeds to organize his belonging.
"Well, a deal is a deal, even if you were not conscious there was one, you helped me, it's my turn to do my side of the deal... How should I help you? Probably by not killing you! Hehehe, but can you survive one more time in an abyss without creature living in it?"
Tossing the body outside the door, he closed it, laughing madly seeing the quasi corpse rebounding on the floor to end immobile against a wall, blood streaming down from the thousands of cuts he did.
"Hehehehe, good luck, and thank you...."
The words were disappearing in the Darkness, as if never really pronounced.