Only endless rage was seething inside Ruel. His mind was in disarray.
How was the Demon Lord inside his body?
How come Ruel didn't notice him until now?
These questions were eating at him.
Ruel had noticed him only when he stepped all over him.
Yet who could blame him? He was just in the first realm and didn't have the powers to see through these things.
There was nothing he could do as this was not within his powers. Hell, he couldn't even peek inside his own aperture without a root stone.
The Demon Lord disrupted the formation of spiritual roots. The mass of spiritual energy Ruel had gathered was lost in the process. However, the energy that was initially wrapped remained in the spiritual root.
But even then, it would take him much more time to start the process of gathering and weaving the spiritual energy around the root.
A single attack had crushed all his hopes of doing something greater than he could have done.
Taking a deep breath, he reached out to the dispitating mass of energy. Gathering it again above his hands with the utmost concentration.
Just as the Demon Lord's voice vanished, Ruel gathered two significant pieces of information from it.
Firstly, even though he was residing inside Ruel's body, he couldn't exercise all of his power, otherwise, Ruel would have died in that one attack.
His mind was inside the aperture, in a tired state after weaving so much spiritual energy. If the attack had been more powerful, Ruel would have died right there and then.
Second was that he could not intervene much inside Ruel's body, he could not actively intervene in something Ruel was doing in the real world.
If he could, then there were plenty of chances of killing Ruel.
Leaving these thoughts behind, Ruel actively focused on forming the sphere. He had less than five minutes to increase his-
Every minute that passed by, he felt as if his mind would crash. He had to put his utmost concentration into weaving it again.
This time his speed was higher, as he wasn't even thinking about saving some energy for the time he would integrate the element into his spiritual roots.
Just as the last second passed by, the inside of the aperture tremored, indicating that the time was up.
With a big sigh, Ruel looked at his spiritual roots.
It was 87 percent completed. This would have been an extraordinary feat if people outside knew about it.
Anything above 80 percent was genius-level talent, and anything above 90 was just heaven-defying.
But in no way was he satisfied with this much. He could have done much more, far more than this, but that all was just ifs.
As the damn bastard had said, this was his stigma to bear his sin.
The path to cultivation wasn't easy, but this was an anomaly.
And Ruel now knew how the Demon Lord had entered his body. It was the keeper's fault!
The Demon Lord was his doing, he was one of the gifts that damn old fucker was talking about.
But the biggest question remained how?
The keeper was far above Ruel in power, even the Demon Lord was an ant in front of him, and that supreme of a being wouldn't have noticed this demon inside Ruel?
Bullshit.
He had known about it, but the question still remained: how was this a boon to Ruel in any way?
This was more of a curse than anything.
Just as he was thinking about all this, another trembling happened inside the aperture. This indicated the start of element integration inside the spiritual root.
Leaving these thoughts behind, Ruel stood up, looking at the small fragments of elements that suddenly started appearing inside his aperture.
They were everywhere around Ruel.
It looked like stars of different colors were inside this dark space. With the addition of the glowing spiritual root, it looked like beautiful and majestic scenery.
Without wasting any more time pondering this moment, Ruel used his mind to segregate the particles inside his aperture.
There were particles of different affinities, like water, earth, fire, ice, and many more.
But there was a shocking scene amidst all this. It was a staggering amount of lightning particles!
They were surrounding at least a third of the aperture.
A third of the aperture was just filled with lightning!
This was a blessing for Ruel, as he had wanted to use lightning as an affinity for his spiritual root this time around.
In his previous life, he had pure water spiritual roots, which had helped him reach great heights, but in the end, it wasn't suited much for battles.
It was an excellent element nonetheless. With great versatility and malleability, it was effective for defense as well as maneuverability.
But Ruel needed much more than that. He wanted power and destructive ability more.
An element that rampages on the battlefield.
With this in mind, his options were lowered much more than before. Either he could try using fire or lightning.
Darkness was also an option, but it was more corroding than destructive.
And now Ruel had an ample amount of lightning particles in front of him.
He started to drag particles one after another with his mind. It was a slow and meticulous process.
Even though all of them were segregated and were ready to be put to use, it was a hard process.
Every particle had the property of needing the energy to move. It meant that energy had to be provided before anyone could move.
Ruel's mind was tired after weaving the root, much of its energy drained, but he kept on doing it.
First, it was one particle, then two, then ten, then a hundred. He kept on dragging them towards the root.
As he kept adding the particles, the color began to change from the ends of the roots.
It started to turn a bright purple with the addition of more and more particles.
Just as around ten minutes had passed inside the aperture, the roots suddenly started shimmering.
Then it all came to a halt.
Ruel thought it was one more attack from the Demon Lord when the wind passed him.
Wind?
But there was no wind inside the aperture, it was a desolate space except for the spiritual root and the elemental particles.
Suddenly Ruel's eyes darted toward the spiritual root, and what he saw left him shocked.
The spiritual root, no, the lightning particles, attracted each other. There was a vortex created around the root.
They were attracting each other at twice the speed that Ruel had done!
A wave of happiness flashed across his face.
He didn't need to do anything and his foundation was automatically being formed!
The happiness lingered till he saw some creases on the surface of the root.
Nothing was free in this world. Everything had a price on it.
And the price for this was the destruction of spiritual roots.
The creases indicated that his roots would be destroyed if this continued!
The integration of elements was a slow process. It meant that the roots could adapt to the process of something foreign entering them.
And this was too much, even for them to handle.