Being groomed as a Yang-Vessel, the most familiar emotion for Rodha was surely Despair
each and everyone he knew who had similar experiences, including the previous him, all had desperation and pure despair written all over their faces
even though he surely hated the Hua woman for being the one who killed him previously, he had to say, she was a woman like no other he had seen, she also had that inner scream of despair always written on her face
the other's might not be able to tell, but he– as a kindred spirit to that emotion–he could surely tell.
Yet, something about the woman was different from all other's he had seen, unlike pure despair on those people's faces, she held onto something more; hope for a better future.
Even in whatever situation that could have despaired her to that degree, she held on to life,
in its purest of meanings, that was something really admirable in his book, really really admirable.
yet not wasting a moment on those thoughts, he stopped using Abyss gaze ability and threw the knife away, then made his hands tranform into the Abyss Form, a body like soul form
and moved his hands into her corpse's head
The ethereal hand slowly sank into her face,
And when it came out, it took out her soul,
alongside all the souls that she had stored inside her soul itself wit it,
This was another benefit of killing Abyssus geniuses, you could get free resources, and unlike other races who had to go through all sorts of troubles to extract souls, Abyssus could easily do that
then, he took her fist sized colourless soul to his forehead, and made it sink in, soon, it had completely sunken into his face and moved into his soul space, alongside another 10 souls
and his process of breaking through to Rank 1 began, he was the first among the posessors to achieve that, and no one knew what surprises awaited him at the other side
...
Raven Rodha.
As the souls moved in to my soul space, I could feel some resistance, "after all there were some differences between me and ordinary Abyssus"
so it took a lot of time before all 11 souls got in, but the moment the 11th unknown soul entered, it was pushed outside due to the limit having reached and soon got extinguished due to having no body or energy to support itself
ah, what a waste of rank 1 resources!
seiing the souls inside him, he could guess, they were all rank 1 abyss creatures, all of different raciality
that meant he had a high chance at recieving an epic ability!
as the 10 souls sank into his own soul, he could feel a structure being established as his soul, that was already as strong as ordinary rank 1 abyss creatures started to expand in size
his soul was only 10 cm tall, almost as tall as Hua Fang Li herself who was only 13 cm
yet, as the structure of 10 souls completed, his soul started expanding until it reached 21 cm length before it calmed, and his Rank 1 breakthrough truly and finally began