Well, well, well, what do we have here?
I stared down at the battered corpse of Golbin. The little green pest was sprawled out, his body broken and limp like an old rag doll. His head was lolled back, eyes lifeless.
"Did you do that?" I asked, rhetorically, to the two dead adventurers lying nearby.
One of them had a knife jutting out of his neck, courtesy of Golbin. The other had a neck twisted at an unnatural angle—my doing. Poor sods. Mid-to-upper level ones, judging by their gear and the way they'd moved before things went south. A few days ago, either of them might've spelled trouble for me, but today? Sheep to the slaughter. They still killed Golbin, though, so credit where it's due.
I didn't waste time. I yanked Golbin up by the stump of his arm, careful not to make a trail of blood, and walked off. His heart had stopped beating long before I unscrewed the head of the second adventurer.
No point feeling sad about it, though. As good as he was as an alarm clock, this was inevitable. Monsters grew fast when they consumed the cores of others, but goblins seemed like an exception. Using xianxia terms, their talent was trash, and I sure as hell wasn't some magical grandpa.
With each step, I descended deeper into the dungeon, moving from the sixth floor all the way to the ninth. The walls grew darker, the air heavier, the kind of oppressive pressure that squeezed the breath out of anyone not used to it. It was starting to feel like home to me.
When I reached my destination, I dropped the small green corpse like a sack of potatoes. My claws extended, and I dug into his chest. His skin was tougher than I expected—almost as tough as a war shadow—but it split open all the same, my claws cutting through muscle and bone like a hot knife through butter.
"You've had a decent run, Golbin," I said, almost conversationally. The corpse, unsurprisingly, didn't answer.
Reaching into its chest cavity, I grasped the small crystalline stone nestled within. Its core—cool, smooth, and almost entirely identical to every other goblin core I had seen before—gleamed faintly in the dim light. I held it up, inspecting it closely.
The same swirling magic, the same pattern of fractures, the same dull light. I knew instantly it would add nothing to my power. It was a simple goblin core. but my hunger gnawed at me, urging me to devour it anyway.
I raised the core to my mouth, but a thought made me pause.
Why could I consume these cores? Why could I absorb the hearts of humans and fragments of their strength? What…were monsters if not extensions of the dungeon's will, fragments of itself?
The realization struck like a hammer. Monsters were pieces of the dungeon, manifestations of its latent divinity. When I consumed them, I was taking that divinity for myself. And when I killed humans, I was ripping power directly from the gods.
For the first time, I saw the patterns beneath the surface of the core in my hand. I felt a resonance, like a thread vibrating deep within my own soul. This was it—this was what I had been missing. I had been eating, growing, fighting, but never understanding.
My thoughts swirled, and I felt a strange resonance, deep within. It was like the pieces of a puzzle finally clicking into place, showing a picture I'd never seen before. Was this how enlightenment felt?
I slid the core back into Golbin's ruined torso, pushing the stone past sinew and bone until it was nestled where it once rested.
If I was right and monsters weren't just flesh...but vessels, their forms animated by the power within their cores...and if that power could be drawn out, manipulated… perhaps it could be put back.
I focused, feeling for the thin, almost imperceptible thread of magic that connected me to the core. It was faint, like a whisper of wind through the trees, but it was there. I pushed mana through it, the flow hesitant at first. It felt like trying to start a flame in the middle of a storm. The connection flickered, weak, and the hunger gnawed at me, urging me to consume instead of restore. But I ignored it, pushing more mana through that thread, feeling it surge into the dead flesh.
A low hum filled the air. The core, nestled within the goblin's chest, began to heat up, a dull glow pulsing through its fractured surface. It burned my palm, and the flesh around it started to sizzle, the smell of cooked meat wafting up. I grinned, feral and wild. The pain was nothing—a small price for understanding. I poured more mana into it, pushing through the resistance, fighting the urge to recoil.
It was like dousing a dead flame with gasoline, the spark finally catching. The core's glow intensified, turning from dull ember to molten red, and then to a white-hot intensity. The liquid fire seeped from the core into the veins, into the blood, knitting flesh as it traveled. Golbin's body shuddered, muscles spasming as the magic flowed through, and slowly, ever so slowly, his wounds began to close.
For the first time in days, sweat dripped down my brow. Mana depletion pulled at my consciousness, a heaviness behind my eyes. I felt the drag of exhaustion, like chains tethered to my limbs, threatening to pull me under. But I pushed through, feeling the pulse of the core syncing with my own heartbeat, the liquid light pouring through its veins as it rebuilt what had been broken.
The core melted, its crystalline form dissolving into liquid light, and it flowed like molten metal, seeping into every crack and wound, sealing bone and sinew. Muscles reattached, skin pulled taut, and veins reconnected. His fingers twitched, and his chest expanded as he took a breath—ragged, but a breath nonetheless.
I rose to my feet, satisfied. The goblin lay there, glowing faintly, his chest rising and falling. I didn't know what I'd just done, but I knew how I'd done it. Soul manipulation. Divinity manipulation. I was barely scratching the surface. A few more experiments, and I might be able to—
But then, everything within me screamed at once. An instinct buried deep in my core, a primal terror, clawed its way to the surface. I felt it—something immense, something beyond comprehension, watching. It was like standing under a magnifying glass, one second away from being burned alive. I looked up, the weight of its gaze pressing down, and felt a chill run through my body.
In the ceiling above, dark holes formed at some point, gaping and unnatural, like the eyes of a predator. The darkness inside was unlike any shadow I'd ever seen—so deep, so infinite, it seemed to swallow the very light around it. It was the darkness of an empty cosmos, a void filled with hungry, twisting things.
The eyes pulsed, veins like cracks in volcanic rock spreading out from their centers. They did not glow, yet they were impossibly bright, a brightness that mocked the void itself. The darkness cracked and sundered, not like a living eye but like fractured glass, shifting in patterns that defied logic and reason.
I looked into those eyes, and at that moment, I knew—I'd fucked up.