"Now, we ramp things up a bit," Theo muttered to himself with a slight smile, only for his consciousness to waver for a second, and his entire upper body convulsed, causing him to hang out from the branch he was on and throw up a mouthful of blood.
This bloody vomit broke the pleasant delirium of the Berserk bush, leaving behind nothing but its speed and senses-reinforcing effect. And with the miasma erosion now eating away at his flesh from the inside of every cell of it…
Theo only grew all the more susceptible to all the pains of the process.
'Keep a hold on it!' Theo cheered himself up, fighting off wave after wave of unbearable torture as he looked down.
Below the tree, monsters were already starting to gather. Sensing the blood in the air, some small predators rushed to see if they could snatch a part of someone's prize. Following them, bigger predators lurked around, ready to pounce on their unsuspecting brethren… With apex predators already converging on the place, more than happy to have such a buffet congregate itself for them to feast upon.
What started with just a bunch of relatively weak monkeys now turned into a situation capable of bringing out cold sweat on every adventurer's back.
Regardless of how things would go, this sort of gathering was often the chief cause behind monster stampedes!
"Just a little bit longer…" Theo muttered to himself, holding for his dear life to what was left of his consciousness, bristling with all the corrosive miasma that melted away at his insides.
Then, Theo saw it.
The huge, carriage-sized body of one of the forest's kings slowly moved between the undergrowth, creeping closer and closer to the gathering of unsuspecting monsters.
Then, it pounced, stretching its agile body in the air as it shot forward and fell down on a massive bear-like monster. Its claws tore the bear-like monster's hide with ease, clawing away entire chunks of the monster's back right as its long, sharp teeth sank down over its opponent's neck, quickly severing all the major bloodlines.
Augoma, the sixth-rank bear-like monster, died just like that.
The feline king shook its head a few times, snapping its prey's neck to ensure it was properly dead before raising its head and slowly scanning its surroundings while letting out a small growl, scaring all the monsters that couldn't match up to its strength.
"That I can't have you do," Theo clicked his tongue, only to finally release the lock of his miasma, unleashing all of it in just one sweeping attack.
The wind blade that he used to shatter the monkeys into a thin mist of finely diced meat and blood now grew as large as Theo himself, assuming the form of a scythe as it fell down to the ground.
During its fall, it appeared as nothing more than a projection of light cast by a small stone in an uncontrollable descent that made all of it look extremely eerie.
Before it could touch the ground, however…
'Now, it's quite literally out of my hands,' Theo thought, falling down onto the bloodied branch as he attempted to assess the damage caused by the two poisons.
Thankfully, to a degree, his gambit worked just as planned. The monster's miasma eradicated all Berserk bush influence by simply eroding all of the parts already damaged by the herbal drug. But what was even more important, this miasma burned away at the intent of Theo's flesh, now leaving it to gradually degrade into a formless mass lacking any sort of purpose.
Or, as Theo preferred to look at it, it left his body in a state just perfect for molding anew.
'Pop.'
As the back of Theo's head struck down against the wood of the thick branch he sat on, his wind blade fell all the way down to the ground.
Swish!
It was but a momentary explosion of magical energy. A blade of wind manifesting like a scythe's blade with Theo's tree at the back-end of it, only for it to then swing all the way across that center point, cutting away at all the monsters that gathered for the feast, save for those few who managed to jump away.
'Tsk, it dodged,' Theo thought, casting a weary glance down the tree, at where the feline king of the forest lunged away, jumping at a nearby tree and digging its claws into its bark to remain off the ground, away from the path his wind-blade took.
But while the big catch escaped… Theo could clearly see the bodies of roughly a hundred different monsters falling apart into meaty, bloody chunks, filling the forest with a rare moment of true, pristine silence.
It was as if even the trees themselves dared not to rustle their leaves on the wind, too scared of the culprit behind this mayhem taking notice.
Theo, however, had no more strength left to celebrate, his body convulsing as the damage to his insides quickly approached critical levels.
'It's do or die, man!'
Prompting himself with the last of his energy, Theo drew a simple rune in the air only to activate it right as he breathed his supposed last.
- Press -
The runebearer's lawful order instantly took effect, squeezing down all the monster corpses in the circle left in the wake of Theo's scythe, wringing their corpses dry as all of their blood seeped into the ground.
This was one hell of a massive waste of money. Each of those monsters' hides could fetch a good price in the town's market. Some of the monster remains Theo's lifeless eyes could see could be sold for quite the fortune, allowing him to just ditch this camp and the academy and start a life as a rich, playboy noble from some distant lands no one heard about.
But riches and wealth weren't Theo's concern.
The dead had no use for the money of the living, after all!
Yet, just before Theo could officially cross over and test all sorts of theories about the afterlife with his another and likely final death…
The thin string of pure, raw determination that held him back, rather than snapping… it suddenly grew thicker.
With the blood of a hundred demons pressed into the ground, the whole area quickly started to exhibit first signs of miasma curse as all of the plants began to simultaneously wilt out and die…
But, for just a short moment, the whole area exploded with raw, pure spiritual energy, like one of those legendary dragon veins that some of the kings and high nobles supposedly monopolized.
This raw energy shot up, purified by the very ground itself as it cleaned the monster's blood from its corruption.
But raw energy could not remain within the corrupted source. And so, it could only be expelled, shot up, and regurgitated by the ground itself as it turned from fertile grounds full of life into the cursed zone like many others in the forest.
It was this very energy that Theo's body sucked up like mad, totally deprived of mana itself and in just the perfectly mendable state this raw energy needed to easily start healing it.
Yet, even with just the last of his consciousness, Theo still managed to grasp the reins of this process, affecting the way in which nature brought him back to life, as he gently nudged it to overwrite parts of himself he was extremely dissatisfied with.
Theo continued to soak in this seemingly endless energy for a good few minutes before the process finally came to an end, as the now cursed ground expelled all of the power from the corruption itself it could now feed on.
'And so, the circle closes, with this land soon giving birth to a whole new host of monsters,' Theo thought, fully aware of this world's endgame.
'Thinking about it, even my death was nothing more than one of the many stepping stones for the bad guys to execute their scheme and bring about an end of the world, wasn't it?' Theo thought, now that he was armed with the knowledge of this entire place being a carbon copy of the novel he'd read in his past life.
Taking a deep breath in, Theo closed his eyes and then exhaled, carefully inspecting the state of his now healed body.
This process wasn't over, though.
There was still that feline king, one of the apex predators of the forest that would succumb only to the monster emperor inhabiting the center of the forest. The reason why just the centermost part of this jungle had its separate rank classification, putting the rank eight of the forest outer rings to shame as its core boasted the highest rank of them all - ultimate.
This oversized cat was but an insect to the abyssal monster residing in the forest depths, a monster that in Theo's original life required a group of seven ascenders to bunch have it slayed, and even then managed to drag three ascenders, half-gods of humankind, with it.
But for current Theo…
"Yeah, it's not worth fighting it out, is it?" Theo turned his face over to the cat as he lowered his arms, settling in his new, empowered body.
His flesh was all the same, with hardly any changes coming to it.
But his mana reserve…
This feline king, a rank seventh… no, quasi rank eight monster, simply looked back at him before squinting its eyes and turning around, more interested in the squashed scraps of meat of the other monsters than it was in duking it out with someone boasting Theo's kind of aura.
'You might be quasi rank eight, but I used to be quasi rank ten!' Theo boasted in his thoughts… Only to fall down to his knees, his body convulsing yet again as he vomited blood again, this time a much darker, blacker kind of it.
'It's nothing, it's just the impurities…' Theo thought, trying to calm himself down… But worn down after force-pushing himself to the level of strength currently unheard of, he could barely afford to keep himself awake. Doing anything beyond that…
'Tomorrow's gonna suck balls, huh?' Theo thought, as his eyelids continued to grow in weight, slowly sliding down his eyes. 'Heh,' suddenly, Theo's mood slightly improved. 'What won't a man do to grow stronger, huh?'