The Jester of Apocalypse

In the headquarters of the Bentheta sect, Gabrias and the man that had led the cultivators to Pavarrie were tied up and kneeling on the ground before the Sect Master. Gabrias looked fine, but the man beside him was bruised and bloody. 

They both would have died if there hadn’t been so many witnesses to what happened in Pavarrie. The first thing their superiors thought when they learned of their failure was that they had betrayed the sect. How else would the details of their story make any sense? A child slaughtering several non-combatant elders from an inferior sect was one thing, but that same child annihilating a highly trained squad of professional assassins was another thing altogether.

They had presented their explanation, and the sect master had listened to them. He wasn’t particularly interested in excuses, which they had plenty of.

The combatants were trying to capture the child, so they weren’t using lethal force.

They had to hide the forms of the Bentheta sect so that no one would discover their origin.

Nobody had expected the child to be so powerful.

The sect master simply had no interest in any of that. But he wasn’t that angry either. He lamented the loss of such a talented squad, but the fact that they had been annihilated also signified another critical bit of news.

The rumors might not have been an exaggeration. They may have even been an under exaggeration.

Either that or the child had acquired more power in the last week.

If the boy could do something like this, there was no point in holding back. Kaigo Bentheta had ordered several cultivators of the golden path to track the child down and capture him. However, rumors had unfortunately already spread… He just hoped they would be the first to find him. The man named Gabrias was luckily still tracking the child’s position with his spirit power.

“Alright. Habrin, you will be detained and sent to a correction facility for your failure. And you, Gabrias, will be assisting with hunting the child again.” 

Gabrias winced at that, and his heartbeat sped up considerably. But he couldn’t say anything.

Even if he didn’t want to go anywhere near that monster again.

Gabrias was dismissed. So he went on a walk through the Bentheta sect. The funeral for the squad that had been annihilated had been held just a few hours back. He had missed it as he was detained at the time. But he walked over to the sect graveyard anyway.

A man stood there, looking at the unmarked graves. Those who lived as assassins for the sect had very few personal connections besides one another. But the bonds they had were strong. This man observed the tombstones, his shoulder-length blonde hair draping over his eyes. 

Gabrias wanted to walk away, but his curiosity ultimately won over. The man looked at him, but he wasn't furious or blaming Gabrias. His eyes were a bit puffy, and he looked tired.

"You're the one tracking that thing, right?"

Gabrias nodded.

"Well... Worry not. Next time I will be among those accompanying you.” The air suddenly grew colder around the man, “I won’t let that creature get away."

***

A band of around thirty cultivators was standing near the edges of a forest. It was the forest that connected to the wild zone surrounding Pavarrie. A scruffy man squatted with his hands over his knees and chewed on dried grass. His hair was dark, long, and greasy. He wore a black leather vest with bandages around his arms. 

Many of the cultivators surrounding him were dressed similarly. One of them stepped out of the crowd and walked up to him. It was a fat man with a fancy mustache.

“Hey, bro. Are you sure that chasing this thing is a smart idea?”

The man squatting responded in a deep, raspy voice.

“Got no clue. But I’m no bitch. We ain’t no bitches now, are we?” 

The rest of the cultivators behind him cheered and whistled. 

“We’ll find that boy, and then once we have him, well… I don’t know. Maybe we’ll ransom him. Maybe we’ll have him tell us his secrets. Maybe both. Maybe we’ll crack him open and find a monster core in there. Who knows? Now get the fuck up, you pieces of shit. It’s time to get going. Spread out, and if you see anything unusual, follow the protocol. Go!”

***

Neave was, surprisingly enough, recovering just fine. Not even just fine. He had recovered rather rapidly. By the end of the same day as acquiring his ridiculous set of spirit powers, he had already nearly fully recovered from his injuries. 

Well, his spirit was still somewhat mangled, and he was missing an arm and half a foot, but besides that, he was doing great. He suspected that some of his spirit powers played a much more significant role than he initially thought. His spirit was still suffering from the damage, but Neave felt it recovering, however slowly.

The greatest contributor to his recovery was the insane quantity of life force he constantly burned. He couldn’t tell whether the new liver or bone marrow was doing it, but one of those two enabled him to use the absorb spirit power with little consequence. 

However, he was no longer burning the life force to speed up the recovery. 

That method was excellent for quick and dirty recovery but didn’t mend the body properly. 

Neave had resorted to a far more complex strategy for properly recovering his body. He focused and observed the way his life force flowed through his body. The places where it seemed to lag or falter were the parts he focused on. He constructed incredibly complex structures out of his life force. He carefully noted the precise ways his body was faltering and directed the life force to mend those issues better rather than faster. 

It was something he wasn’t even really aware he could do. Rather than speeding it up, he can instead use his life force to allow his body to recover from the types of overuse and injuries that would typically be impossible to recover from. There was little point in testing something like that out in the loop. Only now did he enjoy himself and freely experiment with his acquired powers.

Neave vaguely felt a deeper layer of consequences he wasn’t recovering from. No matter what he did, he couldn’t brute force the recovery of these ailments. He was hoping they slowly went away with time.

At first, he was traveling through the woods in the direction he assumed to be leading toward the empire's capital. Then he realized he had no idea where he was going. There was a relatively easy way to figure it out, but he didn’t want to rush for now. 

It wasn’t like he was on a timer to get there as quickly as possible. Soon after realizing he was lost, he just… Stopped going anywhere. He wasn’t strictly sticking to one area but wasn’t actively traveling out of the woods.

Once he’d had a night of sleep, he woke up in a relatively serene forest. Serene, if you ignore the bestial screams you could hear every few seconds in the distance. Abominids weren’t the quietest monsters.

It was a misnomer to call abominids a species. They were more of a category of monster. Slimes ate random bugs or dead animals and evolved into abominids that had the properties of those creatures that were eaten. An extensive range of different potential monsters could end up being created.

Slimes usually had extremely misshapen cores. Those cores only grew to be more and more eschewed over time. However, once a slime reached the big or giant stages, usually, small parts of its core started separating and becoming independent slimes. 

Eventually, if the resulting core was even enough, the slime could then become an abominid. On the contrary, if the core never became round enough, the slime just kept growing ad infinitum. And they could get really massive.

Only in relatively rare cases did a core become even enough for slimes to turn into something other than an abominid. Well, either an abominid or some sort of golem. Those two were by far the most common. But golems, just like abominids, were rarely fully or even partially humanoid. Most monsters did not directly evolve from slimes but were birthed or created by another monster.

That was one of the things that made monsters such a massive problem. They seemed to possess near-infinite ways to propagate.

Neave was catching small abominids and feeding them to a big slime he had found. If he was discovered to be doing this, he would immediately get a hefty ransom on his head. There were few things quite as taboo as monster experimentation. Neave just learned one of the main reasons why. 

The slime evolved into a problematic flesh golem right before Neave’s eyes. It took him a lot of time to kill it, as flesh golems were sturdy and had insane regeneration. Unluckily for Neave, the monster core it dropped wasn’t a regeneration speed-up. 

It was an ability that allowed one to grow extra limbs!

Except these limbs would be extremely malformed, and it didn't come with a ‘detach monstrous limb’ ability. Spirit powers were a bizarre phenomenon the more Neave learned about them. They seemed so random yet so… Deliberate. 

It was weird. Monsters, in general, were strange. Why did monsters with more even cores end up looking humanoid? That was an utterly baffling phenomenon, even for scholars. The current theory was that the exact underlying mechanism, as with spirit beasts taking a human form, was responsible for this.

What surprised Neave was the sheer variety and complexity of different spirit powers he found. Such powers were frequently discarded as trash due to being unstable, unbalanced, unreliable, or too weak. However, even these powers could evolve into awe-inspiring stuff. 

The biggest reason why weak spirit stones were considered trash was that the way they would evolve was utterly unpredictable. 

A good example would be Neave’s kidneys. Or his fire-breathing ability. 

Spirit powers often worked like true strikes because they did not consume any energy but instead put a load on the spirit. Very rarely, they consumed qi, and even more rarely, they could consume life force. This was only the case for active spirit powers. 

Passive spirit powers, as those possessed by Neave, didn't work like that. When one consumed a spirit power, it was like adding a foreign spirit to their spirit. For passive powers, only this alien spirit suffered the extra burden.

What was highly unusual with Neave’s fire-breathing ability, however, was that the fire breathing seemed more of a byproduct of the spirit power than the spirit power itself. 

It didn’t put an extra burden on his spirit, use qi, or use life force, but instead, it seemed to use an utterly mundane energy source. If Neave used fire breathing too much, he just got hungry. When he ate food, he could do it again. This synergized exceptionally well with his ability to quickly absorb food into his body.

Neave was currently in the process of looking for ways to regrow half of his left foot and his entire left arm. Some spirit powers could technically fulfill those requirements but with a massive catch. 

He had killed a small lizard-like abominid that held power to regrow lost limbs. The issue was that those limbs would be tiny lizard limbs. Perhaps an evolution could at least turn them into regular-sized lizard limbs. Although Neave found the idea of having a scaly left arm neat, he was somewhat apprehensive about the actual functionality of something like that. 

Similar issues were there with the others he had found. There was one that allowed him to construct additional limbs out of stone, courtesy of a stone golem. Or another that achieved something similar but with wood.

While he wasn’t putting them off the table, it was infinitely better to just regrow a normal limb out of the flesh he was made off. Reason why? Because of his other spirit powers, of course. Crystal cardiovascular system, steel nervous system, and rubber bones all wouldn’t work on limbs that weren’t of the same construction as his natural limbs.

He had concluded that out of all the powers he had gained, surprisingly, rubber bones had the most potential. It didn’t truly make his bones rubbery. His bones worked just as usual until they suffered enough force to break. Then, rather than breaking, they would bend. It allowed him to make some peculiar martial arts moves that usually put too much stress on his joints.

He had gotten an idea for how to fix his missing limbs, but it was… Extremely unhinged. And very dangerous. Also, unlikely to work.

He was looking for an abominid with a foot similar in shape and size to his own. After finding an abominid like that, he killed it and cut its foot off. Then, with surgical precision, he cut the foot into the exact shape required to replace his missing foot.

The foot was similar in shape and size to his own, but it was a ton hairier, and the skin was dark brown. The nails looked nasty too. He had a solution for those issues, however. He first needed to attach the foot to his own.

The flesh where his foot was cut off was scabbed over and dried. Neave cut off the scarred and dried part and immediately attached the newly acquired foot. Then he burned a ton of life force to seal them together.

Immediately, an agony unlike anything he’d felt in a while consumed his body. It felt like his life force was bitten, and his very spirit was under attack. He knew what was happening. The remnant spirit from the foot was fighting with his own. It was a fight Neave could win. However, sadly, that would also mean he would destroy the foot in the process. He sighed and removed the newly added foot. But he didn’t give up yet.

He had an idea, although it was somewhat uncertain. Neave pulled out a small steel cauldron from Kamella’s ring. He wished it was a little smaller, but other containers in the ring were too tiny or too large. So this was the best he could do for now. Then he filled the cauldron with liquid spirit. 

It drained him quite hard, which is precisely why he wished it was smaller. The drain on his life force was one thing, but his qi reserves were minuscule. There was very little he could do about that, however. Without cultivating further, his only solution was stockpiling qi recovery items and hoping he didn’t have to take more of them than his spirit could handle.

Neave then ate some random plants around him to recover his life force. He just straight up bit off a small branch and chewed it. He ended up with several splinters stuck between his teeth.

"Ugh, shit."

Oh well.

Neave concentrated. He compressed as much life force as he could manage into the tip of his finger. When it felt like the finger would explode if he squeezed any more life force, he grabbed the sword in his teeth and used it to cut the finger. The blood that had flown out of the finger and into the cauldron was practically glowing red.

The mixture of liquid spirit and life force hadn’t yet done anything. It whirled, and Neave could see tiny sparks of red lightning flickering in the mix. Then he pressed his hand to the cauldron.

Pouring qi into the mixture wouldn’t be as simple as pouring the life force. After all, qi needed a proper medium. You couldn’t just push it into something.

Then Neave brainstormed his options. Perhaps he could imbue a piece of gold with qi? He had golden coins. He would only have to melt the gold into the mixture then and… 

Would that work? 

But what would happen with the gold that entered the mixture?

No, that wouldn’t work. Neave thought about just imbuing the qi directly into the spirit. After all, liquid spirit isn’t a well-known substance. Perhaps its properties could be unique in some way. But when he tried, he felt that it wouldn’t work either.

He couldn’t give up here. He was trying to construct a qi bridge that would connect his spirit to the substance within the cauldron. Then he could use his life force manipulation on the life force swimming around in the liquid spirit. He would use the life force to push the liquid spirit into the limb to ‘wash out’ the remnant spirit of the abominid. This was something that could only theoretically work.

Neave had a sneaking suspicion that remnant spirit wasn’t ethereal but rather liquid. The remnant spirit subject was briefly covered in the book he had read. It was certain that it wasn’t the same substance as ethereal spirit, but what it was precisely seemed to be a total mystery. 

It was theorized that it could be a mutated life force, or a particular type of qi that caused the usual problems using animal, spirit beast, or monster parts as ingredients in alchemy. It was named remnant spirit since it held specific properties similar to spirit, but not really.

Neave could only assume it was liquid spirit. He didn’t have any evidence for this, but at least attempting to do this could yield some results. Then he pondered how to construct the qi bridge. The reason he used the cauldron was specifically that they were designed with qi imbuement in mind. But they only acted as a medium. It was the substance itself that had to be receptive to qi. Neave could create a qi bridge to the foot directly, but that wouldn't achieve what he needed.

As his hand was resting on the cauldron, he contemplated.

The potential of perseverance.

The potential of fun.

The potential of experimentation.

Could the concept of experimentation be receptive to qi?

He blinked. Why not? Then he concentrated. Rather than focusing on any substance or element within the cauldron, he contemplated the process, the intention, and the potential of the results he could accomplish. Then it clicked.

Well, well, well… Could this be yet another vital secret?

…Probably not. 

Neave still giggled like a madman.

***

Neave looked at his newly acquired left arm. It was still a little brownish and had strangely thick hair, but he felt it slowly morphing and taking the shape of his previous arm. The only reason he even dared to use this method was because of his purifying bone marrow. If there were any strange substances within his blood due to his body cells slowly replacing the abominids, his bone marrow would at least keep him safe from them.

“Well, now.” He stretched and flexed his newly attached limbs. 

He was finally back in one piece. Now it was time to do something he desperately needed to take care of. Since he couldn’t yet cultivate, the only ways he could acquire more power were either additional spirit powers, treasures that could affect his body directly, or physical training.

He had new spirit powers.

With absorb, his organs, and his qi control, any monster's flesh became a treasure.

So the only thing left to do was to train