The Jester of Apocalypse

Neave left his incredibly chaotic spirit realm and stretched. While he had quite a bit of time within the spirit realm, he had to leave occasionally to let his qi recover. This time, Neave stretched a bit and looked around. He was still safe, at least for now.

Neave wasn’t sure he was entirely hidden from those creatures while in here. Perhaps they couldn’t reach him, but what if they were still looking? Could they possibly just dig through the wall and get to him?

As a matter of fact, should he hide his spirit? Perhaps they could sense it and start making their way here. For now, although it hadn’t been that long, Neave had still spent quite a while in this realm. He was rather glad that this was what he decided to experiment on, as this potentially had the highest immediate benefits out of all the other things he could think of.

If his plan worked, he could have as many spirit powers as he had the time to absorb. But he wasn’t going to be doing that. At least not haphazardly. Getting a lot of spirit powers wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t that simple, either. Some spirit powers could interfere with one another, and others could be outright detrimental.

It was best to approach this whole situation carefully.

After spending some time just letting himself recover and preparing for the spirit trial, he combed through his powers to decide what to do next. Logically speaking, either evolving troll physique, steel nervous system, or crystal cardiovascular system made the most sense for real-world application, but he wasn’t focusing on that.

He wanted to push his newly discovered method to its absolute limit. Which naturally meant evolving absorb—nothing like a gigantic abominid to test whether his new approach would work in practice.

Once he felt he had recovered enough, Neave evolved absorb and started another spirit trial.

Neave found himself inside his spirit realm, exactly where he had left it. His spirit manifestation felt a little different, however. There was a clear difference in how he felt when entering this place voluntarily and being forcefully dragged inside.

Neave felt the ground shaking. The iron fortress he constructed was entirely blocked off from the outside.

The way he went in and out was by using a movement technique. He could hear a vague noise coming from the outside, most likely the screeching of the gigantic abominid. He waited in the ball of metal, and nothing happened.

This peace was interrupted when everything shook. The metal fortress Neave was cooped up in had bent inwards as something struck it from the outside.

Neave didn’t hesitate as he ran away. It was right on time, given that the impossibly massive abominid was in the middle of a much greater second swing. The ‘large stone pillar’ he had prepared to knock over on the abominid was less than a third of its height. It was also already shattered to pieces.

As the tremendous swing crushed the iron fortress, a tsunami of acid rushed toward Neave.

He used a movement technique to appear behind it and land on the surface of the acid lake again. Splashes of acid made contact with his skin. This did quite a bit of damage to his spirit manifestation.

Neave ran around and avoided the gigantic abominid in as wide a berth as he could manage. The steel golem and the crystal golem were mostly fine. Nothing else was alive anymore.

Neave cackled in delight. His insane idea was working! It worked!

Although the stupidly massive abominid was causing a stir and annihilating his structure, it was also in rather dire straits. The acid lake around it was filled with blood and guts as the spikes cut it up from underneath, and the acid melted its insides.

It was a sight to behold. Its movements were already growing weaker, and eventually, it stopped moving. Its entire body dissolved into a massive cloud of ethereal smoke.

The steel and crystal golems were not giving up so quickly, however. The steel golem was taking some damage from the acid, but the crystal golem was entirely okay. Neave had to be honest with himself.

He had completely forgotten about the crystal golem and had nothing prepared for it.

Oh well.

Luckily the slime champion was gone because that thing was a menace. The giant metal and crystal golems were a joke in comparison, especially as both were partially submerged and stuck between spikes.

Neave gloated as the steel golem had no shards of rock to send flying at him, and he gloated even harder as the crystal golem struggled to push its crystal shards through the acid lake.

What a monumental success.

This was the most significant step he had ever taken to surpass the limits of ordinary cultivators. Now it was time to take over the world.

He may be getting ahead of himself. He returned to experimenting.

***

Neave spent some time evolving his spirit powers as many times as he could and gouged what all of them did. He no longer cared for the optimal order since he was confident that he could quickly evolve all of them.

He wasn’t particularly stressed out about it since he didn’t have to limit himself to these spirit powers anymore.

Neave had gone through as many evolutions as he could, and these were the results.

Troll muscle had, of course, gone to troll physique, and then afterward, it evolved into superior troll physique. It was a decent power, but it was just troll physique but better, effectively.

Steel nervous system had evolved first into the version that allowed for extreme nerve memory and afterward became thunder nerves. It was an ability that gave Neave a significant boost to physical ability. It forced his muscles to go far above what they usually would.

This was one example of a detrimental spirit power. Most cultivators would effectively be killing themselves if they forced such a boost.

Neave contemplated this one. Perhaps it wouldn’t be the worst combined with superior troll physique? He would think about it.

Next up was absorb. It evolved into integrate. It was a power that could allow Neave to absorb things more readily and incorporate them into his body with greater ease. This effectively meant that energy from all his food wouldn’t be wasted but stored somehow until it reached capacity.

Perhaps it also had other uses, but this was not the most impressive upgrade. Absorb was already good enough on its own, and most of the stuff integrate allowed wasn’t much extra power anyway. Maybe if Neave wanted to push the absorption to an extreme, this upgrade would be useful.

Next, the crystal cardiovascular system evolved into stasis. Neave could choose a time and freeze all of his bodily functions for the selected period. He could become a rock that looked like a human.

Neave couldn’t think of any possible use for something like this. Perhaps, if he wanted to just sleep for a long time? Maybe if he froze deep underground, only to dramatically reemerge thousands of years later?

He shrugged. He may find a use for it eventually.

Neave tried evolving shapeshifting too. He succeeded, but the slime champion had become something truly terrifying. It was still relatively weak to acid, but not enough to stop it from reaching the fortress.

And when it hit the fortress, it did more damage than the gigantic abominid.

Yeah, no.

I’m not fucking around with that thing.

Neave doubled down on the acid so this horrid creature wouldn’t pummel his spirit into dust.

He didn’t dare evolve the ability a second time, either. It wasn’t worth it anyway, it seemed. The evolved version was also shapeshifting, but the maximum size he could shapeshift into and the minimum size was much more significant now. He could grow over three meters tall and shrink to less than twenty centimeters. The range of things he could transform into and the features he could adopt changed slightly as well.

The problem was that this size was little more than just a show. The further he went from his actual proper form, the less of his true strength he could showcase in battle. So it wasn’t nearly as valuable as it may initially seem. The ability to modify specific body parts sounded pretty decent, however.

Neave evolved the hyper liver ability next. This also had very underwhelming results. It just made his liver even faster, which wasn’t helpful in any way, shape, or form. He evolved it twice more, adding another gigantic abominid to the fight, but all it evolved into were drastically faster versions of itself.

If Neave shifted his body to put his head to his stomach, he could hear a faint buzzing sound with how fast his liver was. 

Hard kidneys, however, were a big surprise. It evolved into durable organs. All of his inner organs were much tougher now. That wasn’t bad at all. This type of power could go for a lot of cash if sold as a monster core. The odds of dying from internal injuries in battle went down drastically with this power. Evolving it another time resulted in the same effect but stronger.

Right back to unexciting.

Pure blood was next. It evolved into something Neave could only describe as sacred blood. Well, it was… It was hard to tell what this ability did, even for Neave. But he was pretty confident something about his blood was no longer so limited. Again, what this meant was beyond Neave’s current understanding. He evolved the power again and felt yet another layer of limits vanish.

How mysterious.

He reached fire breath. It first evolved into ignite. He could boost his body’s energy expenditure and acquire a bonus to physical abilities. This used the same fuel source as his fire breath.

Neat, even if a little unexpected.

Neave prepared himself to evolve the ability again.

He entered his spirit realm as the trial started.

“Oh fuck my ass.”

Great, the giant lizard has evolved into a heavensdamned dragon!

How convenient!

Neave ran as fast as he humanly could. He didn’t bother with fortifications anymore, given that the mass of gigantic abominids and super-powered golems was way too much for any of his defenses.

Usually, his strategy just came down to running until everything that would die on its own died and then finishing the rest very carefully.

Now he was being chased by a dragon. And this dragon didn’t need to lower itself to a swim in the acid pool.

At first, Neave used a movement technique to move on top of the acid lake and ran as far as he could. This took a long time, and he couldn’t afford to blow all of his qi running from one monster.

Eventually, Neave used a movement technique and managed to get the dragon by surprise. He was sure that doing real damage to it was still beyond his abilities, but he didn’t need to aim for anything exceptionally sturdy.

Neave appeared right beneath its wing and took a decent cut at it. He used another movement technique to get out of the way of its breath attack and then watched the dragon slowly descend into the acid lake as it struggled to keep itself airborne. Neave left the dragon to its boiling and shredding while he ran back to take care of the golems.

They were both rather massive, but this didn’t make them more challenging as opponents. Neave was sure it would be a different story if they weren’t stuck at the bottom of an acid lake and jammed between countless spikes. Technically, half of their head was still poking out from above the water, or rather, acid level. 

Neave wailed on their heads to finish the golems off.

He still had to be extremely careful with the crystals the crystal golem was shooting. Any random shard could take a limb off. While he still had plenty of life force, the spirit damage could be too much for him.

Neave was shocked at how little of his life force reserve he had gone through. He knew he had a lot, but he didn’t expect the reserve to last this long, let alone still be holding this strong.

Granted, he didn’t use the life force for much besides injecting spirit into his realm, but even then, he seemed to have an endless ocean of it.

After hours of true strike after true strike to the golems’ foreheads, both of them stopped moving and dissipated into smoke. Since the trial had ended, Neave thought it was fair to assume that the dragon was also down for the count.

The ignite ability had evolved into… Dragon breath?

This was the first time Neave had seen a spirit power change course and then steer back to what it used to be. If this were possible, maybe troll physique would be worth evolving again, even if the resulting monster would undoubtedly be too much unless Neave made a whole other layer of preparations.

He gave a go to dragon breath. It was mighty. With a single breath, he turned the entire side of the cave into a pool of lava.

Neave was pretty happy with the information he had gathered about the spirit powers. Now it was time to either choose something else to experiment on or…

Thud…

Crack…

Neave turned around. Right behind him, a wall was starting to fall apart. A crack appeared.

And a toothy tentacle made its way inside.