Depthless Hunger

Chapter 116: Fusing Monstrous Abilities

After cultivating for a while to calm down after the battle, Kai prepared to take a step into the unknown. Most of his life he'd followed paths that previous generations had made, but it was clear that with his monstrous abilities he had no choice but to forge ahead into new territory. So once he was fully ready, he finally directed his spiritual sight inward.

Name: Kai Clanless

Total Power: 129

Cultivation: Qi Condensation 75% (18)

Physique Level: E-2 (86)

Soul Level: 5 (25)

Bestial Traits: 11/6 - !!!

Monstrous Hunger - VII (eta)

Direboar's Strength - V (epsilon)

Aquagorgon's Health - V (epsilon)

Gomodo's Stamina - V (epsilon)

Isulfr's Bite - III (gamma)

Rockspider's Claw - III (gamma)

Direclam's Shell - I (alpha)

Wallcrawler's Feet - I (alpha)

Behemoth's Heart (???)

Claw Tyrant (???)

??? (???)

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The human side of his power was still simple enough: his Physique and Soul Levels put him well above the average hunter, equal to some of the elite mercenaries he'd fought. He lacked a Class, but the cultivation Zae Zin Nim was teaching him provided a bit of extra power. If he advanced far enough with qi, it could make him look like a cultivator instead of a horror.

It was the monstrous side where things became complicated, and that was where he thought he could make headway. Every monster listed had been something powerful he'd fought and eaten. His tests with weaker monsters had left him certain that they were simply digested, supporting him little differently than normal food fueled his body but didn't make him stronger.

But now that he'd defeated the Claw Tyrant, things had changed. As Kai ran his spiritual sight over the new sigils, he finally saw what he'd theorized.

One of the numbers had advanced from ten to eleven: exactly the number of monsters he could see within his soul.

The number after it - a six - hadn't increased, which confirmed his other suspicion. Most likely six was the number of monstrous abilities that he could support at one time. He had never been sure how to interpret the symbols he saw after that, but they seemed to imply danger, or overloading, or stress. Now he suspected they were showing him the limits that he already knew subconsciously.

Adding up the abilities also fit that theory. He regularly used the first six abilities while fighting - they felt familiar and within reach. "Monstrous Hunger" was still not precisely understood, but it had been with him from the beginning and he was fairly sure that it represented the fundamental core of his monstrous nature or his ability to consume more monsters.

That left the newer monsters, which were oddballs. He remembered eating a clam-like creature during the battle for Monskon City, but he definitely hadn't grown anything that would justify "Direclam's Shell" appearing in his soul. Some of the last abilities remained oddly unformed, including the Claw Tyrant, and the monster core he had eaten from the Rayakan vault was still entirely opaque to him.

Kai concentrated and managed to return to the island of darkness. It didn't feel entirely real, though: it wasn't his actual soul, just the way his mind tried to interpret it. If there were other paths that were similar, Zae Zin Nim didn't know about them. That meant he might be on his own figuring out his abilities.

Feeling around, Kai pinned one of his weaker abilities: Wallcrawler's Feet. It must have come from one of the spiders crawling up the city wall, and maybe it would give him the ability to stick to a wall or something. Not really a useful or strong ability. If he needed mobility, he might as well find a way to fly or teleport, and the Wallcrawler hadn't been an exceptionally powerful monster anyway.

When he reached out to feel the power, it was easy to grasp the essence. In his mind's eye, it felt a bit like he was larger than the entire island, easily holding the statue of the spider in one hand. If he'd wanted, he was sure that he could have thrown it out of his soul the way he had his Class. The spider wasn't an enemy force inside him that had will of its own, it was just meat.

And yet it felt wrong to just throw it away. Aside from his intuition, it hadn't done him any harm. The additional abilities he'd eaten didn't seem to be slowing him down, they were merely inaccessible, and their only real downside was the stuffed feeling he got when he ate new monsters.

Why couldn't it all have been explained to him? If he'd gotten a normal Class, there would have been countless scrolls and books and mentors to show him what to do next. All Kai could do was keep muddling and forge his own path.

The monsters in his soul weren't alive, but they did feel active. When Kai focused, he found it surprisingly easy to push the new statue of the Claw Tyrant beside the statue of the Rockspider. They felt aligned... presumably because they were both related to claws? And yet the new monster was still listed with ambiguous symbols, as if it didn't have a rank, or perhaps even an identity.

No magic intuition solved the problem, so Kai kept experimenting. Eventually he even found the unknown monster core in his soul, though he still couldn't make heads or tails of it.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Looking at the core made him realize another distinction. The abilities with rankings all had names that made intuitive sense to him and spoke of clear abilities, even the ones he wasn't using. But Behemoth's Heart and the Claw Tyrant spoke more of unformed potential, as if they hadn't been properly shaped within him.

Focusing on the imaginary physical world inside him, Kai ran his hands over the steel skin of the Claw Tyrant. Would it be possible for him to draw out that aspect of it? Having more powerful defenses certainly wouldn't hurt, and he could maybe even...

The statue began to sink into the sand and something twitched in his soul. Kai instinctively pulled back as hard as he could until he was just sitting in the physical world.

His heart raced as he realized what had almost happened. As he thought about the Claw Tyrant's attributes, he'd begun to shape it into something else. Something usable, perhaps, but not something he'd chosen strategically. It seemed that this part of the process did work intuitively, and it would be terribly easy to make a mistake. The essence within his soul had felt like it was transforming entirely, so if he had gone forward, he might have changed it permanently. There weren't Claw Tyrants lurking around every corner, so he had to be cautious.

That gave him an idea, but Kai decided to hold off before he went down the wrong path. Instead he tried something else: moving the statues around to try to choose them. No matter what he tried, his primary monstrous abilities remained in place and the others remained inaccessible. He'd hoped that he might be able to swap them out as necessary, but if that was possible, it wasn't something he could figure out quickly.

Since Zae Zin Nim still wasn't back, Kai set up their camp. They finally had the opportunity to use their magical tent again, which quickly expanded to its full size. He used the fire stone to start a soup and began filling containers with fresh water from the water stone. It wasn't exactly living in luxury, but they hadn't been reduced to nothing even if they had spent nearly everything on their advancement before the battle.

Finally she returned, no longer bearing the dismembered claws. Instead she carried a pack that smelled like it contained food, and she smelled like she'd purchased a bath in town. She sat down beside the pot of soup, but ignored it and instead began tossing things in his direction.

"Class Potions," she said as she tossed a bundle of small flasks. "They seem low quality, but they should suffice if necessary."

Kai examined one and immediately saw that its mana felt much feebler than the ones Juray used to make him. He didn't like to think about leaving her behind, so he focused on Zae Zin Nim as she tossed more objects.

"Soap, because you need it. There are no worthwhile cleansing stones here. Another tunic, because you'll just ruin this one eventually. And the rest of the money."

The last object, a surprisingly heavy sack, proved to be filled with Goralian Eagles. Kai tried to estimate the number and soon gave up. "How much do we have?"

"After all my expenses, just under 10,000."

"Wow, the Claw Tyrant was worth that much?"

"More, actually." Zae Zin Nim lifted out its crystallized core and examined it thoughtfully. "They paid us the reward, after some complaining, but they didn't have enough to pay for the core. I'll give them this: at least they're fair. I don't know how much your money is worth and they could have cheated me."

It was worth enough that Kai had to stop himself from whistling. Ten thousand Goralian Eagles was more than most people would ever see, more in the range of buying houses than supplies. Of course, advancement items were expensive on the order of thousands of Eagles, so they could easily burn through all their money buying themselves a little power.

"We can figure that out later," Kai said as he got to his feet. "I want to do an experiment."

"What is it?" Zae Zin Nim tucked away the monster core in her robes and rose with him.

"I think I've figured out how to manipulate my monstrous abilities. Do you think that it would be possible to... merge them somehow?"

"Possibly. Cultivators on Cloudspire are warned to never do such things, as they could cause deviation. But I understand that mergers are done on Rosemount, or some skills require fueling one power with another."

"That's what I was thinking: sacrificing one to improve something else." Kai led them away from their camp to a region of rocky cliffs. "But I'm pretty sure the process will be destructive, so I didn't want to blunder into it."

"It's easy to ruin most cultivation paths, yes." Zae Zin Nim regarded him curiously. "Can you use some of your weaker monsters?"

"I've been trying, but without much success. I think I need to take at least some risk or I'll never advance. So I want to start here."

Kai clenched his fingers and swung them toward one of the cliffs. The energy leapt from his hand and scored three gashes through the stone, each about a yard across. That was the technique he was accustomed to using, and it worked well enough against unarmored monsters, but it wasn't sufficient for the threats he needed to face.

"That's called Rockspider's Claw," Kai explained. "It works, but I don't know how powerful it really is. How much of the offensive power is coming from the monstrous ability and how much is coming from my Physique or something else?"

"I can't possibly say for certain, but..." Zae Zin Nim tilted her head back and forth, as if looking over his soul from different angles. "A powerful cultivator could turn a twig into a deadly weapon. However your monstrous abilities work, they certainly seem to be strengthened by your other powers."

"Was hoping you'd say that. When you awakened your Class, you somehow made it subservient to your primary cultivation. Can you teach me the techniques you used?"

She showed him the exercises, thankfully no longer condescending to him or talking about how everyone on Deadwaste was a barbarian. Kai wasn't sure if he could do the proper cultivation exercises, but he understood the concept quickly. When he tried to apply them to his own soul, he soon felt something shift, so he moved deeper to make his attempt.

When he nudged the Rockspider and the Claw Tyrant closer, they came to life. They began tearing into one another and Kai felt a pain in his soul - if he hadn't spent so long studying his useless Class, he might have lost control and been spiritually injured. He managed to apply those lessons and held both powers back, preventing them from conflicting.

Instead he wanted them to merge... except that wasn't right. Kai started with what he'd trained and then trusted just a little to his instincts: he made the Claw Tyrant eat the Rockspider. One monster rapidly consumed the other and its power grew. Best of all, he could feel the power locking into place within him, as if the two fused together.

Then it was done, for better or for worse. No going back now.

Kai took a deep breath and dared to use his spiritual sight on himself.

Tyrant's Claw - II (beta)

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Immediately he breathed a sigh of relief. The new ability was called "Tyrant's Claw" just like he'd hoped: he'd wanted to feed all of his training on his claw technique into the new monstrous essence. Instead of the beast's armored skin, he had focused on its destructive power. The two had merged into a single ability, decreasing the pressure on his soul.

And yet, when he looked at the rank...

"What's gotten into you?" Zae Zin Nim asked. "It didn't feel like you injured yourself or deviated."

"The ability is ranked lower," Kai said. He gestured uselessly at the symbols she couldn't see. "I tried to create a new combined claw ability that would be stronger, but the rank decreased."

"This is a rank, not raw Power, correct? The rank likely represents how close you are to the peak potential of the ability. It's easier to reach the end of a weak cultivation path than a strong one."

"Then it might...?" Kai realized that questions were pointless. They were covering new ground here, so there was no alternative to experimentation.

He took another deep breath and clenched his fingers in a claw. That part felt right, familiar. The Tyrant's Claw essence within him responded easily. So he swung his hand against the nearest cliff.

Three lines of force erupted across it. Part of the upper half of the cliff exploded away and he tore gashes through the center. The pieces crashed together in a cloud of dust, but for a moment he'd had a clear glimpse of the cliff being torn apart as if by three enormous claws.

Kai stared, having no idea what to say.

Zae Zin Nim watched the cliff for a while, then shook her head. "Damn."

That seemed to cover it.

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