Read Novel Full Chapter 760: Beings From Blood Portal
Chapter 760: Beings From Blood Portal
In another universe, the ground split with a deafening crack.
Boom!
A massive foreleg of dark, crusted granite slammed into the canyon floor. The blow tore a crack ten feet wide through the bedrock, and jagged slabs of stone tumbled into the darkness below. Dust rolled up the cliffs in thick gray sheets.
Above the crack, the beast rose like a living mountain. It stood four hundred feet tall on four pillar-like legs, its shoulders hunched under a jagged shell of layered gray stone. Its thick, armored tail swept behind it and caught the rocky ridge along the western wall.
Crash!
The ridge sheared clean off and collapsed into a heap of gravel that buried half the canyon floor. The monster shifted its huge weight, and every step sent tremors racing across the land, shaking boulders loose from cliffs miles away.
High above the falling stone, Clone One hung in the open air.
He drifted on the canyon wind with his dark robes whipping around his legs, his arms loose at his sides. He watched the mountain of rock and muscle thrash below him, and a wide grin spread across his face.
The beast swung its massive neck up and found the tiny speck against the gray sky. It snapped its jaws shut, and the clatter echoed off the cliffs like iron gates slamming.
Clone One leaned forward and dropped like a falcon through the dust.
***
He had spent the last two weeks tracking this creature across the barrens.
The magic universe was huge, full of wild land, deep tunnels, and ruins left behind by races nobody remembered. While the original body back on Earth handled Nova and spent time with his friends, Clone One took to the wild. He loved a good fight, and he loved testing himself against something bigger than he was.
This beast ruled the valley. The local maps marked the whole canyon as a forbidden zone, a wasteland where even master mages refused to go.
Clone One had pushed his power down to a small fraction of what it really was.
At full strength, he could have turned the whole valley into sand with a wave of his hand, and one strike would have ended the beast. But winning like that taught him nothing.
Not long ago, Liam had realized that energy wasn’t his problem anymore. Since the seed gear took hold, he would never run out of it. What he lacked was understanding. He needed to truly know the laws behind his power instead of forcing his way through everything.
So Clone One locked most of his strength away. He held himself down until he was only a little stronger than the beast below him. He wanted a fight that would make him think.
***
Clone One plunged toward the creature’s broad skull through the rising dust.
He flicked his fingers.
Swish!
Three crescent blades of compressed Primordial Essence formed in the air around his shoulders, glowing a dense, pale white. With a flick of his wrist, he drove them down into the creature’s head.
Clang!
The blades struck the thick stone between the creature’s horns, and sparks sprayed fifty feet into the air. Normally his blades would have cut straight through. These bit two feet into the hide with a screech like a saw on steel, then broke apart into motes of white light.
Thick black fluid oozed from the shallow cuts. Before the dust had even cleared, the rock around the wounds crawled back together and sealed them shut in the space of two breaths.
The creature barely noticed. It raised its head, opened its huge mouth, and pulled air into its chest. The canyon went cold as the wind rushed inward.
Then it roared.
ROAR!
The roar hit like a wall of force, and it turned the dust in the air into a storm of flying stone.
The shockwave blasted upward and tore tons of loose rock off the canyon walls. It hit Clone One square in the chest. The breath left his lungs in a sharp gasp, and he was tossed backward through the air like a dry leaf in a storm.
He flipped three times, caught himself, and kicked off the air to stop.
Before he could steady himself, a shadow fell over him.
The monster had turned with impossible speed for its size. Its huge front paw, with blunt stone claws as big as wagons, swung at him in a wide arc.
Clone One brought both forearms up and covered his skin in a thick layer of essence.
Wham!
The hit felt like an asteroid slamming into a mountain. It smashed through his guard and rattled every bone in his body, and Clone One shot across the canyon like a cannonball.
Boom!
He hit the eastern cliff headfirst and drove thirty feet into the solid granite. A hundred tons of rock came down on top of him. The cliff face cracked all the way to the top, and boulders tumbled into the dark.
For five seconds, the only sound in the canyon was the beast’s heavy breathing.
Then a slab of granite shifted.
Crash!
Clone One shoved a boulder off his chest and stepped out into the light. His robes were torn at the right shoulder, and gray dust covered his hair and skin. He rolled his neck and heard the bones pop back into place.
A thin red line ran down his left jaw where a sharp rock had cut him, but his eyes were wide and bright. He wiped the dust from his nose with his forearm and let out a loud laugh.
***
The beast spotted him in the rubble and stomped forward. Each step pounded the earth and sent shockwaves up through Clone One’s boots. It lowered its head and aimed its twin horns at the base of the cliff.
This time, Clone One stood still on a flat slab of fallen granite with his arms relaxed at his sides, and he watched.
He shut out everything except the creature in front of him. He noticed that it took a breath every four seconds, and its huge ribcage groaned with the shifting of its stone plates. Before every charge, its left rear leg sank two inches into the dirt, and the muscles along its spine tightened from tail to neck. Under all of it, he could feel the beat of its enormous heart, a slow, deep thud that came up through the ground once every six seconds.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
He remembered the long months at the edge of the universe, standing before the giant entropy gears. Forcing energy against them had done nothing. The only way to move them was to listen, find the rhythm of their movement, and match it.
The Law of Universal Consonance.
He had only ever used it to fix the gears. He had never tried it against a living thing in the middle of a fight.
’Everything has a rhythm,’ Clone One thought. ’If I force my way through, the stone fights back. If I match it, it gives way.’
The monster reached the base of the rubble and lunged. Its left horn tore through the air straight at his chest.
Clone One stepped forward instead of back. He timed his move to the creature’s heartbeat and formed a single blade of Primordial Essence, trying to tune the energy inside it to the rhythm of the creature’s stone hide.
He struck.
Clang!
The blade hit the horn just slightly out of time. The two rhythms clashed, and the energy broke apart on the surface. The recoil threw his arm back and left his ribs open.
The monster didn’t waste it. Its heavy snout whipped sideways and caught him in the ribs with the flat of its jaw.
Crack!
Clone One felt two ribs break. The blow drove him across the canyon floor, and his boots dug two long trenches through the gravel before he dug his heels in and stopped. He coughed and spat a mouthful of blood onto the gray stones.
The beast snorted, steam hissing from its nostrils as it turned to face him. It raised its massive right leg to stomp him flat.
Clone One ignored the pain in his side. He closed his eyes for a split second and felt the movement of the monster’s leg travel through the ground and into his heels.
He felt the beat.
This time he felt all of it together: its heart, the push of its muscles, and the steady flow of mana that moved through its body to heal its wounds.
The foot came down from above like a falling tower.
Clone One opened his eyes.
He raised his right hand with his fingers curled and formed a small, dense spike of Primordial Essence at his fingertips. This time, he didn’t pack it hard and rigid. He let the energy pulse, faster and slower, until it moved with the flow of mana inside the monster.
One. Two. Three.
Just as the shadow of the giant foot fell over him, Clone One drove the pulsing spike up into the soft crease behind its ankle.
Thrum!
The strike was almost silent.
A deep vibration ran straight through the point where the spike touched the stone. The essence moved in perfect time with the hide, and instead of breaking against the rock, it sank in and made every tiny crack inside the stone grow.
Crack!
A web of bright white lines spread across the whole leg in an instant. The stone plates that had stopped his blades shattered from the inside out, and big chunks of rock fell away like dry plaster, leaving the raw muscle underneath bare.
The monster let out a shriek of pain. Its huge knee buckled under its own weight, and it crashed onto its side and shook the whole valley.
***
Clone One jumped back and landed on top of a boulder as tall as a three-story house. He rested his hands on his knees and took slow, steady breaths. He could feel his ribs already knitting back together.
The beast thrashed in the dirt, trying to roll its bulk up onto its good legs. The stone on its ankle was already trying to grow back over the exposed muscle.
Clone One didn’t give it the chance.
He could feel its rhythm clearly now. The whole creature was laid open to him. He knew where its energy gathered to heal, and he knew where the core of its life sat beneath the heavy plate on its chest.
He stepped off the boulder and glided down toward the creature’s chest.
The beast saw him coming and swung its tail in one desperate sweep. The huge spiked club tore through the dust, aimed to cut him in half.
Clone One leaned back just enough, and the spikes passed three inches above his nose, the rush of air tugging at his hair. He rode the wind of the swing straight toward the center of the creature’s chest.
His right hand lit up with pale white light. The essence pulsed quietly, in time with the deep, slow beat of the monster’s heart.
Thump. Thump.
On the peak of the second beat, Clone One drove his open palm into the center of the creature’s chest plate.
Boom!
The force went straight through the outer armor, moving in perfect time with the creature’s heart. The shock burst the heart and cut the flow of mana along its spine in one clean strike.
The monster stopped moving.
Its great legs went limp against the rubble. The red glow in its small eyes faded to dull gray, and the grinding of the stone plates along its back went still. The dust drifted down over the huge body, and the canyon fell silent.
Clone One dropped lightly to the ground beside the fallen head.
He held up his right hand and turned it back and forth. He closed his fist, opened it again, and sent a tiny ripple of essence into the air, listening to the faint sound it made against the wind.
He hadn’t won with more power than the beast. He had won by matching it.
He smiled. It was a good start.
***
The wind changed.
The dry smell of crushed granite was swept away by a warm breeze from the center of the canyon, and the air turned thick with the metallic smell of fresh blood.
Clone One turned his head toward the flat valley floor, three hundred yards from the dead monster.
In the middle of the stone basin, the air twisted. A round crimson light flared out of nothing, hovering two feet above the cracked earth. It spread fast, stretching into a circular portal two meters across.
Its surface rippled like a standing pool of thick blood, swirling slowly. Heat rolled off its glowing edge and turned the stones around it black.
Clone One stood still, his eyes fixed on it.
’That portal,’ he thought.
It was the same as the one he had found months ago at the bottom of the dungeon in the Eldwood Forest. That one had shrunk and collapsed before he could go through, and the smell of blood had faded soon after.
This one was holding steady.
The surface of the portal parted with a wet, tearing sound.
Step. Step. Step.
Four figures walked out of the crimson light and onto the jagged ground of the canyon.
They were tall and lean, with pale skin so white it looked like it had never seen the sun. Their faces were sharp and handsome in a cold way, and their long black hair was tied back neatly from their faces. The tips of their ears came to a slight point. When their lips parted, Clone One saw long, needle-sharp fangs.
They wore fitted armor of dark leather and black metal, and long curved daggers hung at their waists.
Clone One saw the difference at once. The creatures in the Eldwood dungeon had been mindless. These four moved together with purpose, and their deep crimson eyes were sharp and aware. The moment their boots touched the rock, they spread out into a wide line, tilting their heads and drawing in the smell of the valley.
Out of habit, Clone One reached for their rhythm the way he had with the beast. He felt their steps and the shift of their weight, but under it, where a heartbeat should have been, there was nothing.
The one in front stopped in his tracks. His gaze locked onto the giant body of the stone beast lying in the dust, and his eyes widened a little. He looked at the shattered chest plate and the broken leg, then at the stillness of a creature that should not have been easy to kill.
Then his nostrils flared.
His eyes dropped to the blood Clone One had spat onto the stones earlier, then rose to the thin red line along his jaw, and finally settled on Clone One himself, who stood thirty yards away in torn robes, covered in gray dust.
The four of them made no sound.
Their faces twisted with a hatred that Clone One didn’t understand, and in a split second, all four dropped low to the ground. They moved with blinding speed and fanned out in a wide arc to cut him off from the canyon walls.
Clone One stayed where he was and let them surround him.
He lowered his chin and rolled his shoulders back. Deep inside him, the Primordial Essence he had been holding back began to stir, and it slowly leaked out into the dry canyon air in a heavy wave.
He gave the four of them a cold, quiet grin.
"Let’s see what you are."