Arthur was dying to see Wovan too, but he wanted to clean things up first. “Just give me a moment to deal with this,” he said, almost chuckling at how Solana visibly shrank in response to his words.

  Arthur quickly looted the remaining bounty hunters, throwing anything interesting into his storage ring. Nothing as great as the hammer popped up again, but he did find a nice silver necklace that would grant all his physical attacks a touch of extra cutting damage via a wind-based concept. It was epic ranked too, which meant he’d probably be using it all throughout the ninety-odd levels till he upgraded his class. Hopefully, it would give him a leg up in eventually mastering his own concepts too.

  Finally, Arthur was done. A small pile of bloody corpses and dismembered limbs lay in front of him like some profane sacrifice to the eldritch. With the wide array of species on the pile, Arthur looked like a true connoisseur of the murderous arts. No one could ever accuse him of being speciest. As dead things went, Arthur’s little altar stank to high heaven. Nothing was rotting—they’d only been dead for a few minutes—but Arthur had punctured a lot of stomachs in this fight. The things inside tended to smell awful.

  “Do you have anything to burn this with?” Arthur asked Solana. “Normally, I’d use my poisoned fang but I’m running a little low on ether.”

  “I do,” Solana replied sombrely, “Though I’ll have to advise against burning your deceased enemies in the future. It may work well for human remains but many races don’t mix well with fire. Burning the Corpse Eater's arm, for example, would risk spreading illness and disease. If you were particularly unlucky, you would have poisoned the next local rainfall.”

  Arthur’s skin rapidly paled. “Thank you for telling me that. Does burying them work better?”

  Solana grimaced and shook her head no, pulling a vial filled with a glowing liquid from her storage device. “The problem when the powerful die tends to stem from how enhanced their bodies are. Burying these hunters in tier 1 soil would mean waiting hundreds of years before they decomposed fully. So many things could go wrong in that time I’d need an hour to explain it all.”

  “What I have here,” Solana shook her glass flask, "is a far better option. An elite-ranked self-propagating acid with a propensity for consuming the formerly living. A few drops of it will be enough for this bunch.”

  Proving her words, she dropped a single small spoonful onto the Corpse Eater's arm. Arthur watched in morbid fascination as the acid devoured the flesh; so fast it was like candy floss dipped in water. It spread from the arm to the lionkin's corpse, now much greater in volume, almost like it was a living being. Arthur took a cautionary step back. Sure, he was durable, but he didn’t want any of that getting on his skin and the acid looked a little too alive for his liking. Not even half a minute later, nothing remained of his macabre pile, the only signs of its existence were a few splashes of red on the ground.

  Reaching out her hand, Solana pulled the acid to her, using ether to manipulate it into a spherical orb that rotated a few inches above her palm. The acid had multiplied in volume by over ten thousand percent, though it visibly shrank before his eyes until it reached its initial size. She unstoppered her vial and let the liquid drop back into it.

  “This is called Talyeong acid, named after the man who invented it. It starts life at merely a rare grade but grows stronger in response to the quality and quantity of the flesh it consumes. It's taken me forty-three years to bring it up to the epic grade and as an alchemist, I come across dead flesh more often than most.”

  “Seems there's another thing on my growing list of things I need to get my hands on.”

  “Well, I could give you a drop of my own but it’s tradition for alchemists to start a fresh one and grow it as they become more proficient. That and I don’t think your water manipulation is good enough to safely handle the acid.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. In my hands, the acid would be a single-use item. No way could I retrieve it like you did.”

  “Okay, you’ve held me in suspense for long enough,” Solana said, clasping her hands. “Bring out your little summon please.”

  Arthur grinned. Little. Solana had no idea just how massive Wovan would become. Reaching into his soul, Arthur located where the Soul Splinter rested. The spider was in a small golden bubble right at the centre of his spirit, even further in than where his skill fractals existed. Arthur grasped the tether between them and prepared to pull her out. Then it hit him. He was supposed to get 1% of all of Wovan's stats, which seemed perfectly fine on paper. The spider, however, had access to two stats that Arthur didn't: control and Titan's constitution. Arthur remembered just how disorientating gaining perception had been and here he was, about to go through it again. The time Wovan had just spent in his soul had already changed him in subtle ways and bringing her forth, Arthur realised would bring those changes into effect.

  This is going to suck.

  Bracing himself, Arthur summoned Wovan.

  Immediately, his body was wracked by terrible pain and he hunched over, clutching his chest. It felt like steel wire was being threaded through his muscle fibres, reinforcing them and his bones felt foreign in his own body, too heavy and dense. Arthur had never ‘felt’ his bones before and it was for good reason. His head was suffering even more. The sub-brain he’d formed during his refinement was evolving, forming thousands of new connections and links to every part of his body and then to his very soul. Thankfully, it didn’t grow any larger—it was still the same size as a strawberry—or it would have run out of room in his skull.

  Solana looked like she was seconds from ripping her hair out, frantically pulling out vial after vial from her spacial storage, each of them a legendary elixir people would kill for.

  “What’s happening Arthur? Tell me what's wrong,” she demanded, her voice even higher than normal.

  If Arthur wasn’t in so much pain, he probably would have found it funny. “Just give me a minute,” he groaned, slumping to the floor and lying down. The pain was thankfully already receding, but it took another three minutes to fade away completely. Finally, accompanied by the sound of a fizzing pop and the smell of burnt ozone, Wovan finished materialising, in all her terrifying spider glory.

  Right on top of Arthur's chest.

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  He shrieked like a terrified child and jumped backwards, or at least he tried to. The ten tiny hell spawn currently resting on his chest however were far, far heavier than anything so small had any right to be and generating any force from his prone position was nigh impossible so his jump to freedom didn’t take him anywhere. The spiders, of course, were still sitting on him. One of the particularly adventurous ones had decided to crawl onto his face.

  Arthur closed his eyes and tried to calm his racing heart. He’d merely been caught by surprise. No way would he have reacted so pathetically otherwise. Yeah, definitely that. Opening his eyes, he could see Solana to the side, trying to stifle her laughter, which meant the guffawing in the background could only be Alyssia. Trust the alverin to wake up in time to catch him doing something embarrassing.

  “Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up. Get it all out of your system.” Arthur drawled, deadpan. “It won't be so funny when I tell her to crawl into your clothes.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath, a flash of green and then Alyssia was standing over him, making sure she stayed a careful distance away from the spiders. “C’mon Arthur, you can’t even blame me for laughing,” Alyssia implored, wringing her hands worriedly. “If you were me, you would’ve laughed too. You can’t deny it.”

  Arthur chuckled and nodded. “Fairs. It’s great to see you too.” Ordering Woven to crawl off him, Arthur stood up and embraced the alverin, using his pitiably low strength stat to squeeze her as hard as he could. “I can’t believe I’m saying this but I actually missed you,” Arthur murmured. He squeezed her even tighter. “Never ever go so far again. I’m the durable one. I can survive a windblade to the head. You can’t. There's no point saving my life if you can’t rub it in my face later.”

  “Hah, you're acting like I wanted to get my legs chopped off. Don’t know about you, but I don’t go around aiming to get decapitated.”

  Arthur stifled a chuckle and stepped back, holding the alverin by her shoulders. “Yeah, you're right. You’d have to be crazy to try and catch a wind blade with your head. Thank you for helping me today. Really. Words can't describe how much I probably owe you.” He turned to look at Solana. “And you too. I would have failed if it wasn’t for your passive domain, so I guess I owe you a favour, though I doubt there's anything I can do for you that you can’t do yourself.”

  “I did very little but I won't say no to a favour from an Originator. You’re selling yourself short. You’re already so powerful at level 103. Oh, it’s level 104 now. By the time you upgrade your class, I’m sure you’ll be changing the course of our very realm. Especially after what you did today," she added, looking at Wovan who was crawling around on the ground.

  "What about me?" Alyssia interrupted, poking him on the side. "What do I get?"

  Arthur stared at her deadpan. "Well... I guess I won't sic Wovan on you."

  The sad thing was, that Alyssia actually looked happy with that reward, trying to prevent a smile as if she'd gotten one over on him. It took the fun out of teasing her.

  "Jokes aside, I'll let you keep half your Draconic Vitality enhancement. Permanently. It'll be yours for good, something I'll never take from you."

  Alyssia instantly rejected his proposal, and in hindsight, Arthur should have expected it. He would've made the same decision in her shoes. Using someone else's power, and and becoming dependent on it was like shooting yourself in the foot. What would happen if Arthur died, or if they became enemies in the future. It also wouldn't help her get a better class upgrade—hell, it might even negatively affect it. With nothing else to distract him, Arthur finally pulled up Wovan's full stat page.

  That explained why she was so damn heavy. Every single one of her little monsters weighed eleven kilograms.

  Arthur didn't even know what to say. Wovan was perhaps the strongest level 1 creature that had ever existed. No, she had to be. Arthur refused to believe there was a more terrifying existence. She was classified as an Ender, beyond even apocalypse beasts and though others with such classifications did exist, Arthur sincerely doubted they'd gained it at level 1. No, Wovan was a being that should have never existed, a creature that broke the laws of balance.

  Was she a tier 5 creature? Tier 6? Something that would be considered an apocalypse even in a higher realm.

  Arthur didn't know. What he did know, however, was that everyone, even Solana who'd watched the whole process unfold, had seriously underestimated just how powerful his first soul splinter was. Otherwise, there was no way she'd be so comfortable holding one of the little demons so close to her face. Wovan was a monster too dangerous to leave in a single person's hands, like giving an ordinary pre-system civilian access codes to all the nuclear weapons on Earth. Had they known how powerful Wovan was, he was certain they'd make killing him their highest priority. How many levels would it take before Wovan became invulnerable? A hundred levels? Two hundred?

  It was a matter of when, not if. Arthur pulled up his own status page to compare, investing the free points from his latest level up into draconic vitality. He wasn't quite Ender level, but he'd start giving apocalypse beasts a run for their money soon.

  Etherious: Originator

  Etherious: The Locus of Power has gone live. As a self published author doing everything myself, my novels success lies entirely on my shoulders. As such, the first day of a books launch is by far the most important time that determines how well my book will do.

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