Elias had never felt so small.
He wanted to slap himself because he almost felt as if he was in a dream, and what he was experiencing could not be reality. How else could everything that happened to him in the last few minutes be real?
But he knew he was not dreaming, and what he was seeing now was only the tip of the iceberg inside an ocean of unfathomable depth.
He swallowed nervously, closed his eyes and opened them, and everything remained the same, and slowly his heartbeat settled, and his breathing regularised when he began looking at everything in a more discerning manner.
Elias had not forgotten that his first goal was to seed his Lumina, and everything since had been the trials and tribulations he was going through to succeed.
He truly focused on the storm of Lumina above, which was a red vitality vortex rotating like a colossal, slow-turning cyclone of crimson light a quarter of the width of the entire cavern.
This was not mere luminescence; it was… Elias struggled for the words… the distilled life-force of hundreds, maybe thousands of fallen statues rising like ribbons of blood.
Each ribbon pulsed with faint lightning, and the whole mass rotated with the patience of a heartbeat, heavy and deliberate. The red was not bright scarlet but deep, arterial, almost black at the edges where it bled into shadow.
Wherever the light from the cloud of Lumina touched ice, it melted it into bloody rivulets that ran upward, defying gravity, feeding back into the vortex like roots.
These statues were monsters, and so they carried the power of Damnation; it was the reason that the vitality from their bodies was red like blood, and if Elias had just killed thousands of men, then the storm of Lumina above would be blue.
Above it was the Green Swarm, which floated close to the storm of vitality but never touched it.
Thousands upon thousands of tiny winged bodies swirled in a perfect, churning sphere, perhaps thirty feet across. Each creature was no larger than a housefly, yet together they formed a living emerald nebula.
Their translucent wings, veined with frost, caught and refracted the blue Lumina veins in the walls, scattering sharp pinpricks of green-white light across every surface like a thousand tiny cold suns. Their bodies were jet-black, including the tentacles they had instead of legs, but their eyes burned with blinding emerald fire, so bright that looking directly at the swarm felt like staring into a constellation of angry stars.
Elias could not believe that he had been holding all of this inside his blood, and he was rooted in this spot with awe. The swarm, as he observed, did not move chaotically; it was as if they were collectively breathing.
Their overall size expanded and contracted in slow, hypnotic pulses, each contraction sending out a wave of arctic chill that frosted the air and made the red vortex below tremble as though flinching. When they exhaled, the temperature dropped another few degrees; breathable air turned to visible vapor, then to fine snow that drifted upward in lazy spirals before being drawn into the green mass.
Elias listened, and he could hear the sound they were making, and it was like a low, crystalline chime, like millions of glass needles tapping against each other in perfect rhythm.
Before he had awakened, sorry, reawakened as a Siphon, Elias had suspected that the Green Swarm inside him must have been feeding on the Lumina inside his targets; that was the reason he had not awakened as a Siphon, despite killing so many Siphons.
Remember that there were two ways to become a Siphon: either by natural maturation, as Elias did when he turned eighteen, or by killing something stronger and passively absorbing their Lumina.
From what he could see, the Green Swarm did not seem interested in the Lumina below them, and with everything he had witnessed during his reawakening and the secrets alluded to by the Commander, his story was not going to be a simple one.
However, for the first time since he had entered this Fragment of Divinity, Elias felt something close to awe. After years of feeling helpless, not knowing when and how his end was going to be, just the raw, terrible beauty of power finally answering to his will, almost made him shudder in pleasure.
Elias, half-healed, half-dead, entirely changed, smiled through bloodied teeth. It was time for the Hunter to reap the fruits of his victories.
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Every child was taught the basics of Vitality Absorption; it was the core trait of a Siphon, and the only path for them to grow from a Wisp into something powerful.
Elias did not know if there was any Wisp in Stormfall who had ever stood before a storm of Lumina as great as this one, but he knew that it was unlikely. This should be one of the reasons why Angels could grow much faster than any other Siphon. These fragments were a source of great benefits, and also grave danger.
He suspected that even Mist Phantoms who were not Angels would not have survived the wrath of these statues. Elias did not fully grasp the power of the Green Swarm, but it did not seem bound by any normal laws he knew.
That did not matter at the moment; for now, he needed to absorb all this vitality and see how far he could grow. They would not remain here forever before they scattered into the surroundings, and so he should be hasty.
Before becoming a Siphon, a mortal could only hope to passively absorb Lumina, but as a Siphon, even a Level 0 Wisp like him, there were different methods that could quickly facilitate the absorption of Lumina.
There was a general method known even to mortals that was seen as wasteful because it could only absorb half of the Lumina in their vicinity, but the Order of Unbroken Shield had taught him a unique method for Vitality Absorption that should technically be able to absorb 88% of the Vitality in his surroundings. He was strictly forbidden from sharing this technique, or he would be killed.
Even without killing, there were stray sources of Lumina roving about in the air, and with dedication and time, a Siphon would be able to gather all of these Lumina to fill up their pools of power, but that would take so much time and effort that it was considered useless. The usage of this technique was for gathering the vitality from the fallen and not for cultivation.
Naked and covered with dried blood, Elias walked across the broken and frozen ground, uncaring of the jagged edges that injured his feet, so he could stand at the center of the swirling vortex of vitality above.
He drew in a deep breath and brought his two palms closer to his chest. He closed his eyes, and then, twisting his fingers into a weird configuration, Elias began to recite the Order's Vitality Absorption technique in his head.