He's dead, and everything he owned is mine.
I stood in the center of the study, staring at the dust motes dancing in the dim light. His shelves were packed with leather-bound lies and obscure grimoires he used to read to me while my bones mended on those frost-bitten nights. He didn't simply raise a successor. The old bastard was too selfish for that. He raised a predator, hoping I'd be sharp enough to protect myself in this rotten world.
He just forgot that predators eventually get hungry.
If someone show up to claim this "inheritance"? Let them. I need more fertilizer for the garden.
"Seriously I need fertilizer for the garden". I thought
I didn't eat the thing because I was hungry. I ate it because I couldn't risk to waste all my work to get it and also want to knowing what it did to a man's insides.
The skin gave way between my molars with a sickening, wet pop. It didn't taste like fruit. It tasted like cold iron and the copper tang of a looming thunderstorm. It hit my stomach like a swallow of molten lead.
My Arcane Soul didn't just "react"—it bucked.
My heart hammered against my ribs, a trapped bird trying to break free. Then, the silence. My thoughts didn't just slow; they froze. The mana didn't flow; it scraped. It felt like someone was shoving a rusted file through my veins, carving new channels into my nervous system. I didn't smile. I couldn't. I just gritted my teeth until I heard them creak, forcing that white-hot Alchemia energy toward the jagged hole in my side where the Abomination had nearly ended me.
The seals were already etched into the stone. I slammed my palms onto the cold rock, the fruit's residue burning like acid against my skin. The stone drank the blood from my open cuts, the ritual circle flared a dying, sickly violet, and then the world started to tilt.
I tried to trigger Notation Analysis to stabilize the surge. Bad move.
The world shattered into a billion glass shards. Trajectories, mana-densities, kill-zones—it all hit me at once. It wasn't "chessboards." It was a mental flashbang. My brain felt like it was being shoved through a meat grinder.
The Gaia System blinked in the corner of my vision, a mocking red question mark over my skill list. Then the lights went out.
I woke up gagging on the smell of burnt hair and old pennies.
My lungs burned. Every muscle felt like it had been shredded and stitched back together with wire. I sat up, my vision swimming, and realized my hands weren't empty.
In my right: A flower, its petals pulsing with a low, rhythmic heat that charred my callouses.
In my left: A stalk of ice-blue glass that sent needles of frost deep into my marrow.
"What the hell..." My voice was a dry rasp. My head throbbed with a rhythmic ache, the kind you only get from a week-long opium bender or a concussive blast to the skull.
Then I saw the mess.
The serpent was massive—a thick coil of green scales and muscle that should have been able to crush a house. Now, it was just… meat. It hadn't been hacked apart; it had been dismantled. The scales were peeled back with terrifying precision, the vital organs exposed and severed. No waste. No struggle. Just a clinical, terrifying slaughter.
I scrambled back, my boots slipping on the gore-slicked grass. Those were my marks. My style. But refined. Perfected.
My clothes were heavy, soaked through with the serpent's dark, viscous blood, yet there wasn't a single tear in the fabric. I looked at the flowers, then at the corpse, and felt a cold stone drop in my stomach.
Across the clearing, a girl was huddled behind a blackened rock. Dark hair, tribal ink staining her collarbone—a local. A "barbarian," as the old man would have called her. She looked like she'd crawled out of a nightmare, her eyes wide and bloodshot.
She wasn't looking at the snake. She was looking at me.
I took one step toward her, my hand outstretched. She didn't scream. She didn't even breathe. She just bolted, disappearing into the treeline with the desperate speed of a rabbit that had just seen the shadow of a hawk.
I didn't chase her. I couldn't have moved if the island started sinking.
My internal logs were blank. No combat data. No mana expenditure reports. Nothing. The Gaia System had taken the wheel, and I'd been locked in the trunk.
I looked at my hands. They were steady now. Too steady.
The fear didn't come from the blood or the girl or the dead monster. It came from the realization that I wasn't the most dangerous thing inhabiting my own body.
Still, a kill is a kill. I pulled my knife and started harvesting the serpent's heart-stone. But as I worked, a thought remained, cold and sharp as the fruit I'd swallowed:
Whatever I became in the dark... I hope I never meet it face-to-face.