Lying on his back on a bed that was still fairly tidy, hands tucked behind his head, Genichi stared up at the ceiling with black eyes that didn't quite focus.
His awareness wasn't in this relaxed body at all. It kept replaying what had happened a few hours earlier in the Occult Research Club's lavish lounge, where Rias Gremory had calmly, unequivocally laid out the obligations and rules he would have to follow as a Gremory household devil.
"…Compared to all those rules and restrictions,"
Genichi muttered under his breath. The haze in his gaze slowly sharpened until it looked like a blade. "What I really need to care about is how to raise my power as fast, and as much, as possible."
Power. Everything came down to power.
With enough power, "obligations" could be renegotiated. "Rules" could be broken, or bent around.
In the slaughter of the Soul Arena that could descend again at any moment, and against the day-to-day world's eerie, unpredictable vengeful spirits, only power was a true pass. It was the bedrock of survival and dominion.
If his body wasn't still under strain right now, Genichi would have already returned to that everyday, mixed-universe world.
Those vengeful spirits that used to terrify him, forcing him to hide and tread carefully, no longer looked like mere threats. In his eyes, they had become fuel for growth.
It was just a shame that most of the strength he had devoured had sunk deep into his body, like a dormant volcano, quietly reshaping every cell over time.
"That mixed-universe world might lack a systematic supernatural power structure, but it has practically endless 'wild resources.'"
As long as he could hunt vengeful spirits safely, it meant a stable, efficient shortcut for growth.
That was far more direct than plodding along in the DxD world, learning step by step, completing tasks, and waiting for opportunities.
"Good thing the flow of time between the two worlds doesn't seem synchronized."
That discovery soothed him, at least a little.
When he was in the DxD world, time in the mixed-universe world seemed relatively frozen, or moving at an extremely slow crawl.
It gave him a precious buffer window.
He could stay in the DxD world and digest Ddraig's power, learn basic devil abilities, build up enough self-preservation to stand on his own. Then he could return to the mixed-universe world, hunt, and rapidly accumulate a deeper foundation of strength, forming a self-reinforcing loop.
With that in mind, Genichi raised his left hand in front of his eyes.
A thought, and only a thought.
A dark red glow seeped up from beneath his skin, hot but contained, not ostentatious.
In the next instant, the Red Dragon Emperor's Gauntlet, vicious in design and brimming with domineering authority, silently covered his entire left hand and forearm.
The jewel set into the armor was like a dragon's eye, giving off a muted crimson light.
"The core abilities of the Red Dragon Emperor's Gauntlet, Boost and Transfer, are still here."
"But the one driving it now isn't Ddraig's will anymore. It's completely, utterly mine."
The gauntlet's arcane patterns brightened slightly. A faint but unmistakable sensation of amplification spread from his arm through his whole body.
That was the first manifestation of the Boost law: every ten seconds, power doubled once.
In theory, as long as his body could endure it, the increase had no upper limit.
"Next, I need to master Balance Breaker as soon as possible."
Balance Breaker was the Sacred Gear's true awakened state. It could massively increase its might, and it could also produce unique, specialized powers.
For the Red Dragon Emperor's Gauntlet, its Balance Breaker form was the Red Dragon Emperor Armor, an all-in-one offense-and-defense nightmare that could make any opponent's blood run cold.
Under normal circumstances, Balance Breaker required the host to reach deep resonance with the will inside the Sacred Gear, breaking through the limiter under the drive of intense emotion or obsession.
But now, Ddraig had been devoured. The Sacred Gear belonged to him completely.
For Genichi, the "threshold" to Balance Breaker might have been reduced to nothing but the accumulation of demonic power.
As long as his demonic power was pure enough, vast enough, in theory he could reach out and activate Balance Breaker on his own.
And beyond Balance Breaker lay something even further.
Juggernaut Drive.
"Juggernaut Drive…"
Genichi murmured the name.
Its power was undeniably tempting, but the problem came with it. Ddraig's soul had already been swallowed by him.
So did Juggernaut Drive, a form that required deep communion with the dragon soul, even a partial release of its full might, still exist?
Even if he could force it, what about the maddened resentment left behind in the Sacred Gear's depths by every previous Red Dragon Emperor host?
That was an accumulation of extreme negativity, a collective stain born from countless hosts losing control, burning their lives away, and dying in the end. It was a horrific contamination that could corrode any rational mind.
At the mention of the previous Red Dragon Emperors' grudges, an audacious thought, bold to the point of madness, suddenly surfaced in Genichi's mind.
"Speaking of those resentments left by the previous Red Dragon Emperors…"
He stared at the jewel that resembled a dragon's eye. His gaze seemed to pierce through matter itself, seeing into the deepest layer of the Sacred Gear, where the curse-like hatred had gathered.
"Those grudges…could they count as a kind of soul? Or maybe, residue left behind when a soul is pushed to the extreme?"
If the answer was yes, then an even more terrifying idea, like a beast snapping its chains, began to roar uncontrollably through his head.
"Can my devouring ability swallow those resentments directly?"
The thought hit like black lightning, splitting the fog around his power path wide open.
Any host whose grudge could remain, and then converge in the Sacred Gear's depths, would have been an elite among elites. At the very least, they would have been strong enough to reach, even use, Juggernaut Drive.
The resentment they left behind, the understanding of power within it, battle experience, even raw soul energy, would be an absurdly rich meal.
Even if it couldn't compare in "quality" or "quantity" to a complete dragon soul like Ddraig, it would be far stronger and more refined than the ordinary vengeful spirits in the mixed-universe world.
Of course, the risk was just as immense, possibly far beyond devouring Ddraig.
Those grudges contained the hosts' extreme pain, hatred, despair, and madness at the moment of death. Their mental pollution, the density of negative emotion, could be ten times, a hundred times more terrifying than Ddraig's slumbering dragon soul had been.
If he devoured it recklessly, it might not be him digesting the resentment.
It might be the opposite: his consciousness washed away by an endless flood of negativity, assimilated into the grudge, turned into a composite entity that knew nothing but destruction and hatred.
But high risk often meant high reward.
If he could succeed, he would eliminate the biggest hidden danger inside the Red Dragon Emperor's Gauntlet and claim a staggering inheritance in the process, sharply increasing his soul's strength and his demonic power.
More than that, he might be able to use it to explore a new path that belonged solely to him.
A new power form, completely governed by his own will, fused from the pure essence of everything he had devoured, and finally freed from the influence of the previous hosts' resentment.
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