Becoming a Monster

Chapter 390: Chapter 390: Breaking Shackles

Noah sat in his home, his eyes shut, oblivious to his surroundings. To his side, several pairs of eyes were closely watching him. Ailetta couldn’t stop herself from staring. Eve and Arachne were waiting in the room with the same curiosity.

But Noah’s focus was elsewhere.

His mind was reeling. Not from the humans outside, not from their petty whisperings or the fear they drenched themselves in. The only thing that mattered right now was what he was just confirming.

The effects of absorbing a soul.

Noah already knew he could do it. The information bestowed by Anubis had already shown him. He could offer the soul to the Nexus eye, to let it consume it and grow its correspondence skills, but if he consumed it himself... that was different. That meant his soul was the one that would change, becoming stronger.

But what exactly did that mean?

Would his will sharpen? Does his control over mana deepen? Would his instincts grow even keener, gaining a sixth sense, or would something entirely unknown awaken? How many souls would it take before he noticed real results? One? Ten? Hundreds?

The thought didn’t excite him blindly, however it did make him cautious. Because he knew that power should come with a cost. If he took them into himself, what pieces of those souls would remain? Would those souls tamper with his own? Would they merge? Or would they simply become fuel to his own soul, without a conscience to taint his own?

What he found was that his physical body hadn’t changed at all. No surge of muscle, no sudden awakening of power. Instead, the shift transpired within his soul realm.

His inner world, where his soul and the connected souls of his creatures, the place had changed. It was barely noticeable at all, but Noah felt it during the process of his absorption. His soul realm had expanded.

At first, the sensation filled him with a sense of contentment, as if he had come out of a stifled living place for a prolonged time. Yet almost immediately, the paradox sank in.

The expansion left behind a hollow ache. The feeling left him desiring the feeling even more. It was like drinking water only to realize how parched he truly was. His soul felt fuller than ever, yet that growth had carved a hunger in his soul that became hard to ignore. At the same time he felt his soul growing, he also was being afflicted with a feeling of emptiness out of the possibility of what he could still become.

That gnawing feeling didn’t waver his resolve to continue the path to absorbing souls. Before he made the decision, he had already accepted the consequences. ”All power comes at a price,” a price that he was willing to pay, as long as it didn’t affect his family. Noah believed that if his soul grew with every absorption, then perhaps the price wasn’t what it seemed at all, but his soul’s instincts to encourage him that he was on the right path.

Finally, Noah opened his eyes. Now that he started, he’ll make sure to continue until he finds his answer. But for now...

His hand made a grabbing motion to a clump of cores by his feet. These cores were bigger than the cores he had acquired before, the energy within them swirled nearly twice as fast as the creatures from their previous world.

But there was a noticeable difference that these cores didn’t have in common with the creatures he killed before. Within their cores, which housed the usual hues of red, black and white, was a color that he had yet to see before within a core... green.

If this had been before, he would feel the need to run his mind frantically to understand what it signified, but there was someone who could answer his curiosity, and all he needed to do was answer a question in return.

Instead of thinking about it, Noah wanted to turn the six cores he had left into the creations that his creatures all considered to be treats. With the energy emitted by the trolls’ cores, he could only wonder if the effects were magnified when further enhanced by his blood.

He didn’t believe the enhancements would be the same as when he still had the system. He felt it the moment he broke free of its shackles, the system was holding him back in so many ways. He also noticed that despite his creatures, or any creatures for that matter, weren’t affected or tied to the system, they too were shackled, the same as he and his creatures were. But their chains weren’t made by the System. No, it was to the world itself.

He noticed it when they ate the troll’s corpses. Actually, it was Arachne who had taken notice of the changes of this world first. When she ate, she didn’t need to eat the flesh, she consumed all of the lifeforce within her meal; that also meant their residual lifeforce.

And it was because of the way that she noticed a certain absurdity. Despite the fact, the corpse she ate should have a little lifeforce left, the lifeforce she consumed was much more than she had ever expected.

The lifeforce inside the trolls’ corpses was absurd. It shouldn’t have been there. Their bodies should have been drained nearly empty, but instead it was overflowing, more than enough to completely satiate her hunger. Not only that, but it overwhelmed her.

So much so that she felt as if her body would burst if she didn’t release it somehow.

Her instincts, bred by the merger of being an Impure Queen and the Ant Queen, guided her. She leapt to her nest, intending to use lifeforce to lay an egg that would be the first of her creation after her mutation. But when her gaze landed on the three eggs she had already laid, she felt her body leading her to the one in the center. Something deep inside her told her that this was the best option.

Her fangs sank into the egg, not deep enough to pierce its shell, but it was just enough to release a substance filled with the lifeforce inside her into it without damaging both the egg and the slumbering creature within it.

The egg shook, brimming so strongly with energy that radiated through the shell, it made it seem as if the creature would break out any second.

When Noah asked Arachne about what happened, her answer surprised him. Arachne had no clue what happened, nor why she acted on the impulse to feed the energy into the egg. It was the first time Noah had seen the spider do something that was outside what the system had told him she was capable of.

Noah thought about what was different between now and the world they came from. And it was then that he thought about the green energy within the trolls mana cores. It was the same as the energy the dungeon core absorbed from the surrounding space.

That led him to go into his soul realm. He wasn’t sure if he was right, but he believed that the answer lay within that green energy. In his realm, his ”gaze” went to Arachne’s core first. Her energies were more vibrant than before, but that wasn’t important. It was the faint traces of green now sprinkled within the other nebulas of energy, almost like veins that were seeking to find a place within the other energies.

He shifted his focus, scanning through the souls of the others. The pattern repeated itself; it was faint but still present. His creatures, even his vassals, had small traces of green essence within their cores.

All of his creatures had eaten from the trolls’ corpses, so it wasn’t surprising that the same faint green hue now flowed through all of them. The only one who hadn’t eaten was Eve.

She sat off to the side. Her usual liveliness was gone; her posture was withdrawn yet tense. The smell of flesh and blood, something she would normally savor, made her visibly flinch. Her crimson eyes only looked towards the food once before settling back on him, never to move again.

Her gaze trailed until it rested on his neck. Subconsciously, she licked her lips, even though she wasn’t aware of the weird expression she was showing.

Noah had to resist the urge to rub his temple.

He could already tell what she wanted. Her nature was starting to surface. Whether it was instinct or simply the result of being spoiled, he couldn’t yet tell. But something inside told him it was probably both.

Though he didn’t mind pampering her, he still had her wait. Not because he was worried what would happen to her if she drank his blood directly, but because he needed to prepare their treats first. He needed his own blood for that. He wouldn’t pamper her without accounting for the others.

But it was during the time that he was reaching for the first core to prepare that he sensed Pandora’s emotions rise, a massive amount of killing intent surged through their bond. And not a moment later, screams and panic erupted outside.

Noah’s hand froze before he rose.

He didn’t understand what was happening, but he had an inkling. From the overwhelming aggression, to the satisfaction that followed, down to the faint regret. He knew Pandora was behind it. Yet there was no doubt in his mind who was truly at fault.