FREE USE in Primitive World

Chapter 278: Chapter 278: Methods Of Leveling Up

“I understand,” Sol said, his voice cold and analytical, completely devoid of the panic that currently gripped the rest of the High Hall. “The Zharun will act as our temporary shield. I won’t waste time complaining about the politics. But how do I actually utilize this power? How do I get strong enough to fight a Layer 4?”

Warchief Veylara’s expression softened marginally. A glimmer of genuine appreciation shone in her stormy golden eyes. In a room full of seasoned elders who were currently trembling at the prospect of the Zerith coalition, this unranked outsider was entirely focused on finding a way to kill the enemy Warlords himself. Instead of cowering, he was asking for the instruction manual to build a better weapon.

“The path of the Spirit Warrior is predominantly forged through one brutal reality, Sol: relentless and unyielding fighting,” Veylara explained. She leaned forward in her carved wooden throne, resting her forearms on her knees as her demeanor shifted from a weary politician to a seasoned instructor. “To harness your newly anchored spirits and ascend to a level where you can threaten a Layer 4 entity, you must intimately understand the Level-Up Requirements. The first and most crucial step of this bloody path is Essence Saturation.”

She gestured toward his chest, right where the invisible, heavy weight of the Dreadwing and the Great Badger currently rested in a fragile orbit.

“At the start, a newly anchored beast soul sits at Level 0,” Veylara stated. “It does not matter how powerful the beast was in the wild. Inside your human core, it is completely dormant. It is nothing more than a starved, sleeping seed of its former glory. To force it to rise, the warrior must actively feed essence into it.”

“Feed it how?” Sol asked, his silver-crimson eyes sharpening. His mind instantly mapped her words to experience points. He needed to know how to grind.

“Through three primary methods,” High Shaman Zephyra croaked from the sidelines, her raspy voice echoing off the petrified timber walls. She pointed the stem of her blue-bone pipe at him. “The first is simple Breathing … using breathing techniques to slowly draw the ambient ’Wild Essence’ from the atmosphere, but it is also slowest.

The second is through battle kills… standing over the corpses of fallen enemies and absorbing their residual, dispersing essence before it returns to the world. The third, and most costly, is through grand ritual offerings of high-tier blood and rare herbs.”

Zephyra took a slow drag from her pipe, the blue embers flaring. “The soul housed within you will ’drink’ this essence continuously. It will gorge itself on the energy you provide until it reaches a critical mass and is finally ready to reach the next layer.”

“And once it drinks enough? It just gets stronger?” Sol asked, completely fascinated by the mechanics of this world. It sounded deceptively simple.

“No. That is when the true danger begins,” Zephyra warned, a dark, ominous shadow crossing her beautiful face. “Then comes the Feedback Trials.”

Veylara nodded grimly, her expression grave. “A Sovereign spirit is not a willing slave, Sol. As the soul grows fat on the essence you feed it, it begins to push back against the confines of your human vessel. It remembers what it was. It remembers ruling the skies and shattering the world. It will violently flood your mind and body with its primal, feral instincts, agonizing phantom pain, or terrifying, hallucinatory visions of its past lives and its death.”

“The warrior must endure this violent feedback without breaking,” Veylara continued, her voice tightening with the memory of her own trials. “You must forcefully resist possession. You must master the beast’s inherent, ravenous hunger, and forcefully bend its specific, chaotic powers to your absolute will. It is a battle of pure ego within your own mind.”

“Failure means being consumed from the inside out,” Zephyra added bluntly, pulling no punches. “Your mind will snap. You will become an Abomination… a mindless, mutated husk driven only by the beast’s wrath, until others are forced to put you down. But success… success means the soul submits to your dominance, and stabilizes at a higher tier.”

“But you don’t have to worry, since you were able to anchor a layer 3 Lord Blood, it shouldn’t be much difficult for you at initial stages, as it’s easily passable at initial levels”

Sol absorbed the information perfectly, his eyes unblinking. It was a brutal, high-stakes progression system. He needed to grind ’Essence Saturation’, trigger an evolution event, survive the perilous ’Feedback Trial’, and secure new skills. It was incredibly high-risk, but the rewards were undeniable.

“You must understand the stages of your power, Sol,” Veylara instructed, holding up a calloused finger. “At the unranked stage, as you are now, the beast soul is dormant, barely alive. It provides you with a terrifying aura and minor physical enhancements, but little else.”

She held up a second finger. “At Layer 1, the soul truly awakens. It fuses with your veins, granting the host permanent passive abilities. Your baseline speed will permanently increase, your muscles will grow significantly denser, your senses will sharpen to match the predator.”

A third finger rose. “At Layer 2, you face the first true Feedback Trial. The beast’s instincts actively invade your consciousness, trying to take the wheel. The warrior must violently resist. If you succeed, you unlock the ability to manifest a beast’s part and enhance your body in combat.”

A fourth finger joined the others. “At Layer 3, It grants you even more strong feedback and you are able temporarily and partially able to manifest phantom to get a quick power up.”

Veylara lowered her hand, her gaze piercing right through him. At Layer 4, the soul evolves. It transcends its baseline. At Layer 4 and beyond… each subsequent rise requires an exponentially greater ocean of essence. The feedback becomes harsher, tearing at your very sanity, requiring a deeper, more dangerous communion with the beast. It begins fundamentally reshaping the human warrior into something entirely beyond mortal biological limitations. You stop being entirely human.

This is why it’s so difficult to reach Layer 4, and this is where you also gain its true physical, elemental traits. Venom, flame, frost, or in the case of your phantoms… storm generation, super speed, etc.”

Sol didn’t flinch at the warning. He simply nodded, his mind racing. He had a Layer 3 Dreadwing and a Layer 3 Great Badger. The hardware was top-tier, but his ’software’ was currently Level 0. He couldn’t tap into their true skills and powers without risking his life because he hadn’t saturated them yet. He needed to feed them. Fast.

“I understand,” Sol stated flatly. “I need to saturate my core. You mentioned breathing techniques to speed this process up. How do they work?”