Damon’s past life had taught him to dread this one. It curved sharply behind the jawbone and wrapped around a sensitive cluster of nerves. Too much energy, and his brain would cook instantly. Too little, and the feedback snapped the ridian like a twig.
This was where most players died.
This was where he had died, over and over and over.
Damon felt the ridian’s resistance imdiately, a coiled, trembling serpent bristling with hostility. Even touching the edges sent ringing pain into his skull. His vision flickered. His breath grew shallow.
Pain flared white-hot behind his eyes. His chest tightened. His heart thundered so violently he thought it might bruise itself against his ribs. However, the next mont, the third broke as well. More mana poured into his head, his skull, his brain. It essentially perated all parts of his brain.
Damon only frowned at this. Even though it was subtle, he had already noticed that it was not just the mana that had perated every part of his head.
More than mana pushed into him.
It seeped in with the mana, threading through every fold of his mind like cold fingers tracing the inside of his skull. It wasn’t malicious, not yet, but it wasn’t passive either. Pressing against the edges of his consciousness to see how tightly it was stitched together.
Damon’s brows knitted as a faint, foreign pressure brushed against the back of his thoughts.
Shadow. Or rather, the shadow elent with clear intent.
His lips curled upward. "So that’s how it is..."
The shadow elent was inherently very different from the ice elent. While the ice elent was more straightforward and oppressive, aiming to destroy the very core of the being with sheer power, the shadow played tricks.
But that was not all. This shadow elent felt guided by sothing ancient and buried within the lake’s depths. If Damon was not wrong, then this wasn’t a simple lake at all.
Umbra hadn’t set up a training pool in the middle of nowhere for the well-being of his descendants and followers. In fact, the bastard’s intentions were not good at all. This lake was not at all ant to train and nurture. It was ant to control and take over!
And all Damon needed to confirm this inkling of a doubt was his primordial senses. At first, he did not want to wake up anything unnecessary hiding at the bottom of this thing, but now it seed like he was going to be doing just that.
Damon took a deep breath and focused, controlling his primordial senses as much as he possibly could. The next second, he saw it. The entire lake was crawling with so sort of threads.
Thin, hair-fine tendrils of shadow tightly coiled through the liquid darkness like a nest of dormant vipers, almost invisible. Their shadow affinity and their stealth skill should be ridiculously overpowered if he was not wrong. They should also have a component of ntal attack, a particularly strong one at that.
Damon had always wondered how a smart guy like Ghost allowed a parasite to slip inside him, and now he knew. If it were these creatures, then even he would have been easily fooled into accepting the ’rigorous training’.
The whole thing was probably a trap. The mont he stepped into the pool, these parasites would be upon him like moss on a Mississippi tree stump.
Damon pulled back his senses imdiately, sweat erupting down his temples. "Shit! Why can’t anything ever be straightforward?" He scratched his chin, staring at the lake in contemplation. The spot he was in right now was pretty good. He could probably open all of his ridians right here and then get the hell out of here.
Yup, this was what a sane person should do.
Damon nodded his head and decided to stick with just this. Why take the risk knowing he had a high chance of failure? Both of these damned lakes could fuck off for all he cared.
He focused and continued working on his ridians. Slowly and steadily, he got them down one after the other.
The fourth ridian cracked open under a controlled surge of power, then the fifth, then the sixth, each one sending a new pulse of mana and shadow ripping through his skull. Damon gritted his teeth through every burst, forcing his body to stabilize before moving to the next.
Sweat dripped from his chin. His limbs trembled. His heartbeat buzzed in his ears like a drum being struck underwater. Still, he pushed through.
One by one, the stubborn conduits snapped open. One by one, the pressure inside his head mounted. One by one, he advanced, inch by inch, toward the lake’s edge.
By the ti he finished the seventh ridian, his entire world had shrunk to three things. The relentless crushing force of the lake. The expanding currents of mana funneling into his skull. And the unmistakable movent of shadow parasites beneath the surface.
He had successfully opened seven of the ten without dying.
A sane man would stop. A reasonable man would stop. A wise man would run. Naturally...
Damon kept going.
But he kept his distance.
Every ti the shadow tried to tug on his aura, subtle, like a fishing hook grazing skin, he pulled back imdiately, forcing his mind to anchor itself. If he slipped now, even a fraction, those little thread-creatures would surge up like a swarm of vipers and wriggle straight into the freshly opened ridians.
Then that ancient intent at the bottom would wake and take over him.
And Damon would wake up two weeks later as a puppet wearing his own skin or never wake up at all. So he held himself back. Just enough. "This is fine," he muttered to himself.
Eight ridians.
He felt it widening like a tunnel carved beneath his skull, the energy rushing through in violent torrents. His whole head felt too small for the power inside it.
"Just two more..." he whispered.
The ninth ridian sparked painfully.
***
Chapter 8 Mass Release Sponsored by Rhi Bran
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