novelraw Chapter 68: Huge secret
Chapter 68: Huge secret
One by one, Xavier worked through the remaining paths with the focused detachment of someone closing doors they had no intention of reopening.
The Regenerative Aberration Body was the first to go. Rapid healing and endurance in prolonged battles — useful, in the way that a bandage was useful, but fundamentally reactive. It was a path built for surviving punishment, not avoiding it, and Xavier had no particular desire to build his future around absorbing damage and recovering from it. He would rather not get hit.
The Void-Touched Body followed it out. Reducing presence, distorting perception, partially detaching from physical detection — there was genuine craft in that path, and he could see the appeal for a different kind of person. But it wasn’t him. He didn’t move through the world by disappearing from it.
What remained was the Devourer Body, and the moment his gaze settled on it for the final time, something quiet but definitive clicked into place.
Every other path on the list was a fixed shape — a ceiling you could press against but never move. The Devourer Body was something else. It grew. It fed on what it killed and became more from the consumption, a path without a natural plateau built into its description. And the evolution of the health attribute itself into defense — not a supplement, but a transformation of something foundational into something greater — was the detail that separated it from everything else on the list in a way that mattered.
He had known which path he wanted almost from the start. But knowing was not the same as being certain, and certainty was worth the cost of a second opinion.
His thoughts moved to Zerin.
He didn’t trust her. That was a baseline fact of their relationship, as established and immovable as the ground underfoot. She would lie when it benefited her, omit when omission served her better than honesty, and frame things in whatever light made her preferred outcome most appealing. All of that was true and well understood.
But she would not feed him false information when her own interests were tied to his survival and growth. That was the useful edge — the narrow sliver of reliability that existed not because of any goodwill between them, but because their fates were inconveniently linked. A Zerin whose contractor made a catastrophically bad evolutionary choice was a Zerin with a diminished asset.
He could work with that.
"Zerin. Come here."
The words had barely finished leaving his mouth before she was already there.
Her figure stepped out of the shadows at the edge of his peripheral vision — silent, unhurried, materializing from the darkness as naturally as if she had simply always been standing there and the world had only just decided to make her visible. There was no entrance, no dramatic emergence. She was simply absent one moment and present the next.
"Hehe." Her red lips curved into something warm and unhurried that managed to be both a greeting and a quiet reprimand at the same time. "Here I was thinking — just how long is he going to keep me waiting?"
Her eyes moved across him as she settled into place, dark and measuring beneath the amusement. Even without wind, her long black hair shifted and drifted with a slow, weightless grace that had no business following the rules of the physical world — drawing the eye in a way that felt less like coincidence and more like architecture.
It never failed to reach him. No matter how many times he had stood in her presence, something in Zerin’s particular brand of charm found the gap anyway — slipping past the walls with the quiet persistence of water finding the lowest point. It was only the iron brace of his own will, and the deep, slow-burning certainty of everything he felt toward her, that kept the door closed.
He took a breath. Kept his face even.
Without preamble, he laid out all the available evolutionary paths in plain, efficient terms.
Zerin listened with the attentive stillness of someone filing every detail away behind a composed expression. When he finished — or when she thought he had finished — she nodded once, her gaze carrying the particular quality of someone who has already formed a conclusion and is waiting for permission to deliver it.
"Hmm. Interesting." Her voice was thoughtful, almost generous. "These paths are to be expected, given that your health is probably already above a hundred points. All of them would allow at least twenty percent conversion. But especially the Void-Touched Body — there are records of that one appearing before. It has a notably good conversion rate for a First Sequence path. Thirty percent, if memory serves." She tilted her head slightly, the smile still in place. "You should choose it."
She said it the moment he paused — sliding the recommendation in cleanly, her tone carrying the comfortable authority of someone used to being the most informed person in any given conversation.
Xavier looked at her.
"Wait," he said, his expression unchanged. "I’m not done yet."
Something shifted in Zerin’s face — not dramatically, but perceptibly. The smooth confidence developed a small, involuntary crack.
"What do you mean, not done yet?" The words came out slightly sharper than she had intended. "Don’t tell me you have more than five paths available." She let out a short, dismissive sound. "Quit dreaming. Even if you are impressive, six paths requires at least two hundred points in the health attribute. That’s not something you reach by—"
"Devourer Body," Xavier said. "Growth Path. By devouring the bodies of killed enemies, the body continues to grow stronger. The health attribute evolves into the defense attribute."
He said it plainly, without theater, and then stopped talking.
The silence that followed was a different quality from all the silences that had come before it.
Zerin stared at him.
"..."
A moment of silence passed.
Then Xavier watched something rare happen to Zerin’s face.
The composure — that carefully maintained, almost architectural smoothness she wore at all times like a second skin — cracked. Not gradually, not with any dignity, but all at once, the way a frozen surface cracks when something too heavy steps onto it. Her eyes went wide. The calculated warmth that lived permanently in her expression simply ceased to function for a full, unguarded second.
And then she moved.
Her figure closed the distance between them in an instant — not the slow, deliberate grace she usually deployed, but something urgent and unrestrained, her hands shooting forward to grab his collar before either of them had properly processed that she was doing it.
"Are you f***ing kidding me?!"
The words came out raw and cracked at the edges, stripped of every layer of performance. Her grip tightened on his collar, her face only inches from his, the crazed energy behind her eyes completely at odds with her usual composure.
"A growth type path?" She said it the way someone says something they are simultaneously desperate to believe and desperate to deny. "Even Seventh Sequence creatures would kill each other for a path like that! There is absolutely no way that would appear as your first evolutionary path. Something is wrong. You misread it. Check again!"
The words were sharp and insistent.
But her lips had curved into a smile she couldn’t suppress — thin and feverish, the smile of someone telling themselves something wasn’t true while every part of them screamed that it was. She was coping, and she was doing it loudly, and Xavier could see every layer of it clearly from three inches away.
His expression didn’t change.
"Get away from me."
The words left his mouth with the same flat evenness he applied to most things. No heat. No emphasis. Just the instruction, delivered like a fact.
Her body obeyed before her mind caught up with it — the contract pulling at her, moving her feet backward, stepping her away from him and depositing her at a distance before she could decide whether she wanted to comply or resist.
Xavier watched it happen.
That told him everything he needed to know. Her reaction — the crack in the composure, the white-knuckle grip on his collar, the crazed smile she couldn’t stop — had already confirmed what he needed confirmed. He had made his decision before he called her over. What she had just given him was the final layer of certainty sitting on top of an already solid foundation.
He turned his attention back to the Infinite Record window.
In the distance, Zerin stood very still, staring at something that wasn’t physically in front of her, her lips moving just barely above silence.
"No..." The word came out slow and unconvinced, as if she were trying to talk herself down from a ledge. "It shouldn’t be possible. He has to be lying. The last time a growth type path appeared in this universe was millions of years ago." She paused, the memory surfacing with the precise clarity of something she had turned over countless times across countless years. "The Crown Prince of Eternal Frost Empire. Big Dipper region. He later went on to become an Eighth Sequence creature."
She stood there with that thought.
Others might not have understood what those words meant — the full weight carried by the phrase growth type path, what it represented in the larger architecture of power and progression that governed the universe. But Zerin understood. She had understood for a very long time, in the particular way that understanding becomes unbearable when the thing you understand is something you cannot have.
The reason she had been fixed at the Seventh Sequence across all these years — across timescales that made most civilizations look like passing seasons — was not a lack of strength. It was not a lack of will, or resources, or knowledge. It was the absence of a single thing.
A growth type path.
It was the first and absolute requirement for advancement beyond the Seventh Sequence. Without it, the Eighth Sequence was not a door that could be forced open or unlocked with enough effort. It simply did not exist as a destination. It could only be reached through something that could be sought and never manufactured, desired and never demanded.
Something that had not appeared in the known universe for millions of years.
Something that had, apparently, just appeared in the evolutionary path menu of a non-evolved human standing in the middle of a goblin battlefield.
Zerin closed her eyes for a moment.
It should not be possible.
She said it one more time, quietly, to no one.
Xavier had already stopped listening.
His eyes were on the Infinite Record window, his focus narrowed to a single point, the decision made and waiting only for the confirmation that would make it real.
He selected the Devourer Body.
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A/N: Sorry everyone who used coins to unlock the repeated Chapter, it was huge oversight on my part for noticing repeated Chapters, i especially seek forgiveness from vip reader winter metor