The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 609 – Sinister trap

Resisting the ocean’s pull seemed easy at first, but the force of the underwater current rose sharply as Percy kept swimming towards the source of the red substance. Mere seconds later, it was powerful enough that controlling his host’s body had turned into a struggle.

Shocked by the sudden change, he drew strength from both cores, pumping more beast mana into the reptile’s veins to activate Circulation, while also expelling the water mana from its hindlegs for propulsion. Turning against the current and towards the surface, Percy swam as fast as his aged body could handle to escape the aquatic prison.

For several seconds, it was unclear whether he had even moved. Thankfully, the current seemed to weaken slightly after that, loosening its hold on the lizard and letting Percy and Micky pick up speed. Even so, neither dared to relax until several hundred metres later.

‘What the hell was that?!’ Micky asked, clearly as shaken as Percy. ‘The current went from a gentle nudge to almost impossible to swim against in… like… two seconds!’

Their heart thumped wildly in their chest, threatening to give out. Their gills hurt even more than before as their hurried breaths had drawn in an unhealthy amount of the needle-like particles, though their host’s condition was the last thing on Percy’s mind.

‘I guess we’ve just discovered the method that the Clear beasts use to trap and devour their prey,’ he said, finally having enough pieces of the puzzle to understand how the alien ocean worked.

It was as ingenious as it was sinister. The giant creatures with the fake Blue cores also played a role – perhaps unwittingly – by scaring everything else away from the surface and driving the other species deeper into the ocean.

The mysterious substance made the red regions impossible to endure for weaker animals, leaving them no choice but to gather in the darker, more mundane waters. Unsurprisingly, the higher concentration of beasts led to them rapidly devouring one another, eliminating those with less potential and forcing the rest to evolve into Yellows and Greens.

At the same time, the competition motivated the winners to delve into the red regions to reinforce their scales. After all, even a Green would eventually lose its life under the constant assault of thousands of other creatures if it lacked the necessary defences to protect itself. It might resist their attacks for a few months or even years, but could it survive the tempered fangs of Yellow and even other Green beasts for decades or centuries?

The weaker beasts could barely handle the outskirts of the red regions, but the Greens could push themselves deeper and deeper with each trip as they slowly accumulated strength.

By moving back and forth between the hunting and training waters, they were essentially fattening themselves like pigs for slaughter, until they finally grew strong enough to cross the invisible threshold separating them from the deepest part of the red region.

After that, there was no turning back, and it was pretty easy to guess whose jaws the juicy, elephant-sized snacks tended to find themselves in.

‘The demigods have basically hijacked the entire ecosystem of their planet, making everything work for them,’ Percy summarized.

He had yet to actually see the quasi-divine beasts with his own eyes, so this was admittedly all speculation. However, it would explain everything they had experienced since coming here. The only question left to answer was whether the mysterious substance and the powerful underwater currents were produced directly by the demigods, or if they were simply natural phenomena that the Clear beasts were taking advantage of.

‘Do we want to keep going?’ Micky asked.

Percy shrugged. ‘Why wouldn’t we? This body won’t last much longer anyway, and the concentration of the substance keeps increasing the deeper we go. If we want to bring a sample back, we might as well push as far as we can.’

‘I don’t want to get too close to the demigod though,’ Micky protested.

‘Me neither,’ Percy agreed with a nod.

It would be incredibly unwise to treat the creature as another dumb animal. At that grade, it was definitely as intelligent as a person. On top of that, a domain that powerful could easily interact with a disembodied soul, potentially preventing Percy and Micky from escaping the planet.

Blues and Violets would struggle to trap them with just their willpower – which was why Syrreneth had been forced to employ a soul-affinity mage to prevent Percy from escaping from his cave on Thess’kala – but a demigod was two grades higher than Kassorith’s master.

The good news was that the quasi-divine beast’s domain would be much weaker from afar, especially if it wasn’t intentionally trying to stop Percy and Micky from leaving. However, they understood that they could easily lose a clone if they made a mistake.

Hopefully, Percy’s main body would eventually regenerate the damage in his soul and the missing cord even in that case, but this was something that he wouldn’t be certain of until it happened – and he had no interest in testing his luck.

Besides, even if the original did recover the clone, he’d still lose a piece of his spatial seal and a fully charged Zelesian bead – both of which had cost an arm and a leg – along with the marks leading back to this planet. Not to mention how unpleasant the experience was bound to be for the clone.

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‘Let’s set the limit to about a kilometre,’ Percy suggested. ‘I’m sure that a creature this massive will be visible from afar. The moment it looks like we’re about to get dragged closer than that, we bolt.’

‘Alright. I’ll focus on drawing concealment runes in our second core, and you make sure to collect as much of the material as you can on the way,’ Micky replied.

Happy with their plan, Percy dove into the depths again, this time reluctantly allowing the powerful current to pull him in, robbing him of the ability to control his body. Before long, it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to turn back anymore – not with his borrowed flesh, at least – even if he went all out.

The source of the red material had appeared blurry up to that point. Percy had hoped that approaching it would have given him and Micky a better look, but the violent current wasn’t helping, making it difficult to see ahead.

Interestingly, the reptile was getting dragged to the side more than it was moving forward, almost as if it had been caught in some enormous whirlpool spanning several kilometres.

Percy spotted countless other creatures trapped in the distance, their silhouettes barely larger than ants from his point of view, their Green cores shining like magical specks of dust in his Mana Sense. The poor animals appeared just as powerless as he was. The only difference was that, unlike him and Micky, they hadn’t ended up in this situation by choice.

‘About three hundred Green beasts… and that’s just what’s visible from here,’ he noted, swallowing hard.

By his estimates, there should be over two thousand Green creatures trapped at this distance from the base of the whirlpool, with many times as many beasts located even deeper. At the rate they were moving, Percy wouldn’t be surprised if they all reached the bottom within the next ten minutes, which meant that the suspected demigod would consume over ten thousand Greens in a single sitting!

The realization caused his host’s blood to freeze in its veins. However, he understood that he didn’t have any time to waste. Especially since he and Micky might end up ejected from the reptile’s mangled body long before it entered the monster’s mouth.

The concentration of the red substance had already been high enough to damage their scales before they reached the whirlpool, and things had only grown even worse since. Carried by the violent currents, the needle-like particles slammed against his host’s exterior, peeling one bloody layer after the other. Inhaling was pure torture, causing Percy to debate whether he should try and hold his breath for the next few minutes.

That said, his current predicament also presented him with a rather unique opportunity.

Thin streams that looked like they contained more of the strange material than seawater flowed around the dying beasts like glowing ribbons, their spiralling paths effectively tracing the overall shape of the whirlpool itself. Trying to absorb the substance from them directly would be suicide for any Green – or even Blue – creature, but that was fine by Percy.

While he wasn’t strong enough to extricate himself from the current entirely, it wasn’t impossible for him to navigate the treacherous waters slightly. Consuming some of his host’s waning stamina, he swam to the nearest crimson stream, barely allowing his left foreleg to sink into the substance.

The pain caused him to wince as the particles shredded his scales and bit into his muscles, but he knew that he had at least half a minute before his paw was devoured entirely. Even after that happened, he could just push what was left of his amputated limp into the stream, maintaining contact with the material for as long as necessary.

‘Better make every second count then,’ he thought, reaching into his spatial seal with gritted fangs.

Percy didn’t think twice about dumping most of his supplies into the alien ocean. His Harvesters and Cloaks could be replaced in seconds by his main body, and almost everything else was practically worthless when compared to the exotic resource. The only object he couldn’t afford to part with was the Zelesian bead, so he made sure to keep his attention on it as he tucked it away in a corner of the warehouse-sized space.

A thick, ruby-like substance quickly appeared inside his spatial seal, filling up the vacuum in mere seconds. This was already the densest, highest-quality version of the material that Percy had encountered on this planet, but he wasn’t satisfied with just that.

Using the same trick that allowed him to compress his potions into the next grade – and which he had practiced extensively over the past few years in the hopes that it would eventually help with his artificial advancement – he stirred the contents of his spatial storage into a second, smaller whirlpool.

Fortunately, the needle-like particles appeared to be slightly denser than water, so they were instantly pushed to the walls of the spectral storage – where the Zelesian bead was also kept – increasing the concentration of the material even further.

That came at the cost of lowering its density near the centre of the seal, prompting Percy to pour the water there back into the ocean. At the same time, he drew even more from the deadly stream, slipping it between the centre and the boundaries of his storage device to supplement the whirlpool.

Over the next several minutes, Percy’s left foreleg was rapidly reduced to nothing as he ignored the pain to separate as much of the precious material as he could from the water.

By the time he felt that the contents of his seal couldn’t get any more concentrated, his host’s body was a mangled mess. Even the parts that he hadn’t deliberately dipped into the stream had slowly been ravaged by the rest of the giant whirlpool.

Shifting his attention back to the outside world, he noticed that they had moved much closer to the source of the substance. If they had been about five kilometres away before, they were now only three, and they were also moving much faster.

The beasts around them were much closer to one another too. A cursory scan revealed over seven hundred within view, and Percy even caught a glimpse of another batch even deeper, probably having a head-start of a full revolution over his host.

More importantly, however, the previously blurry source of the ruby-like substance had grown more defined.

It looked like what Percy could only describe as a vast mountain range, coiled atop the seabed. Rather than stone or coral, it seemed to be made entirely of the same magical material that had lured everything all the way here, though it shone even more brightly than the ribbon-like streams that had just destroyed his arm.

Reinforcing the small bubbles of water mana that he was using to protect his host’s eyes, Percy scanned the strange mountain from end to end, trying to find where the Clear beast was hiding. That continued for a couple of seconds, until a shocking realization hit him:

The whole structure was moving. The colossal mountain range wasn’t just the habitat of the quasi-divine beast… it was its body!