Chapter 182: You Move Through A Cave of Crystals

Elias glanced down at his armor. The plates were still there, still warm with the faint pulse of the Art of Stone, but without the helmet, the full connection was broken, and Stone Skin would not activate.

He was just a man in very heavy armor.

Elias could feel the Art of Stone straining against that limitation, as its inherent abilities pressed against their restraints. They wanted to be used, and yet they could not.

His survivability had suddenly taken a sharp hit, and he knew there was a lesson here that he needed to take note of in the future.

Unexpected events could happen at any moment, and he would not be fully prepared for them. He had wasted too much time wearing his armor, and what was worse was that he allowed it to slip from his fingers.

Such mistakes could not be repeated again, and he may have reduced the chance of his surviving this test by fifty percent from just this single mistake alone.

Elias pushed the thought aside and entered the tunnel.

The first thing he noticed was the sound. Every footstep echoed, but not normally; the crystals caught the noise and bent it, stretched it, threw it back from impossible angles. He took three steps and heard twelve, and every breath he took, he heard a chorus.

So, it was not just sight that was hampered in this passage; he also could not depend on sound. Two of his senses had just been cut off.

With the disruption of these senses, Elias was able to notice a feeling of heat.

This feeling was faint, but it was not too distant, and he knew he was sensing the warmth of living things moving in the maze ahead.

“This is interesting, this heat, it should be blood that I am sensing.”

Elias closed his eyes, with the trait of his Perception, Sight Awakening, he did not need to see with his eyes.

He could feel the air currents, the subtle vibrations through the stone, the heat signatures of whatever hunted in this place. The crystals distorted light, but they could not distort the fundamental truth of living flesh.

He moved forward with eyes shut, letting his other senses guide him. Elias did not know what was inside this place with him, and although a part of him wanted to open his eyes to see, that would be the reaction of a prey who was afraid; he was here as a hunter, and besides, he had a task to complete.

He had barely walked for a few minutes when the first creature attacked without warning.

It came from the left, leaping from a cluster of crystals that had hidden it completely. Elias felt the shift in air pressure a half-second before impact and dropped, rolling, the creature’s claws passing through the space where his head had been.

Elias came up facing it, eyes open now, taking in details in the fraction of a second before it attacked again.

The creature had six legs with scales that matched the crystals perfectly, a chameleon-like adaptation. It also had a long tail tipped with a stinger that dripped something that hissed when it hit the stone.

In that fraction of a second, Elias had analyzed the size of the creature, and it was about as big as a large dog, yet even with the six legs, it was fast and coordinated.

This was all the detail he could get before the creature pounced on him, and Elias just… caught it.

It let out a rather irritating shriek as his gauntlets closed around its throat, his strength at 149 points meeting the creature’s momentum and stopping it cold. It thrashed, legs scrabbling at his armor, releasing sparks as its stinger lashed toward his face. Elias twisted his palm, and he felt vertebrae separate, and the creature instantly went slack.

Elias turned it around, checking all of its features, and he opened the gates to his Lumina Space as he dropped the corpse. The creature did not reach the ground before it turned to ash, and a wave of red poured into Elias’ chest through his armor, causing it to glow for a moment as if it had been heated in a forge.

+0.05% Vitality from Sanguine Resonance flickered at the edge of his vision. Even this minor kill triggered his Crimson Vein Dominion legacy, a trickle of stolen life, barely noticeable but accumulating.

He did not know how many of these creatures he would have to kill for his Vitality to increase by one point, but Elias knew that this was not what was necessary. As he used his abilities, they would grow stronger, reaching completion, hence completing his Fury Forged flesh.

He did not really care for Vitality gain from Sanguine Resonance; his Elder Talent gave him far more of that, but that would change when he completely refined this legacy, and then at that time, it was unknown how ridiculously beefy he would become.

Having more than 4,000 points of Vitality as a Level 0 Fury Forge was already insane, and he wondered if a similarly level opponent might even be able to hurt him if he gave them the chance.

Elias shook his head, knowing that this was his Elder Talent already whispering its madness in his mind, but Elias quelled this instinct with the knowledge that whatever was ahead would bring him to the limits, and there was no hurry to get there yet.

His Crimson Vein made him feel dozens of heat signatures, alerting him that more of these creatures were coming, and it was as he suspected, after observing the first creature, that this was a pack animal.

He could play with them, but he had a task, and he would not be distracted from it. With this thought in mind, Elias began to head deeper into the passage, but now he was running, or rather, it was a quick jog, and even though his armor was not the weight he wanted, the sheer flexibility of it meant that it was almost as if he was not wearing anything.

He kept his eyes open now as he was moving faster; the creatures were too fast to track by heat alone, but he did not trust what he saw. The crystals bent light, created false passages, and showed him walls where there were none.

He had to combine sight with feel, and with memory, with the split-second corrections of a hunter who had spent years tracking prey through environments designed to kill.

A creature lunged from the right, and Elias sidestepped, grabbed its tail mid-pass, and used its momentum to smash it into a crystal formation. The creature yelped and went still. Elias did not stop to confirm the kill; he already knew it was dead.

Another came from ahead, and he ducked under its leap, drove his gauntleted fist up into its belly as it passed over him. It crashed into the ceiling and fell twitching.

+0.05% Vitality. +0.05% Vitality. The notifications stacked in the corner of his vision as a wave of red Lumina pursued him from behind, as his Lumina Space was like a powerful magnet drawing them towards him. He would need to kill twenty of these creatures to give him a single point in Vitality, and the Lumina he was harvesting from their bodies was a single drop in an endless ocean… he would need to kill many more before he would rise to the next level.

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