Savage Webs, page 30
part #2 of Apocalypse Cultivation Series
He kept thinking about the energy he’d taken from Conophta and really hoped he didn’t turn into a minotaur, but it was too late for that. There was a possibility that he’d get a form too large to fit through the door, but he was playing the odds. He should wind up with a new form, and some sort of transformation from being a Reforged Body cultivator.
Jake chuckled a little. All cultivators physically changed some and got a new form when they achieved a Reforged Body, but not many ever probably changed as much as Jake was expecting to. This was going to be the riskiest, most explosive breakthrough he’d ever attempted on purpose. There had been some hairy cultivation sessions in the past, but he’d been forced into it with no time to think.
This time, his nerves were getting to him.
When Jake was about to lay in the bloody, dirty water, he had one last thought. He hadn’t dared take out Blooming Honor in the Dead City, but this place was heavily protected and far enough down that it might be worth the risk. He pulled the saber out of his storage and admired it for a moment. Then he set the divine artifact on the ground by the pool.
It felt like ever since Jake had been sent back in the past, his life had turned into one roll of the dice after the next. He was fairly certain he’d be successful achieving a Reforged Body in these conditions–it was what he might turn into that was completely unknown. If he truly did turn into some huge monstrosity that couldn’t leave the room, maybe he could call upon The Morrigan to get out of it. That would be awkward.
And even if everything went well, he still needed to reunite with Slim and survive to make it to the Skull of Secrets Sect so he could lift the geas forcing him to become an Inner Sect Disciple.
He still had to find Master Zi’s granddaughter too.
These were only his short-term goals in the Murim world, and all of them were practically impossible if he stayed weak.
“Okay, fuck it. Let’s do this.”
Jake swallowed all the monster cores at once, fell back in the sinister water with a splash, and began cultivating like mad.
Chapter 38
Jake was not sure how long he drifted in the dark, bloody water. If he hadn’t met the soul-chewing revenant in the Dead City already to have experienced new worlds of agony, it would have been the most painful experience of his life.
And through the entire ordeal, he had to keep cultivating, assimilating, growing, changing. It felt endless. Luckily, he had some recent experience with moments that seemed to last forever.
So in the midst of trying to break through to a Reforged Body, fighting for his life against massive surges of energy that could boil his brain or reduce him to cinders, and gently move assimilated energy to all three directions he could cultivate, Jake also thought about everything that had happened since he’d gone back in time and become a zombie.
There was still so much he didn’t know, about himself, his new body, and even his gear. The hand he’d gotten from Morrigan was still a mystery. He knew it was not a simple prosthetic and likely contained some sort of power or secrets, but he’d never been able to figure it out. Other than its color and shape, the only thing strange about it was how he’d been able to grow a claw like normal from his finger to replace the one he’d lost.
He felt bittersweet about likely losing his Shadow Ghoul form. It had served him well. The fact that he would never truly be able to figure out how the form actually functioned was strangely sad.
His sword was mostly an enigma. Such a powerful artifact being in the hands of a relatively low-powered champion was as much a blessing as a curse. Even though it’d been made for him specifically, he still suspected that others would be coming after him in droves if they knew about it. Maybe they already were.
Then he thought about his sister, how he’d been able to retrieve and store her soul in his storage ring. The Endless Storage Ring. Its description in the realm of the Faceted and its name wasn’t flashy, but it was an artifact of great power, he knew that now. It could obviously store a person’s soul. What else could it store?
Since Jake had been trapped for so long in the Web Mines, he hadn’t had a chance to properly test it. Just another thing for him to put on his mental, and hopefully soon, physical to-do lists.
Even if the world was ending, to-do lists could simplify problems. To-do lists had helped Jake survive the apocalypse as long as he had in his first life.
He had to recall all of his consciousness and processing power as a particularly nasty combination of monster core energy tried to conflict with itself as Jake assimilated it. It took some finesse and eventually some brute force, but he got it under control. As soon as he did, he felt a surge of physical pain and absently hoped it didn’t mean he was growing gills or something.
Then he pondered the Dao. In fact, he spent a lot of time pondering the Dao after that.
Jake’s first master, and likely his true master, was a dragon. What kind of dragon, he still didn’t know. He was actually hoping to learn a lot more about Master Zi after finding his granddaughter.
But he’d already figured out that since his master was a dragon, some of what he’d taught Jake was likely vampiric. Heavenly Four Winds Purification was likely draconic in origin, which would explain why Jake couldn’t cultivate it for more than a few seconds when he’d still be human.
This meant that Jake’s entire foundation, especially now, was draconic. Maybe one day, he would discover a Dao related directly to dragons. The same time he’d learned Mercurial Lunar Dao Polishing and Demonic Contradiction Wave, he’d also stumbled upon the Nine Points Celestial Destruction Path. He still couldn’t figure out anything about it other than the name, but maybe in the future, that would be the key to his draconic roots. He strongly suspected that all three skills he’d learned were draconic in origin.
So far, he had pieces of a Shadow Dao and some sort of Phoenix Dao, but he needed more pieces to even know what they were both descended from. At first, he’d thought they were a bad combination, not complementing each other at all. Phoenixes were heavily associated with fire. Shadow and Fire, usually considered opposites, but as Jake pondered the two and viewed them through the lens of what he’d discovered and incorporated, he felt a new Dao manifesting.
He chased the feeling, allowing himself the patience to think about every side of the thought he’d just had, fleshing it out in his mind, thinking about how it all related to him and how he related to it.
Shadow Flame.
The name resounded throughout his soul and almost made him lose focus enough to lose control of his transformation. Luckily, he was able to hold on by the slimmest of margins and keep plowing forward. His madly spinning cultivation base and his transformation were generating heat now. Or maybe it was the glimpse he’d managed of a great Dao.
He distantly thought the blood pool might be boiling.
Shadow Flame was definitely not any Dao he’d heard of before, and he instinctively knew it was not the actual parent Dao of the fragments he’d found. However, what he had could strengthen this new path he’d found.
Jake was pleased. To discover a piece of enlightenment now, while cultivating a Reforged Body in the bowels of a city of ghosts? Everything he was doing was dangerous as hell, but so far, it was paying off in dividends.
His future Reforged Body still concerned him, though. He’d had to suppress and transform worry and other negative emotions multiple times already. There were several legitimate reasons to worry, though. One was Conophta’s energy. Another was all the weird, subterranean demon beasts’ energy he’d been forced to consume in the Web Burrows. Ten years of feeding meant he’d been exposed to a lot of energy from weird, ugly shelled things.
Every time he thought about what he might become, he thought of Conophta and wondered if he might end up becoming a giant bull with the head of a zombie or something.
Zombie.
Becoming a zombie again, or some sort of unique zombie, still terrified him. After his recent experiences in the Dead City, he’d experienced even slower thinking than when he’d been a zombie. No matter what happened, Jake feared losing his mind or ability to reason.
God, please not a zombie again, he thought. His emotions started to slip and he savagely corrected them.
For the remainder of his trial, he focused on his breakthrough. Toward the end, it required every scrap of his concentration. When it was finally done, it took a long time to wind down his energy levels, bringing everything in his body to be stable and calm.
When Jake finally stood up in the pool, he was pleased to see that he was still generally the same size as before. Good. He thought his clothing would still fit. His arms and hands looked different, though.
The pool had definitely had better days. Water had splashed all over the room. The water was still warm.
At least the cave smelled nice. The incense Jake had lit had gone out, but it looked like it’d burned a long time.
Jake climbed out of the pool and spun his cultivation base, applying a simple technique to dry himself. Then he pulled a standing mirror out of his storage ring and set a few battery-powered lanterns on the floor.
As soon as he saw himself in the mirror, Jake felt equal parts curiosity and horror. I look even freakier than before, he thought. As soon as he saw his reflection, he knew the name of what he was now, but nothing else about it. He smiled when he realized that he still had the phase ability, though.
In the mirror, his lips peeled back from a mouthful of truly horrifying black teeth. His eyeless face sat below two horns that looked similar to what he’d had before. While his frame had been slim and gaunt before, now he was much more muscular, and his body had some sort of natural armor made of what looked like thickened skin laced with light blue crystal. His skin was dark now, and the leathery and crystal portions were even darker.
Despite not having eyes or any ears that he could really see, his senses were far more sensitive than they had been in any other form, naturally, even before all the benefits of his new cultivation level. His new vision was amazing, with a wider field of view, better night vision, and far more detail than before.
But if he’d looked like the poster child for nightmares, now he looked like a nightmare on steroids.
Primordial Vampiric Horror, huh? That’s a mouthful. There was no information about what a Primordial Vampiric Horror was in the information Morrigan had put in his head, but he had a feeling that it was a known creature. Information existed on it, maybe even monster evolution paths. Whatever The Morrigan had placed in his brain, it hadn’t included whatever he was now. He’d gone that far off the evolutionary beaten path.
Jake looked down at his hands again and noticed that his long pinky claws were gone. Instead, he had sharp-looking fingernails that glowed blue like his eyes used to. With a frown and a brief effort of will, his nails all elongated, springing into foot-long glowing razors.
“I can get used to that,” said Jake out loud. He retracted the claws and decided he could figure out what other quirks this new body had after he saw his transformation.
When he searched his spirit and his sense for how to transform, first he was taken aback by how strong his senses were. Everything felt stronger. With all the energy he’d taken in, he’d not only evolved, he’d massively improved his ability to handle larger amounts of chi, and his ability to cultivate using monster cores. But he was also at a new stage of cultivation now. As a Reforged Body cultivator, it felt like his senses before had been half-blinded.
But after he was past the amazement of his new power, he frowned in confusion. It took him a bit of poking around in his own spirit, but he eventually accepted the truth, unlikely as it was.
Jake didn’t have one transformation. He’d gotten two.
“I didn’t even know this was possible,” he muttered. Then without further ado, he triggered his first transformation.
It hurt to change, but not as much as he thought it would. Once it was finished, he looked down at his arm, then in the mirror in amazement. He laughed in surprise and joy. “I didn’t expect this!”
His image in the mirror, naked as the day he was born…was the same as his body back on Earth when he’d been human.
Jake marveled at having human skin again, even if it was just a “monster” transformation that he could only hold for a few hours a day, max. And even though his vision and all of his other senses were actually better in his new primary body as a Horror, it was good to switch to having eyes again.
His brain felt remarkably less strained with the simple set of senses he had with his human body.
Now there was one last big mystery to tackle before taking a closer look at the treasure room he’d discovered earlier. “A second transformation, huh? Cool.”
Jake reasoned that since his new main form was about the same as before, and his first transformation was human or human-looking, his second transformation was likely to be large.
He moved to the very center of the room and crouched down. If he expanded to be even bigger than Conophta had been, he didn’t want to knock himself out on the ceiling. “Here goes nothing,” he said.
Then he shut his eyes and triggered the transformation.
When he regained his vision again, he tilted his head in confusion. Everything looked similar to before, but wrong. It took a second for his mind to catch up with his eyes. He’d been expecting to be a tall, hulking abomination, but the standing mirror he’d set on the floor looked huge to him now.
He looked down at his arm. It wasn’t human. Hell, it wasn’t even hinged the right way. He didn’t have skin. What the fuck?
Jake moved to the mirror and was glad it was still angled slightly down so he could see himself.
He stared for a solid minute before slowly shaking his head.
Bone Gecko Emperor
Just like with his other form, he knew the name of what he was, but the information was not in his head. He felt rather strongly that more information about both forms would probably come soon in the form of instinct, but all of his forms were outside of any evolutionary roadmap that Morrigan had given him.
This last form, instead of being massive like Conophta, was instead only about two feet long. He was, quite literally, a bone gecko. His entire body was a skeleton, his bones held together with threads of darkness, his eyes glowing with twin, tiny pinpricks of blue light.
Jake lifted up one foot, looking at his strange, bony fingers. So I can be a lizard, he thought flatly.
He’d been excited when he’d found out he had another form. It didn’t make him feel good to admit it to himself, but he faced the truth. However, while becoming human-looking might be helpful socially, it didn’t really offer much power-wise. And he’d been hoping for more of an advantage in the Murim world.
And his second transformation was just… He stared at his small, bony body in the mirror.
He started to speak out loud, and stopped with a start when he realized he’d instinctively begun rubbing one arm on his back leg bones. Experimentally, he tried to say something out loud again, and once again, started rubbing bones together.
Makes sense, I don’t have a stomach or lungs.
Jake thought about the amazing transformations he’d heard of in the Murim world, and even Han Ten’s form. Then he looked again at himself. A bony gecko.
This time, he tried to speak out loud and just let instinct take over. His bones rubbed together, creating a weird, chirpy sound that still could be understood as language when he said, “Really? Seriously?”
Jake returned to his Horror form and got dressed, then put his sword away. He sat on a big rock and tried to control his disappointment. At some point, he must have gotten used to the idea of having some giant, rock breaking transformation.
Instead, one new form looked like a gecko decoration that would be sold in one of those Halloween stores in the US that pop up for two weeks in October.
“How the hell is being a gecko thing going to help me reach the Skull of Secrets sect?” he wondered out loud.
Jake picked up a rock and threw it into the blood pool. “Maybe I can tell them they’re overpaying on their car insurance if I manage to ever get there, though.”
He laughed hollowly at his own joke before dropping his face into his hands. “Shit.”
The story continues in book three, coming soon!
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