Chapter 1603 To Ash

The cobra demon's neck flared open and closed, its excitement clear in its crystalline blue eyes.

Although Fire Force was maybe the Force that it was the least compatible with, this should ironically help with its breakthrough.

The penultimate realm one could reach in their Force, a step that the cobra had yet to reach itself, was to birth one's opposite upon reaching an extreme, while the ultimate realm was to revert back once more.

These were concepts that Leonel had no idea about, and they were things that the demon had only learned itself after countless thousands of years.

The demon felt that it was still several steps away from this penultimate level, but if it could suddenly grasp the exact opposite of its own Force to such a high level and even be able to meditate on these complete Star Runes, it would finally make a breakthrough.

With such a breakthrough, even if it didn't become a Chaos Class demon and even if it stayed in the Sixth Star, it would still become several folds more powerful, maybe even dozens of folds!

The demon clutched the two Innate Nodes, looking toward what remained of Leonel's corpse with a hint of fondness that seemed completely out of place. One would have thought that it was looking at its own child rather than a meal that was half completed.

When it made it settle its emotions and regained its calm, it continued to eat. Up Leonel's torso, savoring the tenderness of his lungs and sweetness of his heart.

The demon had never had a human that tasted so good. Most of its life, it could only cannibalize its own kind. But demon flesh was very hard to eat, which was why humans refined it. Too much was lost in the process.

But human bodies, even ones as tough as Leonel's, were so soft and tender by comparison, and that was especially since a corpse couldn't possibly activate Bronze Runes. They were an exceptional delicacy and one that demonkind couldn't get enough of.

When the demon had finished eating through Leonel's neck, jaw and much of his face, leaving nothing much more than what remained of his brain, it couldn't help but sigh. It wanted to eat more, to savor more. Unfortunately, there was only one Leonel here.

Best

No, that wasn't true. Once it refined this and became a Chaos Demon, it would be powerful enough to target those truly monstrous humans and strengthen itself.

And since it would have been an evolved Chaos Demon, it wouldn't be stuck behind the seal either, so there would be little to nothing the humans could do about it. It would be too powerful!

In truth, the only Chaos Demons running around this world now were the very few that had escaped the fate of being sealed, and the ones like this Fiend Class demon that evolved on their own after the event of all those years ago.

Of course… The humans had no idea about this…

While they were fighting full blown wars against the Demon Bubbles, the Great Families, the supposed defenders of humanity, were hardly fighting any battles at all.

It was all a great joke. They consolidated their power based on what they had supposedly done and were currently doing for humans, when the reality was that they did nothing at all but live lives of luxury.

Of course, this wasn't entirely the case. There were still some Chaos Demons they had to keep in check, and they dealt with most demons like it ahead of time before they could evolve. It definitely wasn't a coincidence that it of all demons had been captured like this, it was a method of getting rid of future problems.

But for the most part, the Great Families rested on their laurels. And now that they finally faced a problem they felt they might not easily be able to deal with, rather than doing their job as the protectors of humanity, the job they were paid so handsomely for whether via tributes, respect, or power, they instead chose to hold such an event instead.

They planned to wrangle together some useful talents they could use as cannon fodder so that they'd once again be able to survive while putting in a minimum amount of effort.

Humans were truly pathetic.

The cobra demon sneered.

Clearly it had a great amount of intelligence to piece all of this together. But how much of it was true and how much of it was just its distaste and bias against those that had hunted it down for its whole life, that much was unknown…

The cobra demon carefully ate around what was left of Leonel's brain. Piece by piece, it swallowed them down.

Just as it had expected, the movements of the small crimson threads became slow and they even became dimmer. By the time there was nothing at all left of Leonel but his Ethereal Glabella, the crimson threads had no movement left whatsoever, falling into a dormant state and even losing their crimson color, becoming a lifeless black.

The demon caressed the small Ethereal Glabella. As it sat in meditation, its stomach churned and its body quickly refined Leonel piece by piece.

A relentless wave of power flooded through it again and again in tall tsunamis. Its cells and its blue scales shone with a vibrant color.

And then, for the first time in over ten thousand years, its scales actually began to shed.

Every shed cycle the cobra demon went through, the strength of its body would actually more than double. It couldn't believe that such a weak human had given it such an evolution before it even entered the Chaos Demon realms!

The more perfect its Fiend Class body, the stronger its Chaos Class body would be! This couldn't have come at a better time.

The cobra's tongue flickered in and out, its sapphire eyes glowing like two blazing torches. And then, it swallowed Leonel's Ethereal Glabella, entering an absolutely focused state.

Its body couldn't be more primed and ready right at this moment.

BOOM!

The aura of the demon began to skyrocket, its power advancing by leaps and bounds as it rushed toward the Chaos Demon realms.

Its body bulged and shrank in a continuous cycle, its muscle fibers doubling and its organs shining with a resplendent light.

What the demon didn't know, though, was that its actions of pushing Leonel through the gates of death and finally and truly awakened the latter's soul, a state that only the Spirituals could experience… a race of people that built their own bodies.

Within the demon's stomach, Leonel's Ethereal Glabella flashed.

[Life Steal]. [Instant Recovery].

The demon, who had been sitting on the edge of ecstasy, suddenly froze.

A strong pulling force latched onto its circulatory system, ripping at its blood and swallowing it by the tens of liters.

The demon's recovery abilities made up this blood in an instant, but the suction only increased.

At first it thought that this was part of its evolution, but it was then that it realized that it could no longer feel its connection with Leonel's Ethereal Glabella. In fact, the two Innate Nodes that it had set aside to fuse with later, suddenly shot into the air, rushing toward it and stabbing two holes in its stomach.

The demon roared with fury, realizing that there was definitely a problem.

It had always been quick on its feet and extremely intelligent. If not for this, it would have never made it so far and been so persistent.

Without hesitation, it pierced a claw into its belly, ripping its stomach sack out and throwing it a long distance from itself.

The demon's scales became somewhat pale and its aura plummeted, but even still, it only fell from the Quasi Seventh Star to Tier 3 of the Sixth Star. However, it wasn't paying attention to this at all, its blue eyes having become red with fury as it watched a blob of flesh quickly reform amidst a pillar of gold light, even its stomach sack was absorbed and used to reform the naked body of a familiar young man.

Leonel fell about a foot from the air, his face pale and his limbs still trembling.

He had felt every second of himself being eaten alive. It was a feeling that made his body vibrate from head to toe.

He gripped his fists, his lips far more blue than red and his hair far more white than violet. Even his Dimension had dropped from the Sixth back down to the Fifth.

He raised his head, meeting the gaze of the cobra demon. At that moment, the cobra demon, who was furious in its own right, trembled.

The fury in Leonel's eyes drowned out its own. Fueled by humiliation, Leonel's rage seemed to want to burn the world to ash.