Chapter 382 Heart of Darkness

382 Heart of Darkness

"Seems like it's working well on the Rookie dungeons…that's pretty good!" Nial mumbled quietly as he continued to spread out his dark energy.

He devoured one monster after another and turned them into his energy.

However, that was not where Nial stopped. He was prepared to devour the entire dungeon or precisely the dungeon's core.

To make sure that a dungeon could manifest and that it would be sustained, Gods had to use bits of their energy that would be accumulated and preserved within a specific orb. The orb was the core of the dungeon that could preserve itself after it received the necessary energy from a being that was powerful enough to activate it.

Higher ranked dungeons were larger in size and the number of powerful monsters within them was on the higher side as well. Thus, it was only obvious that they required more energy to be sustained and empowered.

In the end, the number of low-ranked dungeon portals was manyfold higher than the number of Deux and Keltia ranked dungeons.

Nial had only perceived two Deux dungeon portals until now and not a single Keltia ranked dungeon had popped up around him.

As for rookie dungeons, there were thousands of them just in a range of 500 kilometers around the Forest of Life!

And those dungeons had been Nial's targets! It didn't require much effort for him to expand his darkness domain through a whole rookie dungeon. Killing the monsters within the said dungeons was even easier. Devouring them didn't provide much energy but it was better than nothing.

After a permanent dungeon was conquered in less than a minute, Nial ended up demolishing the dungeon in its entirety until he found the dungeon core.

Destroying the dungeon core was usually not possible. One would be expelled from the dungeon the moment the dungeon core was removed from its designated position. Thus, Nial should have been expelled from the dungeon the moment he destroyed its structure.

But nothing happened and Nial ended up with the dungeon core in his hands. Nial's Essence of Darkness poured inside the dungeon core while his dark energy engulfed it.

Within seconds, the sounds of loud cracks resounded through the tremoring dungeon that showed signs of disintegrating into countless particles.

Nial's smile widened the longer it took him to devour and tarnish the energy within the dungeon core. After all, that meant the dungeon core possessed more energy for him to devour and make use of!

Once he drained the dungeon core of the last trace of energy, it crumbled and turned into countless shards.

Nial walked out of the dungeon portal that was only maintained by the mana he provided it, and it crumbled the moment Nial stopped his supply of mana.

The permanent rookie dungeon portal disappeared when Nial emerged through it. He visualized a Nightshadow Elf at the Keltia rank, who had been waiting for him.

Nial wasn't familiar with the Elf but he had been very helpful so far considering the fact that he was holding the reins of a monster the Nightshadow Elf had beaten into a pulp for Nial's sake.

"My Lord, I brought you a sacrifice. It is not necessary for you to lower yourself and conquer lowly dungeons to become stronger. Just say the word and the Nightshadow Elves and Dark Elves will bring you everything you might need!" The Nightshadow Elf bowed in reverence and said when he first approached Nial.

Nial had felt a bit weird at the beginning but it was certainly advantageous to have a powerful Guard by his side. However, what Nial liked even better was that the monster the Nightshadow Elf had brought him was a Wyvern.

In many tales, Wyverns were said to have traces of the bloodline of True Dragons. For others, this may be interesting because it meant that the Nightshadow Elf sacrificed a living Wyvern to him.

However, Nial didn't really care about that. He had looked at the Wyvern that was struggling to free itself from the tremendous force the Nightshadow Elf had used to restrict its freedom and hold it down.

"Become my subordinate for two weeks, and after that, you can go wherever you want!" Nial proposed when he first encountered the Wyvern. He was not sure if the monster understood him but it seemed to have worked out quite fine.

Nial was able to ride the Wyvern without any issues, and the beast took him wherever he wanted to go. It was almost as if the Wyvern could understand Nial's intentions whenever he said or thought about something and obeyed him.

This made things a lot easier, especially since the Wyvern was in the possession of the wind affinity, and abilities closely related to speed and an increase in its agility.

As it was extremely fast, the Wyvern required no time to transport Nial to the dungeon portals he desired to conquer and destroy.

Two weeks passed in the blink of an eye and as Nial had promised, the Wyvern was set free. It was a shame to let go of the Wyvern because it was a powerful mount but Nial didn't have the time to bother convincing a beast to continue following him.

He had other things to take care of, such as completing the evolution of the Odyssey seed and advancing to the Prometheus rank.

Both the evolution and his breakthrough were closely related to each other. Nial could tell that his advancement to the Prometheus rank would inevitably finish the Odyssey seed's evolution and vice versa.

Whatever would happen first would serve as the necessary catalyst to initiate the other process!

And that was something Nial had worked toward during the last two weeks. He had conquered and destroyed more than a thousand rookie dungeon portals, killed more than a million dungeon beasts that succumbed to his mercilessness, and Nial had accumulated all the energy he had procured in the last two days to provide the necessary push he required to advance as quickly as possible.

His entire body was overflowing with energy as he sat down on the ground in the middle of a huge plain with only a few trees and a Nightshadow Elf guarding him.

And just when he was ready to push all the energy within his body in one direction, both his Mana core and the evolving Odyssey seed began to vibrate violently.

As a result, Nial's body began to shake. He was excited because he could easily tell what was going on.

"Pay attention that nobody interferes in my breakthrough!" He ordered the Nightshadow Elf, who just nodded his head without a second of hesitation.

After some of Nial's secrets had been exposed, the Nightshadow Elves and Dark Elves had grown much closer to him than before. They felt that they had a lot more things in common than expected, especially the fact that they possessed powers for which both races were frowned upon.

They were born with these powers and it was not as if they wished to receive these destructive powers, to begin with.

That, and the obvious fact of Nial being in possession of a Darkness Essence with tremendous potential, only made it obvious that the Nightshadow Elves were ready to serve Nial.

There were limits to their loyalty and Nial was fully aware of this, but he was fine with that.

He wasn't expecting the Nightshadow Elves to be ready to kill someone against their will if he were to order them. Nial didn't plan to do something like this, either way, as he didn't like bossing around. This was why he was perfectly fine with the bits of power he gained from partially controlling the Nightshadow Elves and Dark Elves.

He then focussed on spreading the overwhelming powers that were accumulated within him through the Odyssey seed. This made it tremble even more than before. The shape of the Odyssey seed began to change and it started enlarging.

Nial felt a searing pain spreading through his body when the Odyssey seed enlarged. His body's structure was forcefully altered, which Nial felt quite intensely.

Cold sweat trickled down his forehead, and back. His back was drenched in cold sweat within minutes but Nial endured everything.

The searing pain that spread through his entire body was a necessity that accompanied the changes of his body structure. Even his bone structure changed.

New mana veins that were pitch-black in color, were created and they shot out towards Nial's heart and his Mana core where they connected to them.

The evolving Odyssey seed thumped violently, releasing tremendous amounts of dark energy through the mana veins it had just created and spread out.

Nial's entire body was swept through with dark energy that circulated through his dark veins for the following minutes. The dark energy caused Nial's mana veins to feel like they were on fire.

This was already painful, but it could be considered child's play when the Essence of Darkness spread out from the evolving Odyssey seed.

Nial spat blood the moment the Essence of Darkness began to circulate through his mana veins.

His body turned ice-cold and he paled in an instant. Nial's appearance looked just like a frozen statue for more than half an hour until the Essence of Darkness returned to the evolving Odyssey seed.

Something was being formed but the energy Nial's body had required for metamorphosing and to ensure the completion of the Odyssey seed's evolution was tremendous.

Nial felt extremely weak and the following hours that felt like eons passed in a blur. Numerous changes occurred to his body and two wildly beating heartbeats could be heard deep inside the blind Original.

The evolution of the Odyssey seed was completed after almost tens of thousand years seemed to have passed and Nial slumped to the ground feeling weak and powerless.

And that happened despite the tremendous power that circulated through Nial's body. He felt weak and exhausted but his body was not yet done.

His Mana core was aching to advance to the Prometheus rank and Nial could only surrender to this desire.

He knew that it was necessary for him to advance to the next rank to gain more strength.

His plan was to eradicate a whole race, after all!

Breaking through to the Prometheus rank was not as complicated as Nial had presumed. He read many reports about the breakthrough process of Originals and that it heavily relied on their willpower and talent that changed the level of difficulty for each being who wanted to advance past the Peak of the Mirae rank.

Nial had never been worried about reaching a bottleneck in his rank because he underwent so many transformations in the last few years that his body could be considered to be a large cauldron where all kinds of beings threw their blessings and talent in.

He had received the Titan heart's power, the Odyssey seed's influence and strength, the Symbol of Life, the Fairies' Blessing and he was in possession of his very own innate talent as well.

His mana core might have been weak in the beginning but his mana veins had always been the strongest.

As for his willpower, this was something he possessed more than anyone else.

His desire to advance in the ranks and to gain the necessary strength to breakthrough was more than present..

Thus, Nial ended up advancing shortly after the Odyssey seed had finished evolving.

Meanwhile, the pitch-black heart in his chest was beating full of vigor, celebrating its birth…the birth of the Heart of Darkness.

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