Chapter 123

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I had chosen the Gorgon evolution and it was filling me with power. A cocoon of purple mist suddenly encompassed my entire body, filling it with this mysterious energy.

The very core of my soul started to absorb this energy and assimilate it, turning it into my own power, I began to evolve rather quickly.

As a Ghost, I don’t have a physical body that can evolve, therefore what evolves is my own soul, each time I evolve my very soul grow stronger through mutations. Although there is also what I call the Phantom, an outer layer that progressively grows thicker and stronger the more a Ghost grows stronger by leveling up.

This Phantom also evolves, but the Soul is also impacted by the evolution, making the core of my phantom, the soul, which one would call “the creamy filling” of a ghost, began to mutate and transform with my new evolution.

My “body” started to grow larger and stretch very long, I suddenly felt as if my body began to divide itself into many long pieces, which all began to crawl around one another, entangling one another and melting with each other into a complete fusion.

I had been torn into tiny pieces in the form of snakes. Indeed, I had just become countless of phantasmal snake which later on merged together once more, forming a new self out of it, as if I had become thousands of tiny cells once more only to merge them together and become a fetus.

This “fetus” form resembled a small, large snake. I had become a snake?! Why! Ah, right, Gorgon… a species of Ghost that is very close to snakes and even have cursed eyes like the Gorgon myth, and the description also said something about being able to turn my body into snakes or a big snake… so this is it?

But I’ve become a giant snake! Will I remain like this forever? Of course not.

The entirety of the cocoon started to compress around my snake phantom body, as my body absorbed the phantasmal cocoon and became whole again, shaping once more into my usual humanoid form, but I was obviously way different than before.

As the transformation and evolution slowly began to come to an end, I saw that my materialized phantasmal hands, which were still incredible pale-white and transparent, had grown sharp and long nails, where venom was secreted.

Alongside that, my long and silvery-white hair had gained a new look as the tips suddenly turned into the phantasmal heads of snakes! They were actually purple-colored, and had sharp yellow-gold eyes… they looked creepy but at the same time I felt like they each one was me… Actually, I suddenly felt as if I could share my sight with them and even thoughts… did each one had a phantasmal brain or something? Wow, this actually multiplied by thought process!

I had also gained a tiny purple horn growing in the middle of my forehead, and there was something more, scale-like growths around my neck, arms, and hands, and perhaps my legs too… I didn’t had a snake tail though, I still had my “legs”, even though I can just shape myself however I want to thanks to being a ghost made of formless phantom. But it seems that this evolution shaped myself different and gave me a fixated base form.

In the back of my body there was, however, a tail, a snake tail was there, waving around, I could easily hide it beneath my dress, but it was still there. I think I could even completely merge my legs and create a long snake tail to move around like a snake, maybe this could be more efficient? Well, not like I can’t just fly around like ghosts do, so there’s no real necessity to do all that hassle over it. For now, I tried to relax as I sighed in relief.

I suddenly noticed my lips had become a purple, as if I had been given a very sexy lipstick, and my eyes glowed with a sharp snake-like appearance, with crimson-red color like before, however.

My evolution was complete, and I had never felt this good before! I began to move around as I inspected my new body in utmost detail and as much as I possibly could.

My balance was fine, and I could still forfeit my legs and make them dissipate, turning into a flying ghost and floating around without problems, however, I was also able to turn my legs into a long snake tail that could be used rather dexterously to grab objects and even fight, maybe slapping someone with my tail as if it were a whip was now a great possibility. I do remember practicing shapes before the evolution and I could create tails, but they were hard to maintain, and I needed a lot of concentration.

Ghosts are weird, they can shape themselves however they want, but the rarer and more alien the shape they want to take from their original selves, or well, how they “see” themselves as, the harder it becomes and the more concentration it needs. This is why I couldn’t simply shape myself into animals or monsters or whatever to fight, I was still limited to my appearance of how I saw myself.

Of course I had showed myself rather differently when I confronted the Duchy and proclaimed to be an evil witch brought back from the dead, but that wasn’t so hard to maintain as other shapes, perhaps because I already saw myself as a monster based in all the atrocities I had committed.

Nonetheless, taking this shape and forming and materializing such a useful giant snake tail before evolving would had been an arduous task and a big challenge, even more to maintain constantly to use it to fight, it would probably go back to phantom midway through and ruin my fighting techniques, so it wasn’t reliable.

But now? The Gorgon evolution had very much “imprinted” this form into my very mind, so this is how I now “perceive” myself as, which makes it easy to maintain and materialize. In fact, without any effort at all!

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