Chapter 435: Thread Do Fight
I pulled out the description of my ability once.
[Passive Ability : Apex Body – I]
[Stage I Unlocked: Adaptive Skeleton]
[Your bones can now adapt to any environment, granting increased durability, flexibility, and impact resistance. Damaged bones will reinforce upon healing, becoming stronger against similar injuries.]
[Stage II Unlocked: Tensile Musculature]
[Your muscles are now formed with high-tension fibers. You can adjust their tightness, store strength, and release it when needed. Recovery speed increased.]
[Stage III Unlocked: Neuro-Essence Convergence]
Your nervous system has adapted to high-speed Essence conduction and signal transfer. Reaction speed, coordination, and elemental flow efficiency are vastly improved. You can now instinctively channel Essence through your body with minimal delay, and gain partial resistance to paralysis, overload, or energy disruption.
[Apex Body – II]
Your body is now fully harmonized—bone, muscle, and nerve. Every system functions in perfect synergy. Physical and Essence-based actions are executed with peak efficiency. Resistance to extreme environments, internal strain, and foreign interference has drastically increased. Your body becomes a vessel worthy of Absolute power.
I was curious about what the next stage will bring.
I took in a deep breath and pushed 20 units of Essence into Strength, forcing it past the mark of 3200.
The moment I did it, things went out of control, just like I had expected.
It began with the generator core.
A single thunderous boom echoed inside my chest, as if my own heart had been struck by lightning. Then it started pounding harder and harder.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Each beat slammed against my ribcage, shaking through my entire body.
That was when the Essence in the area lost all order. It went wild, surging straight toward me, drawn by the storm inside. My heart kept hammering, as if it was pulling everything in existence toward itself.
The rush was beyond anything I had ever felt before. So much Essence gathered at once that it twisted the world around me. The sky darkened in an instant. Black clouds rolled above, the wind howled, and the ground itself trembled. Bursts of fire sparked out of nowhere, waves of cold swept through, and space flickered with unstable ripples.
The green Essence streaming toward me wrapped around me in circles, faster and faster.
At first it looked like thin smoke, faint and transparent. But as more flooded in, it grew thicker, heavier, until it began to solidify.
The swirling smoke hardened into sharp octagonal crystals, and before I even realized it, I was enclosed, sealed inside an oval cocoon of pure Essence.
Then, with one last heavy thud, the generator core inside me steadied, and everything fell into a strange, waiting silence.
The runes began to shimmer faintly on the crystals around me.
One by one, they lit up, and then, as if pulled by an unseen force, thin glowing threads of Essence separated from the crystals. Each thread was covered in those strange runes, and they shot toward me in a sudden rush.
The very first thread that touched my skin sent my body into complete paralysis. I couldn’t even twitch a finger. My eyes stayed open, and I could only watch in awe as that luminous thread slipped past my flesh and moved straight toward my veins.
It was heading for my blood.
But just before it could make its mark, before it could rewrite me into whatever it was meant to do, the generator core inside my chest thundered alive again.
My heart shook violently, and I felt the Essence I had generated churn with fierce defiance.
Then, from the violet mass swirling inside my heart, a single thread separated and shot out like lightning. It moved with terrifying speed, slamming into the intruding green threads of natural Essence.
I could do nothing but watch in awe. A war had begun inside my body.
The first clash was brutal. The violet and green threads collided, and the impact ripped through my flesh. My skin cracked open, muscles tore apart, and blood burst out of me in countless streams, staining the cocoon around me a deep crimson.
And that was only the beginning.
The collisions didn’t stop at just one place, they spread all across my body. Violet and green Essence struck each other again and again, and every clash shredded me further.
It felt like a thousand wars were being fought at once beneath my skin. My body shook, bones groaned, and the pain was enough to drown my mind.
I realized quickly that the violet threads were losing ground. The green threads from the cocoon outside me were too many, too forceful. They were pushing deeper into my veins, trying to claim every channel in my body.
But the generator core roared again. The thunder inside my chest was deafening to my senses.
Instead of giving in, the core pulled harder, dragging the violent energies outside into itself through my channels. The moment it absorbed them, it began to twist, refine, and transform them into more violet threads.
The battle raged hotter.
Seeing the shift, the natural Essence outside refused to surrender. The cocoon surrounding me shuddered, and I felt even more green threads surge inward.
They pierced my skin without hesitation, flooding me, pressing harder, trying to overwhelm the violet swarm.
The inside of my body turned into a battlefield of chaos. My veins burned like fire, my bones cracked under the pressure, and my organs shivered as if they were about to explode.
Every collision between the violet and green threads shook me to my core, leaving new wounds across my flesh.
Seeing that the clash had no end in sight, I finally decided to step in.
The real problem was choosing which side I should support. I didn’t know what kind of transformation each side would bring, and that uncertainty made the choice heavier.
It was obvious that this was not some small change, this was going to be a massive transformation, one that would completely reshape me. Depending on which Essence claimed victory, the outcome would be very different.
Countless thoughts raced through my head as I watched the struggle unfold before me.
My instincts screamed one way, my logic another. After a long moment, I chose to side with the Violet Essence. The main reason was simple, it was mine. It belonged to me alone, with no strings tied to the world. That sense of ownership, of independence, was too important to ignore.
Of course, there was still a catch. The Violet Essence I generated wasn’t truly separate from the world, it drew its fuel from the world itself. That meant it wasn’t complete freedom, not yet.
It was a roundabout connection, a half-step toward what I wanted. But even so, it was the only path that felt right to me in that moment.