Every form of energy around the outpost core, including light, sound, and heat, was being absorbed. So a zone of cold, silent darkness quickly formed around the outpost core.
This black zone of silent and cold darkness reminded Loki of the black devouring force field. The main difference was that the zone of darkness wasn’t eating everything within it. It was only eating free energy.
At least, Loki was fine within this domain. He only felt a slight cold draft across his skin.
This condition wasn’t as bad as the airless condition of the third dimension or the cold darkness of the space between worlds. If he could survive those two things, then he was sure that he could definitely survive this cold, silent darkness.
As the black rock absorbed the free energy of its surroundings, it became bigger, and the black zone around the outpost core expanded rapidly. In a few seconds, the zone of darkness had quickly enlarged from covering a range of 1 meter around the outpost core to covering a range of 10 meters around it.
Without being told, Loki tossed golden rocks of world essence at the black rock. He didn’t expect what he was doing to work and was only giving it a try. But the black rock immediately absorbed the world essence and used it to become bigger.
As the black rock became bigger, its multicolored veins also became brighter. Then the zone of darkness expanded. This signified that the outpost core had become more powerful.
When he saw that his test had been successful, Loki quickly threw more world essence into the outpost core. This caused the black rock to grow bigger very quickly.
The zone of darkness was also growing at a rapid rate. While this was happening, the multicolored were slowly and surely becoming brighter.
By the time the outpost core finished growing, Loki had fed it 10,000 years’ worth of lifespan. In return, the transformation stage that should have taken 210 days was completed in 2.1 seconds.
So he had sped up the growth by 8,8640,000 times, and all it took was 10,000 years of lifespan. This was an abysmal efficiency of 0.0058%.
It could be considered a terrible waste of lifespan to spend 10,000 years just to avoid having to guard something for 210 days. But Loki didn’t care.
Fortunately, the sect sent him a message to encourage him not to care about his sacrifice or think of it as a bad thing.
The message said, "Congratulations on surviving the second stage of the outpost core. Your contribution for this transformation is 100%. Your contribution for the defense of the outpost core during this phase is 98.2%."
This message was full of good news for Loki, but he didn’t care about it at all. This was because Fenrir was yearning for the outpost core.
This yearning quickly transformed into hunger. It was a hunger that he hadn’t experienced in a long time. But he has had a lot of experience with this hunger to know what it meant.
So his eyes lit up as he thought, ’It seems I’ve encountered something good.’
With this yearning compelling him to take action, he used the Power Identification Ability on the black crystal with the multicolored veins.
RANK 6 WORLD SEED.
He didn’t know why Loki wanted to eat an object that wouldn’t help him advance to rank 7, but he was willing to go along with this impulse of his gut instinct and eat the so-called world seed.
However, he wasn’t willing to eat the world seed now. He hoped to eat his cake and have it, so he wanted to complete the mission first and get the divine merit points that he is due before eating this world seed.
He decided to prioritize the divine merit points because the world seed is easy to get, while divine merit points are not so easy to acquire.
He can get an outpost core easily and use it to grow his own world seed. But divine merit points require a lot more work. Now that he was so close to getting the divine merit points he needed to advance to rank 7 and had made a lot of sacrifices for it, he wasn’t willing to back out of it for something he didn’t know how it would be of help to him.
So he reigned in his hunger and didn’t let it control him. Instead of pouncing on the world seed, he tore his gaze away from it to look at the messages that the sect had sent to him.
Meanwhile, Money Body was staring sinisterly at Loki. He wanted to beat Loki up for doing something without his permission, and he wanted to teach Loki to respect him as the highest authority in this mission. But just like Loki, he too reigned in his impulse for violence.
He also tore his venomous gaze away from Loki. As he did so, he thought, ’Let him jump around for now. It is not as if the divine merit points will be of help to him after the mission.’
’No amount of divine merit points will help him prevent what I plan to do to him. At that time, he will need divine merit points badly, but no amount of them will be enough.’
Then he chuckled inwardly, thinking, ’Come to think of it, I won’t need divine merit points after this mission. So maybe I should find a way to give him my divine merit points as I beat him.’
As he was amusing himself thinking about the things he planned to do to Loki and Loki’s secret alliance, the black zone of darkness around them disappeared altogether.
Not only did the zone of cold, silent darkness disappear, but even the outpost core went with it. So, gone was the cold and silent darkness, and gone was the source of the darkness. The whole area now looked as if there had never been an outpost core that was draining the world of energy.