Zarek frowned, slowly walking as though getting used to his new leg. But soon, it came as naturally to him as before. There was some compensation to be made, but nothing he couldn't handle.
He had been dealing with constantly fluctuating Growth Potential all this time. That felt like a joke now with his attunement to his body. It was like Harmonic Recall was constantly active—but on himself instead. Not just that, but the sensory perception of Temp Duplicate and Atom Link were there as well.
He thought that after he lost those Talents, they would be gone forever. He was especially worried about communicating with Priya.
But this gift from the Challenge Hub seemed to have made it so that they remained as secondary and tertiary effects. The weight of that, however… was shocking.
For example, Zarek felt like he could Atom Link portions of his body, especially meaning that if he plotted out his body correctly, or could learn to maintain more Atom Links at once, he could force it so that there was no lag between a thought from his mind and an action he took.
At the same time, Temp Duplicate was a large part of the grafting just now. Essentially, he could even use it to heal himself. The drawback was now he needed external items to make it possible. But that didn't mean that it would always be like that.
Zarek's steps came to a pause.
Right ahead, the boy-man was crouched on the ground, shivering from head to toe. He grabbed his head, trying to remain still, but clearly failing miserably.
Zarek's head tilted to the side, not quite understanding what he was seeing. He was a man who dealt with every sort of thing, no matter how difficult, with a calculated gaze that probably did carry a small few hints of madness.
The last thing he expected to see was that the reason the boy-man hadn't come to deal with him wasn't because he was injured, dead, dying, or gone away already… but because…
He was scared?
Zarek couldn't fathom why. Unlike him, the boy-man was protected by the barrier and a distance away. It wasn't like the blade that had been drawn was his to take.
How pathetic could you be?
Zarek reached down, crouching to the balls of his feet, and ripped the boy-man's head up with a hand.
"Don't kill me! Don't kill me!"
His face was a sniveling mess, silent tears had been pouring down and snot covered his face.
When Zarek saw the reflection in his eyes, he couldn't help but be taken aback. This wasn't normal fear, nor cowardice. The boy-man seemed to be… truly broken, as though something inside of him had snapped and would never return back to how it once was.
Zarek didn't quite know how to take this situation. So he didn't.
He didn't bother to think about the boy-man or the situation he was in. Nor did he care enough to decipher why it was he was such a pathetic, sniveling mess.
Instead, he just took.
He stripped the boy-man down of all the treasures on him. Conveniently, there was only one thing to take: the Dimensional Sphere.
Obviously, the boy-man had been using it as a sort of storage device. Zarek had been meaning to get his hands on one for the longest time, but hadn't been able to because they were rare and normally even the worst of them were C Class items, though there were a rare few that weren't.
But the interesting thing about this Dimensional Sphere—and the reason the boy-man was so fascinated by it—was the fact it didn't seem to have an upper limit.
Instead, while it seemed to just be holding a tent, what it was actually holding was everything inside of the tent as well.
That was to say that so long as one had an abode that could be refined into a single treasure recognized by the Dimensional Sphere, it would become the new "limit."
"Erase your mark on it," Zarek said quite calmly. He didn't seem to have the slightest bit of killing intent for the boy-man. He spoke like he was just corresponding with a business colleague.
The boy-man was still trembling too fiercely to even think properly. But…
PA.
The slap was resounding, and the Imperial Wind genius found himself sprawled across the ground.
"Given the sort of pathetic state you're in right now, you can't really give me the battle I'm looking for, and quite frankly, I'm not very interested in fighting someone with such a fragile mind. Do as you're told, and you keep your life. Don't, and I'll just kill you to erase the mark instead."
"I… I…"
The boy-man shivered, but his small hands raised up. There was a mark that pulsed to life in a hovering illusion above the Dimensional Sphere for a moment, and then it vanished a moment later.
After this, Zarek finally felt that he could see into the Dimensional Sphere. Before, he was mostly blocked and could only use Harmonic Recall as a loophole. That was probably why the boy-man was even more surprised than usual.
But now, the tent was as open to him as if he was walking through it himself.
'Fascinating.'
The tent was as large as a normal one-car-garage suburban home. Most of it was actually food and water—in terms of what the rooms were actually filled with. Then there was where the boy-man slept, where he cleaned himself, and then there was the final room, the treasure room. Or rather, the entire basement floor was this treasure room.
This room had five treasure boxes of Godsfall Crystals, a pool of Godsfall Droplets, and then there were the actual treasures themselves.
An array of Wind Godsfall Intent weapons lined the walls, but there were a few things that caught Zarek's attention immediately because he didn't recognize them as easily as the other things.
So, he had no choice but to bring them out one by one.