Chương 3: Chapter 2 - Soul Parasitism

A gargantuan beast emerged. It towered nearly five meters tall, its grotesque figure packed with bulging muscles that writhed beneath coarse black skin. Every step it took carried a suffocating aura, as though the forest itself recoiled from its presence. The bark along Dendron's trunk rippled and tightened until it felt ready to split. His leaves quivered before stiffening upright like countless emerald needles. Panic rooted him in place. He couldn't run. He couldn't hide.

His only hope was to stay utterly motionless, blend into the silent forest, and pray that the beast's wandering gaze and its immense shadow would pass him by. He felt it before he could see it clearly—each footstep traveling down through the earth and into his roots, a slow, deliberate drumbeat no ear could have caught. A human hiding here would have needed to listen. He only had to be standing in the ground it walked on.

[Name: Saro (Black Ape)] [Rank 3: Early Stage] [Attribute: Darkness] Dendron felt the terrifying darkness radiating off the gargantuan beast, as if it were swallowing the surroundings whole. Fortunately, he could still see clearly through it, thanks to his Soul Eye. It was ancient, patient, dark, and voracious—it seemed to consume not only light, but the very idea of it. He saw it slither through the forest like ink in water, consuming everything in its path: trees, shadows, and creatures living inside them.

They didn't even have time to scream before they were gone. The leaves on Dendron's body shuddered.

"Keep still," he told himself.

"Keep quiet, keep—" A deer leaped out from behind the trees, its eyes bulging, mouth foaming. In three quick steps, it was gone. Dendron stopped breathing. He wouldn't have been able to move even if he'd tried. The beast moved swiftly, hunting beasts weaker than itself, terrifyingly efficient. The darkness it emitted swallowed light entirely, creating a pocket of absolute black. Any beast caught inside was blinded instantly, hunted down before it could even react.

A horned rabbit, jolted mid-run, took a knife straight to the neck. Blood dripped into the ground. The beast moved on, and moved on again—a second kill, then a third, each one taking less time than the last, like it had stopped needing to think about it. It wasn't a fight. It was a massacre. Corpses piled up, as if the beast meant to feed more than just itself. Dendron knew he was far too insignificant to be noticed. The beast probably didn't even think him worth eating.

A tree doesn't exactly have flesh to bruise, he reminded himself. Then, suddenly, it let out a loud roar. Dendron wasn't sure why, but guessed it was calling for its tribesmen—there were far too many corpses for one ape to haul off alone. After roaring, the beast sat down. Dendron watched as spiritual essence from the surroundings began gathering toward its soul core, slowly being drawn into it. Wait... isn't this cultivation?

He'd read about scenes like this countless times in his previous life—cultivators drawing spiritual essence into their bodies and refining it within their cores. He'd never expected to see something resembling it in real life, much less from a five-meter-tall black ape. So cultivation really does exist. The beings of this world apparently cultivated their soul cores with spiritual essence, climbing through a ranking system much like the cultivation novels he'd read back in his previous life.

"Didn't know reading could actually be useful. Screw everyone who called it a waste of time." He thought of every teacher who'd told him to put the book down and go outside, and allowed himself exactly one silent lap of victory around the inside of his own trunk. Then it hit him. He didn't need to cultivate to rank up. He was too different from these beasts for that. But if there was one thing he was sure of, it was the system itself.

"Not that it matters. As long as I rank up faster, I don't mind being a little different." He steeled his resolve.

"Since there are so many corpses here, I might as well absorb a few while that beast is busy cultivating."

"Of course this happened. Maybe the universe is finally giving me a break." He extended a root underground and lightly tapped a corpse, since contact was all he needed to absorb.

"How could I pass up a free meal? Thanks for the food." Every fiber of him wanted to laugh—the kind of giddy that comes from getting away with something you're not supposed to.... That sounded wrong, saying it to something that used to be alive. He filed the thought away and reached for the next one anyway. It was already dead. Nothing about that fact changed whether he ate or starved. Still weird, though. He knew full well the beast would notice if it happened to check.

"Risky. But if I want to grow, I can't afford to waste an opportunity." He did it anyway. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"I'll just absorb cores ranked higher than mine. They need fewer to rank up, so it shouldn't look too suspicious." His roots crept toward the corpses slowly, careful not to draw the ape's attention. He felt the sensation of power flooding into him as he touched the first one. Nothing about it changed, no glow, no shift. Absorbing a soul core, it seemed, didn't do much in the physical sense. Just a body with nothing left inside it—and something new settling into him that hadn't been there a second ago.

A ripple went through him, quiet but unmistakable. He'd ranked up. [Absorb soul core to rank up:] Rank 1 Mid-Stage 0/10 or Rank 1 Peak Stage 0/2"Oh, so it doubles each time." He realized the higher the rank, the steeper the climb. [Successfully absorbed Rank 1 Peak Stage Soul Core] [+8 points] [Successfully absorbed...] [Successfully ranked up to Rank 1 Peak Stage] [Mission successfully completed. +20 points]"Mission? Now it feels like I'm in a game."

He hadn't even noticed the mission earlier, too caught up in the whole being-a-tree ordeal. He went on to absorb every remaining Rank 1 Peak Stage core in sight, since there were no Rank 2 Early Stage ones to be found. One by one, the cores fed into him. Each absorption sent a pulse of warmth through his trunk: eight points, then another eight, then another.

"Thank you for the food, Saro the ape. I'll repay this someday. Fret not, for my motto is: repay gratitude twofold, and repay revenge a hundredfold." He made up the motto on the spot for dramatic effect, then felt a bit dejected, remembering he couldn't even speak it out loud. After a while, the black ape's tribesmen arrived, thirty of them, ranging from Rank 1 Peak Stage to Rank 2 Mid-Stage.

"They're talking, but I can't understand a word. This world probably hates me."

"How am I supposed to learn the language of this world when there's no one around to teach me?" Bark cracked somewhere along a branch he wasn't even trying to move, small and involuntary, the closest thing his body had to clenching a fist.

"This is obviously some kind of test of fate." The ape tribesmen started to leave. Halfway through, Saro abruptly stopped and looked back. After a few seconds, he turned away and kept moving.

"Did he notice? Probably. There's no way he'd look back otherwise." His nerves spiked. Saro was Rank 3, after all.

"Phew. Thankfully, nothing came of it." He relaxed once they were finally out of sight. Dendron checked his points, curious how much he'd earned from all those soul cores. [Points: 70] [Draw a random skill (50% success chance): 50 points]"Oh, random and fifty percent, huh. I like this. Reminds me of my old gambling days."

He laughed, and for a second he could almost feel the sticky carpet of some old casino floor under feet he no longer had, could almost hear the particular silence that followed a slot machine going quiet on him for the last time. Then he decided to draw for a skill.

"Draw." He expected at least a decent skill, something that could actually make him stronger.

"What..." [Soul Parasitism (0/2) (F): Able to parasitize the soul of a lower-level entity by feeding it a soul worm. The parasitized entity becomes an extension of yourself.]"This is an incredibly overpowered skill. I can have my own subordinates now." He couldn't help but laugh.

"A perfect chance to just laze around. As expected of me." He'd have put his feet up if he'd had any, and settled instead for letting every leaf on his lowest branch hang a little looser than it needed to. He looked around for an experimental subject to test his new skill. He spotted a few candidates, horned ones and plain ones, but most of them were simply too strong to parasitize under his current limits.

After a while of searching, he finally landed on a brown wolf, sniffing the ground as if hunting for something—one ear notched from some old fight, permanently half-folded in a way that gave him a skeptical look even at rest. [Name: Luan (Brown Wolf)] [Rank 1: Mid-Stage] [Attribute: Smoke]"Luan? Huh. Wonder what that even means. It sounded like something a poet would name a river."

"Looks more like a grumpy old man than whatever a Luan's supposed to be, honestly, given that scowl." He filed the comparison away for later, the kind of joke that got funnier every time he imagined the wolf's face if he ever got the chance to say it out loud. He opened multiple portals, since each one was too small to send many roots through at once, and sent them surging up toward the sniffing wolf. The wolf looked startled as countless roots suddenly lunged at him, but he still managed to react and dodge.

A few seconds later, the wolf used its ability. Thick smoke erupted and swallowed the whole area. It tried to bolt in a specific direction. But Dendron could see clean through the smoke, thanks to Soul Eye. He summoned four portals, and roots shot out instantly beside the wolf, coiling around it from every side like massive snakes. Whoosh! The wolf was caught, bound tight as if by four giant serpents. For a moment it froze, thinking, How did it predict where I'd go? No...

how could it catch me this precisely inside thick smoke? It roared and growled at the roots, but got no response. They didn't care whether it was angry or not. Dendron kept the portals active, steadily draining his spiritual essence. Fortunately, he passively absorbed spiritual essence from the surroundings, so he could hold out a while longer. He used the roots like hooked chains, reaching beyond their usual range to catch the wolf. Each time one found purchase, it tightened and dragged the wolf closer.

The wolf's claws scraped uselessly against the earth as its body was hauled across the ground, carving a long, ragged trail through the dirt. Then, at last, the wolf crossed into his root range. The ground beneath it seemed to come alive. Roots burst from the soil and coiled around its legs, torso, and neck, piling over one another like thick serpents.

With nowhere left to retreat, the tangled mass pulled the struggling wolf toward the towering trunk at the center, inch by inch, until it disappeared beneath the shadow of the tree.

"Who are you? Why did you capture me?" the wolf asked, genuinely confused. After a moment of silence, it used its ability again. Smoke billowed out, different this time, and Dendron's leaves began to melt bit by bit. A poison smoke, huh? Ohoho, the smoke attribute is more complex than I thought. Turns out it can tap into other attribute effects too. Unfortunately for you, it can't melt my bark. He was certain of that, having already seen a poison attribute among the thirty apes earlier. Easy there, grumpy wolf.

You'll be my little experiment. A lab rat. Or, well... a lab wolf, I guess? For half a second, something in the joke went hollow. The wolf's eyes were still on him, wide and fully present, the eyes of something that understood exactly what was happening and was afraid of it anyway. Dendron looked away before the thought could finish forming. He laughed, a little too gleefully, and drew the wolf closer to activate Soul Parasitism. The tear didn't feel like a cut.

It felt like someone had reached into the very center of his existence, into the sap-slow pulse of his soul, grabbed a fistful of it, and ripped. He tried to scream, but his bark only cracked, a fissure splitting down his trunk and weeping thick golden resin. The fissure spread—not just through his bark, but through something deeper. Something that had no name. It felt like being unmade.

Like every memory, every thought, every scrap of who he'd been was being dragged out of him, torn from its roots, and forced into something that wasn't ready to hold it. For a moment, he forgot his own name. Then the translucent soul worm formed, and the forgetting stopped—but the ache remained. The pain wasn't physical. It was existential. A worm materialized in front of him, feeling almost like a second body of his own. It crawled forward and slipped into the wolf's mouth.

The wolf convulsed once, legs kicking uselessly against the roots that pinned him, a thin, involuntary whine breaking loose from somewhere low in his throat before his jaw locked shut around the thing he couldn't spit back out. The wolf's mind filled with memories he didn't own....