Chương 139: Chapter 144: Unstable Aura

──────────── [Achievement Earned: Paragon of Transcendence] Requirement: Reach 10, 000 total attribute points before your next class evolution Description: Your power shatters expectation. Every attribute surges beyond the boundaries of even the most gifted, converging into a force of unmatched magnitude. Your growth is no longer incremental. It is a living embodiment of potential realized.

Every skill sharpens faster, every class path becomes second nature, and latent bloodline power awakens fully, amplifying your essence.

• +75% Skill Mastery Insight • +100% Class Experience Gain • +25% to all Stats (multiplicative) • Bloodline Harmonization (all bloodline abilities evolve to scale with your top three attributes) • Class evolution requirement reduced by 1 (Permanent, Stacks) • +25% chance for advanced skill evolution • Skill Insight Token [Achievement Earned: Refined Vitality] Requirement: Reach 1000 Vitality Description: Your life force surges beyond all natural limits.

Your body sustains, restores, and endures with terrifying efficiency, refusing collapse even under catastrophic strain. Rewards: • +20% to Vitality • +25% Health Regeneration • +30% effectiveness to all Vitality-derived effects [Achievement Earned: Refined Constitution] Requirement: Reach 1000 Constitution Description: Your body becomes an unyielding fortress. Toxins falter, decay slows, and your physical form resists even the harshest conditions.

Rewards: • +20% to Constitution • +30% Status Resistance • +30% effectiveness to all Constitution-derived effects [Achievement Earned: Refined Endurance] Requirement: Reach 1000 Endurance Description: Fatigue loses meaning. Your stamina stretches endlessly, allowing sustained exertion without decline.

Rewards: • +20% to Endurance • +25% Stamina Recovery • +30% effectiveness to all Endurance-derived effects [Achievement Earned: Refined Strength] Requirement: Reach 1000 Strength Description: Your power is overwhelming. Each movement carries force capable of crushing resistance through sheer might.

Rewards: • +20% to Strength • +25% Physical Damage • +30% effectiveness to all Strength-derived effects [Achievement Earned: Refined Agility] Requirement: Reach 1000 Agility Description: Your movements blur the line between intent and action. Action and reaction become indistinguishable. Rewards: • +20% to Agility • +25% Movement Speed • +30% effectiveness to all Agility-derived effects [Achievement Earned: Refined Dexterity] Requirement: Reach 1000 Dexterity Description: Precision reaches perfection.

Every action is executed with flawless control and lethal accuracy. Rewards: • +20% to Dexterity • +25% Accuracy • +30% effectiveness to all Dexterity-derived effects [Achievement Earned: Refined Perception] Requirement: Reach 1000 Perception Description: Nothing escapes your awareness. The unseen becomes visible, and the hidden reveals itself to you instinctively.

Rewards: • +20% to Perception • +30% Senses Range • +30% effectiveness to all Perception-derived effects [Achievement Earned: Refined Charisma] Requirement: Reach 1000 Charisma Description: Your presence dominates. Influence, pressure, and command radiate naturally, bending others to your will.

Rewards: • +20% to Charisma • +25% Influence Effectiveness • +30% effectiveness to all Charisma-derived effects [Achievement Earned: Refined Wisdom] Requirement: Reach 1000 Wisdom Description: Understanding deepens into clarity. Patterns, flows, and hidden connections become clear to you.

Rewards: • +20% to Wisdom • +25% Skill Efficiency • +30% effectiveness to all Wisdom-derived effects [Achievement Earned: Refined Intelligence] Requirement: Reach 1000 Intelligence Description: Your mind expands into a vast reservoir of knowledge and processing power. Complex calculations become effortless.

Rewards: • +20% to Intelligence • +30% Mana Regeneration • +30% effectiveness to all Intelligence-derived effects [Achievement Earned: Perfected Being] Requirement: Achieve 1000 points in all stats before level 100 Description: Every aspect of your existence has reached a level of refinement beyond even the most exceptional. No weakness remains, no imbalance persists. Body, mind, and essence stand aligned, each reinforcing the other without loss or inefficiency.

Your power no longer grows in fragments, it advances as a unified whole, every improvement echoing across your entire being. What you have achieved is not simply greatness. It is completeness. Rewards: • All attributes gain +15% cross-scaling efficiency • Attributes Harmonization (All stats contribute slightly to all actions and abilities) • Attribute Evolution Token ──────────── AAAARH!! I fell to my knees as my own body betrayed me.

I could feel my muscles and tendons wriggle like worms beneath my skin, a skin that felt on fire, my mind was a mess of thoughts and ideas, calculations and theories all mixing together, my skills were flaring up, Accelerated Processing and my Piercing Eyes were in overdrive, together with my aura. I tried to activate Reinforced Infusion, flooding my own body completely with mana in the hope that it helped keep me together. If the last power-up had been wild, this was another level entirely.

I felt the System touch upon me, pouring power into every aspect of my being, enhancing me. There was too much though, too much and too fast. It was overwhelming. I passed out for a moment maybe, but I noticed that I was some distance away from the snake now. I touched my forehead, there was something wet on my face. Blood, red, slightly sparkling blood, coming from a point in the middle of my forehead. I rolled to the side.

I did it on instinct more than anything, my push brought me much farther away than I thought, and not a second too soon, because a being slammed down in the place I was with a spear planted in the ground. What the fuck was happening? Another bout of pain and power crashed into me. I fell to my knee as the reptilian humanoid moved to me with a single bound, its spear pointed at my eye. As the spear tip enlarged in my vision, I raised a hand and just grabbed it.

I couldn't use my skills, they were not functioning properly as the System remade me. But I didn't need them, the snake woman looked at me in shock, her reptilian eyes wide as I used the spear for leverage to lift myself up. I was drenched in putrid-smelling swamp water. And I was quite pissed. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

My cursed aura rose from me, a tide of malevolent power emanating with me at the epicenter, the snake-woman released the spear, and fled. Oh no, you won't. I surged forward, stomping on her thick tail, she was similar to a naga from the legends, just much uglier than what I remembered seeing in movies and books. My boot crunched her bones and brought her to a stop.

"So you thought it smart to just attack me after you saw a chance, uh?" She screamed in pain as she reached for a scimitar at her waist, she had good fighting instinct, I could give her that, not that they would save her. They had already betrayed her the moment she decided to attack me. Why did she do it? Just to assert dominance in the area? Killing the killer of the serpent would legitimize her maybe?

"Why did you attack me?" I asked while grabbing the sword by the blade and pulling it free from her hand. I tossed the blade aside, she opened her mouth too wide, fangs dripping with poison, and tried to bite my neck. I punched her face, she was noseless but the hit still broke something, I didn't even put much force in it. My perception was slow one moment and normal another, my skills going haywire, it was disorienting, but right now it gave me time to think.

"Can you understand me?" I asked her as I stepped away from her pulped tail. Green blood clung to my boot, and a nasty squelching sound came from my motion, she screamed some more. I planted a foot on her chest and bent down, looking at her face to face. She stopped thrashing, or tried, the pain must have been intense because she was shivering and twitching, but she recognized her position.

"Can you understand me?" I repeated again.

"If you can bring me to the serpent nest, or where it keeps its treasures, I will let you live." She looked at me in confusion, totally not getting what I was trying to say, then she opened her mouth and spoke in a strange tongue, full of sibilating sounds and too many s's. I sighed, "I don't speak parseltongue." Then I crushed her face with my boot. The sensation was terrible, her bones broke and her brain spilled all around. ──────────── [You have slain: Vashka Matron Lv99 — Count] Solo kill confirmed.

Experience massively increased due to extreme level disparity. ──────────── Another Count, more of a cunt than a count in this case, but I was wondering, how did one become a count? Or any kind of nobility in the eyes of the System? There must be a way, and there must be benefits too, given how these beings are usually the strongest around. Questions for later, I was feeling my power settling down, at least the one in my body, my skills were getting back under control, but my aura… that was another matter.

It surged within me, too powerful to easily rein it in right now, hell, I tried manifesting it through my skill and it became a whirlpool of currents and waves, smashing and destroying anything around me. I was stranded on the ground for the time being, but I could use the time to think. First I tried to calm down my breath, the power still coursing through me was intense, so much that it was making my body react strangely, I felt energized and pumped up more than I should, maybe?

I didn't really know if all of this was normal, if other people gained these kinds of power-ups in such large doses, but the System seemed designed to reward the powerful, making them even more powerful than before, and leaving the weak to their mercy. I went back to the giant snake and sat down on its head, it was the only not disgusting and wet place around. I used my ring to clean myself, flooding it with mana to get a deep satisfying cleanse.

The magic made me shudder in delight, like the best shower and scrub one could ask for. Actually, I put so much mana into the ring that even the area around me and the head of the snake were getting scrubbed clean. After enjoying the feeling for a moment, I opened my status.

──────────── Name: Elias Mercer Race: Human Class: Hexer Level: 25 Titles: Apex Slayer, Paragon of Potential, Baron Slayer, Untouchable, Defiance of Tiers (I, II), Elite Slayer (I, II, III, IV), Paragon of Growth, Profane Substitution, Overpowering Magic, Genesis of Damnation, Butcher (I, II), Forced Evolution, Origin of Unity, Deviation of Sequence, Paragon of Ascension, Dreadful Gaze, Enhanced Being, Refined Will, Paragon of Supremacy, Viscount Slayer, Giant Slayer, Colossus Slayer, Profane Execution, Paragon of Transcendence, Perfected Being Stats: Vitality: 610 (1868) Constitution: 596 (1688) Endurance: 614 (1841) Strength: 504 (1511) Agility: 486 (1518) Dexterity: 421 (1315) Perception: 439 (1316) Charisma: 474 (1421) Wisdom: 516 (1580) Intelligence: 563 (1724) Willpower: 766 (2345) Free Stat Points: 0 Traits: Curse-Born Resilience, Cursed Aura, Arcane Shaping, Hexer's Touch, Unbound Arcana Skills: Arcane Sense Lv44, Arcane Manipulation Lv39, Entropic Lance Lv26, Curse Detonation Lv28, Curse Absorption Lv13, Reinforced Infusion Lv12, Passive Casting Lv18, Virulent Hex Lv12, Malignant Threshold Lv13, Feast on the Ruined Lv12, Veiled Marionette Lv10, Aural Manifestation Lv20, Accelerated Processing Lv8, Aura Tether Lv5, Piercing Eyes Lv10 Conditions: Curse of the False Saint Tutorial Points: 164927 Tokens: Skill Evolution Token, Trait Evolution Token, Class Evolution Token, Skill Insight Token, Attribute Evolution Token ──────────── I felt a kind of detachment while looking at my status now.

I noticed a new line appearing at the bottom, listing all my available tokens, I had a lot. I had a lot of stats too, a ton of achievements, of power. I had felt powerful already before we reached the town, after massacring all of those spiders, now though? I had no means to compare myself to. I defeated a level 161 Viscount before this last bout of achievements… Did levels even matter at this point? Or were they just a way to block people from achieving more with their class?

Because if I remained stuck at level 99 like that snake woman, just for some lacking requirement, I don't know… I could just hunt for fruits and treasures that would increase my stats. The raw power coursing through me was undeniable, I destroyed that count with my foot, not even using a skill. The question that always came back to plague me was, how the fuck all of this was required to face the kings? How had Adrian not finished the tutorial already?

If I had his capabilities I'd probably abuse the hell out of the tutorial too, but apparently he'd come back to the past many times… was he looking to perfect his class? His skills? Was it just a whim? Maybe he thought all of this was like a video game and was going for the perfect run? I didn't believe that he couldn't wipe away every obstacle with his knowledge and the power he would have acquired by now.

I didn't know, and it was infuriating, more than that was the knowledge that anything I had could be taken away from me, again. That despite all my stats and new shining skills, I had no power to stop him from fucking resetting his memories and fucking me over if he wished for it. I got up, I was feeling better, my aura was still hard to control, it seemed to have passed a kind of threshold, and my mastery of it was insufficient to rein it in.

For the moment it was fine, but my body felt amazing, I used my senses to scan deeply into the snake, I felt it so clearly, its core… It was just behind its head, I didn't want to go through the mouth, and I didn't have my aura at my disposal, so I infused a chunk of mana with my will, and created a giant lance of energy, with a flat edge. It was more like a giant sword than a lance now, it felt extremely light in my hand, it was energy after all, not matter.

I swung it down, cleaving the head from the rest of the body. A great deal of blood flowed out, and pieces of flesh, my curses did a real number on it. I didn't want to do it, but I had no choice, I plunged my hand into the flesh of the body, where I was feeling the presence of the core. My hand was inside the cold and slimy flesh, digging around until I felt it. I tugged the core free, it was the size of a walnut, bright green, and absolutely packed with energy. Did I have a core too?

I couldn't feel anything similar in my body, but maybe the System grew a core for letting us use magic and stuff? Who knew… with another use of the ring, I cleaned myself and the core, then I put it into my satchel, I just remembered that I had gloves in it. I wanted to slap myself. Haa, I came to do what was needed, now it was time to head back, but not before checking what good stuff the snake had lying around.

I turned toward the massive beast, it left clear marks with its passing, I couldn't fly for now, but I could still take a moment to go and check the place it came from… maybe I could find something interesting.