Chapter 215: Sol’s Turn & Warnings

เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 มี.ค. 2569 03:12

Chapter 215: Chapter 215: Sol’s Turn & Warnings The Grove fell dead silent. The remaining youths stepped forward one by one, their previous ambitions entirely crushed under the weight of mortality. They finished with mixed results. Thankfully, they knew their limits and didn’t try to overreach. All of them bypassing the Blood jades,a few did try subjugating Star stone ones, failed miserably, so with their eyes strictly averted from the temptation of the rare Omen-Bloods. They chose the pale-reed basket of Quartz. There were no more fractured cores. No more blood spraying onto the pristine singing moss. There was just the heavy, exhausting, muscle-tearing friction of common binding. A River-Lizard that made a boy vomit river water. A Forest-Hound that left a girl gasping on her hands and knees. A Scorpion. A Mud-Snake. They suffered, they bled from the nose, and they panted like dying men, but they survived, securing their baseline futures in the tribe. They would be the foot soldiers, the shield-bearers, the reliable backbone of the Veynar. As for heights above that, it would depend on their fate and second spirit they’d managed to get. Finally, the last of the initiates, a young girl also claimed a common stone. The initiates sat slumped in a loose circle around the altar, clutching their glowing chests, nursing their physical and spiritual exhaustion. Zephyra leaned heavily on her wooden staff, her milky eyes finally settling on the man who had started this entire shift in the tribe’s destiny. "The path is cleared," the High Shaman said, her voice echoing softly into the mist, carrying the weight of centuries of tradition. "The baskets await you, Sol." Sol nodded and finally stepped forward. The heavy, measured crunch of his footsteps against the singing moss sounded uncomfortably loud in the hush clear. The atmosphere shifted instantly. The exhausted youths lifted their heads, fighting through their pain to watch. Even Zeyra, still basking in the flawless, seductive absorption of her Shadow-Viper, leaned forward, her dark eyes tracking the broad lines of his shoulders. He walked past voluptuous Zeyra, past the bleeding and humiliated Varn...who was still clutching his chest and glaring with toxic envy... and stopped before the monolithic stone altar. He looked down at the remaining Soul Stones. There were still a dozen left scattered in the baskets... wolves, rock-bears, stags. Elite beasts that had taken teams of hardened Veynar warriors months, sometimes years, to track, weaken, break, and trap. The blood, sweat, and lives of the tribe’s greatest hunters were distilled into these glowing, pulsing minerals. To a normal Veynar warrior, this was a treasure trove beyond imagination. It was an armory of legendary weapons waiting to be claimed, a guaranteed ticket to the upper echelons of the tribal hierarchy. To Sol, the Golden Liquid essence inside his stomach was practically rolling its eyes. Sol looked at the stones, specifically the cloudy Quartz and the speckled Star-Stones. And honestly, despite his initial excitement when he had first entered the Grove, they felt... cold. Dead. To his newly evolved senses, they were nothing more than pre-packaged souls, violently broken, tortured, and drained of their primal will, designed specifically to provide a fast and safe path for fragile human cores. They were nothing less than the training wheels. He reached out with his senses, letting the gravity of his endless-sky Core brush against the stones in the baskets. It wasn’t a deliberate flex of power, just a careless, passive sweep of his internal ocean. Instantly, every single stone in the Quartz and Star-Stone baskets dimmed. The blue and orange lights flickered and died down to a dull, pathetic glow. The spectral beasts trapped inside didn’t roar in challenge; they whimpered. The sheer, crushing density of Sol’s unmasked essence terrified them into absolute, groveling submission. He could feel their metaphysical forms cowering against the mineral walls of their prisons, desperate to escape his gravitational pull. He knew, with absolute mathematical certainty, that he could even take all of them right now, simultaneously, and his mutated core wouldn’t even feel the strain. But seeing this pathetic display, Sol frowned, a deep crease forming between his brows. If I anchor these weak souls... they’ll just dilute my essence. They’re simply too weak for my core. My Golden Liquid won’t even have to work to suppress them, it will just crush them into a fine, useless paste instead of mutating them into something stronger. I’d be wasting my capacity. He needed something heavier. Something that could actually survive the crushing pressure of his internal ocean without disintegrating. Something that could fight back just enough to ignite the forge of his core. Every pair of eyes in the clearing was glued to him, painting the foggy ravine with varying expressions of envy, awe, and desperate curiosity, waiting to see what mythic soul the Divine Savior would claim. Sol ignored the common baskets entirely and turned his attention to the smallest basket sitting at the very center of the altar. The Blood-Jades. There were exactly seven of them, resting on a bed of thorny, crimson-stained vines. Unlike the other stones, these didn’t dim or submit to the ambient pressure of his core. Instead, they pulsed with a stubborn, violent crimson light, fighting back against his gravity, maintaining their ferocious, untamed dignity. They felt heavy, ancient, and deeply dangerous. Finally, Sol thought, a spark of genuine excitement igniting in his chest. Some actual loot. He lifted his hand, his long fingers reaching for the smooth, freezing surface of the nearest Blood-Jade. But just as his fingertips were a millimeter away from brushing the crimson stone, his previously heightened intuition... a primal survival instinct sharpened to a razor’s edge of the previous adventures... screamed. Intense warning bells rang in his skull, sharp and agonizing as ice picks driven through his temples. His hand stopped dead in mid-air. His heart skipped a beat, the adrenaline spiking so fast it left a metallic taste in his mouth. He frowned heavily, his eyes narrowing at the stone. He slowly pulled his hand back an inch, and the piercing sense of danger instantly receded, fading back into a dull, manageable hum. Coincidence? Sol thought. He was not a man who believed in arbitrary evil or random bad luck. He shifted his stance and reached for a different Blood-Jade on the opposite side of the basket. Immediately, the alarm in his head blared again. A cold sweat broke out on the back of his neck,the hair on his arms standing straight up. He subsequently hovered his hand over the third stone. Then the fourth. Then the fifth. He passed his palm over all seven of the Blood-Jades. Without exception, every single one triggered a visceral, biological warning to back away. It was the same instinct that tells a human to pull their hand from a burning fire or to freeze when a venomous snake rattles in the brush. His frown etched even deeper, carving harsh lines into his face. This wasn’t the natural danger of a powerful, angry beast. A Lord-Beast would radiate pride, rage, or violent intent. This felt different. Deciding to stop guessing, he activated his Crimson-Sight. Instantly, the physical world in front of him washed away into a monochromatic spectrum of heat and spiritual density. When he focused his enhanced vision strictly on the Blood-Jades, applying a bit of mental effort to bypass the incredibly dense, warded mineral shells, he finally peeked inside the prisons. What he saw made his breath hitch violently in his throat.

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