Chapter 242: The Third Phase Darkness. Finn floated in it, consciousness drifting without anchor or direction. There was no pain here. The pressure, the crushing weight, and the erupting darkness of suppressed desires from before were all gone. He was just aware that he was in a void, feeling time passing by agonizingly slowly. But besides that, nothing else... Until finally, there was a change. Reality reformed around him, and he immediately noticed something was off. Very off. First off, his perspective had changed entirely. He was much lower to the ground now, as if he had lost a solid three feet from his height. His body also felt different. He was heavier and bulkier now, while also being more compact. His senses were sharper in some ways and duller in others. Colors seemed muted, but he could smell everything with overwhelming intensity. Most of all, his mind was quiet. The usual thoughts that should normally be in his head had been relegated to the background. It was almost like he was a passenger hiding in someone else’s mind and watching the world through their eyes. No. Not someone... Something... After the initial moment of disorientation and confusion, Finn immediately understood where he was and what was happening. He was inside the Crimson Fist Baboon. Exactly like when he attempted forcing an adaptation onto a soul mass in the future, where he’d enter their memories, he was also doing the same right now — or rather, the trial was doing the same to him. He was experiencing the Crimson Fist Baboon’s life from within. The memories began. Time moved strangely. Days blurred together. Weeks passed like heartbeats. Finn experienced years of simple, brutal existence as the creature lived its life. It was a beast. Nothing more. It hunted. It ate. It fought rivals for territory and mating rights. It fled from larger predators and killed smaller prey. The cycle repeated endlessly, governed by instinct and immediate need. Finn felt the simplicity of it. The lack of higher thought. The creature didn’t question or ponder. It simply was. Years passed like this. The creature grew larger, stronger. It won more fights than it lost. It claimed better territory. Gathered a small troop of followers. But still, it was just a beast. Then things began to change. The shift was gradual. So subtle that Finn almost missed it at first. The creature started noticing things it hadn’t before. Patterns in the stars. The way certain plants grew near water sources. How other animals behaved before storms came. It began to remember things from seasons past. To anticipate events based on previous experience rather than reacting at the moment it happened. It was getting smarter. But the real turning point came during a hunt that went wrong. The creature had pursued prey into unfamiliar territory and found itself facing something it had never encountered before. Humans. A hunting party with spears and fire and coordination that transcended individual strength. They’d injured it badly. Driven it away from its territory. Forced it to flee like common prey. And for the first time in its existence, the creature felt something beyond base emotion. It felt humiliated. The creature retreated deep into the mountains, into a cave where it could lick its wounds in safety. And there, surrounded by stone and darkness, it did something unprecedented. It thought. For five days and five nights, the creature sat motionless. Not doing anything except... thinking. Finn watched from within, fascinated and confused. What was happening? What was the creature contemplating with such single-minded focus? On the sixth day, something changed. Finn felt it like a thunderclap inside the creature’s mind. An expansion. A barrier breaking. A fundamental shift in the nature of its consciousness. The creature opened its eyes, and they were different. There was awareness in them now. True awareness. Not just instinct and pattern recognition, but actual thought. Understanding. Consciousness. And with consciousness came power. The creature raised its hand, and for the first time, purposefully clenched it into a fist. Its blood began to boil. Literally boil, heating beyond what any natural body should survive. Its muscles swelled, pushing past biological limits, becoming something more than flesh and bone. The fist glowed crimson with internal heat and power, and when the creature struck the cave wall, the stone exploded like it had been hit by a siege weapon. Finn understood with dawning shock. This was it. The moment of enlightenment. The creature had broken through some invisible barrier purely through internal contemplation. It hadn’t needed outside worship or belief or lore. It had transcended through sheer force of will and understanding. There was another path to divinity. A personal path. The path of enlightenment. From that point, everything changed. The creature began exploring its new capabilities. It learned to control the boiling blood, to channel it into specific parts of its body for explosive power. It discovered it could enhance its senses beyond natural limits, perceive things that should be invisible. In time, the humans who had once hunted it for sport also noticed the change. Finn watched through the creature’s eyes as human hunting parties approached with caution now rather than confidence. He watched as they began leaving offerings instead of setting traps. Watched as their fear turned to reverence. The humans, who had considered themselves "superior creatures," now saw themselves as lesser. They’d recognized that something had fundamentally shifted. The beast they’d once hunted had become the same thing they now worshipped. And this was where Finn began to see the creature’s flaw developing. As time passed, as the Crimson Fist Baboon — now truly a Tyrant in its own right — grew accustomed to wielding supernatural power, it stopped seeking enlightenment as intensely. The hard part was done. It had broken through. It could use these powers. Why continue the difficult practice of deep contemplation when it could simply enjoy its newfound strength? Its base nature began reasserting itself. Not completely, but enough. The desire for dominance. For territory. For proving its superiority over rivals. And there were rivals. Finn felt the creature’s awareness expand to encompass a wider world. Other beings existed out there. Other creatures that had somehow achieved similar breakthroughs. The first one the Tyrant encountered was an eagle... one that Finn recognized immediately. The Ferropteryx Eagle. The iron-winged terror that had plagued him with soul debts in his future timeline. The Rank 15/21 soul mass he’d carried. It was no surprise that seeing the creature in its live form, it was also just as magnificent and terrible, if not more so. Its wings gleamed like polished metal, each feather sharp enough to slice stone. It commanded the skies with absolute authority, and when it noticed the Crimson Fist Tyrant, it descended pridefully and without any hint of hesitation, almost like its superiority was being threatened. The battle was brutal. Both creatures wielded power beyond the physical, clashing in displays that reshaped the landscape around them. The Ferropteryx’s wings generated cutting winds that carved through mountainsides. The Tyrant’s crimson fist strikes created shockwaves that flattened forests. Neither could claim absolute victory. They fought to exhaustion and separated, mutual respect established through violence. But Finn had noticed something during that fight. Something the Tyrant had noticed too.