Chapter 1024: Growing Luck The stamping of Rowan's foot shattered the ball of flesh that had been drained from outside and within. Outside by the least, and within by him. Rowan hung in the air for a single second, he had noticed that the gravity inside the stomach of the beast was weaker than what was available outside. Before his feet touched the surface of the stomach of the beast, in that brief moment when he was in the air his eyesight perused the overall state of the stomach. Unlike the stomach of a mortal creature that usually contained some sort of fluid, and was constantly in motion, the stomach of this creature was bone dry and looked like a cave with hundreds of glowing crystals scattered around, and it was cold, enough that Rowan had to begin diverting a lot of resources to keep his organs functional. From the size of the stomach which resembled a fairly large cave, he could estimate that this creature must be around a hundred to three hundred feet in height. However, it was difficult to judge the exact size of supernatural beasts using their internal organs due to various reasons, from fewer or more organs in the body to more exotic reasons like spatial expansion. Before Rowan's feet could touch the insides of the stomach, thousands of tiny worms emerged from the pores of his small feet and wrapped around his feet encasing them in a mesh of wriggling flesh. Rowan was surprised at what happened next when he immediately detected hundreds of worms began to swell up before violently exploding. What had happened was unexpected, every parasite was linked with him, but when outside his body, as a security feature they could not transmit whatever energies entered their bodies back to him, but he could understand everything that occurred inside their bodies. The moment the parasites had touched the walls of the stomach, they had been filled with so much vitality, that they had simply exploded. He squeezed his eyes in thought for a moment before he understood what was happening and he nearly smiled. Even if the Will of this world was moving against him in earnest, his luck was beginning to turn the table. This beast was a carrion, it did not feed off of life, but from death. In fact, he suspected that life was poisonous to this beast, and the dried ball of flesh he had seen outside was filled with expelled vitality from the stomach of the beast. Was this why he was being fed with vitality? No, Rowan quickly decided, the clear stream of vitality entering his body from a mysterious place was far more dense and pure than what was available inside the body of the beast. "How very interesting, I never expected to come across such a creature like this." Rowan's plan before was that he would leave the stomach of the beast and crawl towards its spine or the area closest to its brain, and from there he would find ways of killing it quickly or if not, slowly and in a manner that the beast would not easily detect his presence, but this surprising ability it had demonstrated had given him a new idea on how to proceed forward. Why should he kill something that had what he wanted? This beast fed off death and produced life as its waste, without a stronger consciousness to investigate how this process was occurring, Rowan could only act using intuition and his understanding of mystical energy manipulation. He might not be able to understand the process but he could easily hijack it to serve his purposes. Rowan marshaled half of the parasitic worms inside his body and he pushed them out from himself with tremendous force. From his tiny body of around thirty-five inches, a red wave of parasite that should have been nearly ten times his body weight shot out from him and splattered against all the surfaces of the stomach. He was able to contain this amount of parasites by compressing them onto every single cell in his body, this made him extraordinarily dense, acting as a natural inner armor. When he needed the parasites he could eject them from his body in the blink of an eye. These parasitic worms flooded the entire stomach of the beast, and before long they all gruesomely exploded, Rowan turned his head to a portion of the cave where the parasites had perished the most quickly, this was his target. Creating a spring using the parasites wrapped around his feet he was launched towards that corner of the stomach, and in mid-air Rowan wrapped parasitic worms around his umbilical cord, making it stretch forward like a whip and pierce into the wall of the stomach before retracting, pulling him directly towards his target. This part of the stomach he discovered led to the throat, and there was a large cluster of corpses that had been drained of every fluid and death energy they contained; they were bleached and pale but contained an enormous source of vitality. Rowan turned around and sat on the pile of dried corpses, he relaxed as if he sat on a throne, and groaned softly as dense waves of vitality flooded into his body, and he closed his eyes and began to channel the surge of vitality into his blood. He did not allow this vitality to run unrestricted inside his body, if he did this body would begin to grow unchecked, he was not concerned about cancerous growth, but upgrading this mortal flesh in an overall manner was not yet his priority, it was the brain and the nervous system that was important. Rowan wanted to access his mental space quickly, to do that he would need a stronger consciousness, and to attain a stronger consciousness he needed a stronger body to house that consciousness. That was the long-term goal, to quickly access his mental space in less than a year, he needed more mental prowess. Channeling the dense wave of life, he melted all the parasites in his body except a few that he kept near the wrists, forehead, and knees, those were for his offense, defense, and movement, the melted parasites became the framework he used in supporting the expected growth he was planning. Rowan would not change the outer portion of this body, even his internal organs would largely remain the same, but that would only be on the surface, within would be something else entirely. The body of the child would be his shell and within he would be growing the true framework of his power. Concentrating on the spine of the baby, he hollowed it out, making sure the outer portion of it had enough ligaments and cartilage to support the locomotion of his spine, and with that out of the way he began to build. In every inch of his spine, he began to create small seeds. He had to pause this operation now and then because he consumed the entire vitality inside the belly of the beast and had to wait for it to generate more, and the beast promptly did so by swallowing another batch of corpses. Weeks passed in this manner as he continued creating the seeds in his spine, and when he had created a hundred of them he rested for a few hours. Creating these seeds had not been easy at all because of what they represented-All these seeds were the Nascent states for new brains. What Rowan had been doing for the last few weeks was creating a hundred brains inside the body of this infant. The spark of consciousness that ran through his body like lightning as a hundred brains ignited in his spine was a spectacular sight. Each brain was smaller than a mustard seed and was shaped like a triangle, they were crystalline and had no outward resemblance to a brain, but they were all functional organs, although not one that should ever appear inside the body of a mortal. Rowan arched his back as his consciousness linked to the brains in an ever-increasing cascade and his consciousness although did not grow now had more infrastructure to work with. His consciousness had been like a powerful supercomputer that was stuck into an analog calculator, he needed an upgrade of his hardware to ensure a smoother operation of his -consciousness power. Rowan had spent almost two years building this new neural architecture, a far cry from the single year he would have taken to access his mental space, but he deemed that such an action was worth it because it would be more beneficial to him in the present and future. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖 He had lost a year building up this neural network but he had gained far more. With his mind free of exerting greater control of himself and the reality around him, Rowan had easily noticed that the stomach of the beast had begun to grow increasingly larger, as it was able to devour more death energy due to Rowan consuming all the vitality its body produces. Rowan had unexpectedly created a symbiotic relationship with this beast, and it had benefitted greatly. This became apparent when in recent months, the bodies entering the stomach of the beast were now different. Before they were all humanoid, but now most bodies this beast was consuming were insectlike, having multiple limbs, chitin, and other unmentionable appendages. Rowan's perception spread outside the stomach of the beast for the first time.