I jumped to the side, dodging a house-sized piece of rock. I could have taken it head-on, but then I would get buried, and that was annoying. So I didn’t. As the rock missed me, my eyes burst to life, burning a hole into the flesh of the humongous beast, shocking it with Lightning at the same time.

With a thunderous voice, it roared, and I realized, my Lightning was too weak. I was fighting a large monster called a Black Troll. The beast that once meant death for me, the beast that destroyed Predator’s Bane, I battled like an equal.

After removing my Ring of Weightlessness, I transformed, taking on the characteristics of a Dragon. My limbs grew, my skin turned to scales, and small horns formed on my forehead, as dark as night, as black as coal.

The beast roared, unafraid, and tore out an ancient tree, using it as a club, and swung it sideways. I roared back and the wood splintered, shattering into a million pieces as it collided with my reinforced skin, failing to move me.

I jumped in turn, like a cannonball fired from a cannon, and landed a devastating blow on the face of my foe. A thunderous boom shook the forest and the beast stumbled back. Despite our significant disparity in size, I came out on top in terms of mass.

As my feet landed, the ground shook. My hands were like hydraulic pistons moving at lightning speeds as I rushed forward and delivered my punches, one after the other, into the exposed legs of the Black Troll.

The beast roared and swung its mighty fist, which I dodged with ease. For all the strength the massive creature had, its strength was abysmal. Time slowed down and I walked away, circling the beast, watching, looking for weak points. There were so many, the choices were endless.

But I didn’t like them, there was no challenge. I tried my pure physical prowess, without using Qi, and found I came out on top. I was so far ahead, it wasn’t even fair. And that was in terms of strength. The beast couldn’t kill me even if I didn’t resist.

The chasm between us was huge. Yet there was still more to go between me and a Spirit Cultivator, but I was closing that distance fast.

I wondered another thing. I picked up a stone and weighed it in my hand. It was light as a feather. Such a thing could never hurt a Golden Core Cultivator. Everybody knew that. But was that true? What if it could?

500g stone, going at 99.9% light speed. That would be… like taking a nuke to the face. Could a Cultivator really survive something like that? I doubt it. I’ve seen them die from less. Much less. There was a limit to how much strain Golden Qi could take before breaking. It was a lot, but nowhere near nuke level.

I slowly turned and looked at the Black Troll who already noticed me, and accelerated the stone to Mach 1, breaking the speed of sound. It smashed into the dense fur and exploded into a shower of dust and sand.

Did it do any damage?

No, no it did not.

But what about Mach 2? I accelerated another stone, smashing into a wall of muscle. Nothing. How about Mach 3? 4? 5? 6?

The ground trembled as bigger and bigger rocks rose up and cracked apart only to be accelerated in an instant, producing sonic booms, and smashing against the enraged beast. I used no Qi to enhance them, to give them power. I just accelerated them and let them go. Pure kinetic energy against magic.

At Mach 10 I noticed the breakdown. They clearly began to hurt. At Mach 12, the skin was unable to hold any longer. And I always aimed for a fresh patch, not willing to compromise the experiment.

At Mach 14, the stones went deep, and at 15, they came back out on the other side. Not the 500g stones, but the bigger rocks. I realized that I had a limit on how fast I could instantly accelerate something, and the small pebbles didn’t do enough damage.

But the large, head-sized boulders did the trick as I could push them to go just as fast. The speeds weren’t exactly on the dot, but they were close. I had no modern measuring tools after all. I just knew they were fast.

Anyway, I laughed as I watched the beast stumble from the unrelenting assault. I never would have guessed a beast of that size could be brought down by mere rocks alone. No advanced techniques or special energy needed. Just raw kinetic energy.

[Dust to Dust.] The words were born in my mind and I decided they fitted perfectly as a name for such a technique.

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Modern technology could kill the beast just the same, with overwhelming kinetic energy, leaving only dust in its wake. And I realized that was a problem. I still wasn’t strong enough. For as long as I was weaker than a nuclear weapon, I would consider my work unfinished.

I stopped attacking with rocks and instead jumped up, empowering myself with Qi. I pulled my fist back and punched the beast in the face. That time I was serious. I pushed my energy past its defenses and through its skull, till it came out on the other side.

With the brain matter obliterated, it died. The colossal vitality didn’t matter when it sustained a mortal wound like that. The mountain of flesh collapsed, and the ground shook. It was over.

I stepped over to the beast, dipped my fingers in the fresh crimson blood, and drew two lines on my face. I then took off my robe and summoned a sword. It was time for another upgrade. I drew a formation on the ground with the fresh blood and then began carving my back once more.

The power of the beast. The vitality of a Black Troll. Praised for its ability to endure, feared for its strength and aggression, and respected for its size. I took it all.

I could feel my flesh and Soul taking on the characteristics that made the beast, guiding the merger with my mind. When I felt the foreign life force trying to change me in a way I did not desire, making my body hair grow thicker and longer, I pushed the changes back and burned them out of my newly acquired bloodline.

My body expanded and I grew taller and stronger than ever before. I added another 10% or so to my height, and my limbs lengthened and my shoulders grew wider, allowing for more muscle to be packed on my frame.

I tested out the transformation and felt my body filling me with even more power as Qi circulated in the ways of a Troll. I became like a Hulk with all the bulging muscles and super thick bones. I then added the Dragonification on top of that, and I grew further, becoming a mountain of flesh over three meters high.

My nails turned to claws and the scales grew thicker than ever before, enhanced by the vitality of a Black Troll. My legs were like century-old tree trunks and I felt stable like a mountain. I got the feeling like nothing in the world could move me.

I became an absolute unit!

Testing my voice with a roar, I nearly scared myself. It was a deep and guttural, rumbling voice like that of distant thunder or cannon fire. I laughed with the power that coursed through my veins. Forget sex, this feeling of invincibility was a thousand times better.

The greatest feeling for simply existing. What a dream.

After every jump in power, I thought there was no way I could ever feel any better, yet I was proven wrong time and time again. And for all these bloodline-absorptions I was doing, I didn’t really know how they worked. I knew the steps required, I knew what runes to carve, but if someone asked me to explain the mechanism behind it, I wouldn’t know.

It wasn’t even a purely physical effect either. During the bloody ritual, the Soul changed as well. It took on the property of another, slightly cursing the user you could say. The Black Troll wanted to give me extra body hair, but I didn’t want that, so I removed that part of the curse. It could be manipulated like that. Very convenient.

That showed that not all curses were the same. Some could be good and some could be bad. It depended on what you wanted to happen and how much you could take.

Being cursed just meant your energy moved away from the default, away from your normal baseline. Obviously, there were countless ways to make it worse and only a few ways to make it better, so most people never messed with it.

Unless you were a part of the Myriad Beasts Sect where everyone was cursed after stepping into the Golden Core by taking on an animal bloodline. Just one though. Mixing and matching multiple was a mess, especially since some of them clashed, and unwanted curses to the Soul could quickly become deadly.

I didn’t experience any of those problems though. It was just like eating. I could eat a rabbit, a cow, or a human. Meat was meat. Some might have second thoughts about that, but for me, as long as it had Essence, it was food.

***

I kept my red, scale-covered hulking form as I ran through the forest. Each step would surely sink me into the ground if I didn’t hold myself up with the help of golden steps. I had no idea Conjuration would be so vital for a Cultivator. Just imagine trying to run without it. It would be a nightmare.

Earth might feel solid to a normal human, but when your weight goes into double or even triple digits in terms of metric tons, the area of a foot might as well be the tip of a spear. You would just sink into the ground, turning solid earth for a Mortal into an inescapable bog for a heavy Cultivator.

That would be way too funny. A powerful Cultivator stuck in the soil, each of his steps sinking him deeper.

Yup, Conjuration saved the day. I kept running while creating footholds for myself. I had to train in the skill anyway, might as well do it while sustaining a transformation. It didn’t take much energy anyway, and I could keep it going for an entire day and still not feel exhausted.

Heck, I dropped down to all fours, my slightly longer arms from the transformation giving me an even better form for using Hunting Tiger. The forest became my obstacle course and I jumped left and right while gathering speed as I pretended to chase an invisible enemy.

The forest rumbled and I roared, having great fun, and any animal or beast with a brain had long since escaped. Probably some humans too, though I hadn’t seen or smelled any. As it turns out, Black Trolls had an incredible sense of smell. And now, so had I.

But then I suddenly stopped. I felt a distant rumbling, one I was not responsible for. It was distant, almost silent. I dropped my ear to the ground and listened.

It was powerful even though it was quiet, and I even felt Qi move with it. Once a second, every second, never stopping. Like drums of war.

I watched the Qi in the air shift back and forth with every distant boom and grinned. Another side quest had just appeared. Investigate the disturbance in the forest. And I would oblige.