Lucius stepped through the portal, his senses immediately assaulted by the stark change in environment. He found himself in an immense ice cave, its towering ceilings and sprawling expanse dwarfing his already formidable stature. The air was piercingly cold, and each breath formed a misty cloud before him. With his clothing ripped and torn, Lucius momentarily considered the possibility of frostbite—until he realized that his feet felt perfectly fine against the frozen earth.

A glance down at his exposed hands showed no sign of discoloration despite their exposure to the elements, and when he flexed his muscles, he felt strength and warmth suffuse his body in a faint pulse of vitality. For all that he was markedly less covered than when he’d first arrived on the planet, and despite the fact his attire now had gaping holes and gaps in it from the rebar and his sudden evolution both; the cold could find no purchase within him.

His existence seemed to defy the withering touch of mother nature.

The reason for that became apparent quickly enough.

His newly enhanced senses, now attuned to the minutest shifts in his surroundings, picked up the subtle creaks of the ice, the distant dripping of water, and a myriad of faint, almost imperceptible sounds reverberating through the cavern. His feet carried him forward and he set himself to exploring, while his crimson eyes adjusted to the low light rapidly.

As he grew more used to the enhancement of his natural senses, a deep, resonant hum began to reverberate within him—originating from the nascent Sovereign Core growing in his chest. It sang to him in a dark, rhythmic pulse that urged him towards a singular and primal imperative: to consume. With each step, the tempo of this unseen chorus grew, harmonizing with the savage and brutal reality of his new existence.

It was from his Core, as well, that he sensed the emanation of power which had thus far shielded him from the touch of the elements. A surge of instinct told him that such power required fuel to function, and would rapidly lose its potency should the growing Core be denied an infusion of aether in the very near future.

He needed to escape the cold sooner rather than later.

The cavern was bathed in a ghostly luminescence, a spectral light that seemed to emanate from deep within the ice itself. As Lucius's eyes fully adjusted to lighting so immensely inferior to even the now-shattered mausoleum at the heart of the destroyed Prison; the source of the glow became apparent.

An ancient Methuselan starship, nestled like a slumbering leviathan at the heart of the cave.

The vessel was a work of menacing beauty, its design sharp and angular, every line and edge speaking of a predatory elegance. It looked, to his eyes, to be roughly the size of a small corvette at an eyeballed 150 meters of length; with an elongated T shape, with the top edges of the T curving forward into bat-like wings. It was difficult to easily discern, due to the ice that had grown upon and around it; but the center mass appeared to extend into two immense and parallel central lines with a gap between them, all the way to a dual prow.

The aft of the starship was where the majority of its bulk had been focused, and two immense diamond-like objects extended out from the middle mass of each of its immense, blade-like crescent wings. Fins like those of a shark or other predatory creature lined its top, and two immense engines were visible extending out from either side of its aft center mass toward the true stern of the ship.

Its keel appeared largely flat, and what appeared to be a trio of wicked-looking prongs that served as landing gear had been extended down to the iced over earth, which had crawled along them to freeze the warship—for indeed, it was a vessel of war and might—within its impromptu tomb.

The ship still faintly shone with esoteric crimson rune matrices, and its hull seemed to have been hewn from the very essence of darkness. Its surface actively absorbed the ethereal light around it, making it appear as a brooding, silent sentinel awaiting the command of its master. It likely also doubled as quite an effective stealth mechanism, when he put his thoughts to it.

He would not be surprised if that same absorption also nullified the vessel’s heat signature entirely.

Lucius’s contemplation of the starship, and his increased pace of approach now that he’d spied his quarry, was abruptly interrupted by a low and guttural growl that echoed ominously through the immense cavern.

His instincts flared to life, and Lucius felt the Sovereign Core within his solar plexus pulse with rising anticipation at the sound of other life in the vicinity.

Feeling surprisingly calm despite the implication of a hostile life form, Lucius stopped walking and instead cast his gaze around the darkness of the cavern in a methodical, searching pattern.

It did not take long for the thermal and aetheric outline of his quarry to make itself known. While Lucius watched toward what his mind instinctively identified as due west, a creature of nightmare proportions emerged from the deeper and more shadowed recesses of the cavern where even his eyes had some measure of difficulty seeing.

It was, in the simplest and most straightforward of descriptions, a behemoth.

Its fur was matted with frost, and its eyes glowed with a baleful intelligence. Its muscles rippled beneath its thick russet hide, and it moved with deceptive grace that inferred each step to be deliberate and measured. Lucius recognized it as a creature of legend, a being once identified in humanity’s folklore as a Yeti.

Clearly it was an apex predator of this frozen world, and was quite used to being the single most lethal bipedal creature within its demesnes. At twelve feet high and easily eight feet wide, and with two arms and legs that looked capable of crushing a small starfighter with sheer strength; it was a creature that none save the most highly trained of the Republic’s Cultivators would have attempted to engage. Anything less, and any human facing the creature would have faced certain death.

But Lucius was no longer bound by human limitations.

When the creature bellowed its challenge and charged, its massive jaws agape and salivating for the kill; Lucius' newfound Methuselan instincts surged to the forefront. He moved with a speed and fluidity that his former self could never have achieved, and sidestepped the creature's initial strike with a dancer's grace.

The impact of its blow rattled the cavern, and shards of ice and pieces of stone descended like rain from on high.

Lucius weaved through that falling detritus with less than half his focus.

His mind was a calm center in the midst of the storm, coldly calculating and predatorily pragmatic, and assessed the beast's movements while searching for weaknesses.

When the creature struck again, this time with an attempted double-swipe of its foot-long talons; Lucius swayed away from the raking claws with inches to spare, and then bent back toward the floor a second later when the creature thrust the claws forward—assuming a position that put him at almost ninety-degrees backward and put his spine perpendicular to the earth.

The beast’s claws punched through the air where his torso had been, and Lucius straightened smoothly when they withdrew. A ripple of shocked surprise rolled through his mind at the range of his new body’s movement, and he paid for his momentary lack of awareness when a reverse-swipe of the beast’s right arm smashed into him like a speeding aircar.

A grunt of pain escaped his lips and Lucius heard air whistling past his ears as he was flung like a ragdoll away from the beast—and toward the Methuselan starship. His impact against the vessel’s ancient tomb rattled his new body, and amidst the boom and crack of contact, he thought he felt several of his ribs fracture. His new mind processed the damage with a detached awareness that seemed inherited and refined from his days among the Aether Elite—and he immediately felt the moment that his Sovereign Core worked to infuse aether into the wounds, in order to correct the ‘flaw’ in his anatomy.

It pushed his until-then active cold resistance to dangerous levels.

“Vampiric regeneration, I suppose.” Lucius said to himself in his new, and reverberating baritone. He sounded refined, elegant, and superior in a way he had never mastered in life. He actually felt where the sheer bass in his voice vibrated along his diaphragm.

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Lucius narrowed his eyes on the behemoth when it turned, and then flicked his gaze across the floor.

His eyes caught the glint of a sharp-edged length of ice separated from the starship’s impromptu icebox, and he exploded into motion to where it lay on the cave floor. Moving with purpose, Lucius grasped it, and the shard of ice felt firm even under the newfound strength of his new body’s grip.

The creature, seemingly enraged by Lucius’ continued presence in the world of the living, wheeled around with surprising agility and surged toward him with shocking agility. Its two legs tore the frosty ground apart as it charged, and with a distance-closing leap it parted its immense jaws with the intent of biting down upon him.

Lucius didn’t outright dodge, and instead rolled forward beneath its gaping maw, feeling the rush of air as massive teeth snapped shut inches above him with the force of a hydraulic press.

He felt his ribs actively repairing when he came up into a crouch behind the already-turning ‘yeti’, and wasted no time on what once may have been a moment of second-guessing hesitation. Instead, like the predator he was, he acted.

In one fluid motion, he drove the two foot spike of ice deep into the creature’s flank.

A howl of pain and fury reverberated through the cave, but Lucius was already on the move, with the now-bloodied piece of frozen material torn free and held firmly in his naked palm. The beast spun to follow his movement and Lucius dived forward again, trusting in his instincts and smaller size to avoid the ever-so-slightly more sluggish return blow.

He had punctured an organ with his first attack, and showed no mercy with his second.

A vicious blow between the creature’s legs, toward the four orbs of reproductive anatomy tight against its lower body, punched upward in a viscous eruption of blood and other fluids—and the creature’s scream of agony was notably higher in octave when it erupted a second later.

Lucius spent no time gloating, however, and simply tore the spike forward and out with an evasive roll.

The creature staggered, leaking blood in a torrent, and turned to face him with slight-but-noticeable unsteadiness to its gait.

Its eyes fixed on him with abject hatred, and more than that, an echo of fear.

Lucius felt something dark and hungry rise within him at the emotion, and he charged.

In the whirlwind melee of claws, snapping teeth, spraying blood and bestial snarls that followed; Lucius targeted the creature's vulnerable spots—the soft underbelly, the joints, and even the eyes. His strength, now magnified, allowed him to inflict wounds that would have been impossible before.

His movements, to his old self, would have become an ever-increasing blur as the deadly dance continued, and his new body’s agility ramped up in speed with a symphony of lethal intent.

He was not just defending; he was dominating, and asserting his newfound place in the natural order.

Despite its size and raw power, the creature was no match for Lucius’s relentless assault. It fought with primal ferocity, but each slash of its claws and each bite of its jaws met only air as Lucius danced around it with supernatural agility.

Sensing the tide turning, Lucius saw an opening and seized it.

He evaded a swipe of its massive paw and, with a calculated leap, launched himself vertically from beside the creature, and added to the motion with a twist of his torso.

The ice shard came around in his right hand with every iota of his new strength, and using the momentum of his twisting torso he slammed it home into the behemoth’s eye when it turned to watch him.

The point pierced through and the ice shard slammed home into its brain.

Lucius landed behind it, and idly wiped the blood from its exploded eye onto his pants.

The beast’s movements ceased abruptly while he watched, its massive body spasming in its death throes, and staggering backward before collapsing onto the icy earth with a thunderous finality.

Lucius stepped forward to stand over the fallen beast after it ceased movement, his breathing steady and controlled. He felt an exhilarating rush of power, and a surge of primal satisfaction in the hunt and the kill. There was something about the moment that suffused him with a soul-deep sense of rightness that was impossible to properly describe. It felt like a baptism, or an acknowledgement from the universe that his chosen path was the correct one.

His eyes roamed over the felled carcass of the yeti, and he felt the Sovereign Core's hum reach a crescendo, and a pang of chill in his limbs when the new Core within him demanded fulfillment. His eyes narrowed upon the corpse, still warm in the frosty gloom, and savage understanding dawned in his mind.

The beast had possessed an aether aura, after all.

It was clear what his Sovereign Core demanded.

Lucius retrieved the ice shard with a wet sound of tearing flesh, and wrested it free from the brain matter and eye socket he’d embedded it into with another nerve-spasm from the dead behemoth. He spared it no mind when it twitched, and instead approached its torso with narrowed eyes.

The moment he found the highest saturation of aether density, he tore into the creature's carcass with a decisive and brutal slash of the ice shard—followed immediately by another, and then another, and then another. A relentless tempo of slices and carving impalements that saw him tear open the creature’s flesh and body like a gore-soaked pinata.

The ice shard was discarded once he was in, and Lucius instead wrapped his fists around the creature’s immense ribcage, and began systematically breaking the rib bones with echoing, and what he once might have called blood-curdling sounds of snapping and cracking bone.

The Methuselah he had become regarded the entire process as rote necessity, and he found no discomfort in his actions—only a pleasant sense of fulfillment, and proper adherence to the natural order. His eyes remained fixed on the corpse while his hands, guided by an instinctive knowledge, delved deep in search for the physical manifestation of its Aether Core—the source of its life force.

All creatures of sufficient evolution or power possessed an Aether Core. Whether or not they knew how to Cultivate it consciously or instinctively, one of the universal constants that humanity had discovered upon reaching ‘Enlightenment’ was that even life forms on earth possessed the esoteric orbs of aetheric force. They were at once physical and metaphysical both, formed of pure energy in a solid form within the body, and yet capable of dispersing into that same energy upon the expiration of the body.

The lack of awareness of the existence of Aether Cores could be simply explained by the lack of saturated aether on Earth. No creatures, other than the immense leviathans eventually discovered in the deep seas, had been possessed of enough life force to properly manifest Cores that persisted past death.

Not even humans had been able to, until their later enlightenment.

“There you are.” Lucius murmured in resonant tones upon finding his quarry, and wrapping his blood-soaked right fist around its icy blue shape. When Lucius grasped the orb of concentrated aether, he felt an excited pulse from his Sovereign Core, and raised an eyebrow in consideration of the thing he held.

As a human he had consumed Essence, but only insofar as what was needed for advancement or survival. It had never been a casual or common thing, and had usually been performed only when hunting particularly terrifying or sanctioned apex predator species.

The remnants of the man he’d been swirled for only a moment, and then were dispersed by the Methuselan instincts that had replaced his mortal weaknesses. Lucius tightened his alabaster fingers into a vise, and the Beast Core—the term he knew such Cores to be titled—cracked, and then shattered under his hold.

The moment it did, an instinctive surge of power came to the fore of his mind, and Lucius corralled the diffusing aether as much by instinct as by some application of what he’d done when consuming such energies in the past. Crimson mist swirled from the air to surround the escaping aether and marshaled it back into the shape of a dense cloud of azure essence, which Lucius promptly absorbed through his pores.

It was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before.

The Sovereign Core within him sang its pleasure at the influx of energy, and Lucius felt weariness and bruises he hadn’t noticed fade away almost instantly when the aether flooded his being. For all its savage primalism, the ‘yeti’ had been a creature of great vitality—and Lucius felt every iota of that bestial power suffuse him with the minty chill of ice-aligned essence.

The cave’s darkness turned brighter to his eyes, and he felt his senses enhance and sharpen even further from the consumption; allowing him to better assess everything within his proximity. It brought with it a rush of power, vitality, and a deep, dark satisfaction. The sensation was almost overwhelming in its pleasure, and Lucius let loose a sigh of delight at the sensation.

He had violently dominated and consumed the life force of another being.

It filled him with a rightness that no words could ever do justice to.

The Sovereign Core within him pulsing in triumph, and he felt it subtly grow in density at the influx of essence—though so, too, did he realize what Arkaenan had said to be true: he would need to meditate, cultivate, and properly absorb the essence fully into his Core. He could feel the excess drifting through his veins, aimless and unharnessed due to its lack of proper refinement.

In rough estimation, he postulated that he had only fully absorbed perhaps sixty percent of the total aether he’d taken in from the Beast Core. The remainder was ‘loose essence’, and would need to be Cultivated to ensure he did not lose a vital amount of growth. It may have seemed like a relatively small amount, but over time such losses added up—and Lucius had no intention of weakening himself needlessly.

His eyes turned toward the waiting starship, and he let out a misty breath in thought.

First, he would Cultivate the essence singing in his veins, and ensure the development of his nascent Core. The power he had invested into it with the essence would easily safeguard him from the sub-zero temperatures, and Cultivation would only ensure it did so to greater potency. Once that was completed, he would break through the ice and find a way aboard his new chariot.

And from there, onward to the Crimson Star and the destiny which awaited him.