“I’ve consumed too much energy… this Is going to affect the merging process.” Even though Aleir drained the life out of One’s body, he still needed time to perfectly merge with it and make it his own. After sacrificing and rebuilding his body over and over again, there was a serious backlash and due to that, Aleir had problems merging with the One’s Life and needed to slowly recover first.

Merging with a life force of an extremely strong being wasn’t easy, and there were serious consequences for failing the merging process. If he failed, his whole energy would be thrown into disorder and the two life forces would start fighting each other until only one survived.

“I need to find a place to rest before I start the merge.” Suddenly a loud cracking sound could be heard and the celling actually started falling down. Now that the Holy Lord of One died, the power that reinforced the inner part of the temple was no longer there, it started to fall down from the damage caused by the fight.

Aleir used the last of his energy to release the dark energy to break through the wall of the inner room.

At this point, there was no one alive but Aleir, who left the temple and got out before the whole building collapsed. When he left the temple, he could see the whole building falling apart and turning into rubble. Once a majestic temple ruled by a strong being now turned into a ruin.

Aleir was still too weak to form a body and it seemed like he would have to stay in that form for a while.

After he left the temple, he started going down the mountains, until he arrived at a forest, that was suitable for a hideout to recover some of his powers. He needed to get a hold of his powers, otherwise the dark energy he wielded could go out of control and start consuming him instead.

Although dark energy gave him great powers, powerful enough to completely overpower beings at the caliber of a Holy Lord, it was very dangerous to keep using them. They could go out of control, if you were too weak and outright consume you, turning you into a mindless puppet.

After a bit of walking, he found a cave and walked in. In the cave, there were tiny little bear cubs, looking at the person who entered their home. It was a group of bear cubs, shivering from the aura Aleir emitted.

He, however, didn’t even look at them and moved further in. He sit down and started to circulate his dark energy to stabilize himself.

In an hour, he regained full control of the dark energy and the dark ball Aleir currently was, started taking shape of a person. There were no features on his body, just a black shape making him look like a ghost.

“I can’t do more than this right now, but it should be barely enough.” He then started circulating the dark energy through every inch of his newly regained body to get fully accustomed to it.

Suddenly, big brown bear entered the cave. When the bear noticed a person in the cave along with its shivering younglings it got on its back legs in a threat posture and let out a roar. The bear then started to run towards the person to tear the person apart. The bear cubs also started loudly screeching as if they were calling for the bear to save them.

However, the bear came to an abrupt halt around 3 meters from the person. There was an ominous aura surrounding him and its instincts were telling it to turn away and run. But the bear couldn’t just leave its younglings to their fate and despite its instincts, it started to slowly walk towards the person, letting out growling sounds in the process.

Aleir still hasn’t moved a bit, nor it seemed like he even noticed the bear coming towards him.

Out of nowhere, a huge burst of dark energy poured out of Aleir and started to attach itself to the bear. The bear violently swayed but couldn’t get rid of the dark energy that already covered him. The dark energy consumed him.

“Dammit, the dark energy went out of control. This goddamn bear is too tempting for it after using up so much of the dark energy.” The bear was fully engulfed in the dark energy that consumed him, so it can recover.

The only sound left in the cave was the loud screeching of the bear cubs, looking sadly at what was left of their parent. Aleir looked at the bear cubs but didn’t do anything. He then proceeded to sit back down and stabilize the violent dark energy, that feasted on the dead bear. “If this continues like this the dark energy will go out of control more often. I need to recover fast and get a hold of the energy.”

Shortly after, Aleir left the cave to search for strong life force. He realized that there was no way he can recover just by trying to control the energy. He needed to satisfy the hunger of the energy first. If he left the energy to hunger It would constantly go out of control and try to consume every being with strong life force to satisfy itself. There was no way he can go on like that, not even being able to control his own power.

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After a few hours, the forest was almost devoid of any animal activity. To someone of Aleir’s caliber it was very easy to clean out an entire forest of all animals. This time no matter how small the life force was, he devoured it. Even the trees withered and their leaves turned gray, devoid of all and any life force.

Aleir inhaled with a relaxed expression “Finally, now I should be able to fully control the energy.”

Nevertheless, he still decided to sit down for a while to stabilize the energy. “Seems like it’s time to devour One’s life force.”

Suddenly, an ice cold aura locked onto him. Despite him recovering quite a bit, the aura felt extremely suffocating to him.

“Dammit, what the hell is this aura?” Aleir didn’t wait and immediately started running to get the aura of off him. However, he could feel that the aura was getting closer and closer. He couldn’t block it out nor escape. The person releasing that aura would soon catch up to him and there was nothing he could do to prevent that.

“Little Nine, what are you doing?” suddenly, an ice cold voice resounded in his head.

“Dammit.” Cursed Aleir

“How does she know about me?” He tried to speed up to get away, but to no avail. Thus Aleir stopped and turned around.

Behind him, he could see a beautiful looking woman, standing few meters away from him. “I’m amazed that you managed to take out One, you shouldn’t have been able to kill him, especially in his own temple.” The woman started slowly making her way towards Aleir. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter now.”

Aleir’s thoughts raced, as he tried to come up with some way to escape. Aleir felt that the woman was way out of his league and were he to fight her, he wouldn’t have a pretty ending.

Aleir started gathering the dark energy around him and turning it into a shape of a dome, that engulfed him and the woman in it. It was the same spell he used against the Holy Lord of One. However, now he was in peak shape after devouring so much life force, so the dome was even stronger. Aleir realized that he cannot escape without fighting his way out. The woman was faster and stronger than him. He needed to at least disable her movement for a few moments to be able to escape.

The woman let herself get engulfed in the dome and silently observed. She was shocked. “I felt some ominous energy coming out of him, but I didn’t expect it to be such dark, vile energy.” The woman however still looked composed, as if she was in no danger whatsoever.

Aleir gave a sinister chuckle. “Now tell me, who you are and how do you know about me and One?”

The woman just looked at him in silence, not interested in responding.

“Fine, I feel that you are very strong, way stronger than One was. However, even you won’t escape unscathed!”

The dark energy forming dome then came crashing down on the woman. But before it even got close to the woman, it started turning into ice. The whole dome suddenly turned into a frozen sculpture.

Aleir stayed there, dumbstruck. He expected the woman to be strong, however this amount of power was way beyond his capabilities to handle. Panic started slowly filling his heart, as he couldn’t think of any way to escape.

With a flick of her fingers, the dome started collapsing “It seems like you don’t even know what power you’ve invited in. Dark powers may make you stronger, but they might also consume you. It’s not something you can control.”

As the woman came closer Aleir, he suddenly took out the life force of The Holy Lord of One and started consuming it. Since he had nothing to lose anymore, he tried to pull off his last desperate gamble.

When the woman saw Aleir trying to consume the life force of One, her expression turned serious and she immediately sent out a large amount of large crystals his way to interrupt him.

However, when the crystals were close to Aleir they suddenly started disintegrating, as if they were just normal ice cycles.

When the woman saw that, her pupils constricted. When she looked closely at Aleir’s figure she could see, that he was missing his arms and legs. Aleir sacrificed his legs and arms to deal with the ice crystals sent out by the woman. The ice crystals were much more stronger than the method she used to destroy his dome. They were her peak technique. She aimed to heavily wound Aleir to interrupt him, however, she never would’ve thought that he had a way to deal with the ice crystals.

Before she could do anything else, Aleir already devoured One’s life force. The woman’s expression turned ugly, as she already formed and sent out another round of ice crystals to kill Aleir. One’s life force was already lost, so she aimed to kill Aleir and no longer held anything back. But before the ice crystals even reached Aleir, he turned to look at the woman with a sinister looking expression. Even the woman felt chills down her spine.

However, at that moment the ice crystals pierced Aleir’s body. But his look didn’t change. Contrary to what was supposed to happen, his body didn’t freeze, nor it seemed like he even noticed the injury. He then started laughing, as he dashed toward the woman, who was around few meters in front of him. When he was near her, he ferociously yelled “DIE!”

The woman was taken aback, as she didn’t expect him to be able to move.

Aleir’s body exploded. The combined power of Aleir’s and One’s life force caused the dark energy to overflow and cause an explosion, destroying everything in the vicinity of several hundred meters. Nothing was left. All of the trees and flora around him was completely annihilated. All that was left, was a dark crystal, laying at the center of the explosion, stuck in the ground.

After a few breaths of time, the woman emerged from the ground, her whole body covered in ice. She looked very tired and a lot of the ice on her body had cracks on it. She was seriously injured and even hobbled. The woman’s expression was extremely ugly. She had to sacrifice a part of her life force to fend off the explosion and even then, she was still injured by the explosion.

She gave one last look to the center of the explosion. She couldn’t see, nor feel any traces of Aleir, so she was sure he must’ve completely killed himself in his suicide attack.