Inside a large desert with high temperatures, Rob flew through the air wearing a white lab gown on top of a simple white shirt and black pants. He wore a pair of glasses that complemented well with his pretty boy face, giving him more of a scholarly vibe.
He pointed his gun down at the ground, with one eye closed and the other eye open. An illusory scope hovered on top of the rifle as he looked through it, and down in the ground below, huge worm-like creatures flowed through the sand like fish in water and were displayed as huge red illusions of their vague silhouettes.
Rob took a deep breath and pressed the trigger, launching out a fiery red bullet that pierced through the ground and deep into the sand below. A muffled explosion boomed with billowing smoke as Rob waved his arm and used Fortune Stealer.
From the dead corpse of the large worm, a milky white soul flew out and landed in Rob’s hands. He then grabbed it tightly and stole its foundation, strengthening his soul to another level.
Before, his soul used to appear as an ethereal mold of colors, shifting and twisting at random, but now, it appeared like a tear-drop-shaped cloud of colorful smoke. This was an indication that he was nearing closer and closer to acquiring a Gaseous Soul and was just a few souls away from completion.
He continued to shoot out more bullets, killing one giant worm after another, stealing their souls, and deepening his own foundation. This seemed to have finally captured the attention of the other worms, as one by one, huge worms with wide-open maws full of sharp teeth rushed out of the ground and into the sky in an attempt to swallow him whole.
Rob was prepared though, and he simply flew higher into the sky to avoid their attacks as they landed helplessly back to the sandy desert below. He aimed his gun at the falling worms and out came a volley of fiery bullets that exploded into bright flames one by one.
It was simple. It was effective.
He continued his hunt without pause as if he was hellbent on killing all of the giant worms inside this desert. More and more souls landed in his grasp, and all were used to strengthen the foundation of his soul to another level with each soul stolen.
Soul by soul, they transformed into traces of milky white that caused his cloud-like rainbow-colored soul to churn and bubble, and its translucent-ness began to disappear to then be replaced by solid colors.
The closer it got to achieving a new state, the stronger Rob’s divine sense became. He actively kept it up, and could continuously see the rate of progress he had. His senses were sharpened and heightened to an extreme degree, and in the endless darkness, his vision began to grow onward to a distant wall of squirming globs, with strange chunks of colors inside them, with twisting lumps of thingies moving in and out of those various… cells.
‘Cellular-level senses. Once my soul turns gaseous, my divine sense would finally be able to interfere with the inner machinations of cells, and subsequently, life!’ Rob wore a wide grin as he shot another bullet. ‘Soon, my armor would be perfected, and my strength would rise exponentially!’
He kept on with his onslaught. Not a single giant worm was spared.
Eventually, it seemed to have angered the boss of this dungeon as the entire desert beneath him shook, and through his glasses, he could see a terrifying large blotch of red moving at breakneck speeds toward him.
In the next moment, a large worm - ten meters wide in diameter, with a large open mouth full of rows of sharp teeth - flew out into the sky like a fish leaping out of the sea. Before Rob knew it, he was already inside the worm’s mouth, and darkness quickly closed in on him as the mouth came to a close.
Rob snorted and snapped his fingers. As he did so, matter began to shift and change, and out of nowhere, the entire head of the giant worm simply disappeared, dispersed, and disintegrated into fleeting dust.
Its remaining flesh squirmed and shook in an attempt to regenerate its head. It was overflowing with vitality from head to tail, so something like this could be easily healed in a short amount of time, but Rob wasn’t dumb enough to let it do as it wished.
He unfurled his divine sense, and using his still hazy control over cells, a gross change started to occur from the stump of the headless worm. Rob teleported away into the air to observe the results of what he had done and looked down at the squirming worm with a serene smile.
From the stump, tumors began to sprout as teeth and nerves splattered out like blood, dangling to the sides of the trashing worm. A pained cry could be heard as the tumors grew rapidly like the plague, expanding further from the worm, and influencing its healthy flesh into a weird, grotesque state.
It was a grim sight, but Rob had seen too much horrific shit to be perturbed by something as mundane as a gargantuan worm exploding into a mass of tumors, with teeth and flesh popping out in a pandemonium of eldritch horror.
“How interesting,” Rob mumbled with a smile. Deciding to finally kill this thing since no more visible changes occurred, he raised his arm into the sky and using alchemy magic, ionized air gathered into one sphere of bright orange light as he prepared to launch one devastating blow.
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The worm continued to struggle, squirming and trashing about in its endless torment.
Rob waved his hand forward and a pillar of overheated plasma beamed towards the struggling worm, starting from its head down to its tail, while subsequently melting the sandy desert around it to molten sand.
When his attack ended, Rob approached the mass of tumors and charred worm flesh before proceeding to steal its soul using Fortune Stealer. The soul of the monster was many times stronger than its normal counterpart, and Rob’s soul became infinitely closer to becoming gaseous, but not quite there yet.
“Sigh, the grind never stops,” Rob groaned and continued to hunt down the worms while ignoring the glowing blue portal that opened near the giant body of the worm.
…
After what had seemed like hours, Rob finally stepped out of the dungeon and landed inside a plain gray room, with sturdy walls and a metallic door that can prevent monsters from setting loose to the manor of the Dolton family.
Rob wore a wide grin as the sand that had landed on his white lab coat was swept with extreme precision. He gathered them into a barely perceptible ball of sand, morphed them into glass, and merged them with the glasses on his face.
It was… easy. It was intuitive. It was so accurate. His divine sense had never been this clear before, had never been so precise with its control and perception. He could see the organelles floating within the cells of his body, the way his immune system fought off the surrounding viruses and bacteria clogging the air around him, the way his blood flowed through his bloodstream, the way his neurons fired off electrical signals from one synapse to another… it was a divine feeling.
‘Divine senses indeed,’ Rob mused as his clothes and body began to morph. His white lab gown expanded in size, while his body turned taller and more muscular than before. The changes didn’t stop there, his face morphed and warped, until eventually, his eyes, nose, mouth, and even ears disappeared altogether, leaving behind a… head.
He only stopped when Rob found that the changes were more than enough to ward off all signs that he was Rob, and proceeded to add another layer of protection against information gathering. A cloud of black smoke billowed out from his body, covering him in wispy darkness.
In the end, he appeared as a humanoid shadow wearing a pair of scholarly glasses and a white robe fitted for his large and muscular body. Rob then thought, If someone somehow connects this guy to Rob Fortune, then that’s just bullshit.
It was a fancy and novel experience for Rob - well, as novel as it could get if he hadn’t done something similar in the past already in his numerous past lives. Knowledge and experience be sealed, he had so many memories of altering his cells that it was like second nature for him already.
The only reason Rob didn’t alter his body to a giant human monster a kilometer tall and practically a walking mass of muscles was that his experience had been effectively sealed and erased. Doing something so grand and large would just be a needless risk.
Instead, Rob had another plan in mind, a plan that had taken the majority of his time this month. Within the blink of an eye, Rob disappeared from the prison-like room and appeared right in front of a dungeon entrance inside an airless, empty space-cave-hole-thing area that no human could feasibly survive in.
This wasn’t the first time he had been here, but he could still count on his hand the number of visits he had given to this place. His disguise back then wasn’t as perfect as they are now, since he relied on potions to transform into the eldritch human he is now, but since that problem is now fixed with his gaseous soul and enhanced divine senses, he could be a lot more proactive with his experiments.
He entered the dungeon and soon found himself in a vast open grass field. Horned rabbits frolicked among the meadows of grass, hopping and attacking him with their meager strength. Rob ignored them entirely and approached the building in the distance, with white walls and glass windows.
From the white, rectangular building with a plain design, another eldritch human covered in wispy shadows and wearing a white lab coat walked out. If put side by side together, no one would be able to distinguish which was which from the other besides the pair of glasses.
“Welcome back, me,” the thing spoke in a warped and distorted voice.
“Good morning to you too, me,” Rob laughed at his own paranoia. This thing that appeared and sounded just like him was actually a homunculus, made with the various souls he had at his disposal. It was pretty easy to make, especially since you’re not dealing with your own flesh and blood and didn’t have to risk dying at every single moment.
He made these objects, not to just serve as autonomous research machines, but to also add another layer of mystery to the truth. It was something he was used to doing with his background as a prominent demonic lord.
He still fondly remembered that time he acted as the World’s Chosen best friend while secretly running some really gruesome and dubious experiments on human babies - yes, babies - and was somehow, someway, exposed because the protagonist of that world felt something was wrong.
It was pure and utter bullshit for past Rob, but now that he had ascended to the supreme throne and had unveiled a vast majority of the secrets the omniverse held, he could safely say that that feeling the World’s Chosenf felt was because the world was interfering and wanted him dead.
Because of that, without any reliable or tangible evidence, much less a lead, the protagonist of that world still found out the truth with the world’s guidance.
It wasn’t a fun experience, to say the least, and he began his hate for sentient worlds a while later when he had to reincarnate again after being exposed for his crimes.
Rob wasn’t quite sure if this world was as sentient and smart as the other worlds he had lived in, but nothing was wrong with being a little cautious - other than the mountain of effort he had to go through.
As he walked into the white building, he was finally greeted by the tiny little secret he had been doing his hardest to hide all traces it could have… well as hard as he was willing to go to. He was a fucking supreme existence! So what if his little evil scheme is exposed? He was the greatest thief to ever live, his means of escape was vast and mystical, like an endless mirage!
He was greeted by a pleasant symphony of beating hearts and muffled shrieks. All around him, shadowy humans wearing lab coats stood at equally spaced intervals, meddling with either human bodies, vials of blood, chunks of flesh, or weird beetles with dark red lines across their large bodies.
Rob walked deeper into the lab until he arrived at his personal room, a room with humans placed in various pods for easy access. He eyed the naked men and women floating in those pods and licked his lips, mumbling with crazed joy, “How lovely.”