Chapter 114: Heart’s Desires
Just above the ocean of teeth and bile, Zan was enjoying the hot sauna that was the monster’s vile breath. Its hot, lecherous, and perverse touch, was better than the hotsprings of corrosive acid at least.
A glow of profane, dark red was coming out of one of his eyes. The young man could see it now: The inside of the worm’s mouth.
It was as revolting and grotesque as he had thought, and more. Although he had seen glimpses of the creature’s mouth before being swallowed into the darkness, there was nothing like taking a full scenic view of its viscous, thumping orifice.
Now normally, Zan would have quickly moved on from ogling at the disgusting sight to finding a way out of it, but there was a difference in his vision this time that made him pause.
Everything in his vision, was filtered through a lens of crimson blood. Through that lens, the already unnerving world that was the worm’s mouth, gained a sinister, hellish undertone.
As an individual born under the blue skies, green grass, and brown dirt, the bloody red world triggered within him a feeling of extreme dissonance and disharmony. Oddly, more so than the creature’s disgusting mouth did.
It was instinctual. Being born on the green earth, he could reason that he was inside a monster’s mouth and he needed to get out, but when met with a world that was pure red, an unnatural feeling of dread overwhelmed him. Any sort of reasoning he once had, was stopped by the pure feeling of discord, and trepidation.
It was as if earthly beings had an inborn understanding, that this realm and that realm, were not supposed to meet, ever.
Yet as Zan’s mind and body were going through shock, something deeper within, felt…familiarity to the sight of his surroundings.
That familiarity calmed him down enough, for him to realize that his momentum had reached its climax and he was falling back down. This time, peeking out from the ocean of acid bile were a hundred thousand bone spears the length of flagpoles.
…And they were not spaced out as compassionately as before. Even with Zan’s flexibility and graceful skill, one of the spears was definitely going to skewer him like barbeque.
Zan tried to manifest the blotches of wings that he had before, but he was struck with the same problem, that within the worm’s mouth his energy simply moved way too slow.
Without warning however…his accelerated black blood flooded towards the two points behind his shoulder blades, and his black heart pulsed again with another purple wave of invisible energy. It seemed as if the heart was ushering some sort of command, and its layered-pulsing was a sign of that activation.
Zan felt the warm blood flowing behind his shoulder blades, and his conjoined mind started to race with a thousand different images and scenes. Those flittering memories in his head, were all memories of creatures with wings.
A hummingbird out within a nature whilst he was walking through an unburned forest, an owl perched atop a tree gazing at him whilst the day went into dusk, a raven feasting on the corpses of a thousand dead, and finally the girl who grew her own wings out of energy.
Then, in the next moment…his skin and flesh started to bubble and erupt behind his back. Good thing there was no one there to see it, for the sight was truly quite disgusting.
Zan could feel as if two appendages were trying to grow themselves from behind him, and the sensation was both agonizing and new. New muscles and tendons were creating and organizing themselves, bone itself was rapidly forming and connecting into the young man’s shoulder blades, and new nerves and neurons were connecting themselves to the existing ones within his back.
A sudden realization then hit the young man, and his head and his heart were affirming what he was thinking.
‘Am I…growing wings?’
‘I’m gonna fucking fly?’
Although the procedure itself was horrific, to say the least, Zan was excited. Truth be told, the young man always had dreams of flying. Though to be fair, who didn’t?
He wanted to come and go wherever and whenever he liked. To feel free while looking down to see the whole world beneath him.
In the end however, his flesh wings did not even get the same fate as his energy-made wings. His flesh bubbled and boiled, whilst two lumps formed behind his back in the shape of volcanoes about to erupt. And finally, they instantaneously exploded behind him in an explosion of gray flesh.
Splat! Splat!
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The youth did not get to grow wings or fly as he thought. Unlike before there wasn’t even a constant outburst of energy coming out of his shoulder blades.
…Though it was probably for the best that blood and flesh didn’t shoot out of him like rocket fuel.
But!…Zan did receive something for the horrific experience he went through. It was a sort of request from his pulsing black heart.
“Consume more life forms with wings, and you will be able to fly through the skies.”
Indeed. Within the worm’s mouth that seemed to awaken one of his dormant eldritch abilities, his heart spoke to him through pure emotion and desire.
He needed more genetic information, and the corresponding genetic material to truly grow wings.
That didn’t mean eating a hundred pigeons, or feasting upon a thousand unlucky dodo birds either.
Preferably…his black heart needed something higher in rating within the genetic hierarchy. A naturally born creature made from the world’s concentrated natural energy, could work.
Some examples of those would be phoenixes, dragons, wyverns, pegasuses, unicorn pegasuses, fairies, etc.
And…eating enough humans of those bloodlines could work too…
THUD!
CRACK!
Zan hit the “ceiling” of the creature’s mouth, where after he started to fall, he embedded his fist into one of the worm’s teeth. He may not have flown with the wings that his flesh tried to make, but the exploding momentum was enough to send him further upwards.
There, black blood gushed into his fist as it grew three times as large, before he lodged that same fist into an enormous tooth.
Of course, that tooth was rapidly returning into the worm’s flesh, where it would transform into the death trap that laid beneath Zan.
The young man’s mind raced. He still needed to get out of here. But what attack could pierce through the monster’s numerous layers of flesh? The two weapons he always had with him were his fists, and what he really needed right now was something sharp.
It was not Zan’s fault that his opponents were mostly human, or at least not so fucking huge. Even the giant metal wolf he fought was not so large, and being made of metal versus his dull strikes definitely helped in that fight.
Zan, then promised himself that after dealing with the worm, he would carry around something large and sharp, just for occasions like these. If he was to challenge all and everything for the title of strongest, he may as well not make it hard for himself and procure the right tools for the job.
The youth daydreamed about wielding that same sword that swatted him from out of the skies, before his thoughts went back to his current predicament.
His mind raced with every technique that he had ever seen, and every technique he ever created. He needed something to puncture a deep tunnel through the monster’s flesh.
Zan first thought about the wind-spiraling fist that he created back in Mila’s laboratory. But even if his energy was not moving at a snail’s pace, he doubted he would be able to generate enough force through that technique to carve his way out of the monster’s insides.
Then, he thought back to the fight between himself and the giant metal wolf.
Its red annihilating beam could have vaporized him if he had even once slipped up. He had seen that beam carve tunnels through hills and mountains, and through the very earth below. He had no doubt that it would be able to carve tunnels through the monster’s flesh.
That black metal beast…
Watching its energy circuits light up again and again made him think that its circuits were quite similar to the maze of energy pathways within his body, and the youth had never stopped trying to remember not just the ones in his arms and legs, but the ones that snaked through and all over his body too.
His first demonstration of its power, was when he saved the swordsman’s sister. That beam was roughly and hastily made, and under the conditions of which the energy in his body was almost empty.
In fact, he only had enough energy to create the annihilating beam because he had eaten a few chunks out of one of the draconic descendants…
Disregarding that interaction for the time being, Zan then pondered: What could he do…with a properly filled reservoir of energy?
The young man had eaten a significant fraction of the food stocks meant for thousands of people, it was suffice to say that his body was brimming with energy.
Although his energy moved slower within this mysterious space…it was worth a try.
Zan thought back to the process in which the metal wolf activated its energy circuits. Then, he sunk into a state of extreme presentness.
The maze-like pathways of his physical body, overlapped with the image he held within his mind of the energy circuits within the metal wolf.
The metal wolf used the glowing orb within its chest as its energy reserve, but while Zan was going to use the energy stored in his stomach and chest, when he felt inside his body, he found that energy was instead concentrating itself inside his heart.
Zan briefly directed his vision towards his heart, and what he found, confused and absolutely confounded him.
He expected to see his bare chest, before looking deeper to find a black heart pumping furiously.
What he found instead, was a confusing and divine sight.
Now, his empowered eldritch eye was looking at his heart, but at the same time it seemed to be peering into the secrets of creation. And the heart organ that found itself within select living creatures, seemed to be infinitely more complex than what any mortal being had ever thought it was.
And while the empowered eldritch eye could try to discern what it was seeing, the visual information that was being sent into Zan’s brain, was simply giving him a seizure.
He saw a glowing disc, and written on top of its surface were runes, arrays and lines. Except that glowing disc seemed to have multiplied by a few infinite times, and were now spinning into an image of a resonant orb.
That was, before he had no words to describe whatever the hell he was seeing.
Zan turned away from the sight of his heart, feeling a massive headache.
Honestly, this was quite a happy conclusion. If he had just a few seconds more of looking into the secrets of his heart, his brain would have exploded.
Zan willed his black blood to flow elsewhere. At least, not so furiously into his left eye.
After it noticeably calmed down, he turned his head again to look at his heart, and he saw a more…normal sight.
His black heart was glowing through his skin and flesh, whilst the maze of pathways near it were also glowing like lit circuits.
His heart now served as the nexus for all his techniques, and his body was now executing the metal wolf’s annihilation beam.
Of course, his energy still moved at a snail’s pace, due to both Zan being in the worm's mouth, and due to an inner conflict within.
The lines that spread out from his heartcore, had only done so a centimeter from it. Inch by inch, glowing concentrated energy was inching its way forward in the shape of circuits.
Zan estimated the time it would take for him to execute the process.
Five minutes.
At the end of five minutes, he would use a vaporizing beam to carve himself out of the monster’s mouth.
He looked upwards, at the rapidly ascending deformed-tooth that his arm had embedded itself in. Zan wanted to estimate how much time it would give him if he were to ride it out, but before that happened, his intuition alerted him to something below.
He looked down and his eyes widened, as the whole army of ten-thousand bone spears were propelled into the skies by the flesh gums below.