Rise of the Devourer

Book 2: Chapter 26 — How do I go back?

Noah looked at his menu in anticipation, raising an eyebrow when he heard the sound of a drumroll.

Rolling… successful!

Critical Roll!

1 x [Cloak of Shadows (Legendary)] obtained!

His eyes widened in surprise as he burst out in laughter at the reward. A moment later, after calming himself, Noah opened his quest rewards to look at the tome he’d obtained from clearing the nest.

Quest: Iron Teeth Infestation completed!

Reward: [Tome of Swarm (Epic)] obtained.

Noah looked at the Cloak in his hand with a smile. “To think I went to all that trouble fighting in the Pit when I could’ve just done this all along.”

But instead of using his Tome or trying the cloak out immediately, he set them aside for the moment, opening his abilities instead.

[Starforged Arms (Legendary/Intermediate) - level 10]

Arms forged out of the cosmos itself. You control three arms crafted from the raw, celestial energies of the cosmos. Become capable of attaching two of these arms to your body for decreased mana consumption and increased magical effects.

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Noah read through the description once, before he summoned the starforged arms. Three arms appeared around him, their starry blue looks unchanged from before. “Says I can attach you guys to me?” Noah said out loud, talking to the ability as if it was sentient.

Perhaps a sign that I was slowly going insane.

Calling them towards him, he tried to understand how exactly he would attach them, when the ability very helpfully automatically triggered some sort of instinct. Two arms moved on their own, growing from being just elbows to be a full shoulder joint as they joined themselves to Noah’s body. He felt them connecting to his back, altering the musculature ever so slightly as they sprouted like ghastly limbs erupting from his shoulders, like some part of his soul was about to break out of him.

Noah twirled around, feeling the arms’ presence. They had no weight, in the standard meaning of the word, but he could feel their metaphorical weight in his mind and soul, like he’d always had these two extra limbs attached to his body since his birth. The sensation was jarring, almost more jarring than when he’d first had Tony merge with him, but it was far from the worst he had gotten used to.

Just a few minutes of walking and Noah was doing pushups with the ghostly arms. He was extremely pleased to find out that they did not tire like his physical arms, but instead only consumed a small amount of mana. With his Advanced meditation being active at all times, he was recovering more than he spent each second even with the arms constantly working.

“I could get used to this,” Noah said, leaving the arms attached to his back. They cost no mana to sustain if he didn’t use them, and he was already starting to get used to their presence and felt a strange reluctance to part with his new limbs.

Moving on to his other ability, Noah opened Aura Control’s menu.

[Aura Control (Intermediate) - level 10]

You’ve mastered your aura, gaining control over it. Become capable of expanding your aura presence to overwhelm anyone weaker than you, and restrict their movements.

Noah messed around with his Aura control, trying to note what was different about it. From the start his Aura had felt like a blanket that had covered him, but now, it was as if he’d gained better clarity and could sense a level deeper into them. Rather than a blanket, it felt more like a shell to him. Like an external organ that was still very intrinsically connected to whatever magic existed in this world. Little threads of mana ran across his body connecting what was likely his soul to the aura he controlled. He remembered Aurelia’s words.

“Your aura is the expression of your soul. If your soul is a bottle of ink, your aura is the book being written using that ink, with your body as its sheet of paper.”

Noah flexed his aura now, feeling the last remaining bits of soul strain vanish entirely. The effect had not been immediately obvious but his aura no longer frayed and escaped outwards. Like a leak had been fixed in the drainage system of his soul, and the stuff that made up his aura was now content to remain within the confines of the boundaries he dictated it to remain in.

The changes only pushed Noah further to find the last tome he needed. He’d overcome the hurdle that had been holding him back from Ranking up, so all he needed now was one more tome and he would be ready.

And to that end…

Noah took out the Tome reward he had gotten for clearing out the nest, letting it rest in his arm. Taking a seat on the ground, with his legs crossed he put the tome in his lap, flipping through the magical runes engraved within it.

The act gave him a headache, Aurelia’s warning about doing this coming to mind, but Noah still found himself curious nonetheless. His translation perk seemed to work even for elementals and written language, but somehow, he could not read whatever was written within these tomes.

Feeling curious, he continued to flip through the tome, till his headache went from a mild throb to a pounding pain until he was forced to avert his eyes and rest them for a few minutes.

Noah looked back at the tome sitting in his lap. “I guess if it was that easy to figure out how Tomes worked everyone would be doing it,” Noah said, closing the tome as he pressed his palm on top of its cover.

Letting the mana flow, he waited for the prompt to present itself.

Would you like to use [Tome of Swarm (Epic)]?

Yes/No?

Yes.

The Tome erupted in a shower of light, runes flowing into Noah as the pages dissolved into motes of mana that filled his body. He let the light settle, the energy from the Tome spreading into his aura.

For the first time, he could vaguely follow how his Aura became altered by the tome. If his aura was an expression of his soul, then were the tomes altering his soul itself? Or were they the words being written by the so-called Ink in his soul?

What if they literally do that? Use ink made of souls to craft these?

The thought was grim, especially if it came from the soul of people, but Noah didn’t linger on the hypothesis as the ability awakened.

[Exsanguinator] has unlocked Bloodfly Swarm!

Noah hadn’t had to pick the Path this time, so the tome had made the choice for itself. He reached out to his menu, opening the description of the ability.

[Bloodfly Swarm (Epic/Basic) - level 1]

You can summon a swarm of bloodflies, their hunger for life and blood unending and everlasting. Control the swarm to inflict repeated [Bleed] damage upon your enemies for a short period of time.

Noah stood up from where he had sat, as he channeled mana into the ability. A red glow appeared around his hands, before a buzzing noise filled the air. Blood colored mana flowed from his fingers as a swarm of flies manifested. The insects hummed wildly, swirling around in search of a target. Noah directed them towards one of the boulders, just to see what would happen and the flies struck, swarming the rock as they buzzed around it harmlessly for a few moments before disappearing as the mana supplying them faded.

“Well, unless I’m made of rocks I know I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that,” Noah said, shuddering as he pictured a swarm of blood thirsty insects descending upon him. The damage was perhaps the least sinister aspect of the ability.

Unable to do any tests with no live target given his thorough sweep with Celestial Harvest, Noah moved on to finally testing out his new Cloak. He picked up the cloth, feeling its billowing dark smoke. The fabric felt similar to how he imagined it would feel if darkness had been turned material through convincing the reality of the world that it was in fact solid and could be touched and picked up. Yet, as if reality itself became uncertain at times his grasp on the cloak felt tenous, as it phased in and out of this plane of existence as if it was uncertain about whether it truly belonged or not.

[Cloak of Shadows (Legendary)]

A cloak made of shadows, formed by a Mage from an older order of magic lost to time. The cloak allows its wearer to take on a shadowy form, turning ethereal for a moment. No physical attacks can harm the user in this state.

“Quite literal i-frames?” Noah said out loud to himself.

He put the cloak on, feeling it wrap around his body. His stellar arms twinkled like shining beacons from behind it, giving him a strange appearance with the dark cloak letting almost no light pass through them.

Noah sent a small strand of mana into the cloak as he felt its ability activate.

His body sank through the ground beneath him as Noah tried to scream, but realized he no longer had a body. The world around him was dark, no sound or sensation existing in the darkness, when a moment later, he realized that he could in fact still see, just no longer from his eyes.

Void Hunter’s Senses seemed to love the cloak, conveying in heavy detail exactly how he didn’t exist in the three dimensional reality anymore, and the longer Noah felt the impossible dimensions of his existence in the form of a shadow, the more his mind frayed.

Letting the ability fade, Noah returned back from his shadowy existence, as he stumbled over a few steps before emptying his stomach behind a nearby boulder for the next few breaths.

After everything had left his gut, Noah wiped his mouth, feeling the nausea still swirling inside his head.

“That was awful,” Noah said, the memory bringing up another bout of nausea that he forcefully held down. Silently, he picked the cloak off his body, putting it back into his inventory. He would have to practice controlling his senses as he used the ability, or settle for existing in a state of total sensory deprivation while he was ethereal.

He figured if he used the cloak for just a few seconds to simply phase in and out of shadow form he would likely do a lot better, but that was for future him to figure out and manage.

After taking a few more minutes to breathe in, Noah picked himself up and began making his way out of the nest. Walking the way he came, and picking off a couple of the corpses he had missed from the few monsters that had escaped the nest, Noah finally found himself standing back on the dirt path leading the way out.

After a moment of standing on the road, he realized one glaring flaw with his travel plans.

“Now… how do I go back?”