Adyr started to wait patiently for the changes to begin, keeping his distance but not taking his eyes off the serpent.

Then, without making him wait long, it started to take effect on the massive creature instantly, as if the cube had dissolved straight into its core.

First, Sszhar began thrashing its body as if in pain. Its whole body was spasming violently, its long form sweeping wildly from side to side, completely destroying and tossing aside all the trees and rocks in its path.

Trunks were being uprooted, boulders shattered, and in the middle of the vast endless forest, a giant clearing appeared all at once, like a natural disaster had struck.

To get away from its path, Adyr unfolded his wings and rose into the sky, keeping watch from above while the chaos raged below him.

After a while, the violent thrashing of the serpent began to slow and then stopped completely. It started to coil its body, its massive length spiraling inward, curling up in the center of the huge clearing it had created.

From above, it looked like a mountain made of massive black scales piled upon itself.

When everything went still and Adyr started to wonder if that was all and if it had ended like this, a system message popped up in front of him.

[Rank 4 Sszhar evolving…]

The text was hanging in the air, stating it was only beginning.

Suddenly, a heavy smell filled Adyr's nose, one he knew all too well, thick and metallic, coming from Sszhar's motionless body.

Blood…

The scent was so strong that even someone like Adyr, who had grown up smelling and tasting it casually, felt slightly nauseous. It was like the stench of rotten, spoiled blood left to sit for days, clinging to the back of his throat.

As he was frowning against the smell, Sszhar's large, glossy scales started to change.

Scales that had looked like solid, unbreakable metal plates began to twist and warp. Long, living, wet veins appeared across them, crawling over the surface and slowly turning the color of its entire body into something red and slick.

The smell in the air intensified as these moving, throbbing red veins completely covered the serpent's entire body. Now it was like how death itself would smell, if it had a scent at all—heavy and suffocating.

The trees around the serpent also began to turn black from the smell, their bark darkening as though burned from the inside. They started to rot, losing their fibers and structure, while the soil beneath them turned into something wet and muddy under the spreading corruption.

Adyr felt the scent making his skin prickle and his thoughts grow a bit hazy.

While he was fighting the dizziness, he flapped his wings and climbed even higher into the sky, putting more distance between himself and the source while still keeping it in sight.

For a few minutes, Sszhar stayed silent as if dead, its massive shape unmoving. Only the blood-red veins continued to pulse and crawl over its body.

In the end, all the veins suddenly burst with sharp popping sounds like breaking threads, and the crimson blood inside started to spray everywhere in violent jets.

The blood that erupted did not scatter outward to stain the ground. Instead, it was drawing back onto the Spark's body, pulled inward as if by an invisible force, coating all of it and all of its scales in a thick layer. Just as much of it began to pour into its nostrils and mouth, vanishing inside.

The Rank 4 Spark at this stage began to move again, but not from pain this time. The way its body shifted and the tilt of its head made it seem like it was reacting in pure pleasure.

With gallons of blood coating its exterior and flooding inside, it raised its head to the sky, savoring every moment of its evolution and basking like a creature finally returning to its true form.

Finally, the rushing, shifting blood began to settle, losing its wild movement, and it started to take its final form on the serpent.

The previously black, gleaming scales now turned into a metallic crimson color, reflecting the faint light like burnished blood-steel.

Its eyes, once yellow with black slits, became completely bright red, shining with a dizzying brilliance, as if they were two doors opening onto the river of boiling blood on the 7th layer of hell. They were deep and impossible to look into for long.

The heavy, nauseating stench in the surroundings vanished completely, cut away in an instant. In its place remained an aura where faint cracking sounds could be heard, like invisible dimensions splintering and grinding against each other.

While that aura was spreading, the entire forest and the air fell silent, everything suddenly dead and drained, all life energy extinguished in an instant.

When the evolution finally ended, Adyr heard, for a brief instant, countless voices screaming in his ears like ghosts wailing in agony and wrath.

All of them were directed at him and Sszhar, their rage brushing against his mind, before another system message appeared and the whispers were cut off.

[Rank 4 Sszhar evolution completed.]

Then he called up the description of the Spark, eager to see what had actually changed, his gaze sharpening as the text formed in front of him.

But what he had expected to see was very different from what appeared, leaving him stunned.

"What th…."

The lines on the interface did not match anything he had prepared himself for.

The shock that hit him was unlike anything he had felt before, surpassing even the moment of his reincarnation or transmigration, whatever that had been.

[Name] Sszhar

[Path] Aether, Blood

[Rank] 4

[Ability] Dread Shackle / Blood Maw / Riftwalk / Blood Mirror / Leech's Reach

Description: 01101001 01101110 01100110 01101111 01110010 01101101 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110101 01101110 01100100

Ability: 01101001 01101110 01100110 01101111 01110010 01101101 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110101 01101110 01100100

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.