Mystical Journey

On the yellow dirt field, a pack of fish-shaped white wolves were moving as they carried white knights on their back. The pack numbered fifty to sixty strong, and each of them were huge, uni-horned beasts.

There was a purple-black lion with wings flying overhead, Garen sat on his knees as he fidgeted with the Cthulhu’s Origin that he had taken out from the ground with his hand.

There were three Origins rotating slowly within it, forming a small sphere,. They were of the Time God, War God, and Light God respectively, and among the three origins, The Light God’s was a middle-level Origin, and the remaining two were lower-level Origins.

Garen released some black smoke, they smoke rode the wind for some ten kilometers. Not a single living being dared come close to them along the way, ensuring safe passage for the convoy.

He moved his upper body and looked down at the pack of wolves. After three days of rest and journey, the white knights had slightly recovered their spirits.

On the first day when they left the field, the leader of the White Knights had sworn loyalty towards Garen and was now part of the Black Swamp Palace. The leader of the White Knights was called White Sky, and was the foster son of the White Wind Tribe leader. To have been at the spiritualized totem user level at the age of 23, he was considered a very gifted person, even comparing among the countries.

White Sky had his own reason to be able to stand out among the other foster children; he had a very unique gift, which he named Enhancement.

White Sky thought that once lord had heard of his gifted ability, he would definitely nurture him and view him more heavily. However, Garen only nodded his head calmly and that was the end of it. He didn’t know that for Garen, who had arrived at the end of the path, only viewed his gift as nothing more than a good starting point. No matter how gifted he was, Garen wouldn’t pay his attention towards him if he didn’t grow along his journey.

Garen had a lot of issues to handle. After he understood how the Sun-Sealing Demonic Wheel worked, although the Secret Technique wasn’t compatible with him, his original objective was to learn it to absorb the Cthulhu’s Origin.

White Sky’s talent, Enhancement, was an ability to enhance his totem or tactic by one time within a short amount of time. All he had to sacrifice was half of his strength and energy.

This ability was terrifying in the later stages as the stronger the totem was, the aftereffects of enhancement would be even greater. The most important thing was that this effect could be used to break the defense of a totem user of the same rank. This was also why White Sky was heavily looked up to. If he could reach form four or five, the enhancement effect would be much more horrifying.

Unfortunately, the stronger the gift, the greater the resources required, and it would only increase as it went further and beyond. He had been stuck at the spiritualized level for three years now and there wasn’t any improvement at all.

Garen sat at the back of the flying lion and carefully examined three of the Cthulhu’s Origins in his hand. Each of them gave off a unique color, black, white and red. It seemed rather mysterious as it shone on Garen’s face.

The black lion’s wings cut the wind with a constant howl, thrusting the reasonably steady party along.

Garen focused his attention on the black origin. This black origin was completely black, with some slight silver glittering sand in the middle. It looked like a black concentrated liquid.

Garen gently opened the case of the crystal ball, and gently inserted two fingers into the inner part of the black origin.

Pew!

His body jolted as a red circle appeared around his body and rotated slowly.

The circle was filled with countless half transparent, living tentacles and claws. These tentacles were flailing about, extending and piercing into the crystal ball, and down into the inner part of the Origin.

Gulp! Gulp!

A gulping sound could be heard, as if those tentacles were drinking water while absorbing the origin and transferring it to the red circle.

In an instant, the inner circle shot out four black silver rays of light towards Garen’s body with great precision, forming a perfect cross.

The black cross maintained for at least ten minutes, and Demon Phoenix and her friends were at a loss as to what to do. If Garen hadn’t informed them beforehand, they would have jumped down from the lion and hid on the ground.

The red circle possessed such strength that even Demon Phoenix, a form five, was overwhelmed by it.

After ten minutes, the cross slowly disappeared, and the red circle broke into a sea of shards before disappearing.

Garen opened his eyes and his face was filled with happiness.

"The Cthulhu’s Origin has such an effect!?" He was completely surprised and happy about it.

He started collecting the Cthulhu’s Origin as he wanted to reach for the peak of form five, but ever since he had reached this level, he didn’t view it as importantly as before. He just wanted to absorb it but didn’t expect that by absorbing it through the Sun-Sealing Demonic Wheel, the Time God’s origin had given him an unexpected result.

He moved his focus onto the light red attribution pane.

The attribute pane’s abilities that did not have any changes for a long time had finally come up with something new.

A dark red symbol appeared at the left side of the attribute pane after he absorbed the Cthulhu’s Origin.

It was a symbol that resembled two Ks stacking back to back together, and the symbol was rotating.

Just like always, Garen knew the meaning of the symbol immediately after he stared at it.

‘Successfully absorbed enhancement object. Enhancing soul limit…’

Garen looked at the attribution pane.

‘Strength 14. Agility 10. Vitality 10. Intelligence 10.’ It was still the same, but there was a small blinking addition symbol at the end of each attribute.

Ever since he had entered form five, his attributes were getting weaker among the totem users. His body enhancement, even with the addition of the Troll Grip, wasn’t something outstanding compared to the totem users of the same class. Due to the totem’s potential, Garen’s advantage of increasing his attributes had been overwhelmed by other totem users, and in fact it was disadvantageous to his growth.

This was because he couldn’t completely negate the benefits of form five users’ totems by just increasing his physical attributes. It went without saying that they had stronger Secret Techniques as well.

His physical attributes had slowly become obsolete, as it was completely useless when going against a form five totem user with incredible strength. No matter how strong a person was, he would still be weak if put up against a canon. He would die in one shot, and this was a huge hurdle for Garen.

However, he had no choice. He was able to obtain his overwhelming attribute by transplanting the Dual Headed Salamander’s heart. His body’s limit wouldn’t even reach ten points if he had a commoner’s body.

Now, he had finally found a path after absorbing the Cthulhu’s Origin.

As he recalled the Cthulhu King’s explanation before he left, Garen felt happy and at the same time, he had a hypothesis: Perhaps the Cthulhu’s Origin’s effect was to allow people to break through their limit?

The Obscuro Society’s Marshall used the Cthulhu’s Origin to go beyond his limits in the original history as well.

The Time God’s Origin lasted for half an hour, before the blinking symbol at the back of the attribute pane slowly disappeared. There were no changes in the attributes.

However, Garen could faintly feel that his body was able to improve further.

The dark red symbol at the front of the attribute pane had stopped spinning, and changed slightly.

Garen immediately read the notification.

‘Eternal Soul has increased, attribute limit has increased…’

"Eternal Soul has increased?" He recalled the idea he thought of earlier, and recalled the Cthulhu’s explanation regarding the soul, this refined his hypothesis.

"Does that mean that the limit of my attribute is directly related to my soul?"

As he thought of this idea, a new symbol appeared below the attribute pane.

Garen looked at it curiously, and the symbol suddenly expanded and turned into a red screen, showing him his history of him enhancing his attribute.

‘Increasing attribute…’

‘Increasing attribute…’

‘Increasing attribute…’

‘Absorbing additional potential points…’

‘Absorbing additional potential points…’

….

…

The record was shown down to each minute detail.

+Garen was surprised.

"If the limits of my attributes are strongly related to the enhancement of the soul, does that mean transplanting the dragon’s heart and breaking the body’s limit are also related to the soul?"

Thinking back, he could see the Nine-Headed Hydra’s memories when he was at the underground hot spring after he had transplanted the dragon’s heart, he already had some understanding of the overall situation.

He kept swiping up at the screen as he looked further back into the history. The screen moved like an inverted red waterfall.

After swiping for a solid ten minutes, the detailed record appeared in front of Garen.

"Successfully transplanted the dragon’s heart. Commence merging with the Soul’s will. The soul is unable to reject the effect and the enhancement shall proceed…’

‘Enhancing the limit…’

‘Enhancing the limit…’

…..

Each and every line of enhancement was clearly recorded in the archive.

Garen had finally understood the logic behind the increment in his attribute.

The limit of the body and the upper limit of increasing the attribute via potential points was directly related to the strength of the soul.

As he saw it, he felt slightly afraid. If not for the Dual Headed Salamander non-resistance and its inherent loyalty since the beginning, in addition to his luck and strong will, he would have failed miserably. Back then, he didn’t know that there was a soul category and purely believed that he just had to increase his body’s organs to go further. He didn’t expect that the essence of the organs combined and countless of living beings’ wills -- the soul, was the most important key.

According to his experience in absorbing the Cthulhu’s Origin and the Cthulhu King’s explanation, the soul was most likely a unique energy source within the living flesh. It was so perfect that it had become a completely independent force field.

The body was just like a huge factory, Excluding the consumption of energy that kept the body alive, it produced a huge amount of electric energy, and when combined together, it formed a complicated energy field. This field in turn would affect the behavior of the body as it would react to the body’s signals as well as those outside of the body.

Garen combined the Cthulhu King’s theory together with his own experience and the knowledge he had learnt on Earth, and barely had a full explanation of the soul.

The soul was deemed as the most mysterious item on every world. The Cthulhu King was someone whose soul was so strong that it could temporarily leave its physical body, hence, he was immortal.

To be born in the flesh and surpass it. The intrinsic quality of the Cthulhu King’s body was very likely made out of an energy field. Compared to a living being’s body, the cells, flesh and blood were just stored energy, ready to be converted to other forms of energy.

After clearing up the system, Garen started to absorb the remaining two Cthulhu’s Origin.