Becoming a Monster

Chapter 491: Chapter 490: The Hunt Concludes

Ryder knew his chances of getting away were low.

If the spiders relied only on their webs, his chances were high. However, that wasn’t the case at all. Those closest would lunge at him any time there was a chance.

He twisted away from another incoming strike and countered in the same motion, his blade carving across a spider’s face and rupturing multiple eyes before he pushed off its body to regain distance.

The brief success did not grant him time to recover, because another lunged at him the moment his feet touched the ground, forcing him to shift again and disregard trying to retaliate, lest the others catch up.

This wasn’t a one-time exchange. How many times has this happened?

Ryder couldn’t keep track. For nearly five minutes, he had done nothing but move, evade, and retaliate in fragments, never once gaining full control over the situation.

And never once feeling as if he could lose them.

By this point, Ryder understood the truth of it. It wasn’t that he was escaping; he was being hunted.

Six spiders had formed a loose perimeter around him, and although they never closed in all at once, their movements ensured that he could not break through in any single direction.

Their leader remained just behind the range of the enclosure. Its presence was always there, as if it was beneath it to do the role of its subordinates.

Under normal circumstances, this would not have been enough to stop him. If he chose to suppress his presence, creatures of this level should not have been capable of tracking him through the forest.

Yet that advantage had already been taken from him when the holy field vanished.

After forcing a brief opening, he slowed just enough to draw in a breath, and his instincts reacted the moment he felt the true source behind his agony. He spun sharply, releasing a needle formed from magic out of his hand.

The spell struck a floating mass of slime that hovered just behind him, shaped into a single, oversized eye and a giant mouth that patronized him with a giant smile. The moment the dart touched it, Ryder’s unique magic disrupted the mana sustaining it, managing to kill it outright.

"These damn things..."

The frustration pressed against his composure because no matter where he went, those eyes found him, and the moment they did, the spiders followed without delay.

There was a time when he saw a pack of goblins. He sought to slip through them, hoping to cause the goblins to attack the spiders on his heels. But just like him, the goblins were just as rattled by the floating eyes as he was, maybe even more.

However, that was merely because those eyes spied on their home nearly every day. Relocating didn’t make a difference. And they were aware that those eyes belonged to whoever wiped out their chieftain.

So when Ryder slipped past them, and the goblins caught sight of the eye floating behind him, they took off in the opposite direction.

There was no time to be surprised; he had nearly covered the distance needed to escape the forest. Only a quarter remained between him and the edge of their reach; he couldn’t let this moment ruin it.

That was when the largest one had seen enough and chose to close in.

This time, it did not increase its size or attempt to overwhelm him with brute force, and that lack of change created an opening that Ryder immediately recognized.

He had to act before the creature realized that it had given him the opening he needed.

Using the speed he had conserved, he shifted his path and slipped behind it in a single motion, driving his dagger forward toward the back of its head with the intent to end the hunt in one strike.

The blade was so close to hitting its target, but suddenly Ryder’s foot abruptly shifted.

It was impossible for the spider to move so fast. At least it never showed such speed during the chase.

The instant his weight settled against its thorax, multiple spear-like spines erupted upward without warning, piercing through him in the same motion and ending the exchange before he could respond.

The royal spider gave a brief glance back at its prey, confirming the result without any change in expression.

Once it had, it turned away and issued a silent command.

One of the nearby spiders moved forward to retrieve the body, wrapping it in webs to carry it back.

—

Back in the forest center, Noah wasn’t expecting such a drastic reaction. But it made sense when the soul he was consuming was not only an entity from heaven, but one whose very existence had been formed through the merger of multiple souls.

Souls where only their most intense sinful desires, regrets, and in most cases, passion, were condensed into one being.

Inside his soul realm, a drastic change was taking place from under him.

The "ground" beneath his core stretched outward, growing broader and denser, as if the foundation of his existence had started to create a world of his own.

At the same time, the cores of his vassals and Fallen reacted. Their light intensified into a steady, sustained glow that reflected a deeper stability within each of them.

The faint paths that connected them opened a pathway to something more than just creating a hierarchy where Noah could control their wills or cut away their connection.

Their relationship was almost no different than his main creatures. Power from his soul diverted and nourished each of them, while his vassals gained more than the Fallens in cases like Baka and Dummy, who weren’t connected through his other abilities.

And at the same time that he nourished them, each individual core responded with a small percentage.

The percentage from him to them, and from them back to him, was extremely minimal, but it wouldn’t stay that way.

As long as he continued to create more Fallen and vassals, his power would continue to grow stronger, and the same applied when their individual strength increased as well, just like his tamed creatures.

And if he could continue to consume souls with as much potency as the archon, then the ratio of their exchange would only improve over time.

At a certain point, Noah could take even the weakest creature or being and turn them into something with overwhelming potential.

But as significant as it was to gain another method of growth and another way to strengthen everything connected to him, it was not the change that drew his attention the most.

At the base of his soul, the dungeon core that had taken root there had undergone the biggest change.

Roots expanded across the ground, but they did not behave like anything natural, because each one remained barely submerged while spreading outward along the surface as if trying to claim every bit of space it could reach.

What had started out as a plant no longer remained one, because the stem had thickened and risen just enough to form a small trunk that marked the beginning of a tree.

It did not resemble a normal tree at all. But at this point, was anything related to Noah normal?

Violet energy ran through it in thin, steady veins that followed its entire structure. Mixed within that flow were faint traces of gold, not enough to overtake it, but clear enough to stand out, especially along the trunk and the roots closest to it.

The gold didn’t spread far.

It stayed near the origin, blending into the violet rather than replacing it, as if the two had fused but had not fully become one.

The trunk leaned toward Noah’s core, maintaining that direction as it continued to develop, while at the same time, thin branches extended outward and curved upward toward the cores above.

Those branches did not spread randomly; each one reached toward the other cores without any overlap, as if attempting to connect with them while still remaining anchored to him.

At the same time, the structure beneath it continued to spread, but the deeper the roots extended, the less visible the gold became, leaving violet as the dominant presence throughout most of the network.

Among them, five roots still stood out. Each one moved in a straight path, separate from the rest. Their destinations were each aligned to the cores of his tamed creatures.

The connection hadn’t been completed yet, but the intent behind it was already clear.

As the structure continued to develop, small changes began to appear along the branches.

Leaves started to form.

There weren’t many of them yet, and each one was still in the early stage of growth, but their appearance carried the same balance as the rest of the tree.

Their color was green, yet violet veins ran through each one.

Noah could sense that the other cores, including his own, were now helping the tree grow. For what purpose? He was unable to tell at the moment.

Although his instincts told him that he would find the answer when they returned to their territory.

Before Noah could verify what else had changed, his attention was redirected to a source that was constantly watching him all this time.

He gazed upward to see that the entity was locked onto his soul.

When Noah first saw the tree, his worst fear was how he would protect it from that being. But now it seems that gaining the tree somehow was playing into the being’s goal.