Chapter 183: Fight with a Stoneman (Part 1)

Strength: 675

Agility: 207

Reaction: 198

Stamina: 1106

Mana: 0.5%

After the mutation came to an end, Magna started stretching his muscles to shake off that disgusting feeling from his body while checking his stats.

The numbers were good, even incredible, but the feeling was more than incredible.

Every muscle in his body felt like it was made of the finest metal now. He got up and started flexing his muscles, posing like a bodybuilder in front of a mirror, showing off their gains after a day at the gym.

Increasing his strength 3 times in just a few seconds was a huge change, not only physically but mentally as well, as he needed to get used to his new body. It still didn’t feel completely like his own.

His frame had also gone from lean and muscular to slightly bulky and muscular, with his biceps considerably more developed and his chest muscles more defined.

When he lifted his T-shirt to look at his body, his abdominal muscles were far more defined now. Each one was arranged neatly, like slices of Turkish baklava lined up perfectly on a tray.

So much so that, both visually and by feel, the results were incredible, making him impatient to try his new strength on something. However, he kept the urge down as he peeked his head out from behind the rock to look at the Stonemen who were still working.

They were still carrying rocks inside at the same pace, which Magna still couldn’t fully comprehend, unable to tell where they were taking them or why.

’They don’t look like they’re going to take a break anytime soon.’

Magna frowned slightly before going back behind the rock and lying down again, deciding to wait a little longer.

He kept resting his body and mind while letting his mana regenerate.

His natural mana regeneration had dropped tremendously again. Since his overall capacity had increased, it had gone from around 2% per day to around 1%.

So he decided to wait until it reached 1% before moving again.

He spent an entire day waiting until his mana finally reached 1% while continuing to watch the Stonemen.

During this entire time, they hadn’t stopped working for even 1 second. They didn’t even sit down somewhere to rest, which completely ruined Magna’s plan to enter the cave while they were sleeping.

As he had suspected, the weather hadn’t changed either.

Apparently, there was no concept of day and night, or at least it didn’t follow the logic of a 24-hour cycle. The sky had remained exactly the same throughout the entire day, with its light and appearance never changing.

Not wanting to wait any longer, Magna had also started getting hungry, and he needed to find something to eat soon, so he finally decided to start moving.

This time, he had made a different plan. Instead of directly trying to enter the cave and risk getting caught and having to face all the Stonemen at once, he started walking toward the outside of the settlement.

His plan was to find a lone Stoneman somewhere and try to fight it, at least to understand the difference in strength between them.

It took him another hour to find one that was far away from the others, but eventually, he found a Stoneman on the other side of the mountain, quite far from the settlement, wandering around.

’He doesn’t seem to be wandering aimlessly.’

Magna narrowed his eyes while watching it. The Stoneman was currently holding a stone spear and looking at the ashen ground with intense focus.

It looked like it was searching for something in the soil.

Magna soon understood what it was looking for when the Stoneman suddenly drove its stone spear into the ground with great speed and force.

The spear wasn’t particularly sharp, but it pierced through the soil with ease, more than half of its 2.5-meter-long stone shaft sinking into the ground in an instant.

When the Stoneman pulled the spear back out, there was a strange creature impaled on its tip. It looked dead, blood spurting from its puncture wound.

Magna was surprised. He had never thought that a creature could live beneath the soil, since so far, neither his presence sense nor his 5 senses had detected any creature underground.

Magna had already moved closer to get a better look at what it was doing, allowing him to clearly see the dead creature on the tip of the spear.

It was a worm, quite large but surprisingly short, with a thick, bulky body. It was also completely black, and even its blood dripping onto the ground was black.

For a second, he wondered if it was something edible, as his stomach had already started growling. He hadn’t eaten anything for a long time.

But he quickly changed his mind when he saw the blood dripping onto the ground and releasing smoke with a hissing sound where it landed.

It was either because the blood was too hot or because it contained some kind of corrosive poison that could burn and dissolve even the ashen soil.

Magna could endure the heat thanks to his high stamina, but the same couldn’t be said about poison, which made him decide not to eat it. Its disgusting appearance was another reason as well.

The Stoneman, though, didn’t seem to care about any of this. After pulling the dead worm from the tip of its spear, it bit off a large piece, shoved it into its huge, sharp-toothed mouth, and immediately started chewing.

Its mouth was like a grinder, producing an ear-scraping, unpleasant grinding sound with every bite, as if it were chewing on stones.

The worm’s blood ran from the corners of its mouth, hissing and smoking against its stone flesh. It didn’t care. It devoured the entire worm in two quick bites, swallowed it down, and immediately turned its eyes back to the ground, looking for the next one.

While the Stoneman continued searching for food to fill its empty stomach, Magna also started approaching it from behind, moving quietly and stealthily.