Chapter 225: Tail Devourer

Thea closed Kalon’s apartment door behind her and took the late route home through quieter streets.

She often did this to give herself more time to think before returning home.

Her body still felt marked by Veylora. The forest air. The greyed leaf wolf under her hands. Nyphara’s voice talking about cycles in ways that Thea had never seen them before.

By the time she reached the Bluegale house, the windows were dark and the halls were silent. She washed, changed, and dropped onto her bed.

Sleep took her faster than she expected. It seemed that using her new affinity drained her energy more than her already awakened ones.

Instead of waking up though, she found herself in a dream.

She stood in a wide field under a colourless sky. On her left, things grew without stopping. Grass. Trees. Bodies rising out of the ground whole and breathing. On her right, the same shapes fell away again, as though they were returning to wherever they came from. A wolf from the forest. A man she almost recognised as her father from behind. Leaves. Her own hands.

Between both sides moved a circle.

It was not a symbol drawn in the air. It was a motion. Ending fed beginning. Beginning ran toward ending.

Every time she tried to hold only one side, the whole thing pulled against her. When she reached for Life alone, it slipped. When she clung to Death alone, it hollowed out the ground under her feet.

Only when she finally stopped choosing and let both move through her did the circle close.

A serpent made of light and black dust swallowed its own tail in the centre of the field.

Something in her chest opened with it. It was a familiar feeling, yet one that felt so foreign to her at the same time.

Thea woke up with a jolt, out of breathe like she had just ran a marathon. Her fingers were naturally clutching at her bed sheets.

The room was still dark, which meant it was not say time.

And something inside of her had changed.

Life sat in her as clearly as Death had the morning before.

She had awakened the affinity.

Where Death had felt like cold water, Life felt like pressure behind the ribs, warm and powerful.

She sat up slowly and looked at her hands, half expecting them to look different.

They did not.

The system screen however, had of course changed.

「Affinity Awakened」

﹂Life

「Skill Acquired」

「(S) Ouroboros Circuit」

~ Type: Life / Death

~ Cooldown: 60 seconds

~ Converts residual death energy from a recent death or withering effect into a life circuit.

~ On activation, the user may choose one:

1. Restore a living target’s health and stamina in proportion to the death energy consumed.

2. Store the circuit and release it as a ranged death pulse, or channel it through the next successful Wither Touch, increasing its speed and internal shutdown force.

~ The ranged death pulse travels in a straight line and carries the same withering effect as direct contact.

~ If insufficient death energy is available, the skill cannot activate.

Thea read the skill with gradually widening eyes.

An S-rank skill... She shouldn’t have been able to awaken such a thing at mere silver high silver rank.

Not only that, but the skill belonged to two different affinities. She had never heard of such a thing before, only from Kalon’s skill that mixed both fire and light.

She pressed her palms against her eyes and let out a shaky breath that was almost a laugh.

Nyphara had been right. Kalon had been right. The affinity had not come through denial. It had come through the cycle.

She needed to test it immediately.

...

The Bluegale garden was empty in the early grey light.

Thea pulled on a jacket, crossed the damp grass, and stopped near the low wall at the back where old training marks still scarred the stone.

She crouched, found a patch of thick weeds along the base, and forced Wither Touch into them. The plants dulled, greyed, and collapsed in under ten seconds. Residual death energy clung to her palm the way the system had described, cold and usable.

It did not only come from the plants, but also the bugs and microorganisms that withered away under her touch that she did not even see.

She activated Ouroboros Circuit.

The death energy drew inward instead of fading. A thin circular pull closed through her chest and down her arm, life and death running in the same veins. The skill asked for a choice without words. Restore or store.

She chose restore and pressed her hand to the opposite side of the wall where a small ornamental bush had been dying for weeks.

Green returned through the leaves in a fast visible rush. The bush thickened, colour deepened, and the weak branches lifted as if the season had changed in a handful of seconds. The stored death energy emptied cleanly into the life circuit and left her hand warm.

Thea stared at it, pulse hard in her throat.

Then she greyed another strip of weeds, stored the circuit again, and this time stepped back. She raised her hand toward a thick root several metres down the wall and released the death pulse at range.

A narrow black line left her palm, crossed the gap, and struck the root. The withering effect hit almost as hard as direct contact. The root blackened through its core in seconds and sagged dead against the stone.

Both functions worked.

Restoration, and deterioration.

Thea sat back on her heels in the wet grass and looked at her hands again.

Yesterday she had been scared of what she was becoming. This morning she could pull ending into beginning and push it back the other way, even from a distance.

She felt strange. She almost feared herself for how powerful of a skill she had just obtained.

This changed everything.

I need to tell Kalon...

Thea pulled her phone from her jacket pocket, opened Kalon’s message thread, and stared at the empty compose line for a second while the garden sat quiet around her.

She sent a text message to him.