Chapter 12: Eyes.

"This is the fourth blood energy membrane," Aza'zel pressed his small palm against a thin film of transparent blood energy that ebbed and flowed with a mysterious power.

There was a hint of repulsive power from the blood energy film; this was the fourth of its kind that he came across while traversing the dungeon.

Intrigued, Aza'zel rushed his way through while relying on Soulguider to kill the Abominations and retrieve their evil blood peals intact, devoid of spirituality.

He also realized that each region separated by a membrane corresponded with the different stages of the nine transformations, explaining why he couldn't get past the fourth membrane.

That is to say that only supernatural beings are qualified to explore the depths of the dungeon, while the first level was relatively dangerous to anyone below the peak first transformation standards.

Did this mean that supernatural beings from the aristocracy were on their way to the Evil Grounds?

Aza'zel didn't know, but at the very least, his objective of exploring the hidden dangers of the Nameless Valley dungeon was cleared. Given their powers, his entourage of seven would mainly operate in the first level of the dungeon just like everyone else, but they wouldn't face anything remotely dangerous.

Aza'zel also speculated that the third level was the limit to group leaders like Wendy and Kane, no matter how they exhaust their powers and potential.

The third transformation was their limit, and although they could evolve into supernatural beings from that benchmark, their potential would continue to gradually decline given their frail foundations.

Aza'zel's thoughts wandered about, and he looked down at the bag in his hands. It was stuffed full of evil blood pearls, and each pearl was the equivalent of 100 contribution points. Doing the calculations, there were about 200 evil blood pearls in the bag, an easy 2,000 contribution points.

"They seem like they would fit…" Aza'zel wrapped his fingers around two particular evil blood pearls, fantasizing about inserting them into his hollow eye sockets and observing the changes occurring within. In a sense, his current transformations were related to blood energy, and this might just help with his eyes.

Even if he remained blind, at the very least, his eye sockets wouldn't be left empty and hollow. He considered choosing between using an evil blood pearl that contained volumes of evil blood and one that contained a particularly powerful spirituality, eventually settling for one that contained neither.

Empty as they were, he played around with the soft, warm, yet blank spherical pearls in his hand. They accommodate both spirituality and blood energy, the only property Aza'zel looked forward to.

After making sure he was all alone in the depths of the third membrane layer, he went over to sit in a corner. He removed his hood to reveal the piece of cloth covering his eyes, its intricate symbols as eye-catching as they were, Aza'zel went over and lifted the cloth ever-so-slightly to expose his hollow eye sockets.

Without hesitation, he plugged the transparent evil blood crystals into his right and left eyes respectively before lowering the piece of cloth, binding the latter tightly to cover his eyes after shutting his eyelids tight.

A pang of pain assaulted his mind barely a moment later. Veins throbbed on his forehead as they descended and connected to his eyes. A muffled groan and hints of suffocated screams echoed in his throat, feeling the blood energy in his body rush toward the evil blood pearls all the same.

Inside his inner world, the blood puppet twitched, tilting its head to look sideways for a moment to take in the roiling ocean of blood and the churning clouds high in the sky.

Then, it resumed its motionless stance while resting in the tumbling ocean. Feeling his blood energy gradually running dry, Aza'zel curled up into a ball by the wall. The more blood energy his body transferred over to the pearls, the more his inner world injected into his body to compensate. It was an endless cycle, and his blood boiled and moved about like sharp needles through his veins, inflicting great pain.

While writhing about on the floor, he clutched at his head and breathed heavily, pink sweat pouring down his skin.

…

In a moderate military tent located by the edge of the temporary campsite not too far away from the Nameless Valley, Tu and the rest of the girls stood in a circle, worry evident in their eyes as they looked at one another.

"It has been seven days," spoke Tu, breaking the silence.

No one else replied, as they had taken Tu to be their leader, second in authority only to Aza'zel. This was decided based on aptitude and learning capabilities between the seven, nothing to argue about in recent days.

"I'm not worried about Lord Watcher," she continued in an even tone. "However, many other teams are persistently bugging us to join their pathetic little groups. If this goes on, they won't restrict themselves to simply 'inviting' us over."

Tu didn't see a hint of worry in the eyes of her sisters. If anything, there was thick derision and ridicule.

Seeing their reactions, Tu clapped her hands and smiled. "I understand! It seems like we need to show a bit of deterrent force to earn ourselves a little bit of peace, lest our practice suffers some distractions."

One of the girls, Hailie, suddenly asked, "Are you sure you can break through to the second stance if you go into the Nameless Valley dungeon, Tu?"

"I have a feeling that I can condense my source crystal, let alone practice the remaining 24 forms of the second and third stances," Tu replied proudly.

Only, she wondered how many evil blood pearls her lord must have gathered in seven days of absence.

Their lord, Aza'zel, had just collected his bearings while treading the path all the way back to the peripheral regions of the Nameless Valley, ruthless miasma ruffling his gray trench coat.

The boy didn't even bother to put up much of a resistance as his body swayed back and forth, mind occupied by examining his new pair of ruby eyes in his internal world.

This was a world that could replicate anything about Aza'zel, including the new pair of eyes that he had yet to acclimate himself to. He sat leisurely upon his black throne, his eyelids fluttering uncomfortably as he periodically switched his perception from a first-person perspective to the omnipresent perspective within the inner world.

He had to constantly tweak his optical processing units in coordination with his world of echoes and spiritual perception, not to mention the omnipresent perception afforded to him by his inner world.

The evil blood pearls allowed him to concentrate spirituality into his eyes, and much like the perception and refraction of light, he would attempt to project a field of view based on his spiritual power, though the process was far from easy.

Until he grasped a rudimentary feel of these new eyes, he would rather not expose them to the outside world, and he would instead modify and customize them within his inner world.

If he could develop the fourth transformation through to the sixth transformation with the focus being his eyes and spirit, he might just be able to project a fraction of Soulguider's and Exsanguinator's abilities through his eyes with the evil blood pearls as a medium.

While he was entrenched in his own thoughts, his world of echoes picked up on the standoff between two massive groups of vultures in the distance, and two of the presences involved were rather familiar to him…