26 Growth

A couple of hours passed inside the dungeon, just like that. Warden had spent half of the time in combat, and the other half in recuperating. He needed time to recover his stamina and lost energy, after all.

With little to no light present in the dungeon, he found hiding was pretty effortless with the help of his cloak. The maddening beasts were incapable of finding him from what he had found so far. Not to mention, they were probably busy with the heaps of corpses he left behind for them to consume.

In the meantime, Warden had collected four iron-grade hearts, including the one he hunted outside the dungeon. As for beast cores, he had no specific number. They might as well have reached over a hundred by now. Most of them were obviously copper-ranked, with five of them being iron-grade.

Currently, he was in the process of seeing if he could feed the cores to the blade to empower it. Although [The Divider] was a growth item, the rate at which it was growing was super slow.

[The Divider: Uncommon (71%)]

Warden understood the sword required soul energy, but the problem was that he was absorbing the lion's share of the soul energy from the slaying beasts to increase his attributes. The sword was barely getting any.

Warden reckoned if the blade absorbed all the energy instead of him, it would have already advanced to the next rank. But he couldn't seem to find a way of stopping his absorption of energy, not that he would like to. Although his condition had grown better, he was still halfway from reaching a standard.

That was why he would like to see if he could make the blade grow without sacrificing his own growth.

The little bunny grew stronger, ingesting the beast cores. He couldn't see why the blade couldn't grow from beast cores. The cores were, after all, the energy pool of the beasts and the link between their physical body and spirit. There was bound to be some residual soul energy in them.

If the cores didn't work, he had nothing to lose. He could gain the beast cores pretty easily by hunting the endless number of beasts that festered in the dungeon.

Warden infused energy into the blade, enabling the [Soulsucker] ability, while in the other palm, he crushed one copper-ranked beast core.

Bits of spark flashed in the air above the blade. The dark tendrils reacted to the disembodied energy and sucked them all in. In no time, all the smoky remnants from the core vanished.

Warden found crushed fragments in his fingers which hadn't transformed to energy and turned to the blade.

[The Divider: Uncommon (71%)]

Nothing changed, but he was sure the blade absorbed the core's energy. Perhaps he would have to repeat the process to get a result.

Warden crushed one beast core after another, applying his void energy to it so that he could crush the core into fine bits. There was a fine skill in crushing the cores evenly. Warden had to apply his energy evenly in all directions with the same amount of pressure, and break it without putting any physical pressure.

It was way harder than simply crushing it with his fingers, and why wouldn't it be? Warden wasn't simply crushing it, but transforming its form from solid to gaseous. He had to work for a quarter of an hour to have some success in the correct way of applying void energy.

Through this way, he was killing two birds with one stone. Warden found a surprising amount of improvement in his Imbuing skill after finding some success.

The blade absorbed all energy slowly. And only after the eighth core, he discovered he wasn't mistaken.

[The Divider: Uncommon (72%)]

"Yes!" Without further notice, Warden proceeded to increase the blade's quality as much as possible.

For each percentage of improvement, the blade was taking more beast cores than the previous number. When [The Divider] reached 80%, it actually took sixteen beast cores for just 1%. And with that, Warden had run out of copper-ranked beast cores.

Warden fidgeted with the five iron-ranked beast cores. He only thought for a second before beginning to crush them as well.

With just the first core, the blade jumped by two percentage points to his delight. The next one improved by another two percentage points. And by the end of all the beast cores, the percentage stood at 87%.

[The Divider: Uncommon (87%)]

It looked like the sword would reach the next rank pretty soon, Warden thought. Unless there were some other criteria for the end jump.

The dire wolves should be getting worked up with the amount of corpses he left behind in heaps. They should have gathered together by now, which was exactly what Warden aimed for. Why would he waste his time traveling the unknown land and hunting, instead of letting the wolves come to him?

With that, he stood up, after checking his own specs on the system page. There were improvements, but he felt he could do better.

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[Warden]

Race: Human (Prime/Corrupted – 27%)

Title: [Redacted] [Redacted] ... [Redacted]

Fatelock: [Void Prison Realm]

Disposition: Chaotic

Rank: [Broken Calamity]

Attributes:

[Strength: 49.8]

[Mind: 13.3]

[Spirit: 75.7]

[Recovery: 99]

Abilities:

[Imbuing: Copper- 41%] [Left Hand of Calamity: > 5%]

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The improvement was mostly apparent in Strength and Imbuing. The void energy's capacity was still under 5%, and even still it tore his skin when he directly used it through his body. He wondered how devastating it would become after it reached higher numbers.

Warden finally turned in the direction of the howling beasts. Creeping in the dark, he found silhouettes of dozens of tainted creatures, dwarfed by not one or two, but six humongous cursed wolves.

Warden would definitely die of energy deprivation if he fought them head-to-head. Thankfully, the beasts were dumb to put together any strategy for what he had in mind.

It was about time he got serious.

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