Chapter 367: The Dragon Princess Begins Feeling Sorry for Luke?!

The thousands of Orcs who had rushed outside expecting to slaughter a lone young dragon suddenly found themselves becoming the ones being hunted, while Luke moved through their formation like a wolf entering a herd of sheep.

SLASH—!

Paragon swept horizontally through three Orcs before Luke twisted his body and drove the blade through another warrior approaching from behind.

PUCHI!

He pulled the sword free and immediately stepped aside as a metal hammer slammed into the ground where he had been standing, sending dirt outward before Luke’s return slash opened the attacker’s throat.

Another Orc rushed from his left.

Luke shifted one step forward, avoided the descending club, and drove his elbow into the warrior’s chest hard enough to send the nine-foot Orc crashing backward through several others.

Before the fallen bodies could even settle, the Orcs Luke had killed began reconstructing behind him.

Severed limbs flew backward, spilled blood returned from the ground, and scattered fragments of flesh rejoined their original bodies before the reconstructed Orcs released agonized screams and collapsed inward.

One after another, crimson pills formed across the battlefield.

The four Titan spirits floating above watched the process with increasing amazement.

Even during their primes, none of them had possessed a method capable of creating something like this.

To refine an entire existence into a single evolutionary resource required far more than control over flesh and blood, because the technique was simultaneously handling the soul, spirit, life, death, fate, destiny, karma, and numerous other aspects that together formed a complete being.

Calling the resulting object a blood pill was almost misleading.

What "The Eternal Origin Zero" was producing went beyond ordinary creation.

It was a condensed resource for evolution itself, something that even among the highest existences of their original universe had only ever been discussed as an almost mythical possibility.

Sevaroth stared at one of the crimson pills for several seconds before speaking.

"How is that technique doing this?"

His attention wasn’t even focused upon the energy inside it.

He was looking at the structure holding everything together.

There were seals woven throughout the pill, yet their arrangement was so intricate that even Sevaroth, whose understanding of sealing had once stood at a level few beings could approach, couldn’t completely understand what he was seeing.

For the first time in a long while, his own knowledge of seals seemed almost primitive in comparison.

Nyx remained silent for several seconds before finally murmuring, "Is this really only a fraction of what the universe itself can do?"

That thought struck all of them differently.

They had been born from their universe and had eventually risen until almost nobody within it could stand above them, so over time, it had become natural for them to compare their own achievements against the universe that had created them.

Whenever they accomplished something unprecedented and received rewards or acknowledgement from the universe, they had interpreted those responses as proof that they were gradually approaching its level.

Only now did Nyx begin to understand how wrong that assumption might have been.

What they once considered recognition could just as easily have been affection.

The universe had watched them grow, celebrated their accomplishments, and rewarded them whenever they surpassed another boundary, almost like a mother watching her children succeed.

Yet those children had mistaken that kindness for equality.

Nyx released a quiet sigh.

"I think I’m finally beginning to understand."

There was regret in his voice.

During their era, they had constantly struggled to surpass the universe that gave birth to them, believing that reaching higher and higher realms would eventually allow them to stand beside it, yet they had rarely stopped to consider why it continued helping them along the way.

Even after they crossed the Warden Rank, they still hadn’t truly understood the distance separating them from their creator.

Then those beings arrived.

Their universe was destroyed, and the mother they had spent so long trying to surpass was killed, while Nyx and the others survived only because their Eternal existences had already spread their respective aspects beyond a single universe.

Their enemies couldn’t completely erase them, so imprisonment became the only practical solution.

In the end, the enemy had still won.

Their mother was gone.

They remained.

Sevaroth’s reaction to those memories was considerably different.

Unlike Nyx, he didn’t feel the same regret toward the universe that had created the others, because a part of him still carried resentment toward her for sealing him.

He understood the reason behind it better now.

Someone else had interfered with what the universe had originally created, altering him so deeply that the existence he had once been was effectively erased and replaced by something new, and the universe had responded by placing a curse upon that changed existence before sealing him away.

Perhaps she had simply been furious that something had tampered with her creation.

Perhaps she no longer regarded the resulting Sevaroth as her child at all.

Even Sevaroth didn’t know the complete truth.

What he also didn’t know was that Luke was already aware of part of this history, because the System had revealed enough through Sevaroth’s descriptions for Luke to realize that the Crypt Titan standing beside him wasn’t exactly the same existence that had originally been born.

Nyx and Caelith remained unaware of that detail.

Myrkhal, meanwhile, showed no visible reaction at all.

His featureless face had no eyes, mouth, or other expression to read, and recently he had spoken even less than usual, leaving everyone completely unable to tell what thoughts were passing through his mind.

Below them, Emberlyn’s expression only became darker as the battle continued.

From her perspective, what she was witnessing looked completely different from what the Titan spirits understood.

Luke wasn’t merely killing the Orcs.

His strange technique appeared to reconstruct their corpses, force them through unbearable pain, devour their souls, and compress everything into blood-colored pills that then entered his own body.

Disgust should have been the strongest emotion she felt toward him.

Instead, strangely enough, part of that disgust gradually turned into pity.

Emberlyn had heard stories about cultivators who turned toward forbidden methods after being pushed into desperation, especially those who had suffered some unbearable loss or discovered that ordinary cultivation would never allow them to reach the strength they desperately wanted.

Luke had been declared talentless.

Among all the summoned Heroes, he was supposed to be the one destined to remain weak while the others continued climbing toward realms he could never reach.

Yet now he had somehow risen from an ordinary mortal to D-Rank within an incredibly short period.

Looking at the crimson pills disappearing into his body, Emberlyn began constructing an explanation that seemed increasingly reasonable in her mind.

’Maybe he didn’t have another choice.’

Her gaze remained fixed upon Luke as he moved through the Orc army.

’Maybe this was the only way he found to remove that talentless label from himself.’

And with that thought, the suspicion she felt toward him didn’t disappear, but it became mixed with something she hadn’t expected to feel.

Pity.