Becoming a Monster

Chapter 411: Chapter 411: Wings of Envy

The drake’s nostrils flared, heat rolling from its breath as it glared down at him. "You expect me to agree to that without an answer?"

"It’s not like anything I say will change your answer. If I said I wasn’t going to do anything with it, you wouldn’t believe me. If I said I was going to use it to turn myself into a dragon, you wouldn’t believe that either."

The words made the drake’s claws dig into the stone. For a long moment, neither spoke. The only sound was the drake’s heavy breathing.

Finally, it lowered its head slightly. "If this is another one of your tricks—"

Noah cut it off. "You’ll kill me, I know. You’ve said that before." His tone was almost boring. "Now stop wasting my time."

He stepped closer, tentacles began to release from his body, ready to begin treatment. "We are both gaining from this. Besides, this won’t be bad for you either. If you do your part well enough, perhaps we can negotiate again on better terms."

The drake’s eyes narrowed for what seemed like the hundredth time, a flicker of resentment and reluctant understanding flashing through them. But soon, the tension in its body began to shift to acceptance.

"Fine," it hissed, moving its body in a position to fully display its wound. "Do it."

Noah didn’t waste a second, his tentacles quickly extended. They didn’t immediately enter the wound. Instead, they latched onto the flesh surrounding the gap, then began to expand into the wound, making sure to cover everything.

When his slime enveloped the wound, the drake wasn’t prepared for the miasma to suddenly spike. In that short interaction, it had to circulate its mana to its fullest to prevent the tainting energy from spreading any deeper.

"Dem—" The drake was about to protest. This wasn’t the sort of healing it had in mind. In fact, the corrosive mana became even harder to manage, the pain, even more unbearable. Yet, its words were cut short from disbelief. The pain subsided, even the mana itself was no longer spreading.

It was stuck experiencing a weird sensation. It could feel its rotten meat and decayed scales being ripped from its healthy flesh, peeled away layer by layer. It realized that the demon wasn’t merely pushing the corruption out, he was devouring it.

Soon it began to feel something that it had been forced to forget in the past twenty-four hours, relief.

Time passed, barely five minutes passed before it could feel the changes. The suffocating burn that had plagued it was almost fully gone.

The drake was too consumed with its disbelief and the relief that followed, that it didn’t realize what was happening to Noah.

While Noah devoured the miasma and dead flesh, something powerful was filtering through his body. This was different from the other times he had gained a trait before. It was almost equal to the sensation of acquiring his first trait. His entire body felt as if it was breaking down.

Even though he’d prepared himself, a flicker of concern still hit him.

This wasn’t what he expected.

He had assumed that what he would be gaining was the DNA of a drake, a bloodline closely related to dragons.

But what his body was telling him was something completely different. A dark potent energy was running rampant through both his body and mana. His entire insides felt as if it was being devoured and replaced simultaneously.

He staggered. In front of him, his body tentacles continued to finish the job as if they were doing so all on their own. The rest of his body shuddered violently before a pulse of mana tore through him. The pulse was so dense and heavy that the cave itself dimmed for half a second.

It was then that the drake noticed Noah’s predicament, its head jerked in his direction.

"What?"

Noah didn’t hear it. He could barely hear anything. His heart hammered once, then again... harder. And then... it exploded.

A wave of dark energy rippled from inside his chest, spreading across his ribs, spine, and down his legs. His vision warped, the color of his pupils were radiating with the hues of violet and darkness that both somehow were giving off their own light.

Only when his body stopped being devoured did he become coherent enough to process what the energy was. He wasn’t expecting to ingest the miasma into his genes. It reacted to him as if it was truly a part of him. And that alarmed him more than the pain.

His legs gave out for a moment, forcing one knee to the ground. The tentacles connecting to the drake trembled, their surface bubbling with unstable mana.

"Noah!"

The drake’s voice wasn’t angry. It was just as alarmed.

Violet veins crawled across Noah’s arms and neck. Behind his back, his shoulder blades tremored and bulged as if something was trying to escape.

Behind the veil covering his face, he grit his teeth so hard, blood filled his mouth. He had underestimated the genes. The mana was trying to overwrite him completely.

Noah’s entire body was tense. At first it was his mouth, then his eyes flooded with blood for tears.

His eyes suddenly widened. Not due to the pain, he could handle the pain. It was the realization that his body couldn’t keep up. This wasn’t a simple inheritance. He could feel that the bloodline carried centuries of evolution, a lineage that he just swallowed whole. And if that wasn’t enough. That same lineage was tainted by one of the most dangerous mana he ever came across.

Maybe it was because of his newfound bloodline, or the chimera trait itself. As he regained a sense of clarity, he understood the race of the being he ingested.

A necrotic drake.

His back arched, his spine popping in a rapid series of violent snaps. The tentacles continued their work on autopilot, as if the new bloodline was controlling them instead, to acquire the rest of the miasma within the drake’s wound.

"Demon! Stop! You’l—"

The drake’s voice cut off as it felt the second, stronger pulse. It wasn’t stupid to not understand what was happening. Noah was attempting to absorb its bloodline, but something had happened and the result was that his body wasn’t capable of sustaining it.

Yet all the drake could do was stay still.

The one time it tried to move, the tentacles tightened, a cold warning ran down its spine. As long as they were inside it, even it didn’t dare make a reckless action.

After the second pulse, Noah’s head snapped upward, eyes unfocused, chest heaving. His breath blasted out in a violent exhale of black vapor, miasma leaking in thin, poisonous curls that coiled through the air like smoke from burning tar.

He couldn’t tell if he was winning...

His thoughts flickered in and out. The world around him warped, and then everything inside him went dark.

Deep within him, inside his soul realm, the spawn within his soul stirred.

Ever since the encounter with the Seraphim, it had remained in a dormant state. But the moment the necrotic energy hit Noah, the creature had awakened.

Its entire form had turned into a silhouette of shifting black and violet, resembling a skeletal drake in a humanoid frame. Four arms, two sets of wings, each wing formed from Noah’s slime fused with the necrotic mana. It looked less like an evolution and more like something that had been waiting to wake up.

The necrotic mana resonated with it more than anything else ever had. When it got the chance, it forced Noah’s body to continue the absorption, completing its transformation. The moment it did, the feedback from its growth gave Noah what he needed to fully assimilate to the changes.

Outside his soul, the drake suddenly felt the raging mana calm. But then it saw something burst out of Noah’s body that surprised it more than anything else that had occurred.

A pair of wings.

Wings formed from his slime and the same miasma he devoured. The drake couldn’t see mana, but it could sense a massive amount of mana residing in the wings, sustaining them. But that didn’t matter, not right now.

It was envious.

A creature that had barely received its blood, that wasn’t even its kind, now possessed the very thing it had been denied since birth.

It wanted to speak. To rage. To demand why Noah was able to obtain wings from its flesh and blood. Why a creature who wasn’t born with their ancestors’ blood had achieved what it had chased its entire life.

It wasn’t fair.

But before the words could leave its mouth, Noah lifted his head.

The transformation was almost finished; that was when the drake made the mistake of looking directly at the eye on Noah’s chest.

It froze.

It had remembered the eye from before. There wasn’t a time it interacted with Noah without being distracted by it.

All those times it felt that the eye could see through it, analyzing it. But now that feeling had intensified. It felt as if the eye was reacting to its thoughts.

Then Noah’s gaze settled on it. The eye on his chest flickered, and that pressure faded as quickly as it came.

But the drake wouldn’t forget it. Meeting Noah’s eyes again, feeling that same instinctual tension it felt when facing a higher-blooded kin, its chest tightened.

The drake swallowed hard, realizing only one thing:

The demon no longer needed its cooperation.

It needed his.