Chapter 127: Unhinged Night - Eating Alze-beus’s Records

​How will I eat it?

​His acceptance skipped several steps as the sheer hunger overwhelmed his judgment.

He was already getting over the fact that he was about to eat a Devil.

​He wondered, as he stared at the Devil’s corpse, looking at it the same way one would look at a dinner plate at a 5-star restaurant. He could sense the leftover energy emanating from the body.

​On instinct, he sniffed.

Instead of the rotten smell he was expecting from a corpse, it smelled like fried chicken.

​Shit...

​He realized his brain was not braining because of the overwhelming hunger. It felt like he was thinking using only his stomach.

​As more and more saliva leaked from his mouth, he looked like a lustful pervert in heat standing in front of his favorite idol.

​Just then, he heard Lucy’s sympathetic voice in his mind.

​"Use your Nightmare Mist, and not the Nightmare Fire."

​She didn’t criticize him, but instead gave him a practical suggestion.

Now that’s my cute Lucy, he thought.

​Huh? Why? he asked on reflex, only to feel stupid a second later as he wondered how this adult-sized Devil body was going to fit through his mouth.

​"Nightmare Mist is you," Lucy explained. "So when you devour using it, you will feel your hunger being satisfied. But if you use Nightmare Fire, it might just refine the Devil instead."

​She continued, "From what [Dream] said, it’s a blessing known as the [Sin of Hunger]. From what I can guess, the core principle should be to satisfy that hunger. Anything you do in line with it should pacify the starvation you feel. Even [Dream] agrees with my guess."

​"So don’t mess up. Use the Nightmare Mist. There is nothing else to eat in a radius of hundreds of kilometers, and let me remind you that your system is locked right now, so you can’t use SC to buy something either."

​Night nodded, understanding the seriousness of the situation.

​He lifted his hand, and the Nightmare Mist poured out like a tide, covering the severed head and the body of the Devil. The mist did not need any guidance; it started devouring as soon as it came in contact with the Devil’s flesh.

​"Aaaaaahh..."

​Night’s face flushed, and he moaned instinctively as he felt a rush of energy drift from the corpse and flood him. He didn’t expect it to feel so blissful.

​This... this... this is bliss. Am I in heaven?

But... but I am eating a Devil! How can I be in heaven?

He wondered why his thoughts had turned so stupid, as if the bliss had turned his brain to mush.

​"Aaah..." he moaned again as he felt another wave of rushing energy from the corpse.

​"Aaaaaah... mmmmmm..."

​Shit...

​It felt so shameful that he quickly covered his mouth with his hands. What would the others think? He would bet his right foot’s little toe that everyone in his Soul Space was watching him right now...

​And... and... Vivianne must be watching as well!

​He suddenly felt so embarrassed that his face turned beet red.

​But that didn’t change what he felt. The bliss was overwhelming, and slowly, he felt his ravenous hunger reduce.

​By now, the Nightmare Mist poured out of his body as if it didn’t even need to be guided by his hands. It flowed out of him like an aura and drilled directly into the Devil’s corpse.

​As it happened, his Nightmare Mist underwent a change.

Maybe it was because he was Level 50, or maybe it was the [Sin Of Hunger], or maybe it was because he had unleashed his main body before, or maybe because he felt his System was locked and, in response, his Nightmare Mist had turned a little unhinged.

​The blackish-purple color of the Nightmare Mist grew much deeper, while the Nighmare Mist that touched the corpse began to crack. But he didn’t feel any pain.

​Though the Nightmare Mist was a part of his real body, the cracks didn’t hurt; instead, he felt as if he was gaining something.

​It didn’t feel like a standard evolution. It felt more like a mutation.

​The cracks started spreading, and slowly, they covered all the Nightmare Mist leaking from his body.

​"Aaaahhhhhh!"

​He moaned again, and this time it was noticeably louder.

​"Aaaaahhhhh!"

​He couldn’t control himself anymore. He threw his hands up into the air as if he was about to hug the sky or start praying our father in heavens.

​"Aaaaahhhh... so goood!"

​The cracks in his Nightmare Mist grew more and more prominent.

​"So delicious..."

​His face flushed, and his eyeballs rolled back into his head as if he was experiencing an orgasm.

​"Aaaaaahhhhhh!"

​His body lifted as he felt himself grow light. He was standing on his toes, his back arched, as saliva kept dripping from his mouth and tears of sheer bliss streamed from his eyes.

​"Ohhhh myyyyy gooooood..." he muttered, as the cracks on the Nightmare Mist became fine lines and snapped open.

​Tiny mouths and eyes of various colors appeared across the Nightmare Mist surrounding Night.

​The mist wrapping around him like a coat was mostly covered in blinking eyes, while the Nightmare Mist surrounding the corpse was entirely covered in mouths.

​Teeth of various sizes grew inside the mouths, and the eating stopped being peaceful. It became brutal.

​The tiny mouths sucked violently. Not just the corpse, but all the ambient mana and Qi in the surroundings flooded into Night. It only stopped when the hunger had disappeared.

​As soon as he it happened, the Nightmare Mist left the corpse and wrapped around Night’s body like a cocoon.

​Night suddenly felt like he was in a daze. And in that daze, he started to gain a profound understanding of the Nightmare Domain.

​He realized that all this time, he had been using it wrong. Except for the time he had turned his friends into his summons, everything else he did with it from there on out was wrong.

​And this understanding led him to realize the true culprit.

​The System...

​Though it had ’awakened’ him, let him gain skills by devouring, and allowed him to accumulate EV, all of those things had always been a fundamental part of his original powers to begin with.

​In fact, because of the System, he had been shortchanged. Except for the Unique Skill [Summon Evolution] that he gained purely out of luck, every time he received a skill, he was only ever able to use that specific skill, nothing more, nothing less.

​If that had not happened, he might have been able to gain something far more profound.

​Records...

​Yes, that was one of the true abilities of his Main Body, or rather, something he would have naturally developed over his life.

​Maybe he would have just started by getting mastery over some skills and later been able to acquire the records... but it would have been possible with enough time.

​But luckily, maybe because the suppression of the System reducing his benefits was gone, or perhaps because the System was locked right now, or because of all the near-death experiences he went through recently, or perhaps it was the [Sin Of Hunger] pushing him completely past his limits...

​Something that should have taken a very long time happened right now.

​The eyes and mouths that started appearing on his Nightmare Mist were the proof of that.

​The only other time something this drastic had happened to his Nightmare Domain was when [Dream] had fed him with her precious records.

​It had turned from black to blackish-purple at that time, and he had received all sorts of benefits, like the [Dream] Aspect, which was a direct counter to his originally [Nightmare] Aspect-dominated body, and it had even awakened an unneeded but powerful Physique Natural Calamity within him.

​Perhaps something similar must have happened when Levi Rose had given him his records; it was just that he must not have been aware at that time since it was processed by the Nightmare World Seed and not the Nightmare Domain itself.

​These eyes and mouths on his Nightmare Mist now came from Alze-beus, the Devil in the path of Gluttony.

​These came from his records. It was something Night never would have been able to get from a simple skill. Compared to this, the [Body Modification] skill he had received before was not even worthy of comparison.

​Yes. In his daze, he realized this Devil was the same infant Devil he had killed in Desert City alongside Blade. This was the Devil that had threatened him at the end with his projection.

​This realization made him even more ecstatic. The feeling of eating his enemy was so incredibly good. There was something so primal and satisfying about this that he couldn’t fully grasp.

​All this while, though the System was helping him, it was also artificially narrowing his path of growth.

Perhaps to others it was a massive boon, but to someone with potential like him, it was a noose around his neck that made him conform to limitations that others mistakenly thought were the peak.

​As he understood all this, he did something that he would have never dared to do if he was in a proper state of mind.

​He used his current state to connect deeply with the Nightmare Mist and the Nightmare Domain inside his Soul Space. At the same time, he entered meditation.

​For him, meditation was easier than breathing; it didn’t matter what he was doing.

​And he didn’t stop there. He deepened his meditation further.

​By doing all this, he entered a state hundreds of times more intense than the flow state an elite athlete experiences.

​He did this because he wanted to do something ridiculous.

​He commanded the Nightmare Mist to eat his own skills...