Chapter 44: Caught While Snooping Around

[New substance detected... Double-cheese burger...]

[Energy particles detected...]

[Converting nutrients into energy...]

...

[New substance detected... French fries but a little different in taste...]

[Energy particles detected...]

[Converting nutrients into energy...]

...

..

.

Magna, now alone in his room, ate like there was no tomorrow.

"Ah, I would do anything for a nice fizzy coke right now." He took a sip from the glass filled with the orange-colored drink, mouth still full from the food he had been eating.

[New substance detected... It’s not orange juice, but sweet and delicious...]

[Energy particles detected...]

[Converting nutrients into energy...]

As he kept eating, he could feel the warm energy filling his whole body starting to build up.

He was so close to triggering another one of Gaia’s breakthroughs.

This feeling only made his beastly eating instinct kick in even harder. He shoved more food into his mouth, taking a bite of everything until his mouth was full, chewing, swallowing, and filling it right back up again.

He kept going until nothing but crumbs were left on the trolley. Finally, the energy filling his body reached its peak.

[Energy accumulation threshold reached.]

[Please select a method to utilize the gathered energy.]

"Finally." He said with satisfaction, wiping his mouth with a napkin.

The food he had eaten definitely wasn’t as nutrient-rich as Faye’s jelly cookies, but it was still far more than the goblin meat he was used to. This time, he managed to fill the AI in just one day.

He checked the options, hoping for something that would let him use mana, or if not that, at least something that would boost his willpower.

[Option 1: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to gain a status UI to track your general stats.]

[Option 2: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to greatly improve your instinct for detecting nearby presences.]

[Option 3: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to gain a diagnostic UI to monitor your vital signs and physical condition.]

These options were very different from the ones before, making Magna just stare at them blankly.

Option 1 and Option 3 were basically some kind of upgrade to Gaia itself.

Option 1 would give him a display screen, like the ones in video games, where he could see stats like agility, dexterity, strength, and more.

Option 3 was some kind of health and stamina bar.

Out of the three, only Option 2 gave him a direct power-up. But of course, that didn’t mean the other two were useless.

’Seeing my progress laid out in numbers would be really fun,’ he thought, weighing his choices carefully.

Tracking a character’s growth was always his favorite part of MMORPG games.

But he didn’t want to make a hasty choice just for the fun of it.

Option 3 was nice too, and it could come in handy sometimes. But he could already feel his own health and stamina well enough, so he didn’t really need a separate way to track it.

Unlike the other two, Option 2 actually fit really well with his earlier choices.

Especially after choosing the assassin class, he had gained good instincts for detecting danger. Combined with his earlier choice that had doubled all his senses, this option could form a great combo, one that would sharpen his awareness of his surroundings even further.

’I really want to choose the first option.’ He was caught in a tough fight between his logic and his nerdy instincts.

In the end, he forced himself to pick the option he thought made more sense, hoping he would still get that status screen sometime in the future.

[Option 2 selected. Utilizing gathered energy to greatly improve presence-detection instinct. Prepare for sudden physical pain...]

’Of course there had to be physical pain involved.’ He started to wonder if Gaia was torturing him on purpose every single time, since the option itself didn’t even have anything about pain or physical change.

Still, he braced himself, sitting cross-legged on the bed, and waited for the timer to hit zero.

3...

2...

1...

—

While Magna was going through his seventh mutation, a blurry silhouette hovered just outside his window.

It was Malakor, with his camouflage spell active.

Technically, the spell worked on the same idea as the Winterborne family’s camouflage spell, the one that turned the body into clear ice and let light pass through it.

But the difference was that Malakor wasn’t changing his own body. Instead, he was changing how everything around him perceived things, making himself invisible to any kind of visual detection.

What let him stay in the air was the black outfit he wore, an artifact that made his body weightless. It didn’t let him fly, but it did let him hang in the air for a short time.

As he watched the boy who had been eating like a starving child now sitting on the bed with his eyes closed, his blurred face frowned slightly under his mask.

’Is he doing meditation?’

Shadows usually had their own meditation techniques to sharpen their minds, but as far as Malakor knew, Magna had been raised in a cave.

No one should have taught him a technique this advanced.

After a few seconds, exactly three seconds by Malakor’s count, the boy’s expression started to change.

His brows furrowed, and his lips trembled slightly, clearly showing pain on his face.

At first, Malakor thought the boy might be in pain from eating too much too fast, but that thought shattered instantly twenty seconds later.

After all the pain finally passed from his face and he relaxed, Magna suddenly opened his eyes.

Then, without any reason, he suddenly turned his head and fixed his eyes on Malakor.

"Hey, hey, are you real?" Malakor muttered, caught in a moment of shock.

It should have been impossible for anyone in this mansion to detect him like that, let alone a kid.

Still, Malakor didn’t retreat right away after being spotted. He stayed there a few seconds longer because he realized something.

Magna wasn’t actually looking directly at him. His eyes were just pointed in his general direction, which meant he wasn’t seeing him, just feeling his presence.

But even that was enough for someone like Malakor, a Shadow with a century of experience and training, to know the boy was absolutely not normal.

He didn’t want to admit or accept it, but he started to think maybe his Lady’s assumption was correct.

’I should go report this,’ he thought. Then his body suddenly became heavier and began to fall.

—

Magna kept looking at the window. He had felt someone there a second ago, but now the feeling had suddenly vanished.

’Is this new mutation glitching, or was someone actually watching me?’ He thought, his face frowning.

He was pretty sure it was the latter. It seemed like the moment his stalker realized he’d been noticed, he had run off instantly.

He quickly got up and closed the curtains.

’At least it’s good to know I picked the right option.’

He already knew he couldn’t keep his cheat a complete secret as long as he was living in this mansion, but at the very least, he didn’t want anyone to know the specifics of it.

So the next time he got an upgrade, he had to be more careful about checking whether anyone was watching or listening nearby.

And this last upgrade turned out to be the perfect choice for exactly that.