Chapter 766: Found you

Damon watched the vampire silently for a moment, carefully observing. There was no flickering, no instability, and no sign of existence breaking apart.

Norosse was completely fine outside the game world.

Damon sighed in relief. He still did not immediately bring out everyone else. He chatted with little red for a bit, asking her to analyze the situation as well. He also let Norosse ramble on for a few more minutes and really made sure that everything was okay.

Only after that, he finally got the others out. Lirae, Erin, Ellora, Riven, Kaelthorn, and everyone walked out looking around. Damon explained the situation, unsure how they were going to react. At first, they were confused.

"I never doubted that there was a world outside our world, but I don’t know why... I have never thought about going out, going to another world like this before. I just... don’t know why." Lirae mumbled.

Erin remained silent and did not say anything. Damon could see that she was processing a lot, maybe even unpacking some of her locked memories. So he did not disturb her.

Ellora and the others pretty much reacted like Lirae. They were a little confused but accepted the situation as it was. Overall, everything went smoothly.

Damon sighed in relief and called Aurora over. "Can you keep an eye on everyone? I am going to move around now to speed things up."

Aurora immediately pouted. "No fair, hubby. I want to come too." But after a moment, she sighed and crossed her arms. "Fine. I’ll babysit."

Despite the teasing tone, Damon knew she would take the responsibility seriously. With that settled, he turned back toward the endless slime field.

The bloodline thread still burned clearly in his mind. Somewhere in this ocean of red creatures, his bloodline fragment was hiding. And judging by the number of slimes, it wasn’t going to be easy.

Damon cracked his neck and activated his Dao core again. Crimson energy began swirling around him as the sky above slowly darkened once more.

"If I need to kill billions of slimes to find it..." His lips curled into a dangerous smile. "Then I’ll kill billions."

The crimson clouds thickened overhead, and the massacre truly began.

Time passed by rather slowly, with the dull, mindless grinding. Damon did not like it at all. The more time he spent doing this, the more he felt as if something was wrong. It was as if someone had designed things to be this way.

Could it be a trap?

Damon scratched his head. Was he overthinking this? He continued culling down the slimes. Weirdly, the more slimes he killed, the less connection he had with his bloodline fragment. He only seemed to get farther and farther from his goal.

"Is this guy somehow hiding from me?"

It was not that Damon was underestimating a slime, but this sort of strategy seemed a bit too complicated for a simple slime. Even if that slime carried a primordial bloodline, at best, it should be a giant slime of some sort. How could it so cunningly hide itself?

Damon frowned slightly. The battlefield around him had turned into a sea of popping red bodies. Blood rain continued to fall in rhythmic waves, each droplet detonating dozens of slimes at once. Every few seconds, the system chimed again and again with notifications, several minuscule blood essences continuing to flow into him.

But Damon was no longer paying attention to that.

Something was wrong. He slowed his attacks.

His Primordial Senses spread outward again, tracing the faint crimson thread that had brought him here in the first place. It was weaker.

Damon’s brow furrowed. "That... shouldn’t be happening."

He had expected the opposite. Killing the surrounding slimes should have gradually narrowed the search area, making the bloodline fragment easier to locate. Instead, the connection was drifting away.

Almost like... Like it was moving. It was moving even as he was tracking it.

Damon stopped attacking entirely. Around him the remaining slimes jiggled peacefully, completely unaware that their apocalypse had just paused. He closed his eyes.

The crimson threads appeared again in his mind and then he saw it.

Damon’s eyes snapped open. "Oh." He slowly turned his head and looked across the endless slime field. Millions of identical red bodies bounced lazily across the wasteland. None of them stood out. None of them were larger. None of them radiated power.

Damon’s lips slowly curled upward. "Well played. This entire planet..." He looked out across the wriggling red ocean. "...is basically one single thing."

It wasn’t that one slime was hiding among billions. It was that all of them were the same creature. It had to be and bloodline was being absorbed and distributed from one place to the other.

The bloodline fragment wasn’t sitting inside one specific slime body. It was flowing through the entire slime ecosystem like blood through veins. When one slime died, the fragment simply redistributed itself through the rest of the colony.

That was why the thread kept drifting away.

Every time Damon wiped out a region, the remaining slimes automatically rebalanced the bloodline energy somewhere else on the planet.

Damon slowly exhaled. "So it’s a hive organism..." He stretched his shoulders slowly. "Alright." His crimson aura flared again. "But now that I understand the rules..." A wicked grin spread across his face. "...let’s see how long you can keep hiding."

It was time to test the full power of his primordial senses. Did it have the juice to observe an entire world?

His perception spread outward like a silent crimson tide.

Ten meters.

A hundred meters.

A kilometer.

The slime field stretched endlessly beneath his awareness, each tiny life signature appearing like a faint flicker of red light inside the darkness of his mind.

Millions. Then tens of millions.

Damon’s brow twitched slightly. "Heh."

The pressure on his mind increased sharply, but he continued expanding the range. More slimes appeared and more movements. More tiny pulses of life. His perception kept stretching farther and farther until the entire region around him became a massive living map inside his consciousness.

Meanwhile, the sky darkened and the slimes had begun to tremble slightly.

Damon’s breathing slowed. His senses continued expanding outward, tracing the invisible currents of bloodline energy flowing through the slime network. At first it looked chaotic and random, pretty much meaningless but he kept watching.

And slowly... patterns began to emerge.

When slimes died, energy shifted. When groups moved, the current bent. When clusters gathered, the pressure changed like a living circulatory system.

Damon’s lips slowly curved upward. "Found you."

The flow always converged. Not toward a single slime... but toward a region.

Deep beneath the slime ocean, hidden far below the surface, there was a slime where the bloodline energy periodically concentrated before redistributing across the colony again.

This had to be the heart.

Damon opened his eyes. "Well. That answers that question." His Primordial Senses slowly withdrew as his Dao core began roaring back to life. The next second the backlash hit him but he did not care. He was this close to making an actual improvement to his bloodline and he was not going to let it go.

Damon looked toward the distant mountains where the underground currents converged. Then he smiled. "Let’s see how a hive organism reacts..." His aura surged. "...when its heart stops beating."