Fei'er Li left the trading house with a small but heavy bag of silver, slipping it into her backpack. At the same time, she opened a plain white book in her hand, so plain that even its front and back were unclear, filled with blank pages that only she could see words appearing on. Once she officially owned the materials, all the spell knowledge was recorded into this book.
"Hm… looks like only a few of these are usable for now, but that is fine. My level and Magic are both pitiful, even a fireball is a struggle," she muttered. Still, the meditation method and Magic refinement technique she had traded for earlier, along with a full set of basic spells, were enough for her.
Being prepared was never bad, and expanding her skill set was useful. She also wanted to keep one or two trump cards for herself. "The northern city will probably be destroyed soon after the first Abyss Gate opens," Fei'er Li said quietly.
She scratched her head, unsure whether to tell the lord about the cult, since there was no guarantee anyone would believe her. As a transmigrator, she was even more protective of her own head, since who knew whether soul-searching spells existed. "I should build up first, and if there is a chance, running comes first," she decided, turning toward the food market.
By rights, Icelis should not need to eat, and she only wore a human shape. Fei'er Li could not help but wonder if she even had a stomach that could digest food.
"Good days are coming."
Belial casually made a stick of ice. To ordinary people it looked like a spear-sized toothpick, and he used it to pick his teeth out of habit. With how he ate, it was rare for food to get stuck at all, but old habits from long ago died hard, and he liked having a toothpick in his mouth even when there was nothing to do.
As you can see, he failed to control his mouth again and swallowed several more waves of beasts. Recently, though, the beast tides had become much rarer, and their total numbers kept dropping after reaching a peak. It looked like the migration season was about to end, Belial thought.
Even if the numbers were down, the quality had risen a lot, and from time to time he ran into monsters that were truly strong. Some of them also had extremely abundant Magic. They were probably powerful monsters that had slept for a long time and were finally waking up.
"And they look pretty strange too. Do monsters in Otherworld get more and more bizarre the stronger they are?" he recalled. A lion with spider legs, a massive worm covered in the faces of different beasts, and a giant elephant that looked like two heads stitched together, each one more abstract than the last.
They often led groups of even stronger monsters, likely subordinates they had subdued, and some of those looked just as strange. When they ran into him, none of them were spared. Not only were they strong, they were smarter too, able to coordinate attacks and even turn and run when they realized they could not win.
Their combined group magic was quite powerful. The ice and wind spells he tossed out casually, along with several breaths, were actually endured. When he used a breath meant for clearing fodder, it no longer wiped outblockbuster at once like before, and a few survivors even managed to crawl away, which shocked him.
Still, this was not Belial being pushed back. In the end, his magic was very crude, and its power came purely from his absurd amount of Magic. His breath was nothing more than dumping a massive amount of Ice Element forward.
There was no technique to speak of, just brute force. Belial never believed that such shallow tricks could carry him everywhere. By the later part of the fight, using Spiral Heat Ray felt like overkill, and he did not even activate Space Claw, deciding instead to polish his close combat skills.
With that thought, Belial charged in. "You are really strong. You actually scratched my skin open." To show respect, he did not use the strength that could tear mountains apart with his bare hands, and instead traded blows back and forth to give the opponent some hope.
After he had his fill, Belial slapped a gigantic monster nearly his own size to death. Its hardest part, the skull, shattered like a biscuit. More than a hundred thousand tons of force gathered in a fist larger than a human, and the opponent passed on very peacefully.
The "skin" here referred to the naturally formed shell of ice and snow covering his surface, which had been torn open by a few claws, exposing the black scales beneath. The monster's claws were wrapped in extremely compressed wind, sharp like razors, and when it swung them they even produced a shrieking sound. Once that move was used, several strikes opened his skin, which made him lose patience and finish it off.
Out of all things, it had to ruin his snowfield-limited skin. "But it really was strong." The defense of that skin was no joke, formed from highly condensed Ice Element, harder than steel and capable of reflecting damage. Once the surface was breached, the Ice Element inside would surge out and freeze the attacker into scraps.
For the monster to endure that and fight to the death was truly impressive. So to show respect, Belial followed up with a breath, freezing even the corpse into ice before shattering it with a tail strike. This was purely about respect, not because he thought it smelled bad.
He did not notice that within this deformed monster's Magic was a trace of a different kind of power. As he absorbed it, that power slipped into his body as well. After lying dormant for a time, it suddenly awakened and rushed straight toward his brain.
It slammed into the area called the soul and then crashed into something solid. "Ding… sys, system… noti—" "What kind of crap noise was that."
Belial abruptly lifted his head. For something of his size, that was enough to shake the ground, and since he was lying on a mountainside, it almost caused a small avalanche. "System? Didn't you already drop your loot and die."
When he realized where the sound came from, Belial's eyes lit up. So the cheat was the delayed-login type after all. No problem, he could forgive that.
"Come on, hurry up and bring out the end, planet, hell, singularity, whatever you've got," Belial said, rubbing his hands together eagerly. With any one of those templates, he could show what it meant to blow up the entire world by himself.
The information that flooded in next quickly disappointed him. It was only part of a template from the system's wreckage, activated by some external force, more like a final burst than a true revival. It was not any of the powerful templates he had just imagined.
Even so, being able to load another template at all was some consolation. Having something was better than nothing. "That works too. Hurry, let me see who it is."
"Parsing… 1%." "Parsing information: from 'All-Out Monster Assault'… zzzt… crack…" "…exe…"
With that, the system's coffin lid closed again. Still, the scraps it spat out were enough to excite him. All-Out Monster Assault might not sound clear at first, but to a seasoned fan, it was obvious which monster it pointed to.
The Dark Destroyer. This Godzilla referred to that white-eyed, tusked, hunchbacked Godzilla born from the resentful spirits of the Pacific battlefield. In that installment, the terrifying malice and overwhelming power shown by the Dark Destroyer Godzilla had left a deep impression on him.
He had watched the series in reverse order, starting from the latest and going backward, and was used to seeing Godzilla constantly overshadowed by Ghidorah. Suddenly seeing one that could beat Ghidorah like a dog was unforgettable. Of course, the later "Earth monster that might be unmatched" Ghidorah left an even deeper mark.
Powerful, beautiful, ageless, and undying, those words fit it perfectly. It easily crushed the three guardian beasts, beat the dog, slaughtered the demon sister, and hung Ghidorah up for a beating. Even the mature Thousand-Year Dragon King created through the demon sister's usual sacrifice only barely gained an edge, before being reverse-drained and blown apart in one shot.
It was pure domination, relying on no external cheats, dragging the entire film into despair through absolute strength alone. The three guardian beasts' coin-dropping ultimate move barely left a small wound, and although the final result was death through self-destruction triggered by that wound, its essence symbolized something that could never truly be erased.
In the ending, the heart of Godzilla was still beating on the ocean floor. The resentful spirits of the Pacific War would one day manifest again from the ruins of memory, returning as the terrifying form of Godzilla.
Fusing this template was not just a simple boost in power. It was like gaining an infinite-use revival item. For something already hard to kill due to its cells, this made him even harder to kill.