Truly, Max had lost all control. His punches and bashes were growing more wreckless and uncontrollable. Shadowy tentacles warped out of Max's arm and like a sword, sliced through the immeasurable cadavers.
His demon was having its way with him. It swallowed Max up and effectively played its parasitic role over its host.
Meanwhile, the real Max remained intact and unpolluted, lost within himself in a dense mist of darkness but could do nothing against the formidable helm of the parasite tightened over his body.
In the void of his mind he was alone with nothing but his thoughts and strangely something else– foreign.
An object on a pedestal positioned centerely in the unfamiliar space.
He walked closer towards the object.
Amid the pitch black atmosphere, the pedestal was graced under a dim red light which gave Max better clarity to what it actually was.
"A gem?"
A shattered gem.
Max slowly reached out to the gem testing its tangibility. The crack over its surface was wide spread and deep and by the ream of the crack was a black substance.
"Looks like it spilled from the gem when it cracked," he inferred.
He touched the sticky dark ooze with both his fingers, feeling through it to figure out what it could be.
But then he heard a sound from behind.
He turned back and dark tentacles gripped him tight, suspending his motion.
It then begun drawing him backwards – into the darkness, chaining his mental form in an entanglement. He resisted and struggled but the tentacles were too strong.
He was fading further into the darkness and non-existence.
He tried harder but he just couldn't win.
But just when he was about to lose hope and give up, an image chimed in his head.
Slightly blurred and hazy, pulled desperately from forsaken ends of his memory.
It was an image of a girl. One he had never seen before. She had white to blue curly long hair with smooth and light skin tone, adorned with an easygoing and cheerful aura and a playful smile.
Max had never seen her in his life so it quizzed him how such an image sprung up and why now.
Strangely, though the girl apperaed unfamiliar there was a conspicuous captivation in her unique characteristics.
On comparison, in quite some ways she resembled Max.
Same hair, skin and eyes.
"Her eyes," Max noticed her most prominent feature. She had the same swirl of red and cyan in her eyes as he did.
He had never seen anyone else with his kind of eyes.
The resemblance was uncanny and yet so hopeful.
"Could it be…?', he wistfully stipulated.
Hope transformed into raw power.
He didn't know who she was or if she was… but what he knew was that he was gonna find her, no matter what.
Suddenly, he had been given a greater reason beyond self to keep fighting and press on.
More power and energy pulsed which glowed over Max's weary frame burning off the dropping appendages off him.
It sparked then ignited.
Burneing fiercer and fiercer into a spectra of pure energy.
The darkness began to suck into the core like a spacial drain of a nightly stream while the surrounding space cracked with bright crawling veins.
Max raised his will over the demon and towered his fury even more. The entire space shattered into dark shards containing the demonic infection back into the unsealed gem.
[Corruption- Normal(45%)]
Max awoke on his knees, panting heavily amidst a sea of defeated undeads.
"I'll find you. I promise," he resolved in a determined whisper.
His body was steaming and the dark veins cloaked over his body dissolved back into him.
"Argh!!!", he screamed as shelved, put-off ocean of pain poured over Max.
His head ached and drummed intensely along with every single muscle in his body. They had gone beyond their Level 1 capabilities and cramped like crazy.
The takeover really took a toll on him both physically and mentally.
Lucky for him he had a plethora of unmerited cores smiling over him.
He got up and walked up to the nearest he could sight.
The bone fragments had just concluded its disintegration before he picked it.
Before he started absorbing, he decided to look at his status to see if there were any increments and then note the increase after absorbing.
STATUS
Name- Max Fenton
Class- Unidentified
Exp- 0/100 || Level- 1 || Blood- Hybrid
Concepts- Magic | Anti-magic | Time
Soul- 5 || Constitution- 6 || Mana- 100%
Element- _
Universal Time- 10050872:14:06:91:06:46:19
[The exact age of existence since the dawn of time]
[Eons: Centuries: Years: Days: Hours: Minutes: Seconds]
Current Time- 14:19:57
Points: 0 | | MPR: 1Fr/min
Corruption- Extreme(45%)
Reaction- Null zone | Inertia
[Ambient stereotyped reactions of reality in response to conceptual application. Can be permanently active or not]
Skills- Mana creation
Inventory∆
"Not much," his constitution had only gone up by 1 but other than that every other variable except the corruption and mana remained constant.
On the plus side, his mana had fully restored.
Also, he narrowed his attention to the corruption.
It measured by how much the demon was consuming control of him and luckily it had dropped by about 15%.
The lower 50% was a safe zone but the upper half gave no assurance of self sanity.
"Time for some more," he said beginning to absorb the core in his hand.
[Magical Ingest Denied]
[Core Absorption Rejection]
[Attribute: Incompatibility with magic (Inertia)]
[Punishment mode]
"Arghh!!", he groaned as the system induced an immense volt of electricity through him launching him to the adjacent cave wall.
His breath became even heavier after the shock as smoke and the scent of trifle roasted organs complemented the dew.
His brows furrowed at the sight of the notification as he brushed off the dust and rock particles on him.
'No cores! How am I supposed to level up?!'
[Anti-magical Reaction: Inertia]
[To level up significantly consume monsters' body and corpse and drink human blood]