A few hours went by, and Rion finally woke up. His eyes twitched and then shot open. The first thing he expected when he woke up was pain, but there wasn't any. Instead, he felt completely okay. He bolted up, sitting on the ground as his hands ran over his body, looking for the hole from the stab, but it wasn't there anymore, it was completely gone.
"It healed up," he muttered. He was still confused as to what was happening, but he knew now that he couldn't bother to ask questions he couldn't get the answers to.
He looked at the massive monster's body that lay on the ground. "I killed that," he muttered, looking at his hands for a few seconds. When he had taken it down, it was all a blur, all he remembered was the armor and pain.
He slowly got to his feet, standing in place as he scanned the entire area with his eyes, no soul within the vicinity.
"So this is what they call a Domain monster," he muttered. Walking closer to it, he stretched out his hand and slowly touched it. The moment his bare fingers touched the scales—
[Do you wish to Consume?]
The message was short—no explanation, no meaning, no context—just a straight question. He stared at it for a few seconds but couldn't decipher any hidden meaning or understanding. Swallowing hard, he agreed. "Yes."
The moment the word left his mouth, the same tendrils from before shot out of his back, ripping out with so much pain that he instantly collapsed to his knees. He coughed up an enormous amount of blood. All six tendrils stabbed into the monster, ripping through the hardened scales and entering its body. The lights on them pulsed as the tendrils began extracting both blood and life force from the monster.
[You have gained 10/100 bloodline points]
[Extract more to trigger first evolution]
By the time both messages came, the entire body of the monster had shriveled up, turning into nothing but a dry corpse. The tendrils pulled out and returned back into Rion, healing up.
[Soul fragment found, wish to extract?]
Another message followed. He saw the name and immediately remembered something similar. According to the records of humanity from Earth, only about a hundred people who went into the Domain had come back to Earth and were able to stay there.
Those people shared a lot of information with the public at random, but they also hid the majority of what they experienced, and why they were the only ones who had returned in such a long time. Among the things released to the public was the power of the soul. These people verified the existence of a soul and its importance in the Domain.
"Arghhh, I can't remember it properly. Tsk." He looked at the screen again. "If being here is really to save humanity, why does barely anyone return? And why do the government and world powers suppress the flow of crucial information that could be of help?
And where do they get all those organic materials they experiment on? What exactly is happening? What's the truth about the God's Domain? Why is everything about it so shrouded?" Rion began to question everything. His helplessness made him see how unfair and illogical this whole thing was.
A few days of training wouldn't have hurt, or more information—but they were in such a haste to throw him in, giving the excuse that they didn't want him to lose himself.
None of the thoughts were helping, so he decided to push them aside for now and focus on his survival. "Extract the soul fragment," he muttered.
A light formed at the chest region of the monster, and then a purple item shot out of its chest. It looked like a broken shard of glass. It floated over to Rion; he grabbed it, and then it broke into particles and entered his body.
[Soul fragments collected – 1]
He didn't know what to do with it or what it was for, so he didn't bother. He just walked away from the monster, entering the destroyed camp. He saw the bodies on the ground already rotting, and his stomach churned. This was the first time he had witnessed such a scene. He tried to hold back, but it became too much for him—he collapsed to his knees and vomited everything in his stomach.
It took him a few good minutes to finally gather himself. He got up and walked over to one of the bodies that had its head removed. He did his best not to pay attention to the head and lifted the hand. He checked for a mark, but there was none.
So he started checking all over the body, but there was no mark either, no mark of awakening.
"They weren't Hunters?"
He looked around and found another body, so he walked to it, checked, and it was the same thing. He still went on to check the third, and after that, he was convinced they weren't Hunters.
"Humans that aren't Hunters inside the God's Domain." It didn't make sense to him at all, but there was nothing he could do.
He found one of the spears lying on the ground, so he picked it up, something was better than nothing. He checked around again, looking for maybe some food or anything useful, but what he found was some very questionable flesh. He immediately left it alone and decided to leave.
He picked a random direction and started walking, not even bothering to look back at all. In one day, he worked fifteen hours, got tired of life, suddenly got a mark, got thrown into the Domain, felt the most pain he had ever felt in his life, and finally fought a monster with a power he didn't even understand. It was like a bad nightmare, he wished it was a nightmare, but he knew it was his reality now.