Chapter 77: The Missing Origin
After determining his target, Chris stepped outside the gas station and quickly located the entrance to an abandoned mine shaft half-buried in the desert sand.
He recalled that the mutant clan lived primarily in these old mining tunnels—remnants of Nevada's silver mining boom—to avoid detection by government authorities who might still be monitoring the area for radiation cleanup.
Years of dwelling in the perpetual darkness of these tunnels had adapted the mutants to nocturnal hunting. Their combat effectiveness during daylight hours was significantly diminished, their radiation-damaged eyes particularly sensitive to the harsh desert sun.
Recalling what he knew about these creatures from the film, Chris drew a monomolecular combat knife and entered the mine shaft, his footsteps echoing against the old timber supports.
After advancing several dozen yards along the main tunnel, the sunlight from outside could no longer penetrate the darkness ahead.
For an ordinary person, even without immediate danger, the prolonged sensory deprivation would eventually cause psychological breakdown—a claustrophobic nightmare of absolute blackness.
Fortunately, Chris was far from ordinary. He paused for a few seconds, allowing his enhanced vision to adapt to the environment. Within moments, the mine shaft became nearly as visible to him as the outside world.
This wasn't truly a lightless environment after all. Old battery-powered mining lamps still emitted faint yellow glows at irregular intervals along the walls, and even without any illumination whatsoever, Chris could map his surroundings through his extraordinary sensory abilities—a kind of echolocation combined with spatial awareness.
Walking through the silent tunnels, Chris didn't even need to activate his misfortune detection ability to locate the mutants. His enhanced physical senses were more than adequate for tracking prey in these confined spaces.
Before long, Chris detected the presence of a group of mutants in a side chamber ahead.
Following their direction, Chris moved silently toward them with lethal intent.
"Kill, kill, kill! I want meat, I want meat!"
"Settle down, Pluto. Some unlucky bastards have already driven into our trap. We just gotta wait until dark, then we can start the hunt."
"Can't wait that long! I wanna go now!"
"Big Jupiter won't have it. He's already gone out with Mars and Mercury to scout the situation. Let's just wait for the good news!"
Chris, gradually approaching the chamber, listened to the mutants' conversation and noted that although they were aggressive and physically monstrous, they still possessed reasoning abilities and could communicate coherently with each other.
However, through his enhanced perception, Chris clearly observed that the creature demanding meat was holding a human femur and gnawing on the marrow.
The cave floor around them was littered with human bones and decomposing remains, scattered across the entire chamber in a grotesque carpet of death.
So although Chris confirmed these creatures retained intelligence and could communicate, they were indeed no longer human in any meaningful sense.
Chris had sensed through his misfortune ability that their human attributes were somehow contaminated or merged with something else entirely. Even now, seeing them directly, he still couldn't identify what those non-human elements were—some kind of radiation-induced genetic corruption, perhaps, or something even stranger.
However, this mystery didn't prevent Chris from executing his primary objective: eliminating this pack of cannibalistic monsters.
While the mutants continued their casual conversation about tonight's planned hunt, Chris exploded forward from the tunnel entrance with devastating speed, his combat knife flashing in rapid arcs as he covered dozens of feet in the blink of an eye.
As a streak of silver light cut through the darkness, the mutants—who had only just registered Chris's presence—were reduced to scattered chunks of meat before their expressions of surprise could fully form.
This was Chris's current level of capability. With a properly sharp blade in hand, as long as a creature's reaction time remained in the millisecond range, killing it was simpler than gutting fish at a processing plant.
Actually, fish required more effort—you had to carefully scale them first. These monsters required no such preparation.
As eight mutants fell to Chris's blade, he simultaneously felt eight streams of grayish-white energy being absorbed into his body.
However, as Chris assessed the increase in his physical capabilities, he noticed something was wrong with the numbers.
The life essence Chris had absorbed so far could be categorized from lowest to highest as gray, grayish-white, white, blue, and red.
From extensive experience, Chris had developed a general understanding of what each color represented.
Gray represented ordinary humans and animals, providing only basic physical enhancement. Grayish-white also increased physical strength, but because the boost was significantly more substantial, it had taken on a whitish tinge.
Upon reaching the white level, absorbed essence would grant Chris some supernatural abilities beyond mere physical enhancement.
For example, the Ogre—the only creature to provide white-level essence—had given Chris powerful regenerative abilities in addition to tremendous physical strength.
The blue essence obtained from killing Mickey the psychologist had enhanced Chris's mental power and granted him basic psychic abilities.
As for the higher-tier red essence, Chris only knew from Stewie that this energy had been touched by fundamental laws of reality. He understood it was more advanced than the previous categories, but lacked specific knowledge about its properties.
Excluding the advanced red essence, Chris had developed a reasonably consistent understanding of the gray, grayish-white, and blue categories, where the power scaling followed predictable patterns.
According to Chris's own analysis, these three essences were all variations on basic human life force, and their effects merely amplified the body's existing capabilities to superhuman levels.
Chris had even theorized from Mickey's blue essence that the Ogre's life force should have registered at a higher tier, but weakness or starvation might have degraded its essence, which was why it only provided white-level energy.
Otherwise, it made no logical sense for mere white-level essence to grant cellular regeneration, while blue-level essence only provided minor psychic sensitivity.
Unless the Ogre's essence had merely triggered Chris's own latent regenerative potential, or the fundamental nature of psychic abilities was inherently superior to physical regeneration—in which case Chris would have no counterargument.
But this inconsistency between white and blue essence levels remained unclear to him. As for the difference between gray and grayish-white, Chris understood that perfectly.
Gray essence required no explanation. Of the thousands of humans he'd killed in the Death God universe, every single one had provided gray essence without exception.
This extensive sampling had allowed Chris to estimate precisely how much enhancement gray essence provided based on the depth of its coloration.
According to established patterns, these mutants should have provided grayish-white essence that delivered a power boost far exceeding gray essence.
However, after Chris calculated carefully, he discovered that these eight grayish-white essences combined were only equivalent to the enhancement provided by roughly fifty top-tier gray essences.
The numbers were completely wrong. He was missing the equivalent of three full grayish-white essences worth of power.
Upon this realization, Chris was no longer in any hurry to hunt the remaining mutants. He needed to thoroughly investigate what was happening.
After all, this concerned his fundamental ability—the core of his power acquisition. He couldn't afford to ignore potential malfunctions or limitations.
To eliminate the possibility of abnormalities in the mutants themselves, Chris walked over to the scattered remains and methodically chopped them into even finer pieces.
Even after this additional mutilation, no further essence absorption occurred.
Seeing this, Chris retrieved the gasoline canister he'd taken from the gas station, preparing to replicate the method he'd used against the Ogre—burning the mutants to ash to see if complete destruction would release the missing energy.
After several attempts with fire, there was still no change. His missing essence had genuinely vanished somewhere.
Unable to extract answers from the dead, Chris decided to look for answers from living specimens instead.
He needed to capture one of these creatures alive and conduct a more thorough investigation.
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