Chapter 207: Beginning (VII)
The world went completely silent.
Every drop of color drained from Erin Volter’s face in a fraction of a millisecond. Her skin turned as pale as chalk. Her knees buckled under her own weight, her legs turning to water as she collapsed hard onto the moss, her hands clutching at the ground to keep herself upright.
’A... a Calamity Lord...?’
Her mind short-circuited. The words echoed in her skull like a deafening bell. A Calamity Lord, one of the apocalyptic Rulers of the alien world. The nightmare entities that humanity fights with all their power.
’I wasn’t saved... ’The horrifying realization hit her, leaving her suffocating.’ I wasn’t dragged back to Earth by the Exterminator guards. I was abducted by a Calamity Lord!’
Primal terror gripped her heart. She was a normal human—an unawakened researcher with no combat talent, no weapons, and no defenses. Sitting right in front of her was a creature capable of wiping out entire cities.
She squeezed her eyes shut, expecting her head to be severed from her neck at any second. But as the seconds ticked by in silence, her hyper-analytical brain—which she could never truly turn off, began to register several massive, scientific impossibilities.
If she was still in the world beyond the Reverse One-Way Gate... why was she alive?
The Dead Zone’s perimeter alone was saturated with dark mana capable of killing a human within an hour. The world of the Calamity Beasts was supposed to be a pure hellscape of corrupted energy. An unawakened human should have succumbed to lethal mana poisoning within three minutes of stepping through the threshold. And as she remembered, she already did.
Yet, her lungs were drawing in air smoothly. Her blood wasn’t burning. Her body felt completely healthy—in fact, it felt better than it ever had in her entire life.
And then, an even more terrifying, incomprehensible realization struck her.
Erin’s breath hitched. She raised her trembling hands, staring down at her palms in absolute disbelief.
She could feel it.
She could feel the subtle, ambient vibrations in the air around her. She could feel the heavy, pulsing heat radiating from the ground, the slow flow of energy through the roots of the glowing violet trees, and the overwhelming, terrifying reservoir of dark power contained within the man standing before her. It was an entirely new sense—a sixth organ in her perception that had never existed before.
She had a mana core.
She... she had Awakened!
"H... How?" Erin stammered, her voice cracking as her green eyes snapped back up to the charming monster. Flashes of her waking up naked, with her clothes laid gently over her body, exploded in her mind, sending a fresh wave of panic and confusion through her chest. "How did I awaken?! What... what did you do to me?!"
The Calamity Lord let out a slow, quiet sigh. He uncrossed his arms and took a step forward.
Seeing her flinch violently, he stopped, holding his open hands up in a placating gesture.
"First, do not be afraid," the Calamity Lord said softly, his ocean-blue eyes looking down at her with a gentle, patient gravity. "I am not going to kill you. On that note... I actually saved you. You almost died because of mana parasitism."
Erin stared at him, her mind struggling to process the concept of a Calamity Lord offering a gentle explanation. "Mana... parasitism?"
"Yes," he replied, lowering his hands and gesturing to the dark forest around them. "Your fragile human body crossed the spatial boundary into Rilth without an internal core. The ambient dark mana of our world flooded your body instantly, treating your blood like an empty host. It was consuming your internal cells from the inside."
He tilted his head, his smoke-like hair drifting softly around his shoulders. "When I found you collapsing down on the ground, your heart had already stopped. You were moments away from turning into a lifeless husk."
"Then... what did you do?" Erin whispered, her voice trembling. "How am I alive? How am I sensing mana?"
"I created a core inside your body with my mana," the Calamity Lord answered plainly, taking a slow step closer and sitting back down on a smooth boulder across from her. "Then, I used my authority over darkness to forcefully extract the wild, parasitic mana from your bloodstream before it once again entered your body the right way."
He pointed a long, elegant finger toward Erin’s chest. "I gave you the ability to process the energy of this world."
Erin’s hand flew to her sternum, pressing against her ribs. Deep inside her chest, right beside her heart, she could feel a serene, perfectly formed sphere of energy pulsing softly. It was a core. An Awakened Core.
"You... you forcefully Awakened me?" Erin breathed, her mind reeling from the impossibility of what he had just described. Human science had spent decades trying to forcibly induce Awakenings using condensed Life Stones, yielding a success rate of less than two percent. And this entity had done it casually, with his bare hands, in the middle of a forest!
Actually... how did he do that? A red creep crossed her cheeks. "How... how did you do that?"
"Uh... I had no idea how to awaken a human, I didn’t know your body structure as well." he added casually, entirely unbothered by her earlier panic. "So I had to be one with you... Thanks to you, I also gained this human anatomy." He laughed out loud.
Erin flushed bright red again, pulling her collar higher, ’No... no, this can’t be. This can’t beeeeee!’ To think that her first time was with a literal calamity lord.
Her mind went blank, and tears rolled down her eyes.
She was an unawakened government researcher who had illegally jumped through a forbidden Reverse Gate into the origin world of monsters, suffered lethal mana poisoning, been physical with a Calamity lord and forcibly Awakened with a dark-mana-affiliated core.
It broke her heart and mind. She suddenly stood up, and slapped the creature in front of her and ran deeper into the forest with closed eyes.
No... how could she ever accept this? She could never and so she ran and ran, until she suddenly realized that the ground beneath her leg was no more and thousands of feet below her, there was nothing but land blanketed by snow.
She just realized that she was on a fucking floating island... and now she was falling down!