by Pegaz
“Not so much in charge,” Jamie replied. “More like she set a few rules for Transcendents. I only know one rule, though—no fighting. O’Malley told me that even a casual fight between Transcendents is strong enough to destroy planets by the dozens.”
John nodded. “I have one last question. When you told me about the Rank 9 immortality, you said that you produce vitality to nourish different parts. Level 1 to 3 for the organs, 4 to 6 for the body, 7 for the soul, and level 8 and 9 for the brain cells.
“However, when I went through Rank 9 immortality, the first 6 levels were like you had described, but level 7 to 9 were for the brain cells and there was nothing about the soul. Why is that?”
Jamie knitted his brows. “I’m not sure. I told you my personal experience, so if it’s any different then I don’t know why.”
John began thinking about the differences before he thought about something O’Malley had said. “Do you know about the three different types of soul ranks after reaching Rank 9?”
Jamie shook his head and John had a revelation.
The loss of the proper cultivation method from the battlefield is worse than I thought. Not only did the proper method get lost, but also the information about the soul ranks were lost, too.
Jamie must have gotten the second ranked or even the worst ranked soul if he had to use vitality on his soul at Rank 9.
I got the information about the soul ranks while inside the battlefield and I hadn’t reached the compressing part of the immortality skill yet, so I’m luckier than I thought since that information might have changed how the compressed immortality skill worked, letting me get the best ranked soul.
Not long after John finished his train of thoughts, O’Malley came out of the castle with a man following behind him.
The man was clean-shaven with slicked-back hair, and he was wearing a three-piece, grey, striped suit. It was the first time John had seen a suit of any kind since coming to this universe, but it was reasonable to believe O’Malley or another Sider had designed it or, at least, told this man about suits.
John saw the man stretching and yawning; it was obvious O’Malley had just woken him up.
After the man had stopped yawning, he looked at John and asked, “You da man that O’Malley ‘ere said can kill me?”
John was slightly taken back by the way the man spoke. He was under the impression that a man in a fancy suit would sound posh, polite, or even normal. What he heard was completely different.
Coming out of his shock, John nodded towards the man. “I am.”
O’Malley laughed. “I would say you’d get used to his manner of speaking after a while, but hopefully you don’t have to. Let me introduce you. This man is Finlay Moss and he is almost as old as me. He’s one of the few people I know who won’t change his mind about this.”
O’Malley then placed an open palm towards John while looking at Finlay. “This man is named John Allen. I think you should at least know the name of our saviour.”
Finlay smiled and nodded at John before saying, “If tis works den thanks.”
John only smiled back at him before he created a blank Information Sphere and chucked it towards Finlay.
Finlay caught the sphere and brought it to his eye level to look at it closely.
“Place that on your forehead and think about any and all the information you find useful that you don’t mind passing onto others,” John started. “The information could be from what you’ve read, experienced, heard about, or got from an epiphany, but I don’t want useless things like what you’ve experienced in your love life.”
John smiled and continued, “If there’s any useless information in there, I won’t kill you.”
This is a first. How it usually goes is, the threats are about killing the person, not about not killing them. They’ve been waiting to die for who knows how long, so this is the best method to milk them for information.
Finlay frowned. “How’s tis gonna work den? If yous get da info but can’t kills me, den I get short-changed while yous profit for doing nowt. But if yous kills me before getting da info then ya can’t know if I did what ya asked.”
John shrugged. “You’ve been waiting for this for a long time, not me. How many more years or millennia can you wait for another chance at dying if I walk away? Isn’t just doing what I asked worth the chance? If it doesn’t work out, then I’ll have to make it up to you in some other way.”
Finlay squinted his eyes while staring at John before sighing and bringing the sphere to his forehead, doing what John asked.
Good thing he isn’t like O’Malley and threatens anybody close to me to get his way.
An hour later, Finlay chucked the sphere back to John who caught it and brought it to his forehead as he shut his eyes.
The amount of information coming out of the sphere overwhelmed John. He had to stop all his mind parts from working on anything else and instead got them to help him process the information.
It still took over twenty minutes for the information to be processed and when it finished, John felt the Sinners Shop’s Continuation skill working. All the breathing and absorbing techniques Finlay knew about and John hadn’t seen before that were inside the Information Sphere were merging with the techniques John was using.
Inside the information, John saw how Finlay helped in creating planets like O’Malley had told him about; the experiences about using all the elements in different ways were now his which would stop John from wasting time and effort experimenting to come to the same results.
One of the few questions still bugging John got answered, too.
He had wondered why the system would give him the Resistance’s Elemental Force, but the beastman cores and abilities were called Gravity instead.
Now he knew that Gravity was only to add or subtract force onto something to make it heavier or lighter while in a planet’s atmosphere or on the battlefield’s plane, but Force was the ability to do that and so much more.
Force was using the element in any or multiple directions instead. It could be used in every direction at a target to cause the target to be crushed into paste, or it could be used on different parts of a target in different directions to pull the target apart.
It could also be used anywhere in the universe, even if there was no atmosphere.
The system’s immunity was towards the whole element and not just Gravity, but getting physically hit by somebody causing him to be pushed backwards was a different type of force, which the system hadn’t given him immunity to.
So when Keket physically hit him back on the battlefield, John was still launched backwards from the generated force.
John opened his eyes and smiled at Finlay. “Thank you. Since you’ve kept your end of the deal, I’m going to do everything I can to fulfil my end.”
Chapter 38: *Spoiler*
After making sure Finlay was ready, John used all one million of his threads to wrap around Finlay while making sure every millimetre was covered.
John then opened his system and turned the Absorb option on.
O’Malley had explained that this castle had runes around it to block the Chaos Power of the universe, so John didn’t feel any elements or Chaos Power being drawn towards him when he turned the option on.
But after half a second, John felt power travelling through the threads into his body. That meant that his threads could take the Chaos Power from a transcendent, meaning there was hope in fulfilling the deal.
It took a few minutes for the power travelling through the threads to dry out, so John removed the threads.
As soon as the threads were removed, a pile of skin and clothes that was still standing upright collapsed on the floor.
However, something was moving inside the pile of skin and the empty eye sockets had bright purple colour shining from behind them.
A few seconds later, John noticed the skin that was around Finlay’s skull was being filled once again, meaning Finlay was being revived.
John used a single unit of Chaos Power to create a small blade above his fingertips and used the blade to slit open Finlay’s scalp to find a small bright purple ball was in the middle of the flesh that was being generated.
Before any more flesh was generated and wrapped around the soul completely, John created more threads and pulled the soul outside the skin.
The threads started absorbing the flesh that the soul was generating while he pulled the soul out.
He brought the soul up to his eyesight to see the situation more clearly.
As long as my threads wrap around the soul, I can stop Finlay’s recovery, but I can’t walk around with the threads and more souls around me all the time.
I’ve still got Sarah’s, Kelly’s, and my soul from the past with me and I’m already being careful with everything I do to not damage them. Adding more souls isn’t an option.
Every time I’ve killed somebody with the threads, the soul flies away to who-knows-where after the person died, but this time, since the soul is the thing that’s keeping the Transcendents from dying, the soul stayed inside the skin to regenerate the body.
I might be able to eat the soul like I’ve done before and that will destroy it for sure, but that would make me relive Finlay’s eons worth of life through his memories and who knows what kind of effect that’ll have on me.
Danny’s short tens of years worth of life almost made me hate my master before I came back to reality when I had just become an immortal.
Isaek’s memories were longer because he was older than Danny. Thankfully, the memories of others popped up, too, so I didn’t get confused about who I was while I was stuck in Isaek’s memories.
Finlay has lived too long… Even if I see other people’s memories, my mind might just break. He’s not the only Transcendent who wants to die either, so eating everyone’s soul definitely isn’t an option.
Since I’ve got a passive skill that lets me defy the universe and it’s the soul that’s making the Transcendents unable to die, I might be able to destroy the soul.
The threads and the Absorb option don’t work on the soul, so let’s try brute force.
John used Chaos Power to wrap around the soul while removing the threads. He pushed more and more Chaos Power around the soul while he was trying to crush it.
When the amount of Chaos Power reached a tipping point, John heard a crack. He generated more Chaos Power and pressure onto the soul.
A few seconds later, an explosion occurred and a thin purple ring of Chaos Power expanded from where the soul was.
Ding!
Added creature ‘Human’ to Create Illusion skill.
Oh? That shows that I’ve managed to kill a Transcendent and that Kelly’s system skills will even work with humans.
John stopped pushing Chaos Power to reveal what had happened.
When the Chaos Power had disappeared, a hollow, broken soul was disappearing into thin air, bit by bit.
After it had disappeared, John looked at the pile of skin and clothes on the floor and waited for a while. He noticed the skin wasn’t moving and nothing was being generated anymore.
Looking at the system, he noticed a massive increase in Chaos Power.
Chaos Pool: 103,394
That’s a little over ten billion Life Power I got from killing Finlay, but I didn’t get a system notification about killing my first Transcendent. It’s fine, I don’t have a need for the Skill Point that normally comes with that notification anyway.
If the system was given by the universe and I defied the universe to kill a Transcendent, then it’s not surprising I didn’t get a reward, but I am surprised I didn’t get a punishment like O’Malley said would happen if you forcefully changed the past.
John looked at O’Malley, who was poking Finlay’s skin, and spoke. “It worked, Finlay’s dead.”
O’Malley stood up, tossed his head back, and laughed like a maniac.
It was only quiet again after ten minutes.
O’Malley was still smiling, but he had tears in his eyes. They seemed livelier than they were before, and they shone with glee.
O’Malley wiped the tears away and gave John a few compliments before asking if John could continue, or if there was a limit on how many Transcendents he could kill.
Shaking his head, John replied, “It only takes brute force to destroy the soul, so there’s no limitation there. I didn’t get any kind of punishment from the universe either, so as far as I can tell, there’s no limit to how many Transcendents I can kill.”
Clapping his hands with a huge smile, O’Malley shouted, “Great! That’s fantastic! Let me go wake everyone else!”
As soon as he finished speaking, O’Malley disappeared so fast his shadow was still on the floor without him being there. Less than a second later, the shadow disappeared, too.
John walked over to one of the seats and sat down, waiting for O’Malley. He wasn’t sure about the exact number of people inside the castle because his Scan was being stopped from seeing inside.
Looking over, he noticed Jamie was thinking about something, so he opened his system and used two mind parts to do a test.
One mind part for absorbing and the other part opening the Storage Space, he waited for a few minutes to find out he was gaining eight Chaos Power every minute, meaning eight hundred million Life Power per minute.
The techniques from Finlay’s information gave him about 650 million Life Power per minute increase, and he had about two hundred Transcendents left to kill.
All of a sudden, he was looking forward to killing these Transcendents rather than only killing them to stop O’Malley from coming after him and his family.
Mid-thought, a man walked out of the castle. He had his hair to one side and was dressed well, but when he walked towards John, his plump body began to bounce.
“You are the man who will kill us, yes?” the man inquired. “Sir Shane already told this one what to do, so let’s get on with it, yes?”
John could just about understand what the man was talking about, but he created an Information Sphere and chucked it to the plump man.
A few minutes later, John had the sphere back and began to go through the information. When he was done, he nodded to the man and repeated the process of killing a Transcendent.
It didn’t take long for another ring of Chaos Power to explode in his hand, but there wasn’t any kind of system notification afterwards this time.
Another man came out of the castle not long after he killed the plump man, and this new person also said O’Malley told him about the deal.
Fifteen hours later, John had killed all the Transcendents O’Malley had woken up. All of them wanted to die when the chance had been given to them, even those who said they didn’t want to die a hundred millennia ago.
John also met Singlestrike, the man who created the Sword Sect. He wasn’t a Sider like he and Sarah had assumed, but he had gotten the ideas about the podium, badges, and other things from O’Malley.
The amount of information he had gained from them all was too much for his brain, so he had to shut down all options and swapped the mind parts that were working on something to help him go through it.
The Scan’s range is a little too low for me now anyway. It was extremely useful back when I just became an immortal and couldn’t travel far, but now that I can teleport between universes spanning countless light years, it has a limited use.
John looked at O’Malley, the only Transcendent left besides John and Jamie.
O’Malley stood before him, finishing up his Information Sphere, and quickly handed it to John.
John smiled as he went through it. “There’s something extra I want from you.”
O’Malley laughed. “You want to hurt me before killing me? Revenge for threatening you and your wife?”
Shaking his head, John didn’t explain. He looked at Jamie and asked him to leave for a little while. When Jamie was gone, John opened up the Share tab in the system. A new name, Shane O’Malley,
was in the list.
When he activated it, John spoke. “Share all skills you’ve got with my system. When you die, the skills might disappear, but I’m hoping they don’t.”
“Oh?” Shane’s eyebrows lifted up in surprise. “I didn’t know we could share skills between systems, unless it’s something unique to yours. Haha, I’m actually curious as to what the results will be now, but I’ll never know since I need to die.”
Soul Manipulate All:
Anything that has a soul can be manipulated anyway you want.
However, that was the only skill that O’Malley shared.
Knitting his brows, John asked, “You’ve got no other skills? My Soul Manipulation skill is pretty much the same as this skill.”
Shrugging his shoulders, O’Malley replied, “My system is the upgrade type, so I only got one skill to help me cultivate and that skill upgraded along with me.”
“Upgrade type?” John asked. “What’s that?”
“You’ve seen different Siders, right?” O’Malley asked. “Every Sider has a different system depending on what they’ve gone through in their past life, but the way the system helps its host is different, too.
“My system is an upgrade type, so when I got to a certain immortality rank or when I increased my knowledge on certain subjects, the skill would upgrade to become more useful for me.
“I told you how I spread my manipulation technique all over the universe when I was an immortal. Well, that was the skill back then.
“When I got stronger, the skill upgraded to manipulate souls and I no longer needed other people being manipulated to increase my strength. It eventually upgraded to the skill I’ve shared with you after I transcended.
“I’ve seen other types of systems, like one that’ll strengthen a person quickly but couldn’t even help the host become an immortal. Another was the opposite, where it didn’t strengthen the host at all. But after they became an immortal, the system got its host to Rank 9 in less than a hundred years.
“The most unique one I’ve seen was one where the host could actually alter how the system worked, so the host made the system give the most ridiculous skills possible, but that host still failed to transcend in the end.”
