Chapter 7: The Heart-Stone Parasite
Awakening 138.
The world that greeted Kael was a symphony of overwhelming life. The air was thick, humid, and heavy with the scent of a billion blooming flowers and a billion rotting leaves. The light was a dim, green-gold, filtered through a ceiling of foliage so high it seemed to be a different sky. The Verdant Maze.
He sat up, his seventeen-year-old body feeling frustratingly frail, a stark contrast to the living weapon he had just left behind. But the weakness was only skin deep. Beneath it, the knowledge remained. The discipline. The will. He could feel the ghost of his Adamantine Body, a phantom strength etched onto his very soul. The path was not lost.
He had pushed the limits of what mortal flesh could become. His analysis in the face of the Basalt Golem was correct: he had built a divine vessel, but it was empty. It had no engine. To fight greater beings, to challenge the wardens of his prison, he needed more than just resilience. He needed to interact with the fundamental power of the world—Qi.
And that brought him to the second tenet of his heretical scripture: Artificial Core Creation.
He could not form a Spirit Core internally. His body lacked the root, the very blueprint for such a thing. Therefore, he had to look outward. He needed to find a catalyst, something that could bridge the gap between his purely physical existence and the ethereal world of Qi.
His mind, a vast and cross-referenced library of lore, settled on a single, obscure legend, something he'd once heard from a condemned soul-artist in the Scourged Wastes. The legend spoke of the "Heart-Stone Parasite."
It was not a beast or a plant, but a bizarre symbiotic mineral. According to the legend, it formed in places where the veil between the Mortal Realm and the Spirit Realm was thin and had been "scarred" by the death of a powerful elemental. The Parasite was said to be a crystalline lattice that, when bonded with a living host, did not generate Qi, but acted as a sensory organ. It would violently latch onto the host's circulatory system and, in exchange for a constant supply of life force, would grant the host the ability to feel the flow of Qi in the world around them.
To a normal cultivator, who could already sense Qi, it was a useless and dangerous relic. The bonding process was described as excruciating, and the constant drain on one's life force was a terrible price.
But for Kael, it was everything. It was the missing key. The ability to see the music.
The soul-artist had claimed the last known Parasite was located in the Sunken Necropolis of Al'Khar, an ancient, ruined city from the time of the last great cataclysm, now buried deep within the Blighted Sands of the South.
Kael stood up. His path was clear. He was in the Verdant Maze. The Blighted Sands were a continent away. The journey would be long and perilous for a seventeen-year-old boy with no power and no resources.
He smiled. A cold, thin smile that did not belong on a young man's face. Peril was just another word for training.
He spent the first two months in the Verdant Maze doing one thing: rebuilding. He subjected his new body to a compressed, brutally efficient version of his Adamantine Forging. He found venomous vines and used their poison to temper his blood. He provoked armored beasts not to kill them, but to let them pummel him, hardening his bones against their attacks. He was weaker than he was at the end of his last life, but by the time he was ready, his body was already far beyond the limits of a normal human.
He didn't need a fortune to travel. He needed to be able to survive. He sold rare herbs he recognized from his 54th life to a local apothecary, earning enough coin for a map and basic supplies. Then he set out, moving south, a lone, determined figure swallowed by the endless green. His quest for his artificial core had begun.