FREE USE in Primitive World

Chapter 266: Chapter 266: Triple-Crown Set

Sol stopped his blurring sprint and turned his hyper-focused gaze toward the opposite end of the crater.

There, half-buried in the churned, acidic mud, lay the colossal corpse of the Lord Blood Great Badger.

“You magnificent, stubborn bastard,” Sol murmured.

He didn’t say it with the flippant, casual arrogance of a gamer who had just cleared a difficult boss. There was a heavy, genuine reverence in his voice.

Walking briskly across the ruined earth, his boots splashing through deep puddles of cooling green plasma and churned mud, Sol looked at the trail of absolute, linear devastation the mammal had carved through the valley in its final seconds.

It hadn’t just fought to survive. It had fought for its family. When faced with the agonizing eradication of its bloodline, it hadn’t retreated into the jungle to lick its wounds and live another day. It had weaponized its own death, burning its very soul to ash just to ensure the architect of its misery died with it.

He reached the mammal and stood in the shadow of its massive, scarred snout.

Up close, the sheer brutality of the beast’s final stand was visceral. Half of its face was completely melted down to the gleaming white skull, the silver fur fused into a hardened, blackened crust of blood and acid. Its neck was a ruined, gaping canyon of severed muscle. Yet, even completely broken and devoid of life, the beast radiated an aura of absolute, immovable majesty.

Sol felt a strange, complicated knot tighten in his chest. He was the mastermind of this slaughter. He had actively orchestrated the red tide that tore the Badger’s pups to pieces. By the moral standards of the modern world he had left behind, he was the undisputed villain of this valley.

But in the Great Orrath, morality was a luxury afforded only to the dead. The Badger had played its hand flawlessly; Sol had simply stacked the deck.

Still, looking down at the fallen Sovereign, he couldn’t help but feel a profound, overwhelming respect for the sheer, apocalyptic spite of the creature. It was a true king of the vanguard.

It was a titan of defense that had stared down a swarm of tens of thousands of ants, a rival Layer 3 Lord, and a colossal Hive Mother, and it hadn’t gone quietly into the dark without dragging every single one of its enemies to hell alongside it. It was the epitome of the primitive world’s unyielding spirit.

Sol reached into his leather belt pouch and pulled out the pure Blood-Jade.

The smooth crystal felt incredibly cold and heavy against his palm, a stark, grounding contrast to the stifling, radiant heat still baking off the titan’s corpse.

He was gonna save this for later needs.

Sol stepped forward, placing his left hand firmly against the thick, un-melted silver fur of the Badger’s shoulder, preparing to press the Blood-Jade against its skull with his right hand.

But the very microsecond his bare skin made contact with the fallen Lord, his own body violently rebelled.

Suddenly, the Golden Liquid core in his solar plexus… the heavy, dense, life-giving essence stirred with an aggressive, autonomous hunger.

Sol gasped, his eyes going wide. He didn’t issue a command yet, nor did he flex his will.

Without a single conscious thought from Sol, the heavy, earth-shattering density of his Golden Essence roared to life. It seemed to recognize the deep, tectonic, vanguard-aligned nature of the Great Badger.

A massive, gravitational vortex violently opened within his chest.

It completely bypassed the pure Blood-Jade in his hand.

Like a black hole violently tearing open in the physical world, the Golden Liquid greedily sucked the Great Badger’s heavy, earth-aligned spirit directly out of its colossal corpse. Sol physically saw the thick, yellow essence rip through the air and slam directly into his solar plexus, crashing in right next to the Dreadwing’s soul.

Sol stumbled backward, completely shocked and profoundly confused. He dropped hard onto his ass in the mud, clutching his chest as the sheer, overwhelming, tectonic weight of a second Layer 3 soul slammed into his spiritual vessel.

“What the…” Sol coughed, staring down at his glowing chest in absolute horror. “Isn’t it an absolute law of this world that a body can only anchor one spirit? How the hell did I just absorb two?!”

He even braced himself, squeezing his eyes shut, fully expecting his veins to violently shatter under the conflicting pressure of two apex Sovereigns occupying the same space. He waited for the explosion.

But strangely, the explosion never came.

Instead, he felt the overwhelming, dual-layered power settling into absolute, terrifying harmony within him. The Dreadwing’s weightless, super speed wrapped seamlessly around the Badger’s unyielding, tectonic density.

It was a flawless synergy of motion and mass. And at the center of it all, acting as the ultimate, stabilizing anchor, was the sheer, miraculous density of the Golden Liquid keeping them perfectly contained.

Suddenly, a wild, breathless grin broke across his face as the realization hit him.

He remembered his own anomalies. He was a transmigrator. He possessed a body that fundamentally defied the biological limitations of the Great Orrath. He wasn’t exactly a normal human. Heck, her even had fucked a goddess. So, it wasn’t something too unexpected.

But why was there no resistance? Why hadn’t the Badger fought back in the mental void like the Dreadwing had?

Sol looked over his shoulder at the ruined corpse of the Ant Queen in the distance, and the puzzle pieces clicked together perfectly. The Ant Queen’s final, suicidal psychic spear hadn’t just killed the Great Badger physically, it had utterly shattered the mammal’s mind.

The Badger’s soul was seriously injured, stripped of all its ferocious willpower and consciousness. It was nothing more than a massive, unclaimed battery of raw, Layer 3 earth essence. Without an ego to defend it, his Golden Liquid had simply consumed it without a fight.

“I am completely, utterly broken,” Sol laughed, clenching his fists.

He could literally feel the gravity-crushing strength of the Badger humming in his muscles, perfectly paired with the hyper-reflexes of the Dreadwing. He possessed two Layer 3 Lord spirits. He was a walking calamity.

Greed completely overriding any remaining common sense, Sol pushed himself out of the mud and sprinted toward the massive, severed remains of the Ant Queen resting in the shadows of the tree line.

If I can hold two, maybe I can hold three. A triple-crown clear! Sol thought frantically, blurring across the crater in a fraction of a second.

He reached the Queen’s bloated, bleeding thorax and slammed his bare hand against her obsidian carapace. He closed his eyes and aggressively urged his Golden Liquid to wake up. He tried to mentally flex the same spiritual muscle that had just devoured the Great Badger, trying to force the gravitational vortex to rip open one more time to swallow the Hive Mother up and complete the ultimate triple-crown set.

But…

Nothing happened.

There was no terrifying suction, no metaphysical black hole tearing through reality. Instead of the ravenous, autonomous hunger from before, the Golden Liquid in his solar plexus felt like a massive, coiled snake that had just swallowed two whole elephants.