The Insane Regressor: Throne of Pride

Inside the cave, Ravian was finally able to sit up straight and began regaining movement in all his limbs. The paralysis had been natural, given the state of his heart and the rest of his internal organs, which were still adapting to the changes.

”Ugh. I really don’t want to repeat that process again.” Ravian groaned, still feeling as though his organs had expanded inside his body—as if he had been inflated with air, except that air was hot as fire and hard as steel...

’Why do my thoughts always come out so strangely?’

’I really do need to work on my vocabulary so I can use more graceful descriptions in the future.’ Ravian thought, then looked at the other orc’s corpse.

’System—can we begin now?’ he asked inwardly.

[Yes, host.]

’Begin, then,’ Ravian said calmly to himself, closing his eyes and waiting for what would come.

The system didn’t wait any longer.

[Absorption and transformation process initiated.]

A new notification appeared—one Ravian was seeing for the first time. It had been a while since the system had shown him a completely new type of notification, but it had already told Ravian beforehand that this process would bring a noticeable transformation to his body, as he would cross one of the bottlenecks of his Sovereign Pride Physique.

The moment he heard the notification, Ravian lay on his back and drew his arms to his sides. Throughout the entire process, he never opened his eyes, knowing that the grandiose state that came over him would return again—stronger this time.

Then the process began to run its course.

The gray energy poured out of Ravian’s body—at double the volume this time—and went to envelop the orc’s corpse entirely. Then the green energy began to be drawn out of the corpse—but to Ravian’s surprise, the gray energy didn’t pull the green energy into his body the way it had last time.

Instead, it drew the green energy into itself, and the purification process suddenly began outside Ravian’s body.

The seconds passed, and Ravian felt nothing but the current of gray energy leaving his body without anything returning in exchange.

When he noticed that several minutes had gone by and nothing had happened, Ravian decided to open his eyes and take a look.

He nearly leapt at what he saw.

A sea of gray energy rippled in front of him, hovering above the orc’s nearly desiccated corpse. Green energy poured out of the corpse in enormous quantities, only for the gray energy to swallow it like a starving whale. With each passing second, the gray energy grew larger and larger, until it had filled Ravian’s entire field of vision.

Even accounting for how close it was as a factor in blocking his view, it had easily grown several times larger than it had during the first absorption.

It grew so large that the gray energy was now touching Ravian’s face—but unlike the violent way it treated the orc’s corpse, it handled Ravian’s body as though it were a treasure. Its texture was unrealistically soft against his skin, and it wasn’t weightless either. Its density was close to water, though slightly lighter, and it gave off an air of mystery with its shifting, unfixed gray color.

Ravian was taken aback by how calm the entire process was.

’Why is everything so quiet, System?’

[That is the refinement and condensation stage. The absorption and transformation process itself has not yet begun, host. I advise the host to prepare well, because—as I said before—it will not be easy.]

Ravian listened to the system’s warning and roughly understood the mechanism at work.

It seemed the gray energy had previously been too little to carry out the purification on its own outside the body, so it had been forced to use Ravian’s own constitution to help contain the green energy and speed the process along. But now, his gray energy—which he had guessed was his element, Void—had become abundant enough to carry out the purification externally, sparing him the effort of resisting the grandiose state that came over him every time he made contact with energy he considered beneath himself.

After a few more minutes, the orc’s corpse had withered into a skeleton stripped entirely of its luster, while gray energy roughly the size of a small pool hovered above Ravian’s still body, gleaming strangely—as if something unique were taking place within it.

And then, suddenly, the gleaming stopped.

[Brace yourself, host. The real part begins now.]

The warning came from the system, and Ravian clenched his jaw.

In the next instant—

All of the gray energy suddenly surged back into Ravian’s body, pouring every drop of purified energy into his physical constitution.

The energy crashed against his entire body like a wave breaking over him at the shore—but this wave was a little different. A wave that crashed, then poured into his body as though it had always belonged there.

”Arrrgh—!” A scream tore from between Ravian’s teeth, the pain stripping away any control he had over his nerves.

The energy entered straight into his body—the flesh, the blood, the bones—refining and sharpening every part and every atom, large or small, throughout him.

But this time, the effect didn’t begin in his internal organs. It began in his bones. In the very marrow of them.

Crack.

Crack.

Ravian could hear his bones snapping like brittle toothpicks.

He felt the bones of his spine and neck shatter into fragments. By all rights, he should have died in a moment like that, or at the very least been completely paralyzed—but Ravian was fine. Pain aside, every function was working normally, as if nothing had happened.

The bones of his legs and arms began to break, then the bones of his face, until Ravian’s face was nearly featureless. Even the bones of his skull—Ravian could have sworn he heard the crackling sounds traveling directly from inside his head to his eardrums—and yet his thoughts stayed perfectly clear. Clearer, even, than before.

Then, in an instant, the cracking sounds stopped entirely, and in their place, a strange humming began to emanate from his entire body.

This was, of course, the sound of his bones being completely reconstructed. Yes—his bones were being reassembled, fused, and increased several times over in mass and density, and that humming and faint crackling was the sound of bones melting together like metal.

Then the bones began to take their places anew, growing even whiter—but if anyone had looked closely, they would have seen small gray markings and engravings beginning to appear across them, symbols that flickered between white and black in succession, never once losing their rhythm.

And the moment every bone had formed, an enormous explosion rang out. More than anyone, it was Ravian himself who heard it, because it came from inside his own body. Anyone standing beside him would only have thought a massive boulder had struck a wall at high speed—but for Ravian, it was as if a bomb had detonated right next to his ear.

”Aaaaah—!” Ravian couldn’t control his scream this time, his hands moving involuntarily to clamp over his ears to protect them—though it changed nothing. The torment written for him would be drunk down to the last drop until it was satisfied, and only then would the reward come.

Ravian’s ears began to bleed—and not only them. Every opening in his face began to leak blood, the blood pooling around him.

The process was strange, but easy enough to guess after the reconstruction of his bones: the bone cells had begun producing a new kind of blood.

The blood of the Sovereign Pride Physique.

Ravian thrashed on the ground, blood pouring from him in a frenzy, staining his clothes and the earth around him. He rolled and clutched his ears, the pain in them still lingering from the moment of the explosion. He couldn’t even hear his own screams now.

[Ding!]

[Basic-Grade Sovereign Pride Physique — Progress: 29%...]

[Basic-Grade Sovereign Pride Physique — Progress: 35%...]

[Basic-Grade Sovereign Pride Physique — Progress: 39%...]

[Basic-Grade Sovereign Pride Physique — Progress: 40%...]

The system had been raining notifications down on him since the process began, but Ravian was barely conscious enough to care about any of them.

After a few more minutes, the blood stopped flowing—having formed a small pool beneath his body.

And as the blood stopped, something else began to change.

’The Heck?! Is this a transformation or a total reconstruction from the ground up?!’ Ravian thought, looking at his hands and his body, feeling something different unfolding.

And sure enough, something new began to happen: his hair began falling out at the same time as his skin started peeling away.

”My God?!” Ravian shouted aloud this time, watching the skin on his hand slough off and the hair fall from his head, sliding smoothly down into his palms.

”What in the hell did you do?” Ravian was in complete denial.

[Please remain calm, host.]

”You’re telling me to be calm?! I’m watching my skin fall off and the flesh and bone begin showing in front of my eyes, and you’re telling me to be calm?!” Ravian snarled, his eyes flushing red.

[Please control your state, host. This is the final stage of the transformation. Remain calm until the process is complete, and everything will return to normal... not entirely, but the host will most certainly return to a human appearance again.]

Ravian read the system window that appeared before him, skin and hair still falling away. After a few more breaths to steady himself, he lay back down—and the burning sensation he should have felt, lying with his bare flesh against the ground like that, never came.

Ravian didn’t particularly care. Not anymore.

’I was ugly to begin with. This isn’t much of a difference anyway,’ Ravian told himself—though even he didn’t believe his own thoughts.

And after all his hair and skin had fallen away completely—to the point that anyone seeing him would think he had been skinned alive—something new began to happen.

A very thin layer began to appear slowly, but noticeably, across his face. A layer that looked like...

Skin?