The Invincible Full-Moon System

Chapter 2023: Race Evolution (3)

Rex’s eyes flickered with both relief and excitement when the notifications appeared before him.

Even with the items he consumed to temporarily make his body more durable, it still felt horrible. Rex felt like his body and mind were still being torn to shreds from the overwhelming surge of divinity, but those sensations disappeared the moment the notifications from the System appeared.

A sudden sense of drowsiness assaulted his mind.

He instinctively tried to resist it, but this drowse was stronger than even his willpower.

It was different in a way that Rex couldn’t quite understand.

Just then, a notification flashed to his eyes again.

Rex thought that it was the divinity in him that was trying to make him pass out—which would be really bad. But it turned out to be the System initiating the next step of his evolution. Thus, he let the drowse swallow him as his vision turned dark.

For a suspended moment, there was only darkness.

He couldn’t feel his body as if he was merely a phantom drifting in the darkness.

And then, gravity suddenly seized him again.

Splash—!

Rex landed roughly against the very shallow water and scanned the area with his crimson eyes—finding nothing but darkness as far as the eye could see. He didn’t know where he was, but he was quite sure that this was somewhere within his deepest consciousness.

A place accessible only to him.

Before he could even stand up, another notification appeared before him.

Reading this, Rex snorted.

”I’ve suffered unimaginable pain. Not only to my body, but also to my mind and even soul. What c—”

His sentence stopped mid-track when the first stroke of the evolution brushed him.

Rex screamed at the top of his lungs and snapped his head skyward, as if looking up would help him endure the sudden pain that charred his nerves. Veins bulged across his entire body, rising from his chest like rivers of black lightning—and then spreading outward into his limbs and climbing his neck to swallow his face.

Each one throbbed with a life of its own.

Each pulse was akin to a hammer against the inside of his skin.

Each throbbed so hard that his skin began to split.

One by one, the veins tore through—blood spurted into the air and revealed the glistening blood vessels beneath. His face became a ruin of ruptured tissue. A map of agony painted in his own blood, and he kept screaming.

Despite his pain tolerance, his eyes rolled back, leaving only the white.

And the scream that tore from his throat didn’t even sound like his own.

It sounded like the damned soul that was being burned in the deepest burning floor of hell.

Rex screamed until his vocal cords snapped, and blood leaked from his mouth in a warm, coppery flood. And still, he kept screaming—the sound now broken and wet. A gurgling ruin of a voice that refused to fall silent.

But the evolution did not care.

No empathy or even consciousness to know that Rex was in a world of agony.

Crack—!

His bones began to shift, moving beneath his flesh like waves, then snapping grotesquely.

They restructured, realigning themselves with brutal precision.

His form convulsed, twisting and stretching. Fur sprouted in jagged patches, only to recede. His snout lengthened—then collapsed again. He shifted into his werewolf form mid-scream, the sound deepening into a guttural roar that vibrated through the shallow water around him.

Then, he was back to his human form.

And then werewolf again.

For a good moment—the two forms warred with each other, colliding and merging like storm fronts on the edge of breaking. The pain was beyond anything Rex had ever known. It was not a sensation, but a world.

A universe of fire and splintering bone, of veins tearing and blood boiling.

He wanted to pass out. He should have passed out. But the process kept him awake.

It kept him locked inside his own skull, forcing him to witness and feel every second. He was not a man anymore. He was a crucible, and something new was being forged in the furnace of his body. His body shimmered with a silvery light, and then the change went deeper.

Past flesh, bone, and into the very architecture of his being.

His genes screamed as they were rewritten, unspooled and then rethreaded,

And for a long, terrible moment, Rex forgot his own name.

Moreover, he was no longer on his knees. He was rolling in the shallow water, claws raking through the wet darkness, trying to find a way to ease the pain—some way to escape from the agony. But he found none.

All he could do was endure.

Only the raw, animal need to hold on to the last spark of himself and not let the fire consume it.

And then finally, at last, a notification flickered before his rolling, blood-filled eyes.

Instantly, the light receded, and the pain began to fade slowly like a tide pulling back from shore.

Rex lay in the shallows—the water lapping at the back of his head as he gasped for air. Aftershocks still rippled through his limbs, and his blood ran bright—silver and humming, alive with power he had not yet learned to contain.

He had survived the first step, but it had carved a traumatic scar into him.

I thought I’d experienced it all, but I was wrong.

He coughed out some blood as he savoured the peace before the next process started.

Considering what he had gone through, he thought that there was no more pain that could surprise him.

There was no other pain the universe could produce any other pain that could overwhelm him.

But he was dead wrong—there was always another.

How is this even possible, System? I’ve already experienced the pain directly to the soul.

What in the hell? I hope nothing happened to my soul. I can’t have it wounded again.

It better.

Just then, the dark space trembled.

A deep, resonant quake rippled through the void and jolted Rex upright.

His eyes snapped open, and the world around him was no longer empty.

Colors swirled in the darkness—faint at first, like echoes of light reflected through water, but growing brighter, sharper, more alive with each passing heartbeat. Rex tried rubbing his eyes to make sure that they were real, and they were.

They spiraled around him, faster and faster, until he stood at the eye of a storm made of pure power.

Rex frowned, and his senses flared.

He recognized these colors. These were all his energies. Mana, kingly energy, life energy, curse energy, moonlight energy—every force he had ever commanded was now swirling around him in a tightening vortex.

It made no sense.

This was the space inside his own consciousness, the sanctuary of his mind.

Why would his energies manifest here?

Before he even had the time to contemplate, the vortex narrowed rapidly.

The walls of spinning color closed in, and Rex forced himself to his feet despite the strain and pain that each movement created. The distance between him and the storm collapsed until it was no longer around him, but on him instead.

Each movement these energies made—now scraped against his body.

And a scream tore out of him again before he could stop it.

The energies clung to his body like metal to a magnet, searing through his skin and sinking into his very being. His flesh turned translucent, and the colors bled into him, tainting him, staining him, filling him until he was a vessel of raw, conflicting forces.

Unlike the first step, the Quintessence-gene Altering—this pain was superficial, but no less devastating. It attacked his body from the outside in, lancing through every pore, every nerve, every inch of exposed skin.

His mouth opened, and light poured from his throat.

His eyes, his ears, his nostrils—every orifice blazed with the borrowed radiance of his own power.

And then, something came out of him. Clones.

Energy leaked out of him and materialized into two figures on either side of him, perfect mirrors torn from his own soul. One was his human form—face twisted in agony. The other was his werewolf, fur bristling and claws twitching.

They screamed with him, their bodies devoured by the same storm, caught in the same crucible.

Rex watched through tear-blurred vision as the energies began to merge.

Fire mana with water. Dark mana with lunar. Wind with earth. Life with curse. Kingly with moonlight. Each impossible pair collided and fused, birthing new colors, new types of energy that should not exist. They were contradictions given form—powers that had been enemies now forced into unity.

And then the new energies began to merge with each other, combining and recombining in an ascending spiral of complexity. The stress on Rex’s body and on the bodies of his clones doubled with each fusion. His bones vibrated. His blood boiled. And even the space itself seemed to groan under the sheer weight of what was being forged.

Out of multiple, two colors remained.

Faint bluish-white within the human clone. And absolute black within the werewolf. They pulsed, facing each other, and then the clones moved. They stepped into Rex, merging back into his body, and the two colors collided in his chest.

Swish—!

Upon merging, a single, profound color burst from the union.

A cosmic silver that sparkled—like glinting stars scattered across an endless night. The detonation was absolute. Light and sound and force erupted outward, consuming the dark space, wiping away the strong vortex along with the pain and the screaming.

Rex’s body arched, his mouth open in a soundless cry, and then he collapsed, gasping.

Echoes of the blast faded into silence.

Rex was on his knees, chest heaving up and down as his mind went blank.

He couldn’t think of anything but recover from whatever happened during the Body Morphing process.

And then, the last step of evolution began.

Rex lifted his heavy gaze, the weight of exhaustion pulling at his limbs, and forced his eyes to focus on the notifications that shimmered before him. The first few barely registered through the fog of fatigue— but as his stare drifted to the last, a faint, tired excitement flickered to life in his gaze.

Like a spark struggling against the dark.

And then, bright light bathed his face.

Spheres of bright silver bloomed into existence around him, hanging in the air like newborn stars. They shimmered once, twice, and then unfolded before him—reshaping themselves into moonlit cards that hovered in perfect stillness.

Their edges gleamed with pale radiance, as if carved from the surface of the Greater Moon itself.

Rex raised his chin, watching as words began to etch themselves across the silver faces.

Each line appeared like light poured onto glass.

One by one, the cards revealed their truths—they were the Origin-rank bloodlines that he unlocked.