"I do not have many people to talk to anyway," Belial said. "This is enough for now."
He nodded to himself and then turned inward, probing deeper into the most hidden parts of his body. He had already broken himself down into Black Mist Form to make this possible. Only in that state could he find what he was looking for.
"I have said before that my strange form could not be explained by raw power alone," he said. "These days, Godzilla eating human supplies is nothing special, but why did my skill list and energy properties almost change entirely?"
"Wait a second," he added. "So it was you."
After circling through his body, Belial finally found the cause. Deep inside him, a golden shining figure was rolling around everywhere.
"Ah…" "Gua…" "Yah…!"
Nearby, three black shadows, Space, darkness, and a planet, stood in a triangular formation. They happily kicked the rolling golden figure back and forth, beating it in a circle. The scene looked both absurd and familiar.
"Pause. Stop kicking it," Belial complained.
This was actually a manifestation of a small rejection reaction inside his body. The thing rolling on the ground looked extremely familiar. Golden scales covered its body, horns rose from its head, it had three heads, a pair of wings, and two tails.
That appearance was unmistakable. It was the traditional nemesis from the Godzilla series, Ghidorah. Worse, it was the Millennium Dragon King version, that embarrassing one that got beaten from start to finish.
This Ghidorah originated as one of the three guardian beasts of a nation. It was defeated by humans in ancient times and later summoned to fight Diablo Godzilla alongside the other two guardian beasts. The result was still complete humiliation.
At the start, it could not even fly or use lightning properly and could only bite things. The ridiculous part was that in the films, Ghidorah benefited from another monster's sacrifice and evolved into a mature Millennium Dragon King, finally gaining some strength. Then it shocked everyone by being absorbed by Godzilla and blown apart, with its final move barely leaving a wound.
As a senior cosmic monster, others at least had some impressive records before losing. This one was humiliated from beginning to end. Thinking about it made Belial want to sigh.
"So the reward from System for telling me to blow up Rodan was this," he said. "I thought it bugged out, but it turns out you needed your own mana bar."
After understanding the situation, Belial realized that his earlier Clone state was not just a simple power boost. It also included the Millennium Dragon King template, which was scaled to his own base stats. That explained the ridiculous performance.
As for the rejection reaction and why the template had never activated before, the reason was simple. Even if it was embarrassing, this thing was still a legitimate god. It was the kind that could receive worship and consume faith.
Given Belial's usual way of doing things, where would faith come from? Without a mana bar, this template was almost useless beyond basic traits. It only truly awakened after he absorbed that massive power and the light gave him what seemed like a boost of faith.
As for why the Diablo template, another monster of the same series, could activate, the reason was different. That thing was an incarnation of resentment, did not need faith, could share a mana bar with other Godzilla, and could freely consume souls. After killing so many along the way, it naturally had no shortage of growth.
The rejection reaction made sense too. He already had three Godzilla on him. Even in terms of investment, it was not less than Ghidorah. Adding Ghidorah on top of that was simply excessive. No wonder Diablo kicked the hardest earlier.
As a result, his body was now divided into two territories. One belonged to Godzilla, and a smaller one belonged to Ghidorah. They were still one body, but something felt off about it.
"Still, this is not completely useless," Belial said after thinking it over.
It was a template after all. Besides boosting his base stats, he should make use of its abilities if possible. The rejection only prevented the templates from merging, but the abilities themselves were usable.
It was like having two skill trees equipped at the same time. Ghidorah's exclusive skills needed a mana bar he currently did not have, since it had already been spent. Even so, it was not entirely worthless.
After careful study, he noticed that even when the Ghidorah template was inactive, its base stats and passive traits had been helping him. Parts of his internal System and skill tree construction already carried Ghidorah-like characteristics.
When he checked his internal System, he found that it had vaguely grown into the shape of Ghidorah long ago. It felt strange, but it was undeniably useful.
"And Ghidorah's abilities seem connected to this little translation space the light gave me," he said. "Something related to gods? So it really does need faith. Interesting."
After some thought, Belial used Ghidorah's three-headed trait to split off a portion of his consciousness. He placed it independently inside that space to act as an administrator. The process felt smooth and natural.
After doing so, he discovered a new function. "Friend invitation?"
Belial froze for a moment. The criteria required some level of connection, such as possessing one of his Clone bodies or being influenced by him.
Under those conditions, with his main body acting as a base station, he could send out a wide-area scanning pulse as an invitation. Anyone within range could receive it. Thinking about it, he realized there were indeed a few targets who still had parts of his body.
"Then I will try it," he said.
With the mindset that there was no harm in using it, he directly pressed the invitation button.
High above a small city that had suffered a large scale mass coma incident some days ago, a blurry shadow like a mosaic suddenly appeared above the thick clouds. The surrounding scenery twisted like a vortex and gathered toward a single point, opening a pitch black hole. From it flew out a massive Floating City that perfectly fused technology and Magic.
A giant spherical Barrier surrounding the Floating City flashed past, while two large thrusters using fusion cores dropped to low power and folded in at the rear. Soon after, everything concealed itself once more and vanished without a trace.
"There is nothing strange around here, right?" "Old man, you said the abnormal energy fluctuations came from here, but there is nothing at all. I scanned this place three times with my detector. Did you mess up the Teleportation?" "Uh, I should not be wrong about this. At least in this field, I am still quite strong."
Safas was just as confused. He had clearly observed a massive burst of Holy Light energy here earlier, mixed with the aura of the Abyss, and before that there had even been large scale Domain Law activity. Any one of these should have been a major event, yet this place looked completely ordinary, just a normal small city below.
There were really no traces at all. He looked down again, then turned back helplessly and said that they had all seen it in the gap, that enormous flood of light had originated here. It made no sense that nothing was left behind.
"I am already using a new type of detection radar. This is strange, is it broken? Why is the whole map filled like this?" Bella tapped the display on her arm. Even though it was connected directly to her computing System, she could not help suspecting that something was wrong.
Lilith floated out slowly while holding the Crystal Magic Staff and looked down. In her crystal like pupils, light flickered, and from a different perspective she saw many things that others could not. "Then I will take a look at what happened here," she said calmly.
Bella turned to her with her mouth open. "Huh? You can see what happened back then? I do not remember you having spells like that in your database." "So it is not mine," Lilith replied. "I will just look from the perspective of the person involved."
She stepped onto the air and descended a short distance, then gently waved the Magic Staff. Closing her eyes, Magic surged from within her body. Dense auxiliary calculation arrays and structures spread out around her, and the vast spell structure engraved into the Magic Staff was projected and activated almost instantly.
She floated in midair, her crystal like hair lifting without wind and flowing with faint light. A soft glow covered her whole body, even her eyelashes shining faintly. The amount of Magic pouring out far exceeded anything from before, and this was purely her own power rather than what the Magic Staff usually stored, making Safas feel uneasy.
Was his disciple still even human at this point. He was already a Saint level, yet he might not reach even one tenth of her output. "This is normal. I was surprised when I first saw it too," someone said. "To be precise, Lilith's Magic started growing exponentially at some point. Her recovery speed is also frightening, and this is just the low power mode she uses to feed Magic into the Magic Staff."