While Laura was still caught up in her indecision, Alex moved on to calculate his gains beyond the massive upgrade that Gaia suddenly received after absorbing Ultron. The Infinity Stone fragments. And especially the fragment of the Power Stone that he didn’t yet possess. He quickly took the three Infinity Stones from Tony Stark’s corpse and took them into his soul, where they moved to their designated spot at its center. The Mind Stone merged with the one that was already there, intensifying its glow even further. The Reality Stone also merged with the one that was already present after he took the fragment from Angelic Wanda a little while ago, which had consequently led to him taking implicit control over Spider-Gwen’s planet. Lastly, the Power Stone, since it didn’t have a place, took its spot in between the other four, directly in the middle. Upon its absorption, Alex felt as if Infinite Power was coursing through his entire existence, as if it was impossible for him to ever be defeated as long as he had the Power Stone. With that feeling came an intense purple glow that illuminated the outside of his soul, similar to how the other stones had their glows.
After shaking off the feeling of false invincibility that accompanied the acquisition of the Power Stone, Alex pulled up his status panel.
«Skill Acquisition»
«EP/Bioenergy»:: 541 Units
«Cosmic Energy»:: 0.2347 Units
«Soul Energy»:: 69534 Units
«Manipulations»:: ‹Lightning Divinity› ‹Basic Blood Manipulation›
«Innate Abilities»:: ‹Biological Manipulation› ‹Host Enhancement› ‹Devour› ‹Copy›
«Derived Abilities»
:: ‹Cosmic Physique Creation› ‹True Sixth Sense› ‹Inventory› ‹Advanced Camouflage› ‹Elemental Immunity› ‹Hypnosis› ‹Secondary Consciousness (Gaia)›«Magical Abilities»:: ‹High Magic Affinity› ‹Wielder of Chaos› ‹Soul Devour›
«Authorities»:: ‹Time (2.5%)› ‹Mind (7.5%)› ‹Soul (5%)› ‹Reality (5%)› ‹Power (2.5%)›
«Cosmic Abilities»:: ‹Low Cosmic Manipulation (Incomplete)›
As an unfortunate side effect of using the Infinity Stones so freely, Alex had essentially exhausted all of the Bioenergy reserves that had built up in the past week or so. Of course, it was an understandable expense if he wanted to freely use fragmented Infinity Stones without being affected by their backlash. Still, it wasn’t a big deal for him anymore since the more his farm expanded, the more Bioenergy he could collect consistently. Currently, the residents of the Gaia Penitentiary, unofficially dubbed the Farm, had exceeded the two thousand mark. Out of which around a hundred of the residents with good Qi talents who provided almost a single unit every single day, while a thousand of them who had spent over three years in there provided him with half a unit daily, while the rest of them provided a tenth of a unit every day. Of course, there were some extremely talented ones like Silvija who regularly provided him with more than a single unit of Bioenergy. Considering the time dilation of one day to one year that the farm was under, he received tens of thousands of EP every single day, and the number was only increasing as the days passed.
“I guess I’m ready, Alex,” Laura said, pulling Alex out of his thoughts. “I think I’m ready to go out and confront those guys.”
“Good,” he nodded. “Time to go.”
Alex simply wrapped around Laura, and she disappeared into his ‹Inventory› before reappearing outside. By now, every single citizen of the Bastion had disappeared as the Widows took them away through an underground route that Alex had helped set up. Of course, they weren’t going to be moving across the country and would instead be moving to a location where the Sanctuary’s floating fortress would pick them up in a carrier and transport them.
“Do you want to go on a bike ride across the—“ Laura’s words never finished as she felt an unbearable sense of pressure all over her. Blood started seeping out of her pores as if literally being pulled out like sweat. Without a moment of hesitation, Alex sent her into his ‹Inventory›. As she disappeared, a floating eyeball blocked the sky above him, casting a massive shadow all over him and the emptied Bastion. It was truly massive, far larger than its form had been when he had first encountered its true form with Jane.
“Heh,” Alex chuckled. “Did you think you could simply ambush me after I’m tired from my fight against Ultron and consider everything finished? Or was it a failsafe that Ultron had devised in case of his failure… Everyone thinks they are schemers now.”
Four enormous tentacles made of blood became visible in the sky as the ‹Eldritch Leader Class› abomination’s eyelid lowered halfway to make it seem as if it was squinting. Immediately, Alex felt a familiar sense of pressure assaulting him. It was the same sensation that Laura had felt before her blood escaped Alex’s control and started to seep out of her body under the effects of the abomination’s blood manipulation.
“I don’t have blood, smart ass,” Alex said as he completely removed all elements of a human body from his current form. Usually, the bodies he created when he was with his women were perfect emulations of human bodies with organs, muscles, bones, blood, and everything. Of course, it was all being emulated by his actual body. Now, however, he simply looked like a human with his insides being completely those of a slime that rendered the abomination’s blood manipulation completely useless. “Don’t you want to live a little longer, huh? I was thinking of coming to you with Susan to get her some exposure, but since you are so damn impatient, who am I to refuse?”
Each of the four blood tentacles was as thick as the space elevator that Alex had previously destroyed, and the speed with which they were approaching him made it seem as if the eldritch abomination was planning to destroy the entire continent with him. In response, Alex raised his arms, and from the ground around the Bastion, four similarly sized black tentacles rose up before impacting the four blood tentacles of the monster. They tangled up with each other and quickly drew into a stalemate. To break the stalemate, Alex started devouring the blood tentacles of the eldritch abomination.
[EP +1][EP +1][EP +1][EP +1][EP +1]…
The eye’s panic was clearly visible as it started trying to pull its blood tentacles back from Alex’s black ones, but it was useless as he continued constantly absorbing its blood and the Bioenergy that it contained.
“You are the worst possible match for me, dude,” Alex said. “And now you’ve earned my ire because you tried to hurt Laura. You should have stayed in wait, counting your lucky stars that I didn’t suddenly decide to kill you. Instead, you came all the way to me. Huge fucking mistake.”
Amidst Alex’s calm taunting and slow murder of the eldritch creature, it panicked and sent an enormous horde of abominations at him, wanting to stall him and escape.
Even as the Abominations approached Alex, he kept looking up at the creature that seemed ready to cut its losses and escape. The sky above it crackled and darkened before multiple thick bolts of thunder struck it. Despite having no method to release any sounds, the reverberating of its body and the bloody tentacles made its current state clear as day. Alex looked dismissively at the abominations approaching him.
The horde consisted of all sorts of different creatures, including hundreds of Leader Class ones, all with loads of different blood-related abilities and weapons.
“While I would love to keep you all alive to raise the next generation of Abominations, I think I’m instead going to reverse engineer you all into a virus that affects humans directly. If I don’t want any unexpected surprises arising, I think completely culling the current generation of abominations is a good plan,” Alex mused as he raised his palm, and a flat dark disk formed over it. “I could simply make the new virus something that affects people with age. Anyone who goes beyond sixty or seventy years of age will naturally turn into an abomination that must be released into the wild. So many ideas.”
His words seemed to infuriate the eye even further, but under the constant assault of the lightning and his tentacles absorbing its literal vitality, it wasn’t able to do much.
The disk that Alex had formed in front of him suddenly released an invisible wave of force that impacted every single one of the hundreds of thousands of abominations that had all suddenly gathered at the behest of their continental overlord. Instantly, multiple chunks of their bodies disappeared from existence and releasing all of their entrails, blood, and gore. A literal sea of blood and dead bodies formed in front of Alex as he threw that disk forward. It expanded into a massive black blanket that covered everything and disappeared, providing Alex with tens of thousands of units of Bioenergy in an instant.
“This is why Susan is just unbelievably awesome…” he said. “This was just a single shockwave that disturbed the frequencies of their molecules and turned parts of them selectively intangible. Not to mention, this was something that she just released under my instruction after training for three weeks. The things I could do once I form a level two bond and actually copy her abilities for myself…” There was a dangerous glint in Alex’s eyes as he thought of the endless possibilities that his bond with Susan represented.
“Now it’s your turn,” Alex said as he released a fifth tentacle that was even larger than the other four, which simply wrapped around the massive eye and pulled it toward him. He jumped up and stood atop the fifth tentacle while slowly walking toward the massive eye in the sky. Considering his small form and the colossal nature of the constructs that were being used, it took him five minutes to walk up to the eye despite it being pulled closer to him. Yet those five minutes sent such terror through that eldritch creature that it had lost all resistance and was simply shaking in fear.
Unconcerned about its feelings, Alex put his palm on the surface of its massive, slimy eye. One moment, it was there; in the next, it was covered by a blanket of black, and in the third, there were no traces of its presence beyond the upgrades that Alex received to his abilities from devouring such a massive entity.
«EP/Bioenergy»:: 127560 Units
«Soul Energy»:: 84563 Units
«Manipulations»:: ‹Lightning Divinity› ‹Advanced Blood Manipulation›
Not only had his blood manipulation gone from basic directly to advanced, but he had also received almost twenty thousand points of soul energy and over a hundred and twenty thousand points of Bioenergy after killing the eldrich abomination and its lackeys.