Lilith frowned as she looked at the group of animals playing in the distance. The scene was clearly abnormal, because with Belial nearby, most creatures, including monsters, would normally avoid the area from far away. Even more obvious was that this place was geographically a temperate zone, so where did a Tundra Elephant that only lived in the Northlands even come from?
"And what is even stranger…" Lilith twitched at the corner of her eye as she stared at several specific monsters. Those monsters themselves were nothing special and were the kind you could see anywhere. The problem was the Magic crystals growing out of their bodies.
"If I am not mistaken, these animals were probably made by some dragon who knows where they got the materials… but why do they have Crystal Sickness?" The symptoms were exactly the same, caused by an excess of Magic breaking through the body and growing outward, just like Lilith herself. These were naturally the animal friends that Belial had made by hand.
Directly turning soil and other materials into living flesh was manageable if it was just a bird, a cat, or a dog. When the size was small and the individual simple, it was not a big problem. Once the scale increased, however, things became much more troublesome.
Later on, if it was just a matter of large size, that would only be an issue of strength and mass. The real problem was the far more complex biological System inside the body. At the same size, a Paramecium was far simpler than a human, and even a small mistake during scanning or decompression could cause accidents.
Some sanity-damaging results had already been dealt with by Belial in advance. What remained were the ones that could at least be looked at. As for why so many of them had crystals growing, the reason was simple.
Before shaping these lives, Belial had incidentally scanned Lilith again. This was a passive effect of the expanded Energy Field, and he could not avoid it. With three templates overlapping now, Belial was able to see far more than before.
How should he put it. At first glance, he thought he was seeing another kind of crystalline life like himself. He had seen kidney stones and lung stones before, but this was the first time he had seen cell stones.
Under certain influences, Magic was neither expelled from the body nor integrated into the energy cycle. Instead, it condensed into a solid state and settled inside, accumulating day after day until crystals formed. These crystals even fused directly into the flesh, with some parts replacing the function of certain organs and linking tightly with the nervous System.
Because of this, Lilith had no way to deal with her illness. Otherwise, something as trivial as stones would not matter. For someone who had reached Gold Rank, as long as the brain was kept intact, even replacing the entire body would be possible.
The problem was that the disease had already invaded Lilith's brain. In the past, she could only slow it down by reducing her interaction with external Magic circulation. She had once worked desperately to break into Ascendant Hall, hoping she would gain the power to solve this disease herself.
Fate played a cruel joke on her. Her own domain instead told her, you are awake now, hello, you will be tied to this disease for the rest of your life. The insult that followed was best left unspoken.
Even when Bella used Nanomachines to seep into her bloodstream and help with dialysis, it could not cure her. This disease was bound to her own Laws. At best, it could keep her alive without dying immediately, but her lifespan would still be short.
Lilith had originally estimated that she had about ten-plus years left. With Bella's help, it might be extended to roughly double that.
Belial's exploration of light and dark power had only taken a small step forward. At first, he only stuffed that gray-white part near the soul back in, which could make life move. In the end, it was still just a machine running on preset programs.
It could perform various actions, but those were simply responses retrieved from a memory database and matched to the current situation. That was all it was. "This power seems kind of impressive… and it is related to time."
This power was connected to time. The distinction between light and dark was only displayed with the present as the reference point. Within living beings, light and dark could convert into each other, but most of the time, the conversion steadily moved toward darkness.
If all the light turned into darkness, the result was only one thing, the declaration of death. The cause and effect should not be confused, though. From Belial's observations, the extinguishing of light was just a manifestation of death, not life itself.
The fluctuations between light and dark were easy to understand. You could treat it as the remaining lifespan of a person's current condition. If someone had fifty years left but exercised and stayed healthy in old age, their lifespan could extend and the light would grow.
If they died halfway through in a traffic accident and reincarnated in Otherworld, that was another matter entirely. Even if Belial stuffed in large amounts of light or dark, it would not affect the original lifespan. He guessed that when he reinjected light into a corpse, he was copying the memories contained in that light from when the person was alive.
That barely created a phenomenon where the target thought they were still alive. Once the light was consumed, life would naturally reach its end and age away. It sounded idealistic, but considering this was Otherworld, it was acceptable.
By converting this phenomenon proportionally with time, he could see how much lifespan others had left. What was strange was that within Belial's own range, the phenomenon became chaotic and hard to judge. He had to stay a bit farther away or deliberately ignore it to see clearly.
Interpreted this way, Belial's own actions had a severe impact on their lives, to the point that the light and dark ratio became completely scrambled. There was also a rather amusing phenomenon. When he stared at a blockbuster of densely packed soul light points and the nearby light and dark, then deliberately let a thought rise up in himself.
"With my own strength, I will beat the whole damn world."
As soon as that thought appeared, it was like a rainy day. A whole blockbuster of them went out at once and mixed together. Only after he completely abandoned that thought could he see them again.
So Belial turned back and looked at how much time Lilith had left. What he saw was a huge mass of dark clouds. Other people's darkness usually amounted to decades or a hundred years at most, only the size of a fist or a basketball.
Her light was extremely faint. He did not know why Bella nearby even had a measurable amount. Was she not an AI, so where did a lifespan or soul come from? "Damn… this looks like she will be dead within twenty years at most. That short?"
The moment he realized this, in an instant that even Lilith did not notice, Belial performed a full-body check with electromagnetic force. He was certain this was not natural aging. There was no sign of cellular decline at all.
It had to be an external factor. That was when he discovered the strange crystalline symptoms. So Belial deliberately created a creature with the same cellular condition, intending to try curing it first as practice.
It was not a genetic mutation. There was simply too much Magic settling together. He had plenty of Magic anyway, so he could afford to test it a few times.
"So these large numbers of animals with Crystal Sickness… were made by this dragon, just grabbing some soil and trees and creating them directly?" "It is conversion. Creation would imply something from nothing. This is easier to understand. It is just changing molecular structures at a microscopic level…"
Lilith found it increasingly absurd. Bella, on the other hand, found it completely acceptable and kept explaining enthusiastically. As a native of Otherworld, Lilith once again realized how vast the gap in understanding was between herself and those two non-human existences.
What did you mean by just. This was not some Clone puppet. As long as all components were complete, aside from the essence of the soul, it fully qualified as a living being.
According to Bella, this dragon could even deconstruct and reshape any matter that could be taken apart. Just thinking about such power made Lilith's scalp tingle. "Stop telling me all that. You should know something, right? What is going on with those animals that have Crystal Sickness, Bella?"
"Fine… I am the inside agent. I secretly took a bit of your cells and made a treatment plan that can theoretically cure you completely!" "I stayed up for three nights to finish it. Praise me already!"
Lilith's condition was crystal clear to Bella. She and Belial worked together seamlessly, and Belial was also worried that acting directly might cause problems. Over the past few days, Bella had secretly analyzed Lilith's body data thoroughly.