With the clone's advancement finally complete, Evan broke through as well.
He could feel the change rippling through him from the inside. His body, worn down by malnutrition and Percival's endless mistreatment, had already been improving over the past few days, but now it seemed to reach a whole new level.
The same was true for the quality of the mana within him. It felt purer, flowing more freely through his body, cycling from his mana core outward and rejuvenating him from within.
He had to admit it felt pretty good, but he didn't linger on it for long.
Instead, he focused on the changes in his clone. He could already tell it had become stronger and far more lethal, but he wanted to see exactly what had changed in its abilities and what new skill it had obtained.
---
[Skills]:
> Stealth
> Death Sense
> Life Drain
> Call of the Dead
---
Seeing the name of the new skill alone was enough to pique his curiosity, and he immediately selected it to read the description.
---
[Call of the Dead]
Rank: E
Description: This ability allows the user to sacrifice creatures of a certain strength to summon Creatures of Death of equal power to serve their will.
[Summons]:
> F-Rank: 0/3
---
Evan stared at it for a moment.
'So it can summon undead as subordinates?'
'Does that mean I now have a small squad of awakeners under my control?'
It didn't take him long to understand the implications of such an ability.
Having an E-Rank clone with all those abilities already gave him an enormous advantage over other Awakeners. But now that the clone could actually build a small army, that advantage had increased by several degrees.
And it didn't stop there. The ability was only E-Rank, and as far as he knew, all abilities could be ranked up, which meant the number of summons, and possibly even their rank, could grow in the future.
'At this rate, this guy might actually become an actual God of dead.'
'Is this the potential of a divine bloodline?'
Evan finally realized the true potential of this clone, a potential he had ignored all this time, focusing only on what it could do now rather than what it might become in the future.
And this was just one of his clones. Would the others possess abilities just as insane as this?
Didn't that mean he was essentially cultivating future gods with his system?
The idea sounded absurd to Evan, yet considering everything that had happened, maybe it wasn't so absurd after all.
'Ah, screw it. If I'm cultivating future gods, then so be it.'
'What's the worst that could happen?'
[Host, you really shouldn't jinx it...]
'Eh? What do you mean?'
[...]
'Hey, Bruce, I heard that. Come on, what do you mean?,' he pressed mentally, but the system ignored him completely.
'Tch, this guy never interacts unless I talk to him first, and now this?' he shook his head and shifted his focus back to the clone, which was still out in the forest, now considerably stronger than before.
'Well then, time to go find you three subordinates,' he thought, sending the command. The clone moved off into the forest.
The difference between the outer area and the slightly deeper zones was immediately obvious.
Here, beasts were more numerous, and stronger. Unawakened creatures were rare to nonexistent, awakened ones, on the other hand, were easy enough to come across.
This was the zone that made these remote corners of the kingdom a real goldmine for adventurers. Here they could hunt awakened beasts in groups, within certain limits of course.
Sure, with the opportunity came greater risk, anyone who had spent even a little time hunting understood that much.
Only those willing to take risks could truly go far in their path of evolution.
Evan had already decided he'd register with the Awakened Association when he had the chance. It would give him a personal identity that would make life in any city considerably easier, along with a range of other benefits. But that was all for later.
For now, his goal was to free himself from his current situation, and now that he'd reached E-Rank, he could finally start moving on that.
The clone didn't take long to find a handful of F-Rank beasts, and with a few precise, lethal strikes, cut them down. The difference in strength compared to before was obvious.
'Alright, let's see how this ability actually works,' he thought, looking through the clone's eyes at the carcasses laid out in front of it.
Though dead on the outside, the vital energy in their bodies was still present, bleeding away rapidly, but still there.
The clone wasted no time, it raised its hand toward the corpses and activated the ability.
[Call of the Dead]
A dark violet glow immediately enveloped its hand.
At the same time, a visible change occurred in the corpses.
They started to tremble, dark veins spreading across their skin. Then the skin itself began to darken, and before long a black smoke started rising from them.
Evan could feel a very familiar aura starting to emanate from them.
The aura of death.
The corpses, now completely blackened, began to crumble like ash in the open air, dissolving into strange particles of dark violet energy, and as they did, three spheres the size of footballs settled in the spots where the bodies had been.
They were remarkably similar to the one the clone itself had emerged from the first time Evan encountered it.
The spheres didn't stay that way for long. They twisted, slowly at first then faster, and began to expand, taking shape.
The process was swift. Within seconds, where the spheres had been, three humanoid figures now knelt, roughly the height of an average adult, all down on one knee with their heads bowed toward Evan's clone.
From an aesthetic point of view, Evan had to admit that they looked quite similar to his clone when it had been F-Rank.
He could sense their strength, all three were F-Ranks, though only in the early stage.
Not an issue for him. The fact that he now had three awakened subordinates plus the clone under his command was already something significant given his current situation.
'Looks like future hunts are about to get a lot more interesting,' he thought, already picturing how his clones could work together to bring down E-Rank awakened beasts.
The thought alone sent a thrill of excitement through him, and for a moment he wondered if he might be starting to become a Battle maniac.
It was already afternoon by that point.
Evan had been using the clone during his afternoon break, and now that he'd taken care of that, he could focus on his own rewards from the system.
He gave the clone the order to keep hunting on its own to level up the summons and build some coordination between them. Then he turned his attention to what mattered next.
With everything he now had, he could finally start preparing his escape from this hellhole, and once outside, he would deal with the slave mark, and then find a way to make the Langthon family pay.
Percival was currently away at the academy, so Evan set him aside for now. Honestly, he preferred it that way. Once he was free, he would have all the time in the world to decide how to deal with him.
'let's see what's changed for me,' he thought, opening the system screen.
[Ding! Your synchronization percentage with the clone has reached 10%]
[Congratulations. You've unlocked your first ability from the God of Death's Bloodline]
Evan read the notifications with eyes full of anticipation, moving quickly to open his ability status screen to see what he'd received.
Meanwhile, far away from Lirath, thousands of miles to the south, something stirred.
Deep beneath the earth, buried under miles of stone, an enormous cavern stretched through the darkness.
It was a breathtaking place. And an ominous one.
Towering crystal formations rose from the ground like frozen lightning, their surfaces catching faint glimmers of strange minerals embedded in the cavern walls. Rare ores pulsed with dim light, bathing the vast underground space in eerie shades of violet and blue.
At the center of it all lay a lake.
Enormous, Impossibly deep.
Its surface was perfectly still, unnaturally so, dark as polished obsidian.
Then it trembled.
A single ripple formed at the center, spreading silently and steadily outward in all directions as something shifted in the depths below.
Far beneath the surface, hidden in the lightless dark, an eye suddenly snapped open.
Enormous, its pupil thin and needle like, cutting through a glowing violet iris that seemed to hold entire galaxies swirling within it. The aura it emanated was ancient and impossibly deep.
A voice echoed through the cavern, strange and distorted, spoken in a language so ancient that very few beings in the world could still understand it.
'That energy…'
'Could it be…?'
'No… that shouldn't be possible.'
'Unless…'
Something like realization seemed to settle over the being. The violet glow within the eye deepened, if only slightly.
The voice came again, clearer this time, its tone faintly feminine.
The ripple in the lake grew, each wave wider and heavier than the last until the entire surface was churning. The disturbance spread beyond the water's edge, trembling through the stone floor of the cavern itself.
The crystal formations vibrated, their resonance building into a deep, bone-felt hum. Dust rained down from the ceiling as a suffocating aura swelled, pressing down on everything.
Then the voice spoke again.
Soft. Certain.
"A progeny of death… has been born."