1228 Return...? [2]

He looked around curiously, still unable to spread his awareness.

The terrain was relatively barren and the rock was greyish-black, which held similarities to Al'Katra, but he was certain he was no longer in the Nox stronghold.

Because there were signs of vitality all around.

It wasn't clear, as there wasn't any fauna, but he could feel it intuitively in the earth.

This area was just extremely rocky. There were several mountains and large hills in the distance, and though Damien was currently in a valley, he could see a path to a plain in the distance.

The problem was that it was far too empty.

"I need to find shelter."

Damien struggled to stand up in his current state, but he eventually got to his feet.

For now, his first priority was to stabilize his personal state. Everything else would become much easier afterward.

"Keuk...!"

Damien suddenly coughed a mouthful of blood.

"Heuk...! Haaah...HEUK...!"

It seemed standing up was not the right choice.

Blood pooled in his throat and forced him to vomit it out.

It was black in color, clearly stained with impurities.

Damien clutched his chest in pain.

"Ah..."

Right, he was back in his body.

And his body was not given the same treatment as his soul.

The hole in his chest was still present, and to best describe the state of his internal body...

It was a stew of bodily fluids, mixed with organ chunks and bone powder.

He was quite literally only surviving through the power of his soul. His body was still technically deceased.

"Haha...heuk...! No wonder it felt like that..."

The coldness and the scent of death that wouldn't leave him. It was definitely present in his soul, but he didn't realize how much his body eviscerated the sensation until just now.

"Technically, I'm a zombie right now. No wonder my soul was having so much trouble acclimating."

He was some kind of corpse puppet, a state that couldn't be allowed to remain.

He limped through the rocky terrain and somehow found his way to a cave on the side of a nearby mountain.

Since Damien couldn't properly wield his mana to protect himself, he could only follow the cave to its deepest depths and collapse against the wall, hoping nothing would discover his position.

"Okay..."

It was fine.

It was painful, and it felt like he was dying, but the situation wasn't as bad as it could be.

"I just need to figure this out."

He had a far greater connection with his soul than before. Now that he had half of the true Void Physique, he found himself equipped with several more abilities.\

One of which being the power to use mana without his body as a medium.

"Transcendent Regeneration."

He said it out loud, using his words as a trigger to tell the Legends in his soul what he wanted.

And like that, mana obeyed his command from a plane beyond reality.

"[Heal]."

Two streams of mana flowed through his body.

The colorless mana of Transcendent Regeneration mixed and flowed with the pure white mana of [Heal], and together, they began working to put his body together.

The first step was obviously his organs.

He couldn't use his awareness because his brain was nonexistent and his spiritual world was disconnected, and he couldn't use mana because the Ananta Matrix and his blood vessels were melted into nothingness.

He had to not only reform his physical systems, but also the ethereal ones.

Chunks of flesh and blood came together to reform his heart, before empowering it to a new level.

Mana came together and reformed his Mana Heart, recreating the vessel where several of his powers housed themselves:historical

Those powers immediately responded upon its recreation, and things like the Void Flame and Lightning took their proper places without Damien's prompting.

He reformed his blood vessels and other core systems that kept his body healthy, and created a space for his bloodline core to reform, which allowed his bloodlines to reform in his body and help him with the process as well.

The more he completed, the more his body responded in kind, and eventually, Damien lost the need to directly control the process.

It was better that way.

Damien was very clear on the structure of his spiritual world and the ethereal aspects, but he was still a human.

Even he didn't know exactly how the brain functioned.

He trusted it to rebuild itself more than he trusted himself to guide it.

So, he waited and meditated.

After his brain formed, Damien stopped focusing on the bodily rebirth and tried to find his spiritual world.

Though he didn't have awareness at the moment, he was able to find it through his soul, and as expected, it was in a shattered state.

"Haa, to do this again..."

It brought back bittersweet memories, especially because of the similarities between the two situations.

It was always Nox Demigods making him go through things like this.

Nevertheless, the current Damien was far more equipped to deal with it than his old self.

Back then, it took him several months in the real world and over two years in the spiritual world to fix everything, but despite the fact that his spiritual world was now far more broken than that time, he fixed it far faster.

The process took roughly six months in the spiritual world still, but he didn't view that as a long period of time anymore.

Perhaps his perception of the concept was broken now.

The eternal second he spent beyond existence made time seem irrelevant, and the decade-plus he spent in the Abyss already broke his worldview.

This was how someone with a lifespan like his should've perceived time, but he was always stuck in the views he developed on Earth.

By the standards of his original world, he was already aged.

He was almost fifty years old now.

But he was still just a child compared to those monsters who lived for tens of thousands of years.

And his main enemy was a man who'd lived for uncountable millions of years.

The process of putting his body back together wasn't all bad though.

While it was time-consuming and placed him in danger if he was found, he was lucky enough to stay secure for the duration of his treatment.

Once his body was functioning again and Transcendent Regeneration took over the workload, he focused on rebuilding the Ananta Matrix over everything else.

The Ananta Matrix had been with him for a very long time, and it went through multiple evolutions as his strength grew.

The system was capable of supporting Void Mana and gave him efficiency others couldn't hope to match.

On top of that, its revolution system made his already expansive mana capacity even more limitless. He only had to deal with the problem of running out of mana a handful of times despite his moveset becoming ever more taxing over time.

It was his most reliable creation, and now that it had been broken by a mana even he couldn't contain, its reformation marked the beginning of a new evolution.

An evolution that allowed it to withstand Divine Energy and bring Damien to a new state of existence.

It was taxing for sure.

Damien's attention was completely removed from the outside world. His soul and body needed time to readjust to each other, but he could now use his mana and awareness effectively.

Which meant he was equipped to trek this land and understand his current situation.

Or at least...that's what he thought.

Until he placed the last piece of the puzzle.

The second his body was recovered to peak condition...

His mind expanded past its limits.

He was struck with sudden enlightenment.

And his mana started to move.