SSS Awakening: All My Clones Have Divine Bloodlines!

On the upper floor of a building, Selena, who had spent the last day cultivating the cores she’d harvested from Forsaken, had finally reached a turning point in her cultivation.

’A little more... I’m almost there,’ she thought, feeling the next stage drawing closer with every passing moment.

She’d already come close to this point the day before, but she’d since discovered that this last stretch was far harder to close than she’d expected. She’d had to burn through an entire core just to narrow the gap to this stage, an amount many times greater than what it had taken her to reach that same point in the first place.

It was clear the gap between mid-stage and advanced-stage wasn’t small. But that hardly mattered.

She’d managed to stockpile enough of those strange pearls to cultivate at her own pace, in peace. The only things she really needed were patience and time.

Two things she had no shortage of.

So she’d kept going, and today, she could finally feel herself closing in on the threshold she’d been chasing for a while now.

The flow of mana inside her core kept condensing further and further, an invisible pressure beginning to bear down on it, compressing it far more tightly than it had ever been before.

Normally, Selena would’ve circulated the mana through her body, condensing it gradually before returning it to the core. But she couldn’t afford to do that here, even the faintest trace of mana leaking outside her core would be more than enough to draw those creatures straight to her, and she couldn’t risk losing focus now.

So she did everything internally, entirely within her core. Under normal circumstances, that would’ve been an incredibly rough process. But thanks to the peculiar nature of this energy, it turned out to be far less brutal than it should have been. She pushed through, and finally reached that point of mana condensation that would let her take the next step forward.

The instant she did, her whole body felt renewed. Her meridians seemed to shift, adjusting to the new density of mana now running through them, and her mana core took on a darker hue, a sign that the mana within it had grown far more concentrated than before.

She’d finally reached the Advanced-Stage of D-Rank.

She let out a slow breath as the tension holding her mind together finally released.

She’d spent the last ten hours in this state, without a single movement or distraction, all in the hope of successfully reaching the next stage. And she’d done it.

A wave of satisfaction lifted her spirits for a brief moment before she set it aside.

She’d made enormous progress over these past three days, progress that would normally have taken weeks, if not months. And more than that, now that she’d reached the advanced-stage, she could resume cultivating without obstruction and push toward the peak as quickly as possible.

She looked down and saw a pearl in front of her, one of the several she’d gathered earlier.

She was just about to settle back into cultivation when she suddenly felt a powerful burst of mana coming from somewhere ahead, and her head snapped toward that direction immediately.

’That presence...’

The burst of mana had been brief, but strong enough for her to catch it clearly. She could tell it had come from the edge of the nearby forest. But that wasn’t what caught her off guard.

What caught her off guard was that she recognized that mana signature.

She was on her feet in an instant, snatching up the pearl and pocketing it in one motion.

Her expression was no longer calm. It had turned cold, laced with a quiet, simmering intent to kill.

She would’ve recognized that signature anywhere, and how could she not? After all, it belonged to one of the people she’d sworn to personally wipe off the face of the earth.

It was Percival’s.

Without hesitation, she surged forward, leaping off the edge of the rooftop without so much as a blink, landing on the next building 20 meters away without breaking stride, without effort.

Now that she was in this cursed place, nothing was going to stop her from getting her revenge.

Meanwhile, several dozen meters away, at the place where the burst of mana had originated, two figures stood facing each other.

One of them was partially obscured by the mist that had risen from the recent clash, while the other stood clearly visible.

It was Vincent.

Vincent stayed frozen for a moment, his remaining arm still raised in a guarding stance, his sword trembling faintly under the weight of the last exchange. The blow he’d just blocked had rattled him down to the bone, not an ordinary strike, but something far heavier, the kind of force that should have belonged to someone at least a rank above him.

He’d only just reached the edge of the forest, preparing to head inside. He’d already noticed the strange atmosphere surrounding it, the way that even though snow still fell here, and the storm still raged, both felt subtly different, as if the true anomaly ran deeper within.

He had been moving forward with little more than instinct and guesses to guide him, but that was the only thing pushing him onward, the faint hope that he would eventually find the others.

But who would have thought that, before finding them, he would be the one to be found first? And by someone strong enough to attack him without hesitation from the very first moment they crossed paths.

With his battle instincts always on alert, he’d managed to sense the attack just in time, it had been fast, incredibly fast, giving him only enough time to raise his weapon and parry the blow, which sent him skidding back ten meters.

That gave him enough distance from his attacker, and at the same time, enough to get a sense of just how strong whoever had struck him actually was.

He watched with wary eyes as the figure in front of him became clearer, the dust and shards of ice kicked up by the impact slowly settling, carried off by the freezing wind that never stopped blowing through this cursed place.

Vincent gritted his teeth, the stump of his left arm throbbing with a dull ache, and lifted his gaze toward the figure standing before him.

His heart stopped for a beat.

Percival.

It was Percival.

For a moment, Vincent’s mind simply refused to process what he was seeing. He’d imagined this moment countless times during the journey to the forest, the relief of finding his brother alive, maybe scared, maybe hurt, but alive.

Not this.

Percival’s skin had taken on a grayish tone, almost corpse-like, and thin dark veins crawled up his neck like rotting roots beneath the surface. His eyes, once full of that childish arrogance Vincent knew all too well, were now empty, two black pits devoid of any warmth, any recognition.

"Percival..." Vincent’s voice came out hoarse, cracked, a mix of disbelief and a fear he still didn’t have the courage to fully admit. "What... what happened to you?"

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