Chapter 281: Who are you, little blooddrinker?
Damon dashed forward as he conjured a flaming crimson lance. At the same time, the other one did the exact same thing.
Two figures, identical in form, in power, in fury, clashed in the center of the poisonous mist like colliding stars. Their lances struck with an earsplitting crack, a shockwave tearing through the air as fire met fire and blood met blood.
The force of their clash rippled outward, splitting the green fog and scorching the stone beneath their feet.
Damon spun, ducked a mirrored strike, then thrust his lance low, only for the doppelgänger to anticipate it, blocking perfectly. The clone grinned, mimicking his movements down to the twitch of his fingers.
It was like fighting someone who knew all his instincts before he could even act on them. "You think you’re in control," the doppelgänger sneered, lashing out with a blood-slick palm. "But you’ve already lost yourself. You are nothing but a puppet now, walking in the path already forged for you by someone else."
Damon grunted as he took the hit, skidding backward. The next moment, his body surged with power. He did not talk anymore. Talking was pointless when he could convey everything through his attacks.
However, it did not matter. The same power surged through his opponent. Every attack he threw toward the guy came right back at him. It was truly a hopeless situation. There was no possible way he could win.
Damon grinned. "Well, you can replicate me from a second ago, but can you replicate the me right now?"
A cold determination glinted in Damon’s eyes. "No," he growled. "You can’t. Because you’re a shadow. And I... I evolve."
He had been fighting for a while now, and there were several theories in his mind on how to improve himself and take his damage to the next level. If this was not the perfect chance to practise all of that, then what was?
Damon suddenly calmed down and there was no more hurry or rush in his moves. He slowly started with the blood attacks. Blood Manipulation. The new technique that he received. He only barely had a chance to use it.
Now he had more than enough time to tinker around with it. He used his past life experience and started conjuring one attack after another using blood manipulation.
He sent out blood energy blasts in all sorts of forms, and he tried to condense each one with maximum power, as much as he could muster.
Then he switched it up with his shadow skills. He conjured his shadow dagger and slashed at the doppleganger with it. He pushed his movement skills and his set of shadow support skills to the extreme, weaving in and out of the shadows.
Soon things started to change. The doppelganger tried to keep up, mimicking his blood whips and shadow steps, but it began to lag, even if only by a breath. That breath was all Damon needed.
He vanished into the shadows with Stalk, Shadowmeld, and Shadowstep. His movement became impossible to predict, and his attacks became erratic.
The clone was still reacting to the Damon from a moment ago, not the one slipping between dimensions of darkness right now.
"Let’s push further," Damon laughed from the shadows. His shadow clone emerged, and the next instant one other doppleganger sprang up, this time his shadow clone version. The gap between the real and fake only became bigger and bigger.
"You stopped evolving. I didn’t," Damon said, raising his hand. In his hand spun a crimson lance that contained not four elements but five elements. Blood, fire, shadow, ice, and lightning pulsed in his hand, creating an attack that befitted the power level and rank of his new core.
It writhed and pulsed like a living thing, arcs of lightning crackling across veins of ice, shadow coiling around tongues of flame, all fused by the viscous power of his blood. The air warped around it, space itself bending slightly as if the weapon were distorting reality by its mere presence.
The doppleganger tried to mimic the lance but the elemental harmony was beyond its comprehension. Too many opposing laws. Too much instability. The shadow Damon conjured a flickering approximation, but it trembled, unstable, already beginning to unravel.
Damon’s eyes gleamed like molten rubies. "That’s the thing about copies," he said softly. "They follow the past. I live in the now." He hurled the lance.
"This attack is not something that he should be capable of at his level." The veiled woman gasped from the shadows. She immediately strengthened the barrier around the place because it felt as if the attack was capable of blowing away the whole damn temple structure.
The doppelganger raised its hands to defend, layers of copied magic rushing up, a fire barrier, a blood wall, a shadow veil, but they shattered on impact like glass struck by a comet. The lance exploded, devouring the space where the clone stood in a cyclone of elemental fury.
When the light finally died and the dust settled, nothing remained. No fog. No clone. Just Damon, standing alone, scorched and panting, but victorious.
He straightened and cracked his neck. "Five elements in harmony... and that’s still not my limit." He grinned faintly, the green veins on his arms pulsing gently.
Around him, torches lit up, and the entire temple area finally revealed itself. He was now standing in a similar chamber as upstairs, except there weren’t any altars here.
Instead, there was a small statue of a snake at the center of the chamber. "That’s a cute little noodle." Damon let out a long breath, finally starting to feel the strain of the whole thing. "Are you still around? How many more trials are left?"
There was no answer to his question.
"Hmm?" Damon frowned and walked around.
He then sensed that there was something off about this chamber. He immediately sat down in front of the snake statue and looked closely. He focused as much as he could, relying on his primordial senses to see what was happening.
At first, there was nothing. There was nothing odd at all in the whole room. However, a moment later, as he blinked and opened his eyes, all of a sudden, an enormous serpentine head appeared right in front of him.
Damon froze in shock as he came face to face with a pair of vicious slit-like eyes, eyes far more vicious, cunning, and cruel than the wyrm’s eyes. Eyes that gleamed with terrifying ancient intelligence and eyes that were peering into him, into his very soul, dissecting him layer by layer.
"Who are you, little blooddrinker? Show me everything that I need to see."
Damon’s heart dropped. This was not good. He scrambled to do something, but a power beyond his understanding grasped him. He was not able to move or breathe or even think as the force assaulted his mind and went through thoughts and events one after the other.
However, before the snake could get far, a deep rumble echoed from his primordial mana core, and his blood started boiling. The next second, the snake was thrown out of his mind, not even a sliver of its presence left behind.