The Lord Who Levels Up by Devouring - Chapter 296

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com

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Chapter 296. Beast Lord
Evolution.
The phenomenon of organisms undergoing change.
Conventionally, when people speak of evolution, they say this.
A leap forward and advancement.
Or.
Improvement and growth.
Most believe evolution always proceeds in a positive direction—stronger, more refined, more intelligent.
But that is not the case.
That is progress.
Never true evolution.
Evolution is merely the accidental byproduct of organisms adapted to their environment surviving.
Whether the result of survival is degeneration or reduction.
Or even destruction.
It matters not in the slightest.
Take the whale, which entered the ocean some fifty million years ago.
By that span of time.
It could have developed gills and more.
Yet it did not.
The whale maintained its lungs as a respiratory organ throughout fifty million years in the water.
Rather than gills, it survived by holding its breath longer.
Inconvenient. Imperfect.
And yet it endured.
That suffices.
That is evolution.
Mere survival is all that matters.
Even if useless organs remain.
Even if the most vital functions degenerate.
Even if the organism becomes weaker than before.
Evolution cannot entertain such thoughts.
—We lose now, but gain far more later.
It does not consider long-term efficiency.
It does not judge which situations favor survival.
Evolution proceeds in only one way.
—We happened to survive?
A clumsy patchwork.
An awkward apprentice’s work.
Evolution never signifies progress.
In other words, evolution possesses no purpose or will.
Then.
What if that were possible?
If I could infuse evolution with purpose and will?
If I could discern situations favorable to survival?
If there existed an intelligent being capable of selecting genetic abilities while considering all of these factors?
An intelligent being possessing unwavering purpose in evolution.
Breathing forth resolute will.
Selecting and concentrating design upon the most advantageous elements.
==[What? You didn’t tell me your mother came too!]==
[Objective] – Survive the Beast Lord
[Reward] – Unlock new 【Exclusive Skill】
[Failure] – Death
The Beast Lord.
Her true identity was the primordial Dragon, T-Rex.
T-Rex’s gaze turned toward me.
From a height of fifty meters, that stare was utterly overwhelming.
An overwhelming disparity in physical mass.
T-Rex’s colossal foreleg came crashing down upon me.
Boom!!
The ground shattered entirely.
I hurled myself aside to evade, but the shockwave that followed swept me away.
Dazed. Dizzy.
My ears rang.
My vision blurred.
…And death drew near.
T-Rex’s second attack followed.
This time, not her foreleg, but her tail—descending diagonally with devastating force.
Screech!!
The sound of air being rent asunder tore at my eardrums.
And then.
The tail struck me directly.
Boom!
The tremendous impact buckled my knees.
The ground beneath me caved inward.
Though my physical attributes transcended mortal limits, the overwhelming brute force born from the vast difference in size negated that advantage entirely.
Dust erupted in all directions.
Beyond the obscured vision.
T-Rex’s massive body tilted toward me.
Soon her enormous, ferocious maw opened wide with a terrible sound.
I cannot block this.
No—I cannot block it.
I twisted my tingling body away.
Rolling across the floor, I was engulfed in dust.
At that same instant, T-Rex’s maw swallowed empty air.
CRAAAAAASH!!
A deafening roar as space itself was devoured whole.
The spot where I had stood just moments before….
No—space itself had been erased without a trace.
Soon after, T-Rex murmured.
【This form is inconvenient.】
An overwhelming physique reaching fifty meters.
Biologically, strength is proportional to muscle mass, so greater size yields greater power.
But with that came corresponding sluggishness.
Of course, sheer size alone didn’t necessarily mean clumsiness.
Yet at such an extreme scale, inevitable slowness was unavoidable.
A biological limitation.
Greater size was not an unqualified advantage.
It became a weakness unto itself.
The Beast Lord, T-Rex, was acutely aware of this constraint.
And the evolution to overcome that limitation.
In other words, intelligent design had already been completed.
CRAAAAAACK!
The colossal fifty-meter body collapsed in an instant.
Bones folded inward and restructured themselves.
Flesh contracted.
Scales twisted and flattened.
The fully spread wings folded inward, transforming into a hardened membrane like an insect’s carapace.
Gradually, the body shrank and reformed into a new shape barely five meters tall.
The most dramatic change was the shift from quadrupedal to bipedal locomotion.
With that, the legs became slender and elongated.
The skull stretched into a streamlined form.
The jaws and teeth, inheriting the Dragon’s legacy, split vertically and diverged in four directions.
As if breathing through its entire body, fine gases erupted like vapor across its entire form.
The tail was adorned with sharp, pointed bone spikes.
This appearance was… how to describe it.
Like a creature from the Other Dimension itself.
Yet examining it piece by piece revealed otherwise.
It seemed as though every creature from The Continent had been disassembled and reassembled.
A grotesqueness as if hundreds of monsters had been fused together.
A chaos as if thousands of animals and insects had been amalgamated.
A being created by hybridizing tens of thousands of organisms.
Chimaera.
T-Rex had abandoned her draconic form, taking on the shape of a Chimaera—a being that grafted together every living creature in existence.
…The very essence of existence was different.
No, the hierarchy of life itself was different.
Even if the Dragon reigned supreme over all things, there existed yet another sovereign above it.
A tingling dread crept up from the depths of my chest.
Terror flooded through me.
My instincts screamed.
‘She comes.’
In that same instant, T-Rex descended upon me.
‘So fast!’
Incomparably faster than before.
Even with my stats, I could barely react.
But react, I did.
Crash!
The impact sent my entire body reeling.
Yet it was weaker than before.
Her speed had increased, but her reduced mass meant her power had diminished.
I twisted my waist and drove my fist forward, the immense energy of Rilcelium surging through my ultra-form muscle cells [S-], erupting outward in a devastating wave.
Boom boom boom boom boom!!
T-Rex’s body was driven backward.
It wasn’t a clean hit.
Just as I had reacted to T-Rex’s attack, she had reacted to mine.
But the blow still landed.
T-Rex’s flesh tore.
Her exoskeleton caved inward.
Yet it regenerated instantly.
She already possessed regeneration [B+] equal to my own.
Through intelligent design, she was exhibiting performance rivaling ultra-regeneration [A].
T-Rex’s gaze fixed upon me.
“I sensed powerful evolutionary force within you, yet you harbor the strength of countless lives within yourself.”
T-Rex’s eyes gleamed for a moment.
And I understood.
‘That is….’
Predator’s Instinct [S].
A skill that allows one to know a target’s information ‘a priori’.
This was originally an authority possessed by the Beast Lord.
And a priori.
This meant the opposite of empirical or learned knowledge.
It referred to knowledge and information gained through innate intuition, independent of experience or learning.
But.
The Beast Lord, T-Rex, was different.
Not theoretical knowledge.
It was empirical understanding.
The Continent’s last dinosaur, T-Rex.
T-Rex had lived through countless eons of evolutionary history and survival, directly experiencing, directly consuming, and directly enduring it all.
She had survived longer than any other living being.
She had witnessed more life and evolution than anyone else.
Through this, she knew every living thing and environment on the Continent.
The Predator’s Instinct[S] was merely a skill version of T-Rex’s knowledge.
The essence was T-Rex’s knowledge itself.
Therefore, even though I had granted authority to the Lycanthrope, the totality of that knowledge remained with T-Rex.
“Even all the genes within you have achieved perfect fusion.”
T-Rex pierced through the essence of my Predation[S+] at a glance.
“Yet you call yourself human… No, can I even call you human?”
“….”
“But to call you a hybrid would be giving too little credit to your perfection.”
T-Rex murmured with interest.
“Evolution without planning. Adaptation bursting without structure… truly inefficient, yet immediate and above all, intensely powerful.”
“….”
“But there is no balance. It is not stable. It is merely an instinctive reaction.”
“….”
“Yet something is strange.”
T-Rex tilted her head and spoke.
She fixed her gaze upon me and asked quietly.
“How are you maintaining your sense of self and reason within that?”
T-Rex felt confusion.
Even with the Predator’s Instinct[S]… no, even with the knowledge accumulated across countless eons, she felt profound confusion at a phenomenon she could not comprehend.
In a way, it was inevitable.
The reason I was not consumed by the madness of Predation[S+].
It was the Will of the Successor[EX].
In other words, it was thanks to Ian’s ability.
Ian’s ability was an irregular[EX] grade that could not be explained by anything in this world, whose rank could not even be determined by the Predator’s Instinct[S].
“Why are you not consumed by evolution?”
“There’s no need to know.”
I spoke curtly.
T-Rex laughed briefly.
She seemed utterly unconcerned by my provocation.
“A mutation that swallows instinct without breaking… an adaptation that accepts madness while maintaining reason… yes, you exist outside the framework of evolution.”
T-Rex raised her head and looked directly at me.
“You resemble me.”
That was T-Rex’s ability, after all.
◆Selection Pressure[S+]
: Absorbs the essence of living beings to extract and redesign their abilities. However, biological resources are consumed in the process.
This was not evolution—it was advancement.
Based on this ability, T-Rex absorbed the genetic material of her own kind and countless other creatures, then selectively reassembled only the traits advantageous to her.
Much like my own ability, Predation[S+].
◆Predation[S+]
: Devours the heart of a living being to absorb their abilities and convert them into skills. However, mental power is consumed in the process.
“But simultaneously, we differ.”
Predation[S+] achieves immediate and straightforward evolution.
Yet it is unstable.
I cannot selectively filter and apply the absorbed genetic factors.
Selection Pressure[S+] achieves systematic evolution.
But it is slow and intricate.
It requires considerable time to filter and decompose the absorbed essence, along with highly sophisticated knowledge.
In other words, Selection Pressure’s evolution is not as explosive as Predation’s.
Conversely, Predation is not as precise as Selection Pressure.
“You are wild evolution, and I am calculated evolution.”
Yet the mechanism remained identical.
Absorb and evolve.
And the fact that our methods were the same.
That meant we shared a fatal weakness as well.
Namely, the inability to create “new genetic factors” on our own.
Our evolution depends entirely on external sources.
We cannot transform ourselves.
We could only set the direction of evolution by absorbing and devouring the essence and hearts of other living beings.
T-Rex and I cannot design or absorb anything without the essence and hearts of living creatures.
But the gene pool nature permits is finite.
Therefore, T-Rex and I.
Our evolution is not infinite.
There are limits.
T-Rex knew this.
That is why she fell into a long slumber.
She was waiting.
Waiting for another form of evolution to emerge on The Continent—one that could overcome the evolutionary ceiling she could not break through alone.
Thus, tens of millions of years passed.
Finally, one of the genetic seeds she had sown sprouted.
Fafnir the Dragon.
The ability he possessed—Mutation[S+].
◆Mutation [S+]
: Cell division transforms into a dual-division system, continuously generating random mutant genes.
An ability that perpetually undergoes mutation, acquiring new genetic codes.
Creation of something from nothing.
It produces genetic abilities that transcend the boundaries of nature itself.
For instance.
The ability to survive without breathing.
Or immortal genes that cease aging entirely.
Or undying cells that resurrect even after death.
Mutation [S+] makes all such things possible.
Without relying on other life forms.
Without depending on the environment.
Evolution born solely from creating new abilities within oneself.
T-Rex hunted such a Fafnir.
The sealed Fafnir offered no resistance.
Thus T-Rex absorbed Fafnir’s essence—Mutation [S+].
But she could not make it truly her own.
She could not make it completely hers—that was the precise problem.
Selection Pressure [S+] requires both immense time and extraordinarily advanced knowledge to filter and decompose the absorbed essence.
In other words, one must perfectly understand the mechanism of Mutation [S+].
But T-Rex did not understand.
She could not understand.
Because Mutation [S+] creates entirely new genetic information that never existed in the conventional genetic structure.
No matter how powerful T-Rex is, she cannot know what she has never experienced.
And so.
“If I obtain your essence, then I finally become perfect.”
She was attempting to absorb my Predation [S+].
Predation [S+] requires no understanding.
It simply devours and evolves.
Thus this was.
“Here, one of us two will be consumed.”
The strong devours.
The weak is devoured.
“And the ultimate being is born.”
We were each the other’s means toward ultimate evolution—the law of survival of the fittest.
“This is our way, is it not.”
An evolutionary competition toward the ultimate life form.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com

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