The Soul-Harvesting Puppeteer - Chapter 24
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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 24
The moment Han Eol heard the alpha’s roar, every Pyorang’s eyes blazed crimson.
The Pyorangs that had been retreating suddenly surged forward in unison, their mantis-like tentacles tearing into the Watchtower’s pillars with savage fury. Others, mindless with rage, threw themselves bodily at the structure, hammering it with their armored frames.
Boom. Thud. Thud. Thud.
The Watchtower, built of densely stacked ivory bricks, trembled violently under the onslaught.
“This can’t be happening.”
Han Eol’s panic flared.
Sensing the danger, he poured everything into activating the Rainbow-Colored Hand.
In a blink, three more Pyorangs dropped dead.
But in exchange, one corner of the Watchtower crumbled away.
“Emergency! Emergency! Please, send reinforcements, you bastards!”
Han Eol screamed a distress signal toward the Base Camp like a madman.
Yet the Base Camp itself was already surrounded by swarms of Pyorangs. Reinforcements reaching this position in any reasonable time was nearly impossible.
‘I have to do something. Anything.’
Han Eol gritted his teeth and slaughtered Pyorangs with frenzied desperation.
Within minutes, dozens of corpses piled around the Watchtower’s base.
But each time, a sonorous roar echoed from the distance.
Hearing it, the Pyorangs threw themselves forward again and again like undying berserkers, battering the tower without pause.
Finally, the Watchtower collapsed.
“No! Dammit!”
Han Eol cursed savagely and slammed the emergency evacuation button.
The window panels hissed open.
The moment Han Eol escaped through them, the entire tower came crashing down. His split-second decision had saved him from being crushed beneath the rubble.
Instead, he now stood surrounded by thousands—tens of thousands—of Pyorangs.
“Ahhh!”
Han Eol tore at his own hair in frustration.
Shriek—
A Pyorang leaped from his left flank and came down upon him.
Han Eol dove into a makeshift trench formed by a dead beast’s corpse, exposed only his head, then launched upward and tore out the attacking demon beast’s soul with a finger of his Rainbow-Colored Hand.
Another instant kill.
The dead Pyorang’s body dropped beside him.
Then another beast charged from his front.
Han Eol ripped its soul out immediately.
Now four Pyorangs attacked simultaneously from all directions.
‘Nngh—’
Han Eol whipped his Rainbow-Colored Hand through the air like lightning, dropping all four instantly. Sweat soaked through his shirt.
The Pyorangs, as though asking ‘Who will win?’, launched eight of their number at once.
Han Eol barely managed to dispatch seven.
The eighth survivor hurled him into the trench.
Growl. Roar!
Its thick paws pinning him down, the Pyorang swung its sickle-shaped shoulder tentacles.
But Han Eol seized the beast’s soul and tore it free first.
The corpse fell heavy across his body.
“Urgh.”
Crushed beneath the demon beast’s weight, Han Eol gasped for breath.
More and more Pyorangs piled onto him.
They died, one after another. The corpses stacked atop his body, mounting higher and higher into a mound of flesh.
Now he was being buried alive under the weight of beast carcasses.
‘Please stop. Someone, please save me.’
Han Eol felt the will to fight drain away entirely.
Surrounded by tens of thousands of demon beasts, terrified and exhausted beyond measure, he found himself tempted to simply let go—to surrender the thread of life itself.
Truthfully, he had no strength left to continue.
Pinned under corpses, he couldn’t see the approaching Pyorangs clearly enough to target them.
Without seeing his enemy, he couldn’t pluck out its soul.
This was the limit of his power.
Chapter 2
Han Eol had felt this limitation acutely days ago when Ssang Du Jo had threatened his life.
That was when he’d begun desperately searching for a way to shore up his weakness—but before he could devise a solution, fate had thrown him into this hellscape.
At last, the corpses completely blocked his vision.
Now Han Eol could no longer kill the Pyorangs instantly. His ultimate weapon, the Rainbow-Colored Hand, was reduced to thrashing uselessly through empty air.
Through the corpses of its kin, Pyorang’s sharp tentacles pierced through and struck hard at Han Eol’s left shoulder blade.
“Hrrgh.”
Thanks to his toughened skin, his shoulder was spared from being torn away, but Han Eol’s left arm was now useless.
Another attack followed, grazing his cheek and leaving a long gash across his face.
The third strike tore a long line across the crown of his head.
Yet Han Eol remained pinned beneath the layered weight of corpses, unable to move. A few more attacks like this, and there would be nothing left of his face but holes.
‘It’s over.’
Han Eol closed his eyes.
Everything went black.
Even so, the Rainbow-Colored Hand remained vivid in his vision. He could see even the small eyeball that had sprouted on the Rainbow-Colored Hand with perfect clarity.
In truth, it was not a real eye.
It was something like an eye-shaped pustule that had formed when the soul of the Three-Eyed Eight-Tailed Beast was absorbed into the hand in his inner realm.
Naturally, this eye was incapable of independent thought. It could not judge for itself or possess its own will.
The “hun”—the component of the Three-Eyed Eight-Tailed Beast’s soul that governed will and thought—had already been absorbed into the Rainbow-Colored Hand and annihilated.
Instead, the “po” of the Three-Eyed Eight-Tailed Beast retained all the knowledge the creature had accumulated in life, having taken the form of an eye-shaped pustule.
This willless eye moved constantly, gazing here and there, rolling without cease.
‘What is it looking at?’
Han Eol felt a sudden curiosity.
As he observed quietly, he noticed that the eye’s shape resembled the Three-Eyed Eight-Tailed Beast’s third eye—the one set in the space between its brows.
‘!!!’
In an instant, a light blazed on in Han Eol’s mind.
The Three-Eyed Eight-Tailed Beast could read tens of thousands of kilometers at once through its third eye.
During his third expedition to the Highland, Han Eol had attempted to excavate the corpse of a male Giraffe Beast from the Wasteland.
But at that very moment, an eerie sensation began from beyond the horizon and swept across the place where Han Eol stood in the blink of an eye.
What Han Eol later realized was that at that time, the female Giraffe Beast had opened its third eye wide and read an expansive area spanning thousands of kilometers in both directions instantaneously.
The female Giraffe Beast had set out on this search to find the male Giraffe Beast’s whereabouts. And Han Eol had been caught in that perception.
‘A Giraffe Beast with its third eye opened can perceive every movement of every object within an area spanning thousands of kilometers with that wondrous eye.’
This was an undeniable fact. Not a single insect nor blade of grass within thousands of kilometers could escape the third eye of the Giraffe clan.
‘So it was inevitable that I was caught in the Three-Eyed Eight-Tailed Beast’s perception back then.’
Yet that formidable Giraffe Beast’s eye had sprouted on the hand in Han Eol’s inner realm.
‘Then could it be…?’
Han Eol squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated his consciousness on his inner realm.
Then he saw something.
The small eye that had sprouted on the Rainbow-Colored Hand was now moving at breakneck speed, scanning without missing a single movement of tens of thousands of Pyorang in the vicinity.
Whiiirrrr—
The scenes the eye was reading appeared on Han Eol’s retinas like captured photograph frames.
Then all those Pyorang souls transformed into two-dimensional shapes drawn on paper.
The shapes did not scatter. Instead, they created a scene as if thousands, tens of thousands of two-dimensional shapes were densely drawn across one enormous canvas.
If you cannot see the enemy, you cannot extract their soul.
This premise had now become the past. Now Han Eol could track enemies however he wished through the eye that had sprouted on the Rainbow-Colored Hand.
Therefore, the above premise shifted to the following.
If you see the enemy, you can extract their soul.
Even as Han Eol reached this profound realization, the Demon Beasts of the Pyorang clan were rushing at him, breaking the sound barrier.
Regardless, their movements were all being tracked by the eye sprouted on the Rainbow-Colored Hand.
This was a speed that no human’s tracking ability could ever follow.
Even an Ability User classified as A-rank, or even S-rank for exceptional speed, could not keep pace with the tracking speed this eye displayed.
Yet the Rainbow-Colored Hand easily transcended that limit. Perhaps because it existed in a higher dimension or within the inner realm, the Rainbow-Colored Hand seemed to have no speed constraints.
Thrip-thrip-thrip-thrip-thrip!
The Rainbow-Colored Hand’s fingers began extracting the souls of the Pyorang at a speed that defied physical limits, shocking in its velocity.
Like an automatic threshing machine separating husks from grain with a rapid rattle, like a sewing machine needle driving thread through cloth, the Rainbow-Colored Hand left only the corpses of the Pyorang on the ground, deftly pulling out their souls and absorbing them in one breath.
Chapter 3
In the blink of an eye, thousands of Pyorang had died.
The Rainbow-Colored Hand swept from the far horizon, scanning from east to west and then from west to east again, killing Pyorang in great swathes.
The speed was so great that Demon Beasts along nearly straight lines spanning several kilometers in the east-west direction collapsed line after line, rank after rank.
Screech! Screech!
Now the Beasts themselves were consumed by undeniable terror.
The alpha Pyorang urged its subordinates forward with a thunderous roar.
But it was useless. The Pyorang Demon Beasts, faced with this unprecedented phenomenon for the first time, lost their nerve and instinctively tucked their tails between their legs.
The frightened Pyorang herd scatters in all directions.
The small eye sprouted on the Rainbow-Colored Hand does not miss a single fleeing Pyorang, capturing every last one.
Once caught in that radar net, it’s instant death. The moment it registers in the eye, fingers of rainbow light come flying to harvest the soul.
Within hours, tens of thousands of Pyorang corpses lay scattered across the Metal Mine.
Among them was the body of the Pyorang chieftain.
The horrific landscape was almost impossible to comprehend—even the sky seemed to have turned pallid with revulsion. Pale sunlight flickered in and out between darkened clouds.
“Ugh… I’m dying here.”
Han Eol only managed to push himself upright after an eerie silence had settled over the battlefield.
Blood from his scalp and cheek dripped steadily down his jaw.
Thanks to his exceptional vitality, the bleeding stopped quickly. The bruising that covered his entire body, from his shoulders to everywhere else, visibly faded.
Han Eol stared at the countless Beast corpses scattered around him.
“What on earth……”
He didn’t finish the sentence. At the hellish sight before his eyes, Han Eol’s pupils trembled.
That was when it happened.
A sound like a whoosh cut through the air as a group of people came flying at tremendous speed.
Thud, thud.
The eyes embedded in the Rainbow-Colored Hand tracked each of the incoming figures.
The visual information captured was transmitted directly to Han Eol’s retinas.
Since he could see them, harvesting their Souls would be possible.
‘What should I do?’
For a moment, Han Eol’s eyes narrowed to slits.
If he so chose, he could kill every one of these witnesses and silence them permanently.
But he didn’t.
‘That would cross a line.’
Han Eol had no desire to become a death-hungry demon or a slaughter-crazed murderer.
As he turned his body backward, enduring the pain radiating from his back, a group of Ability Users from the Base Camp landed before him in succession.
They had flown here hanging from glider-like Flying Vehicles with one hand, and to his surprise, Han Eol recognized some of them.
‘The commander and vice-commander of the Artemis Knight Order.’
Han Eol swallowed hard.
Soul Harvest Puppeteer
Author |
Juno
Publisher |
Samyang C&C Co., Ltd.
Editor-in-Chief |
Editorial Department
Published by |
Samyang C&C Co., Ltd. – Dream Books
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7F Gwangsung Building, 28 Bongeunsa-ro 114-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul
UCI |
G720:N+A063-20260703071
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blog.naver.com/dreambookss
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@dreambookss
Submissions |
[email protected]
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Samyang C&C Co., Ltd. – Dream Books.
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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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