Chapter 280: Fight Fire with Fire (1/2)

Zac’s mind was screaming at him to get away, and he had learned to not question his danger sense by now. He unhesitantly pushed backward with the help of [Loamwalker] only to see a spurt of liquid metal from the sphere lash out at him like a whip.

The air cracked as the line of darkness ripped through it, and Zac sensed a horrifying finality contained inside it. He wasn’t simply being attacked by some liquid metal like when he fought Salvation. He was being attacked by death.

Luckily he had reacted in time and was able to quickly create enough distance from the ball, allowing him to understand what was going on. The sphere made out of the metallic plaque had started to transform, not only in shape but also in composition.

It looked like the inert nature of the former monument was changing as it started to teem with both exuberant lifeforce and desolate death. One half of it was gaining a golden sheen as the other half turned pitch-black.

It reminded Zac of his Duplicity core as it shared similar characteristics, with the difference that the sphere in front of him lacked the intricate inscriptions on the surface of his core. Another pretty obvious difference was that the ball in front of him was over five meters in diameter.

The sudden attack that had come at him had stemmed from a part of the death-attuned part of the sphere and had felt like a tentacle of death. But the whip was long gone, having returned to the main form, which now seethed with chaotic powers.

Zac had already taken out his axe and summoned a fractal edge. He still wasn’t sure what was going on, but the thing had already attacked him, so he wouldn’t just stand around. That ball contained extremely dangerous Daos, and he couldn’t let it act as it pleased. He felt it was best to destroy it first, then ask questions.

He imbued the fractal edge with the Dao of Sharpness, and with a grunt unleashed it straight at the sphere so that he could destroy it before it managed to undergo whatever transformation it had in store. However, the moment the edge was about to slam into the floating ball the golden side flashed, and a protective glow spread to cover the whole thing.

Luckily the ball didn’t retaliate, but instead it kept changing form at an extremely rapid pace. It looked like it consisted of two different colored shapes of clay that were pushed together, and currently some unseen hands were twisting and reshaping the ball.

The object elongated again into an oblong shape. It almost had the form of an enormous matryoshka doll, apart from being slightly more rectangular and having two arms. One arm was mostly golden with some black veins running through it, but instead of a hand it just had a large circle that reminded Zac of the object that was behind the statue depicting Lord of Cycles.

The other arm was mostly black and was the only part of the construct that still looked mostly liquid. It was this arm that had attacked him before it had properly formed, and it still radiated a terrifying aura. He truly didn’t want to know what would happen if that thing hit him, but it felt extremely dangerous.

One thing that differed from both his Duplicity core and the sphere from before was the main part of its body. It didn’t simply have one side that was golden and another side that was black, but it had created an intricate mesh of the two colors, where neither side dominated the other.

Zac couldn’t be sure, but he felt that the pattern that had been formed on its body was an enormous clue that could help him immensely if he only had proper time to study it. It was as though it represented the fusion of life and death. But unfortunately, he was in no position to ponder on the mysteries hidden in the body of the enormous doll. It floated toward him at a steady pace, and black motes of light started to rotate around the arm of death.

The moment it got within twenty meters of Zac the arm once again lashed out, and Zac was forced to reposition himself again. The attack wasn’t impossibly fast, but he didn’t dare to intercept it until he had a better understanding of what the effect of the arm was.

Perhaps his Draugr form would be immune to the Death-attributed arm, but he had no way to swap mid-battle. He would have to fight the thing as-is. Zac quickly used [Inquisitive Eye], and to his surprise it actually worked even though the information was a bit sparse.

[Life-Death Construct – Dao Vessel. Level 83]

The good news was that the thing was only level 83. The bad news was that it was clearly much stronger than some random early E-grade beast. Even worse, it possessed two very strong Daos. He wasn’t sure how it worked with these particular Daos, but he suspected they were like the Dao of Time and Space - advanced Daos that had no basic seeds to attain. They were much to strong to gain as an F-Grade cultivator.

That meant that the power they imbued was also far stronger than one should encounter at this stage in cultivation. He had a feeling that he truly had been boned by this combination, and it reminded him of the desperate fight with Inevitability. Life and Death were truly the most appropriate paths to fuse of the fractals that lit up, but they were far more dangerous than any others as well.

It would have been more reasonable for him to encounter a construct that consisted of the Dao of Trees and the Dao of Rot, or whatever that murky fractal represented. It would still have been a challenge, though not as bad as this one.

But since Zac knew its level he also felt more confident. If it came down to it he should be able to brute-force the thing. The only thing that was holding him back from summoning the giant hand of [Nature’s Punishment] and smashing the construct to bits was that he wasn’t sure if there was something else to this test than just destroying the construct.

He didn’t want to slip up and ruin his inheritance, so before he went the usual route he decided to test the thing out for a bit, and perhaps glean any insights from the intricate pattern on its chest. Zac kept his distance from the large construct by occasionally flashing away with his movement skill as he peppered the thing with fractal edges.

The construct had multiple ways of handling the attacks. Sometimes the golden circle on its left arm lit up and formed a shield that blocked out the attack. However, after seeing the shield a few times he realized that it wasn’t a traditional mage’s bubble or array defense.