Whoosh!
Ivan executed Sonído, teleporting hundreds of feet in an instant to appear directly behind the Gillian.
Compared to the Gillian’s nearly hundred-meter height, Ivan’s twenty-meter length seemed a bit lacking.
His massive centipede tail whipped out, coiling tightly around the Gillian’s legs.
The Menos Grande’s pale, bone-like feet were instantly bound.
Ivan immediately activated Lightning Arc.
Zzt!
Violent arcs of lightning surged straight down his tail.
He was giving the Gillian a deep-tissue foot massage.
Roar!
Feeling the agonizing pain radiating from its feet, the Gillian threw its head back and howled.
It finally noticed Ivan behind it, twisting its massive head around and unhinging its jaws to aim a black-red Cero right at him.
Ivan flexed his tail and gave a vicious yank, snapping the Gillian’s legs clean off.
Roar!
The Gillian shrieked in pain again, completely losing its balance and crashing heavily into the ground.
Rumble!
The Menos Grande’s colossal body crushed a massive swathe of crystalline trees as it fell.
The half-charged Cero backfired, detonating violently inside its own mouth.
Ivan took the opening, whipping his lightning cord and cleanly slicing the Gillian in half down the middle.
Just like that, the lone Menos Grande was cleanly and efficiently dispatched.
Ivan took a closer look at the ring of jagged bone spikes around the dead Gillian’s neck.
This confirmed his theory: the two bone spikes he had looted from the chameleon Hollow had definitely come from a Gillian.
Originally, he had planned to dual-wield those bone spikes as swords once he evolved into a Giant Hollow.
However, his evolution had boosted his stats so dramatically that those spikes couldn’t even pierce his own defenses anymore.
So, he just used Soul Devour to absorb them directly.
Ivan raised his tail high and activated Soul Devour once again.
A surge of dark gold Reiatsu erupted from the stinger at the tip, forming a massive Reishi vortex.
In moments, it completely absorbed the bisected corpse of the Gillian.
As the massive volume of Reiatsu flooded into his body, Ivan spread his arms with a look of pure bliss.
“That hits the spot!” He never expected that devouring a single lone Gillian would boost his overall Reiatsu reserves by sixty or seventy percent.
Feeling the surging Reiatsu within him, Ivan stretched his massive body out.
He felt that if he fought that same Gillian again right now, he could easily kill it in a head-on Cero clash.
“I just wonder how I’d stack up against that mutant Gillian from back then?” Even though Ivan was technically still a Giant Hollow and had yet to evolve into a Menos Grande, standard, mindless Gillians were no longer a threat to him.
With his current strength, as long as he didn’t run into an Adjuchas commanding an entire horde of mindless Gillians, his life was practically guaranteed.
As for whether he would run into a Vasto Lorde…
you could count the number of Vasto Lordes in the entire Hueco Mundo on one hand.
Ivan firmly believed his luck wasn’t that rotten.
Besides, he still had the god-tier skill Reiatsu Concealment.
Ivan estimated that if he activated it now, a standard Adjuchas wouldn’t even be able to see through his camouflage.
Emboldened by this, he activated Reiatsu Concealment and marched deeper into the Forest of Menos.
Because there was no white sand in the Forest of Menos, Ivan couldn’t tunnel underground to hide his physical body.
Since Reiatsu Concealment only hid his energy signature and not his physical form, he had to travel very slowly, prioritizing stealth and sticking to the shadows.
Along the way, he encountered quite a few lone Giant Hollows, slaughtering and devouring every single one of them.
He had to admit, for someone with Soul Devour, the Forest of Menos was an absolute goldmine.
The efficiency and conversion rate of using Soul Devour was infinitely superior to manually tearing and eating corpses.
Other Hollows had to waste time chewing and swallowing their own kind, and during that time, the corpse would inevitably decay into Reishi and scatter into the air.
Worse, they had to constantly watch their backs for ambushes while eating.
The slightest lapse in focus could result in losing their meal—or worse, ending up on the menu alongside it.
“Cutting out the middleman and keeping all the EXP is a beautiful thing!” Ivan was currently chasing an electric eel-shaped Giant Hollow.
This beast could discharge pale blue voltage from its entire body.
Ivan had a strong premonition that absorbing its Reiatsu would directly buff his Lightning Arc, so he relentlessly hunted it down.
He had to hand it to the eel; its speed was absolutely top-tier among Giant Hollows.
Ivan had to string together several consecutive Sonídos just to catch up.
A lightning whip tore through the air, slashing down on the eel Hollow as it slithered through the sky.
The eel immediately coated itself in blue lightning and surged forward another hundred meters to dodge.
But no matter how fast it was, Ivan’s lightning whip was faster.
It cleanly swatted the eel out of the sky.
Blurring with speed, Ivan appeared right in front of the falling eel Hollow.
A horizontal sweep of his segmented centipede tail cleaved it cleanly in two.
He immediately activated Soul Devour and sucked the electric eel dry.
A moment later, Ivan slowly opened his eyes.
He raised his hand, and the dark gold lightning whip materialized in his grasp once more.
“Just as I thought…” A look of pure ecstasy washed over the wide face beneath his mask.
Devouring the electric eel hadn’t significantly boosted his total Reiatsu pool, but he had instantly gained a profound new understanding of how to wield his Lightning Arc.
His lightning whip was an extension of this ability.
Before, holding the whip felt like wielding a literal, physical weapon.
But after digesting the eel Hollow, Ivan felt a distinct shift.
The lightning whip now felt like a natural organ attached to his own body.
It moved exactly as he willed it.
With a single thought, he could extend or retract it, make it as fluid as water or as rigid as steel.
It moved in perfect synchronization with his mind.
Just as Ivan was basking in the joy of his upgraded ability, he suddenly picked up on a very peculiar Reiatsu signature.
This Reiatsu was flickering and faint, like a candle in the wind that could be snuffed out at any second.
More importantly, Ivan could clearly sense a fundamental difference between this Reiatsu and that of a Hollow.
If a Hollow’s Reiatsu was a raging fire, this tiny wisp of Reiatsu felt like a block of solid ice.
“Could it be…
a Shinigami?” Ivan carefully locked onto the source of the faint Reiatsu and began creeping toward it.
His senses told him that whoever possessed this strange energy was incredibly weak right now and posed absolutely zero threat to him.
Confident, he moved in to see if he could stumble into some unexpected loot.
“According to the Reiatsu signature, it should be right here.” Following the trail, Ivan arrived at the base of a massive, sprawling crystalline tree, but he didn’t see anything.
After scanning the area carefully, he finally realized that the faint Reiatsu was leaking out from a tiny hollow near the roots of the tree.
You couldn’t really blame Ivan for missing it.
With his total length exceeding twenty meters, even if he slithered with his lower half low to the ground, his upper torso alone was ten meters tall.
From that vantage point, it was naturally difficult to spot a hollow barely half the size of a human at the base of a tree.
Because of his massive size, Ivan could only weave the tip of his centipede tail into the small hollow and pull out two items.
“It’s actually…”