Crunch, crunch!
Teeth-setting chewing noises drifted through the otherwise silent sea of sand.
In a matter of moments, the two-meter-long lizard Hollow had been devoured entirely.
Ivan didn’t feel the slightest bit full.
It felt like he could scarf down a hundred more of those lizards and still have room.
After completely digesting his meal, he felt his overall Reiatsu increase by roughly one-twentieth.
He also noticed his physical size had grown slightly.
During the feast, Ivan realized something important: the lizard Hollow’s actual flesh accounted for less than forty percent of the Reiryoku he absorbed.
Over sixty percent came directly from eating the broken pieces of its mask.
“The texture is weird.
Kind of like a dense ration bar.” Feeling the tangible boost in his Reiatsu, a satisfied smile stretched across Ivan’s pale, bony face.
In the days that followed, Ivan returned to his routine, wandering the sea of sand and hunting for other Hollows.
After half a month of relentless exploration and pushing deeper into the wasteland, the local Hollow population finally began to thicken.
However, every Hollow he encountered was exactly like that first lizard—mindless beasts driven entirely by instinct and savage bloodlust.
Clearly, a Hollow retaining a human consciousness like Ivan was a massive anomaly.
On this particular day, Ivan was traveling in stealth mode, his massive centipede body buried entirely under the sand with only the top half of his head exposed above the dunes.
Roar!
A bloodcurdling shriek ripped through the air, followed immediately by a terrifying beam of black-red light radiating intense heat.
The beam shot in from a distance, narrowly missing Ivan’s hiding spot as it blasted toward a massive, forty-meter-long earthworm Hollow just ahead of him.
Under the devastating force of the black-red light, the earthworm Hollow let out a continuous string of agonizing screams as it was cleanly sliced in half.
The shockwave of the blast hammered the sand, kicking up a massive dust cloud and leaving Ivan trembling in his hiding spot.
“That was…
a Cero!” Even though Ivan had seen the signature Menos Grande attack countless times in the anime in his past life, seeing it in person was a completely different, pants-wetting level of shock.
Ivan carefully traced the Cero back to its source.
Standing in the distance was a towering giant nearly a hundred meters tall.
Its body was draped in pitch-black robes, a ring of stark white bone spikes jutting from its neck.
A single, sharp bone spike protruded from its pure white mask.
It was radiating a terrifying amount of Reiatsu.
“That’s a Gillian!” “Wait, no.
That is definitely not a normal Gillian!” This wasn’t the first time Ivan had seen a Gillian during his half-month of exploration.
Just three days ago, he had spotted a group of them marching off toward a territory deep in the desert known as the Forest of Menos.
But the giant in front of him was significantly taller than that pack of Gillians, and its mask design was fundamentally different from the standard, uniform Menos look.
“A mutant Gillian!” Buried under the sand, Ivan drew in a sharp breath.
He immediately understood what he was looking at.
This was an aberrant Gillian—one that had retained its ego and intellect.
He remembered the canon lore clearly.
A Gillian was born when over a hundred ravenous Hollows devoured each other and ultimately fused together.
Because standard Hollows had incredibly low intelligence to begin with, the resulting fusion meant that almost all Gillians completely lost their sense of self, becoming mindless drones.
But there were exceptions.
A very small fraction of Hollows managed to retain their individual consciousness after evolving into a Gillian.
Driven by that intellect, they knew they had to keep devouring other Hollows to continue evolving.
This type of Menos Grande was a mutant.
As long as they didn’t get killed, they had a very real chance of evolving into an Adjuchas, the middle-class Menos, and perhaps even reaching the apex Vasto Lorde stage.
Right now, Ivan’s heart was practically in his throat.
Sure, his current body was nowhere near the size of that giant earthworm Hollow, but to a mutant Gillian, he would still make an excellent after-dinner mint.
Suddenly, the situation went completely sideways.
The upper half of the earthworm Hollow—the piece that had been sliced clean off and was playing dead on the sand—violently plunged into the dunes.
It began fleeing for its life, tunneling straight toward Ivan’s hiding spot.
“Holy shit, stay the hell away from me!” Seeing the bisected monstrosity charging right at him, Ivan felt a massive headache coming on.
If this idiot drew the mutant Gillian over here, he was going to end up as collateral damage.
Seeing the giant earthworm’s desperate gambit, a look of distinct amusement actually flickered across the mutant Gillian’s stark white mask.
Its massive eyes gleamed with utter contempt for its prey.
Swish!
Faster than words could describe, the mutant Gillian blurred.
Its colossal body instantly warped across the battlefield, appearing directly in the path of the fleeing earthworm.
The giant reached down with a massive right hand covered in sharp bone spikes and effortlessly hoisted the panicking half-worm out of the sand.
Sonído!
That mutant Gillian had just used Sonído!
According to normal evolutionary progression, a Hollow shouldn’t be able to use that high-speed movement technique until they became an Adjuchas or an Arrancar.
This mutant had mastered it early!
Watching this unfold from nearby, Ivan was scared completely out of his wits.
“Did I seriously survive transmigration just to get snuffed out before my journey even starts?” A wave of bitter irony washed over him.
Holding the earthworm Hollow in one hand, the mutant Gillian opened its cavernous maw and shoved the beast inside, chewing it up whole like it was nothing more than a stick of beef jerky.
It finished off the massive earthworm in two or three bites.
Then, without even looking back, it turned to leave.
“That was way too close.
I almost got exposed!” Just as Ivan was celebrating the fact that the mutant Gillian hadn’t noticed him, the towering giant suddenly stopped in its tracks.
It slowly turned its head, looking directly at the exact patch of sand where Ivan was buried.
A distinct look of mockery flashed across its massive masked face.
Then, it turned back around and walked away.
“Did it…
did it know I was here the whole time, but decided I was too pathetic to even bother eating?” Properly interpreting the mutant Gillian’s gaze, Ivan felt a burning sense of humiliation, followed closely by immense relief.
“Alright, fine!
That’s how we’re playing it, huh?
You just wait until the day I hit Adjuchas or Vasto Lorde.
I’ll make damn sure you experience exactly how I’m feeling right now!” Staring at the direction the mutant Gillian had vanished into, Ivan only dared to talk trash in the safety of his own head.
He waited out the clock for several hours just to be absolutely sure the giant was gone before finally digging his way out of the sand.
He looked over at the remaining lower half of the giant earthworm Hollow and let out a delighted grin.
Even though the Gillian had eaten the upper half containing the mask—which held the highest concentration of Reiryoku—this remaining chunk of meat was still a massive prize.
It might have been worthless scraps to a Menos Grande, but to Ivan at his current level, it was an absolute feast of premium EXP.
“Thanks for the care package, big bro!” Ivan decided that when the day came to beat that mutant Gillian into the dirt, he might actually hold back just a little bit.