Jet lay completely flat on the damp ground, his chest heaving as he breathed in rough, agonizing gasps.
His face was entirely translucent white, devoid of any natural color, and the deep, wide lacerations across his body continuously dripped crimson blood into the black soil.
He felt incredibly weak, an absolute numbness spreading from his fingers down to his feet as the adrenaline from the final strike began to rapidly drain from his system.
He slowly turned his head to the side, his bloodshot white pupils looking at the motionless, battered form of the bunny lying less than a meter away. As he stared at the dead predator, a wide, manic grin slowly carved its way across his pale face.
He couldn’t help himself; a soft, breathy chuckle escaped his cracked lips, vibrating through his raw chest. This tiny, deceptive creature had really made him suffer. He had walked right up to the absolute precipice of a death multiple times during the course of their battle.
Yet, although a natural trace of survival fear still lingered in the back of his mind, somewhere deep within his heart, he was filled with an unyielding, crazed excitement.
It was as if being pushed to the brink of destruction over and over again was fundamentally exhilarating to his soul.
"Really weird..." Jet muttered, shaking his head slightly against the moss to clear the unhinged thoughts.
He realized that his mentality was already beginning to warp under the passive influence of the Asura Physique.
The war deity etched into his back thrived on slaughter, and that primal baseline was actively altering his mental boundaries.
After waiting a long minute to regain a sliver of physical strength, Jet slowly forced his trembling torso to sit up from the dirt.
He reached out his hand, his fingers closing around the newly materialized crimson marble resting on the grass beside the dead animal.
His grin widened even more as he felt the cool, dense weight of the core.
Then, his gaze shifted slightly to the left, locking onto a secondary object that had materialized directly beside the beast’s corpse. It wasn’t another core. It was a fully formed, independent weapon.
The system interface expanded cleanly above the item layout:
[ Relic Details ]
Item Name : Vorpal Blade
Item Type : Relic / Weapon
Item Rank : Lesser
Bound Status: Unbound (Requires Mana Injection)
[ Description: A weapon born from
th crystallized existence of a Vorpal Bunny.]
[ Effect: Drastically reduces wind resistance during a swing, accelerating the wielder’s line
of attack by 25%. Possesses natural, razor-sharp edge retention capable of bypassing basic low-grade monster hide.]
Jet’s eyes immediately flared with a sudden, intense heat and excitement.
He reached forward with his functional right hand, grabbed the weapon by its hilt, and lifted it to examine the details, a minor trace of drool unconsciously forming at the corner of his mouth from pure satisfaction.
The blade was remarkably long, measuring exactly eighty-five centimeters from tip to pommel. Unlike the bone-derived weapons that had protruded directly from the bunny’s muscle joints earlier, this version had been beautifully optimized by the system logic to fit a human hand.
It possessed a solid, minimalist hilt wrapped in durable, textured black hide that provided a flawless grip. The weapon was a long, single-edged blade crafted from a strange, iridescent silver steel that faintly reflected the crimson light of the forest canopy. It was significantly longer and sturdier than what had appeared on the creature during their battle, balanced perfectly for high-speed slicing movements.
"Hahaha! A Relic! I actually got a Relic!" Jet couldn’t stop himself from bursting out into a loud, ecstatic laugh that echoed through the quiet trees. "I am incredibly lucky! To secure a genuine Relic drop on my very first Descent... this is an absolute jackpot!"
He didn’t care about the sharp, burning pain radiating from the massive cut across his chest or the deep puncture in his left wrist. He forced his shaking legs to lock beneath him, standing upright on the torn earth.
He raised the Vorpal Blade, stabilizing his grip, and executed a sequence of basic horizontal swings through the empty air.
SWISH! SWISH!
The physics of the weapon were spectacular. Every single casual swing cut through the air with zero physical drag, generating a sharp, audible gust of compressed wind that flattened the surrounding ferns.
Jet’s white eyes lit up even more with raw fervor. "Such incredible power... now with this weapon in my hands, I won’t be miserable or helpless if I come across another high-velocity monster in these outer regions."
He was deeply happy as he continued to admire the flawless finish of the silver steel. He was genuinely shocked and surprised by the sudden drop.
In his previous life, he had spent a decade listening to Awakeners talk about how rare Relics truly were.
They were unique, soul-bound artifacts that had an exceptionally low probability of dropping from Beyond Monsters. They could take an unpredictable variety of forms, weapons, defensive armor, stat-boosting accessories, single-use consumables, spatial storage equipment, utility artifacts, or movement-enhancing gear.
Their distribution logic was completely random; a powerful monster could drop nothing but while a low level monster can drop a Relic just like this Vorpal Bunny.
Furthermore, high-quality Relics frequently inherited the specific supernatural attributes of the monster they dropped from.
"And looking at this Vorpal Blade, it completely inherited the speed signature and structural sharpness of the bunny," Jet muttered, rubbing his chin thoughtfully as he analyzed the weight distribution of the hilt.
He quickly came back to his senses, realizing that the daylight was continuously fading. He knelt back down beside the dead animal, utilizing the razor-sharp edge of his new weapon to cleanly dissect the carcass.
The silver steel sliced through the thick muscle joints like a hot wire through butter. He meticulously harvested the valuable alchemical tendons, the thick hide, and the intact front incisors, storing each item directly into his digital system inventory.
Previously, whenever he had encountered a Lesser monster and managed to kill it with his crude ironwood stake, he had been forced to simply to only take the core and leave the rest of the body behind to rot.
He hadn’t possessed a tool sharp enough to harvest the dense, armored hides. Now, with a genuine Relic at his side, he could properly harvest the raw materials to sell back on Earth’s markets for massive capital.
Just thinking about the previous high-grade carcasses he had been forced to discard over the last few hours, leaving them behind for other wild predators to feast upon, made Jet’s heart twist with a sharp pang of financial regret.
He really regretted the fact that he had rushed into the Beyond without any baseline survival preparation or tools.
"There’s no point in crying over spilled milk now," Jet shook his head, hissing slightly as a sharp muscle spasm flared across his split chest.
He completed the harvesting process, wiping the silver blade clean before sheathing it into the digital space.
After sitting quietly on a root for another ten minutes to restore some energy, he stood up. He looked up through the dense, interlocking leaves of the ancient ironwood trees, tracking the vibrant orange setting sun as it dipped below the horizon.
The shadows were rapidly lengthening across the forest floor.
"Looks like night will descend completely soon... this entire territory is about to become an absolute slaughterhouse," Jet thought, his expression turning solemn. "I can’t continue my exploration any longer in this physical state. Looking at the distance, it’s impossible for me to find a Citadel before the darkness falls. I better return to Earth to heal my wounds and continue my track tomorrow morning."
He focused his intent on the system interface, pointing his finger directly toward the patch of muddy earth he was currently standing on.
"Initiate Beyond Anchor," Jet muttered.
The response from the red interface was immediate, dropping down a succession of urgent notification screens before his eyes:
[ Establishing Beyond Anchor... ]
[ Remain within the designated area for 60 seconds. ]
[ WARNING: Any physical movement or external displacement will immediately cancel the anchoring process. ]
Jet immediately stood perfectly still, locking his joints and refusing to move a single muscle.
HUMMM...
A sequence of five complicated, dark red runic rings abruptly descended from the air above his head. They rotated rapidly around his torso in a precise, geometric loop before dropping cleanly onto the damp earth beneath his boots.
The rings expanded, connecting with one another to form a single, massive, and highly intricate red runic diagram that glowed with a dull light, looking as if it had been permanently carved deep into the forest floor.
[ Personal Beyond Anchor Completed. ]
[ Spatial coordinates locked to Sector 4-092 of The Thousand Boughs. ]
Jet finally let out a small, heavy breath of absolute relief, a soft smile appearing on his tired features.
"Return."
The red runic diagram on the ground immediately flared upward with an intense, blinding flash of crimson light.
The dense energy completely enveloped Jet’s body like a thick column of fire.
A fraction of a second later, the light imploded, and his figure vanished entirely from the forest clearing, leaving behind nothing but empty space.The entire surrounding area fell back into a heavy, suffocating silence.
The brown, churned soil, the severed pine trunk, and the empty space where the dead monsters had collapsed were slowly swallowed by the encroaching dark.
A cold evening breeze began to whistle through the high branches of The Thousand Boughs, accompanied by the distant, deep roars of high-rank predators that had officially begun their night hunt.
As for Jet, he had successfully returned to Earth.