Apotheosis

At the moment, the two huge beasts were too busy focusing on each other to notice Zen.

One of the beasts, the queen blade locust, had a broken limb from her earlier scuffle with Zen. In spite of being at a disadvantage, the one remaining limb was still a powerful lethal weapon shaped like the blade of a sword. Alongside her blade, the queen blade locust was a little bigger than the fire scorpion lion.

Although the fire scorpion lion was smaller than the queen blade locust, it was nimbler. Further, since the lava cave was the fire scorpion lion's natural habitat, it had an advantage.

As soon as the beasts collided in battle, the cave shook, rocks tumbled, and the cavern floor was littered with rubble.

Rocks fell from high up on the walls of the cave, and fire spouted out of the earth's core.

"Crash, bam!"

"Ba-boom!"

Loud clashing sounds ensued as the fire scorpion lion threw the queen blade locust on the floor swiftly.

In spite of the aggressive attack, the queen blade locust forcibly stomped the ground with her hind legs, thrusting the fire scorpion lion backward about one foot.

Immediately, the queen rushed towards the lion and flung her enormous blade at the fire scorpion lion. However, the lion evaded her attack and snarled before retaliating. The locust, which could only survive by slaughtering, was much more courageous and brutal than ordinary beasts.

"Skrressh!"

came the horrifying sound of the blade slicing into the flesh of the fire scorpion lion. Its heart and other organs spilled out. The fire scorpion lion, mortally injured, wailed mournfully. At the same time, cocking its nimble tail up, the lion slashed at the queen blade locust's head.

"Snap!"

The queen blade locust couldn't dodge in time, resulting in her head splitting and falling to the ground because of the force of scorpion tail.

Without her head, the queen's body became limp, and the blade trembled for a moment before her carcass slumped to the ground. The lio

tion.

Everything that had transpired was far beyond his ability to comprehend. When he jumped into the lake of lava to escape from certain doom, shockingly, his body absorbed the earth's core fire in the lake. Perhaps his physical strength was improved after being refined by the flames.

He looked down at his body and noticed that his chest had a wave-like texture to it.

Seeing the change, Zen was puzzled.

In the back of his mind, he felt as though he'd seen that texture, and he recognized the pattern from somewhere!

After contemplating the design, it struck him where he'd seen it! Clapping his hands, he shouted, "Yes! I remember now! It's a spiritual texture!"

Zen had seen such textures in the books of weapon refining techniques left by Evil Lan.

Weapons fell into a few classes. They were mysterious, spiritual, fairy, sacred and divine weapons.

Except there were no unique textures on mysterious weapons, special characters similar to this were found only on treasures like spiritual, fairy, and sacred weapons.

For instance, spiritual textures were on spiritual weapons and fairy textures on fairy weapons.

A streak of spiritual texture showed up on Zen's chest, which meant his body had possibly entered a different stage, turning from a mysterious weapon into a spiritual weapon!