RBCT Chapter 264 264
Chapter 264 264
With the civilian population successfully neutralized and their memories sufficiently altered, Su Ping shifted his focus toward the true purpose of his presence in the square.
He looked past the shivering villagers toward the piles of deceased Montgomery soldiers, both those who had fallen in the initial beast tide and those who had been recently turned into undead during the battle under Henry and Sir Godfrey.
His eyes began to glow with a deep purple-black light once more, the energy rippling through the air like heat haze.
From the shadows that stretched across the cobblestones and the dark corners of the buildings, several massive Dark Tentacles emerged.
They rose from the ground with a sickening, slithering sound, their slimy surfaces glistening in the dim light as they writhed through the air.
The villagers let out a collective gasp of terror at the sight, their hearts racing as they watched the multitude of dark appendages swaying above their heads.
Many of them clutched their loved ones tighter, convinced that the massacre was about to begin anew.
However, their fear turned into a stunned, morbid fascination when they saw that the tentacles were not reaching for the living.
Instead, the dark limbs began to wrap themselves around the corpses and the scattered remains of the deceased Montgomery knights.
They moved about, coiling around mangled torsos and severed limbs, hoisting the dead into the air.
Some of the children in the crowd began to cry, their high-pitched sobs echoing through the square, but their parents were quick to hush them, pressing their hands over the children's mouths with pale, desperate faces.
They were terrified that even the smallest sound of distress would displease their "savior" and bring those dark tentacles down upon their own heads.
Su Ping, of course, paid absolutely no heed to the emotional turmoil of these people. His focus was entirely on the task of processing the harvest of souls and flesh that lay before him.
Every corpse represented a tiny fragment of power, that would eventually lead to his next evolution.
As the tentacles began to stack the bodies in the center of the square, slowly but steadily forming a grotesque mountain of steel and flesh.
Fortunately for the turned soldiers who had been reanimated during the heat of the fray, Su Ping had eventually decided against consuming them, choosing instead to preserve their existence in order to bolster the total number of his standing forces for the trials ahead.
It didn't take long before every single one of the remaining deceased, along with the scattered and torn bits of those who had been caught in the crossfire, were all gathered by the writhing dark tentacles that emerged from the shadows of the square.
The onlookers watched in a state of paralyzed silence.
The tentacles then took a step further in their gruesome task, coiling tightly around the pile of remains and beginning to exert an incredible amount of pressure to compress every single corpse into a singular, dense mass.
The horrifying and gruesome sounds of countless bones snapping like dry twigs, metal groaning while being folded, and the wet, nauseating squelching of flesh being crushed under immense force filled the village square, echoing off the stone walls and horrifying the villagers even more than the battle itself.
Even the village chief himself, despite his age and the many hardships he had witnessed throughout his long life, did not remain completely calm as he watched the thick, dark blood from the corpses begin drenching the tentacles as the mass was further compressed.
What terrified the village head even more than the horrifying scene, was the cold, stone-like calm look on their benefactor's face as he watched the sight without so much as a flicker of disgust or hesitation.
It was the look of a craftsman watching a familiar process, a man who saw the dead not as people, but as raw material to be refined for a higher purpose.
Fortunately for the villagers and their future sanity, they would not be forced to carry the weight of these memories for long, as they would remember absolutely none of this once he departed from their lands.
A morbid and suffocating air continued to hang over the village square, and everyone continued to watch with wide, watering eyes until eventually, the nauseating sounds of the compression finally came to an abrupt stop.
The dark tentacles then began to slowly disperse back into the shifting darkness from which they had arrived, fading away until only one remained extended into the open air.
That lone tentacle stretched toward Su Ping, stopping before him as it presented him with a gruesome meatball that was now no bigger than a human head.
Su Ping reached out and collected the meatball with a steady hand, and then his jaws began to expand in an unnatural, disjointed fashion that defied human anatomy.
He swallowed the entire thing in one mouthful, and even as the massive concentration of essence entered his belly, no bulge or change in his physical form could be seen whatsoever, the energy being instantly assimilated into his core.
After his jaw returned to its normal shape and the dark mask settled back into place, Su Ping stroked his chin with a contemplating and distant look on his face.
That compressed meatball, containing the combined essence of all those deceased corpses and the mana they had held in life, was quite satisfactory in terms of quality, but nevertheless, it still had not provided the necessary strength to help him reach the next stage of his evolution.
He glanced briefly at the turned soldiers who stood in their silent, rigid lines, wondering for a fleeting moment whether he should simply eat them then and there to see if they would provide the missing spark.
Luckily for the undead soldiers, he eventually shook off the intrusive thought, feeling a strong intuition that even after eating every single one of them, it still wouldn't be quite enough to push him over the threshold.
Sure, the compressed meatballs had contained the lingering essence of several high-tiered soldiers who had been trained for years, but the quantity was still lacking compared to the vast requirements of his unique racial progression; he needed more, significantly more, to reach the peak he wanted.