The upgraded abilities

"Oh, come on. So nothing happened to either of you after all," Lin Qing muttered, though her expression had lightened.

Chen Xuan silently rolled his eyes. In truth, that was only one of several things weighing on his mind.

What really unsettled him was the abnormality in the Ability Store.

But telling anyone about that would do no good. No one could help him solve it, and spreading the news might only cause unnecessary panic. So he had kept it bottled up these past few days, without even telling Liu Shuyue.

It all went back to two weeks earlier.

After the disaster in Chang'an City had come to a temporary end, Liu Shuyue had returned the two abilities to him. In her words, they were simply too evil, and using them left her deeply uneasy. It would be better for Chen Xuan to seal them away. Since Fission and Fusion and Flesh Hunger had both been in his inventory before, neither could be traded again once it returned to his hands. Perhaps that was exactly what Liu Shuyue wanted.

Chen Xuan could accept her reasoning.

Honestly, even watching from a distance as countless rootlike tendrils made of exposed muscle fibers and blood vessels surged madly into Liu Shuyue's body, he could empathize with her intense discomfort and revulsion. Had it not been an emergency, with the lives of everyone in the city hanging in the balance, she would never have used an ability that made her no different from a demon.

Yet after retrieving the two abilities through One-Way Demand, he discovered that something was wrong.

For starters, their colors had changed, and so had their descriptions!

This was how they now appeared in his inventory:

``` "Curse: Flesh Thirst" LV5, purple.

—"You yearn to incorporate new flesh and new