Amon sat down on the cold aluminum alloy platform and closed his eyes.
The next moment, the transformation descended without a sound.
The skin on his back beneath his black coat writhed faintly. Threads as fine as hair, yet vivid crimson, pierced through the fabric and wound their way out.
They gleamed with a translucent, dark-red sheen like blood vessels, resembling the finest conduits in the tender veins of plant leaves, or the tentacles of some deep-sea creature, brimming with astonishing vitality and hunger.
The crimson threads dangled down, gently probing into the murky seawater below as they continuously crawled forward from the bottom.
The instant they touched Maria's remains, they abruptly stirred to life. Like a disturbed swarm of snakes, they spread and extended at astonishing speed, like a crazily proliferating red fungal web, precisely fastening themselves around every piece of bone growth and flesh.
The ends of the threads swelled slightly, like tiny mouthparts, greedily sucking.
They were not merely consuming matter, but carrying out plunder on a deeper level.
Through this method, he drew in the immense genetic information belonging to a First Generation Dragon that had yet to fully dissipate from those shattered tissues—the blueprint of life containing the "Crown Rank."
Maria's flesh visibly withered away, while the network of crimson threads grew fuller and brighter, as though molten-gold streams of light surged within it, flowing back along the veins into Amon's body.
His body trembled faintly. Beneath his skin, countless tiny living things seemed to be crawling and restructuring. This was a forcible plundering and integration on the genetic level, brutally dismantling and weaving together alien, powerful Dragon Kind factors into the foundation required for his own evolution.
Pain was inevitable, but Amon's face did not ripple in the slightest. There was only an inhuman