Less than three seconds after swallowing the pill, Mizuki suddenly arched his entire body.
It was as though an invisible hand had seized his spine and yanked it upward.
"Urgh... ah..."
He knelt on the ground, his fingers digging into the mud as incoherent sounds squeezed out of his throat.
The next second, he began rolling on the ground.
His roars tore through the entire forest. They barely sounded human anymore.
Uzumaki Hayashi stood where he was, watching it all unfold.
Beneath the moonlight, every vein in Mizuki's neck bulged, like red-hot wires cutting into his flesh.
Then something even more horrifying happened.
Something stirred beneath his skin.
His meridians and muscles all came alive, writhing and crawling beneath his skin, one ridge rising after another, as though a nest of living creatures had burrowed into his body.
His joints crackled.
"Aaargh-!!"
Mizuki threw his head back, roaring until his voice broke.
Agony was written plainly across his entire face.
Uzumaki Hayashi froze for a moment.
Wait.
Was this scene in the original?
He ransacked his memories-no. Nothing like it.
So the moment I showed up, the difficulty jumped on the spot?
The man rolling on the ground slowly came to a stop.
Mizuki braced himself against the ground and rose, inch by inch.
The thing that stood up could no longer be called entirely human.
He had grown half a head taller. His arms had thickened, splitting his sleeves in several places.
Black markings emerged from his neck like little snakes coming alive, crawling along his jaw and up his cheeks, gleaming black.
His fingers lengthened and blackened one by one, his nails curving into hooks-
Those hands had little to do with human hands anymore.
His fangs protruded past his lips. His pupils narrowed into vertical slits,