404 Absorbing the system seed
The existence of system seeds was the element that took the balance of the world and turned it on its head.
In short and simple words, it gave humans a fighting chance… But that’s all assuming those seeds worked how Mathew envisioned them to work. And his vision included the ability for the system owners to switch over to a better system once they were ready for it.
And there was a simple way to test it out… by trying to actually have it done.
“Hey!” Carol called out, approaching the guy she mentioned the second Mathew whispered his instructions to the girl’s ear. “Eee…” the girl hesitated for a second. “John, was it?”
The newbie hunter raised his eyes. He twitched a little when he saw the girl standing right in his face. His throat moved as he gulped his saliva down.
“Yes,” he confirmed Carol’s guess regarding his name, “that’s me. How can I help?”
The kid’s voice was on the verge of breaking… but he still managed to keep up a proper facade.
ραndαsnοvεl.cοm The calm look on his face was as fake as it could get, but it was better than him giving out just how terrified he was at the moment.
Which he did either way, given how much his knees were shaking right now.
“First, I need you to absorb this seed of a system,” Carol explained while pulling out a crystal-looking ball from her makeshift bag.
‘It looks…’ Mathew gulped down his saliva. ‘Strange.’
The orb was roughly the size of Mathew’s fist. It was perfectly round with a complex set of lights dancing around within the confines of the orb.
Just a single look was all it took for Mathew to realize that albeit the movement of the lights looked extremely chaotic, there was some hidden rule to it.
“Okay…?” John muttered a hesitant response.
The sparkle in his eyes indicated the orb caught his attention, but the fear in his soul was clearly too much.
“Take it, you moron,” someone from the side commented. Then, someone else struck John’s back. “This is what we all want, so don’t make them offer it to you twice!”
John’s face twitched.
“T-thanks…?” he muttered before reaching out with his hand.
“Here you go,” Carol acted as if she didn’t notice the kid’s hesitation at all, happily raising the orb in her hand before dropping it down on the extended palm of John’s hand.
The orb rolled out of Carol’s fingers as if it had a certain will to itself. It then dropped down to John’s palm… only to sink right through his skin, merging with his flesh as if it was a puff of smoke rather than a solid material that Carol just held in her hands a moment earlier.
“What the…!” John jumped up, startled by the sight of the orb sinking into his flesh. He stared at his hand with his eyes popping wide open…. Only for an unexplainable expression to then take over his face.
His eyes squinted. John clenched his jaws and breathed in, before closing his mouth and tensing all over…
And then, he relaxed. He opened his eyes once again, this time gaining a strange shine in them.
“That’s it?” John muttered, blinking his eyes a few times. He then stretched his hand out before moving it as freely as all of its joins allowed. “I don’t feel any different, though?” he spoke and raised his eyes to Mathew.
As the first person to have a system in their entire group of survivors and the one who granted his own system to those who he claimed as wives, Mathew was now the greatest expert on system-related matters that the survivors had.
Which didn’t mean he had any sort of expertise to justify calling himself an expert.
“System doesn’t make you stronger just by having it,” Mathew sighed and explained, easily reading into the confused gaze of the fellow former student.
He could still recall how confused he was when he first discovered his own system. And in the end, all the way until the last moment of his former life, Mathew failed to see through its power.
“What’s important is that you should be able to absorb a part of the power of all the zombies and monsters you slay,” Mathew summed the situation up before fixing his position and shaking his shoulders. “Systems only serve to give us another avenue of growth besides investing in the cores. In a sense, they are here for us to clean up all the energy that would otherwise be left unattended.”
Mathew only mentioned the topic in the passing, but it was something that he was seriously concerned about.
‘Nothing in physics can stop existing. Stuff can only transform,’ Mathew thought, taking a step back and giving Carol a nod once she looked at him, indicating that his orders were still good to go. ‘So, when a person without a system kills a zombie, what happens to the energy that the system user would absorb?”
Mathew took a deep breath.
He could still recall how he felt about the battlefield brought by the might of firearms alone.
Back there, every corpse of the zombie appeared to be full of something strange. A foreign power that albeit weak individually, could easily grow quite massive when taking the number of its owners into account.
‘Back then, we cleaned out the battlefield quite soon, but I’m quite damn sure there was less of that energy than we would find if we were there when the battle happened,’ Mathew thought, watching with the side of his eye how Carol whispered something to John before sneakily feeding another orb, this time a slightly more beautiful, to the young man’s hand.
And just like before, the orb kept its perfectly round shape while diving into the kid’s flesh.
Mathew felt weird just by looking at the process, just like he felt back when he first saw someone dive into a glass tank filled with water.
Back then, it was the way the water changed and how the light scattered that led to the confusion.
But even after observing the event twice by now, when it came to how the orb absorbed itself into human flesh… Mathew didn’t even have a shred of an idea!