SSS Evolution: Upgrading My Trash Grade Skeleton to Godhood-Chapter 64: Rapid Rise in Power (II)

The soul fire in Tommy’s hollow eye sockets flared.

It was not the steady, controlled burn of a creature operating within the parameters of a given instruction. It ignited with the particular eagerness of something that had been waiting for permission and had now received it — bright and immediate, filling the empty sockets with a warmth that had nothing calculated about it. Tommy moved toward the pile of bones with a speed that was, by his usual standards, remarkably purposeful.

The second Astral Bone Vanguard stood still for a moment, its hollow gaze moving around the cavern in the mildly confused sweep of a creature that had just been summoned into an environment it was still processing. Then it saw Tommy. Watched the senior skeleton’s enthusiastic descent upon the bone pile. Made what appeared to be a rapid assessment of the situation.

It moved forward with clear, unambiguous excitement.

Lukas observed this for exactly as long as it took to confirm that both of them were occupied and unlikely to require supervision, then turned away and left them to it.

The medallion continued its vibration against his chest. He continued to ignore it at his own chosen pace.

He moved through the cavern’s outer reaches, gathering dry wood from the scattered debris that lined the rocky walls — remnants of old cave-ins, dried root systems that had pushed through from above and long since died, fragments of material he didn’t examine too closely but that burned adequately when tested. He assembled these into a rough structure at a comfortable distance from both the bone pile and the Moonflower, working with the practical efficiency of someone who had built campfires under worse conditions than this and considered the skill beneath the threshold of things worth being precious about.

He ignited it with Lightning Bolt.

The bolt came down with the same casual, absolute finality it had demonstrated on the boulder — a flash of pale yellow light, a crack of displaced air, and then fire, committed and immediate, taking to the dry wood without negotiation. Lukas looked at the result for a moment and filed away the additional utility. The talent had more applications than pure offense. Noted.

He began grilling.

The smell that filled the cavern within minutes was extraordinary in the specific way that things are extraordinary when they happen in places that have never hosted them before. The rich, heavy scent of roasting meat moved through the iron-and-ozone atmosphere of the cavern and simply replaced it — not blending, but overwriting, the way a strong presence overrides a weak one. The rocky walls, the cold floor, the darkness pressing in at the edges of the firelight — all of it receded slightly in the face of something as fundamentally immediate as the smell of food being cooked.

Lukas ate without ceremony.

He picked up drumstick after drumstick and swallowed them with the focused, mechanical efficiency of someone who has reframed eating as a task rather than an experience. There was no appreciation for flavor, no pause to consider texture or the particular qualities of Legendary grade serpent meat prepared over a lightning-ignited fire. This was not a meal. This was resource consumption, undertaken with the same deliberate thoroughness he had applied to the butchering — because the serpent had cost him significantly, and the return on that cost was lying in front of him in the form of dense, energy-laden meat that was going to end up in his stomach whether it took one sitting or twenty.

He was eating out of spite, and he was comfortable with that.

Around him, the cavern had transformed into something that would have been difficult to explain to anyone who hadn’t seen it — three creatures sharing a feast in the flickering firelight of a deep stone cavern, the smell of roasted meat mixing with the dry, ancient smell of assimilated bone. Lukas worked through the meat pile with grim, methodical determination, one drumstick at a time. Tommy and the Astral Bone Vanguard worked through the bone pile with what could only be described as joy, swallowing without pause, without interruption, without any apparent upper limit to their enthusiasm.

When the bloating became too significant to continue comfortably, Lukas stopped.

He set down whatever he was holding, closed his eyes, and turned his attention inward — directing the Star Eater Body Refining Method through his system with the practiced ease of someone who had upgraded it to Epic grade and was now fully acquainted with what it felt like to operate at that level. The cost of that upgrade had been thirty full sacrifice points — an expenditure that had felt genuinely painful at the time and that he had justified to himself through gritted teeth by running the long-term arithmetic.

The arithmetic was paying off.

He could feel it now — the method taking the dense, Legendary grade nutritional content of the serpent’s meat and converting it with an efficiency that the earlier ranks of the technique simply would not have been capable of. The energy moved through his frame in deep, sustained waves, settling into muscle and bone and the layered physical infrastructure that body refining existed to develop, compounding with each cycle of the method in a way that made the progress visible even from the inside.

His physique climbed.

Two hundred kilograms. Then three. Then past four and continuing upward with a momentum that showed no sign of finding a natural ceiling before the resource driving it ran out.

He opened his eyes, ate more, closed them again.

The mountain of meat shrank with each cycle — each rest period converting the previous session’s intake into permanent physical advancement, each new session adding another layer to what the method had just built. The process had a rhythm to it that Lukas settled into without resistance, the focused calm of someone doing something that is difficult but uncomplicated, demanding but not uncertain.

When the last of the meat was gone, he opened his eyes and stayed still for a moment.

He ran an internal assessment with the quiet thoroughness of someone taking inventory after a significant transaction.

Seven hundred kilograms.

He held the number in his awareness and examined it from multiple angles. Body Refining Rank Seven. He had entered this cavern at Rank Two — solid enough, functional enough, adequate for the challenges he had been facing. He was leaving it at Rank Seven, his physique more than three times what it had been when he descended into this darkness, every physical parameter recalibrated upward to match the new foundation.

One Legendary grade serpent.

One extremely unpleasant hour of close-range combat and lightning-induced structural damage to Tommy’s bones and a near-death experience that he preferred not to linger on.

And in return — Lightning Bolt, a fully repaired and reinforced Tommy, a second Astral Bone Vanguard that had also benefited from the feast, and a physical advancement that would have taken weeks of conventional training to approach.

The medallion pulsed against his chest.

Lukas looked into the darkness ahead — where the pull was strongest, where the cavern continued past the firelight into whatever it had been keeping from him — and for the first time since descending, felt that the ratio between what he had paid and what he had received was trending in a direction he found acceptable.

He stood up, checked his star energy reserves, rolled his shoulders once against the new weight of his upgraded frame, and extinguished the fire.

Time to find out what the medallion wanted.