Chapter 139: Titan's Embrace
Frank stood alone in the outer ring of the ancient garden, where the wild beauty of untamed nature clashed with the precise elegance of archaic cultivation. The air shimmered with thick ambient mana, a vaporous energy that danced across his skin like static before a storm. Around him, the ground was overrun with creeping vines, twisted roots, and thickets that pulsed with a quiet, dangerous life.
The deeper regions of the garden were cordoned by layers of protection mystic seals interwoven directly into the earth, humming faintly with sigils that repelled both time and theft. Within those sealed sanctuaries grew herbs too ancient to be named, surrounded by thick vapor-like mana so potent that liquid rain condensed from the sky itself, falling in shimmering droplets that never quite touched the ground.
Frank exhaled, a slow breath that released tension from his limbs. With every movement, his body flowed like water through stone silent, precise, and unrelenting. He advanced through the garden, blades in hand, cutting through the thick mat of vines that resisted his passage.
These weren't ordinary plants. They had lived for decades, maybe even centuries, growing fat on the garden's ambient energy. They struck like animals, thorned tendrils whipping with preternatural speed and intelligence. One lashed at his throat like a whip. He tilted his head, and his blade met it midair in a clean sever. Another coiled toward his ankle, but he stepped down with brutal force, crushing it beneath his heel.
He wasn't fighting wildly. This was refinement through confrontation, a cultivator's slow walk through pain and pressure.
Each vine that fell released a burst of vital mana into the air. And Frank's body soaked it in.
Deep inside him, the Titan Hunger technique started circulating automatically.
His heart beat like a drum and his body drew in mana like a bottomless hole. It was an instinctive will to grow to consume, refine, evolve. A remnant of something older and greater, sleeping inside him like coals waiting to blaze. With each breath, mana streamed into him, thick and syrupy, running through his meridians, illuminating them faintly beneath his skin.
Subtle. Silent. But unstoppable.
The bone-implanted vitality seed deep in his arm began to thrum. Once. Then again. Then faster matching his heartbeat, then surpassing it. The rhythm took over his senses, a deep internal metronome calling something ancient to rise.
Then
Snap.
It happened in silence. A crystalline rupture inside his soul.
The containment ring around his core, the final limit holding back his growth, shattered.
Mana flooded his system like a divine river bursting through broken dam walls. It didn't tear him apart it carried him. Elevated him. Channels widened. Bones groaned. Muscles stretched and bulked. His body began to crackle with the weight of rebirth.
He dropped to one knee in agony.
His heart pounded so violently it felt like it might burst. Impurities surged through his bloodstream and were expelled, thick and black, steaming from his pores. A sour stench filled the air.He roared in release.
Muscles bulged, expanding with supernatural density. Ligaments realigned. Bones extended and thickened. In seconds, Frank towered over eight feet tall shoulders broad like cliff faces, arms thick as stone columns. His eyes burned bronze, molten and unwavering. He looked like a creature carved from divine wrath.
But he did not panic.
He did not fight it.
He embraced the surge. Controlled it. Mastered it.
He activated the Titan Breathing Technique personally, drawing in breath after breath of filtered, high-purity mana. The flow calmed. The overload steadied. His form began to shrink not in weakness, but in compression. His transformation retreated, leaving behind a new body: leaner, more efficient, but dense as a star-core. He stood again, and even the sound of his steps had changed. They struck the ground like declarations.
He flexed his fingers.
His left arm pulsed.
The parasitic vine tattoo had changed. Once pale and passive, now it glowed dark green, threaded with crimson veins pulsing with each heartbeat. It had evolved. Rank 4. No longer a passive feeder, but a bonded predator. A weapon. A partner.
Frank reached into his spatial ring.
The vitality seeds all forty were gone. Consumed, utterly. Burned to nothing during the breakthrough. But they had done their job. He was no longer the same man who'd walked into this place.
He looked up.
The garden had changed. It no longer resisted him. Its mana moved with him. Reacted to him.
In the distance, he saw them shadows, slinking through the thick vapor. Rank 3 beasts. Maybe even Rank 4s. Prowling. Circling. Drawn by the rupture in energy. Predators sniffing for a challenger… or a meal.
Frank smiled, gripping the hilts of his twin blades.
He wasn't prey.
He wasn't a scout.
He was the hunt.