[Explosion sounds.]

[Monsters Roars mixed in with humans screams.]

The sound of battle swallows every background noise, and the ground vibrates in resonance.

Ben Higgs slowly regains his consciousness.

‘Cold…’

He can’t feel his limbs, neither he can open his eyes.

Ben can only feel his whole body freezing. However, even with his senses somewhat impeded, he can still feel the vibration of the battle happening somewhere nearby.

The shaking serves as his wake up call, so he concentrates.

‘Where…? How long…?’

With the little sanity he could get back, Ben tries to focus on repairing his body after noticing he’s alone.

His heart regains some of its rates, achieving around a dozen per minute. His brain heats up as it starts to overwork, and runes glow around the two of his only functional organs.

The runes then begin to create lesser runes that cover Ben’s whole body. Yet, the new rules are weak and unstable, as their nature seems to be different from the original runes that keep emitting an aura of absolute resistance.

‘Warming up this way is not viable.’ Ben concludes after noticing the state of his shell.

‘Was I put in a freezer for years? Madness.’

Ben was frozen alive or only technically alive since the situation back then wasn’t that good either, and most would consider him dead. However, the shocking news is that he’s somewhere else, in a place much colder.

The issue is that the only fully functional parts of his body right now are the ones he had partially refined over his thousands of years. Hence, he can’t decide if freezing was bad or good to his recovery, as it certainly helped his protected parts, but utterly destroyed the rest.

‘Luckily, I wasn’t dissected yet. Running away this time will be bothersome, and I may still need to play with some mad scientist, but I don’t want to! I hope this isn’t some research facility.’

Fortunately, this isn’t the first time Ben’s body shuts down, so he understands what he needs to do. However, the fact he didn’t prepare for it annoys him.

Confronting death isn’t scary, but doing so while cornered is.

So without further ado, he outlines his plan in his mind. Unfortunately, he finds a big issue. Between warming up and regenerating, he doesn’t have enough strength. He was already running low on living reserves, having only a few more months to live, so how can he recover his body from such damage.

While not all his ‘tanks’ are dry, most of the reserves he has left are battle oriented. Those are from a long time ago and were so compressed and layered in restrictions that transmuting it again is a pipe dream.

‘So even if I have nukes inside me, I’m not courageous enough to open and use it as batteries. Having such a limitation on my path makes me angry sometimes, but not like I would have lived otherwise. If the worst come I can still blow myself up tho, but I don’t feel like firing all my one-use trump cards due to giving up.’

Knowing he needs to find some other way, Ben begins to feel his surroundings. The whole room is remarkably cold. He’s laying in the ground together with another eleven cadavers. His body close to the center of a room, and his legs point towards a closed door.

Ben feels signals of battle from outside.

He then finds in the wall to his left, on the corner closest to his head, a hole of 1m in diameter. From it, cold air circulates, as it transforms the whole room into a freezer.

‘It’s a fucking freezer, and it’s storing human meat!’ finding traces that confirms his first joke, leaves Ben in shock.

As he concentrates on analyzing the cold air, Ben notices its abnormal nature. He finds it particularly similar to the cold from the Sunset Empire Ruins Plains.

‘Am I still in the area? Or is it another source of a cold nature vein? There should be no one using the ruins tho. I never heard of someone wanting to clean it up since the trouble is not worth it.’

Studying the bodies, he notices that the situation is strange.

They’re all dead, sure, but the bodies are all over the place and still emitting artifact’s auras. Most cultivators prize their possessions. They’re prideful regarding how much they have.

For energy sensitive’s beings, it’s easy to identify who made what or at least guess from where some cultivator is due to the strong presence their magic items have.

However, in this room with a dozen bodies, while only one is still alive but the bodies shining the most with ‘life’ are, weirdly enough, the dead ones.

‘I can’t feel anything too extraordinary. The bodies can’t compare with the aura that the poisoned bastard had. But even if those here are poor cultivators, if humans were storing them, they would retrieve anything of value. Why would they waste anything?’

Even if those are all low and mid-level items, those are perfect for disciples, servants, or whatever low-level personal an institution has. There is no lack of people needing protection, some money, a weapon, or a spatial ring. However, all those things are here, frozen.

‘Interesting. My kidnappers don’t care at all then. Not caring about riches, but caring enough about bodies to the point of freezing them…’

Connecting the dots, Ben feels a sense of doom running all over his frozen body.

‘Am I something else’s food supply?’ he didn’t expect to have to consider such a situation.

A sense of urgency sharps his mind as he begins to imagine what could have happened if he didn’t wake up now.

‘Would I have become a poop? Really? REALLY?’ as he stipulates his future and how much time he has to run away, he wants to cry, but unfortunately, his eyes are still frozen.

For a long time, Ben has forgotten how to feel anxious and rebellious.

In his early years, he had no marvelous fateful encounter, and neither some destiny was waiting for him. So, after confronting death once he aged, and understanding the limitation of his so-called talents, he chose to walk with death rather than accept it.

From then on, after experimenting on himself, mutating himself, and become a mess of a monster, his living became very bothersome, but he lived. Every day was like he was carrying an immense weight that even caused his bone to crack. However, even then, life was still uneventful.

Some days he even wanted to yell at the world: how could he be so bored.

The only worry that stayed in his mind continually was about becoming someone else’s laboratory rat. Since on this path he took, despite making many bets and losing more than gaining, he still seized time and quite a bit of it.

In contrast, the rest of the world is always running low on it. How many powerhouses have everything? Power, love, land, and riches are at their disposal, and even if not, they can fight for it, they can scheme for it, or they can trade for it. However, they all always run out of time, as they all despair confronting their mortality.

How much madness would they embrace, if the likelihood of gaining a few thousand years emerged? That was the crucial question that came to Ben’s head after living and experiencing some of this world, and the answer he came to wasn’t beautiful.

Living forever isn’t a pipe dream here, as many tasted it as they extended their lifespan. They saw others dying while they lived on, so how couldn’t they feel like the path is right before them.

They all only have to grow stronger and stronger as they walk their path further and further.

However, the reality is a tragedy, and they can’t go against nature. Maybe someone will, but not them, not everyone. If eternity was possible, who would shine the most? Probably some monster from the past. Society would be different then, maybe more magical or a utopia, or perhaps we would all be dead if we held no worth. Nevertheless, they can’t grasp eternity, they can easily live a couple of hundred years more, some reach a few thousand, but much more than that, no one is known of achieving it.

There is no regular occurrence of ascendancy or beautiful legends about it either. Some crazy people broke space-time on their search for somewhere else, but history only had those once or twice every million years. Those legendary cultivators don’t even amount to 10 for the whole recorded history. And the depressing reality is that those who left showed no sign of success either.

Ben would call them crazy, but after reaching the apex, they did what they could do. They took risks. Those sad legends are at least better than the so many great names buried on those lands.

So while Ben became less and less afraid of death, numbed by the many risks he had to take, after seeing the world as it is, he grew very fearful of curious eyes.

This time he thought that he finally fell in the hands of some mad cultivators, maybe even to the baldy who ‘treated’ him. However, that turned out to be unlikely after considering the treatment he’s receiving.

‘I don’t want that, nope, nope, definitively not poop. Let’s lower the bar a bit, and hopefully, no one will take notice. I will leave their blood and life codes, since tasting those may bring me to an even bigger tragedy. So lets only rob them and burn the residues left in their bodies.’

The runes on Ben’s body begin to shake again, as they emit an even stronger aura.

Little lines of energy fly off in all directions ending on the other bodies in the room, intending to gather resources.

‘Found it!’ Ben commemorates in his mind as he selects the best artifact around him to serve as a furnace. Even if burning things is easy, forcedly transmuting energy while retraining the burning process is not. So using an artifact to help is essential.

The object selected floats from its original owner to above Ben, chained by the lines of energy. The artifact is a little box, similar to a lantern. It has blue side glasses, with emerald-colored runes drawn on outside, while red-colored runes on the inside.

This artifact is an example of one of the commodities used by many cultivators: A storage-like object used to extract and refine energy crystals. Anyone who can increase their spiritual energy using one of those is luckier than an ordinary foe.

‘My body passively absorbed too much of this chilly energy, so for now, I can only directly supply it with heat to increase its temperature. It should temporally work while I run away.’

Its regeneration ability is the main reason Ben’s body is so frozen, as it kept absorbing the available energy trying to stabilize its condition. Unfortunately, while healing itself, his body ended poisoned with this cold aura. So even if someone brings him out, it will take a long time for him to warm up. He’ll only warm up after replacing all the cold energy stored.

However, such a process is slow, and he doesn’t have much time to deal with this, since who knows when something will happen.

In the end, Ben can only proceed while using some aggressive roundabout manners. Having decided the route he will take, Ben begins to act.

His chest opens wide. Attached to his normal-looking heart is a half-sized black heart. From below it, two thick black runes sprout, those grow to around half a meter above Ben and half a meter apart.

The little box floats to the tip on the right, as the robbed energy crystals begin to fly into it.

A flame starts inside the artifact, burning the resources. The black runes surround the object, protecting it from exploding due to the strong forces generated inside.

In the left tip, chilled energy slowly gathers, balancing both nodes forming on the runes end.

The free lines of energy that gathered all the resources are then positioned in a spherical shape around Ben’s Body, aiming to suppress the waves emitted. Those start to absorb the cold nature in the air and are frozen. However, in the process, it created a good camouflage effect. From outside, no one should notice Ben’s abnormal state.

Around Ben, the corpses were gathered. All the resources keep going inside the chosen artifact. The temporary little furnace then transforms all kinds of energy into heat, and the blacks runes work on absorbing the heat into the node.

The runes on the left become blueish and gain a frozen like texture, while the one to the right becomes reddish and starts glowing.

Both nodes begin to provide Ben transmuted energy. As his body temperature starts to rise, Ben starts to sweat.

On the hole on his chest, both heart rates increase while beating in sync.

The warming up and the healing process has begun on full force.

At first, Ben burns all crystals, jewels, and stones, then he burns all medicine found. After, he decides to burn any little piece of metal and plants available. All those were either directly on the bodies or were forcedly extracted from the spatial treasures without an owner.

However, soon all the small things were used up, but, by now, the black runes had finished drawing out a small spatial array inside the furnace. Bigger things are then thrown inside the now expanded storage space. Weapons, protective clothing, bags, everything with an aura enters the artifact.

Ben starts to feel his body warming-up.

His frozen state like appearance is gone. His eyes are healed and are now shaking with life while slightly opened. His healing process kept going for a few minutes as the furnace eat everything available.

At the very end of this process, Ben keeps staring at the two nodes above him. He can now see a few white lines of energy gaining golden runes. They move from transferring items to attaching themselves to the corpses around Ben.

The process is quite fast, and eleven nodes appear. As soon as they form, the now eleven golden nodes are put inside the furnace to be processed in the same way as everything else.

The red node glows strongly, and with an unstable nature, while the blue one on the left is warily peaceful.

The blue node is quite smaller due to the rest of the freezing energy being present inside Ben’s body.

The process has ended. From now on, Ben has to deal with two new and ready to explode nukes in his body.

However, not everything has ended, and the eleven golden lines begin to coil around the unstable furnace. Their last job will be to suppress the artifact temporally.

Finishing ordering every rune around, Ben finally disconnects from everything else. His open chest then begins to close, hiding his weird heart again. The frozen spherical net begins to evaporate, and the ice left on its former shape begins to fall to the ground, making some noise.

Ben finally takes a deep breath and sees the cold vapor in the air.

‘Fortunately, the plan was a success!’