[swish]

After moving inside, Ben’s tense body quickly freezes.

‘Nothing but death.’

Before him is a big pit with dead bodies, filled with animals. Furthermore, many walls divide the circular hole like a pizza, linking the edges to the center of the ritual zone.

Ben shuts off his sense of smell and forms a small energy veil around his body, isolating himself. Then, he begins to walk towards one of the paths leading to the center. While moving to the core area, he looks around and sees all kinds of animals, including a few of the types that observed him after he jumped down from the plateau.

‘How long did I spent down there? It shouldn’t be a decade. So not only did they built this quite fast, but they also must have been overclocking it to achieve such a shocking result.’

—

After arriving before the core, he notices the improvised ritual and its corresponding Arrays. The veil surrounding him disappears, and his body functionalities turn off as he walks into the core area. Once he shuts down all his intrusive senses and outwardly actions, the whole system becomes unable to sense him. In the end, he walks in like a dead man, only using his vision to identify the surroundings.

‘Jack pot!’

Around Ben, the area is chaotic. The whole system is poorly glued, like a computer put together by using broken pieces, tape, uncovered wires, hot glue, etc. The sight makes one thing clear: whoever built it didn’t have spare time.

‘I will give it to them, it is not every day that I find someone who makes things as bad as I do… Like a terrible improvised DIY.’

Ben’s body begins to get stiff, so, to avoid further after-effects, he immediately begins the theft. He starts acting like a kid who found a charming mountain of Lego’s pieces. He breaks a few pieces, throws some away, and forcefully puts some together, ignoring any reasonable game rules.

First, he breaks the security-related setups. Then, he tweaks the core functionalities and begins moving around all kinds of objects. Since the system was arranged hurriedly, Ben acts with easy. Even if he isn’t the best array master, he is a master used to work in the middle of a mess, so how could this surprise him. Most of his carefulness comes from him trying to notice if something waits beneath, something like a trap that may cause him danger.

However, once he explores enough to feel confident in the lack of a trap, he goes uncontrollably.

Once he crashes everything which would cause him some danger, he deploys his senses again. With the ability to use energy, he scans everything once more. After quickly ranking everything within sight, he begins to pick the valuable assets.

‘As within my expectations, they put no tracking since those may work against them. Since they dare to do something like this, they should be willing to eat their losses if the worst cases arise. Indeed, in this whole plot, there is only one connection to them: the core artifact sending them the harvested energy. One single point of failure! And they should disable it as soon as they notice something wrong. Alright, I can’t hold back, let make them angry.’ [laughs]

A pen appears on Ben’s hands, and since his energy already took control of most of the system, he begins to order them around.

Before the wireless energy sending device, he writes on the floor a simple design. Next, many things around him break, and an enormous amount of energy concentrates on the single Array. Lastly, Ben sends the Array towards the artifact when it starts to crumble.

[RUMBLE]

Ben puts together the whole protective system and uses the rest of the burnt energy to isolate the area around the artifact. His DIY from the pieces around holds back the results of the explosion, but as a consequence, the whole system turns ineffective, and even the illusion finally disappears.

The simple design was Ben’s Bomb Array, which tries to replicate one of Earth’s humanity’s most disastrous inventions. While Ben never arrived at a complete copy, by applying a few general physics concepts, he built a highly unstable array which causes all sort of non-spirit based damage.

[sigh]

‘Destruction is so much easier than building something…’

In a world where one thought can kill many, people didn’t explore nuclear reactions or much of any of the sciences that made revolution back on Earth possible. Here, those matters are labeled as inefficient and wasteful, and they indeed are when compared to the alternative available.

The reality is that most of the progress in natural sciences is a consequence of developing methods that use this world’s unique energy to alter them. From the beginning, gunpowder was never needed for killing, nor did people need nuclear power to destroy cities, and a full electricity grid was not required for quality of life improvements.

The same happened to almost everything else. In a way or another, the handy nature of spirit energy had made much of Earth top technology obsolete in comparison.

However, despite Ben’s last attack being indeed inefficient, he still used it. The reasoning is simply because such an attack is highly unexpected. The whole world focus on learning, refining, and preparing against spirit energy induced technology. So when any protective system receives a pure physical blast, they are taken by surprise. Most of the protective measures are refined in dealing with advance use of spirit energy and not what it causes, because while the first is the source of trouble, the last is too complicated and diverse.

‘Ha! Take that, bastards! Their heart must have at least skipped a beat. And this… throwing money away always feels so exhilarating, some things never change.’ Ben thinks as he glances at the fortune burnt.

Perhaps his actions are wasteful, but Ben still feels much satisfaction from it, so a big smile appears on his face as his mood turns for the better.

‘I would like to send a little eye with it, so at least I can see what outcome my gift produced… But I may never know, my curiosity may never be satiated. Alright, focus! Anyway, better leave.’ Ben thinks as he slaps his face to focus.

He, again, starts to pick things around. Then, he moves to the center of the explosion. A black pattern appears on his hand, as it moves towards the place where the exploded device was. From within the broken stuff, Ben picks a horn-like object.

‘Really!?’

Even if this object is the only thing he ends up stealing, his actions would still be worth it, as the black and blue horn is the remains of apex creature.

‘Remains of a Lord of Space! How could this be… The gluttons are too much! Were they using this to connect many scenes like this? What the?’

Since they were using such a high-level monster, the ritual must be much larger than Ben initially expected.

‘Unexpectedly, the blast must have taken the fragile artifact by surprise, breaking the horn as a result. But if I can pick such a thing, would that indicate that the system uses a whole head or even a complete body? No one would ever use such treasure this way if they didn’t have more, or they weren’t aiming for something catastrophic. Which apex organization is moving like that? I thought some major shift would take at least forty or fifty thousand years, or need some extreme disruption to appear suddenly, but neither of those happened yet. Everything has been quite calm. Too calm. Was it only superficial?’

From Ben’s hand, many engravings appear, washing the horn from any external restriction. He breaks down any residues from the prior owner.

With this surprise, everything else becomes secondary, and a shadow of worry appears on Ben’s mind.

‘I should move faster.’

He stores the horn into his chest area, disconnecting it entirely from the outside. Then, he quickly picks a few more ordinary things.

He made his money back and more since he found much fuel sitting around. He also retrieved dozens of modular tablets arrays. Unfortunately, they are all engraved, but still, they are quite valuable. Also, he took a few relevant supportive artifacts and materials, while most of them don’t make Ben’s heart palpitate, the horn does!

Unfortunately, much of the ritual has sipped into the ground as it was activated, so the rest valuable stuff is impossible for him to extract.

When coming here, Ben was going to loot everything he could, but since he saw so much, he chose instead to destroy some of it to payback the gluttons. From the beginning, Ben felt extremely uncomfortable due to his tight connection to nature, so when given the opportunity, he didn’t hesitate.

While he was looting, Ben drops to the floor a few things he prepared overnight. He made sure not to leave anything behind that could link it back to him, then he covered what was left by making energy noise with some random spell-like structures. Above all, he made sure not to use his inner energy at all, always using external inefficient energy manipulation, so tracking him would be almost impossible.

After finishing everything, he walks towards the north with a big smile on his face. While it is outside of his power to save this region, he stopped the ritual and caused some level of damage to the group behind it. Sometimes that is all it takes for an organization to lose against their peers, and if they can make it, then there is nothing more he can do.

Indeed, if they are all-powerful, the only solution is to everyone to throw their bodies at them, and a single individual would amount to almost nothing. At this moment, Ben can only make a few bets and act accordingly later.

—

Once he was getting closer to the edge of the pit, Ben suddenly stops. Due to his good mood, he didn’t retrieve his sense completely, and it caught something else.

< “Maybe I should rob his hair… A bit of his blood, maybe… Or… Would they still consider me an allay if I cut one of his feet and treat it like a rabbit’s lucky feet? This isn’t normal… This isn’t normal…” >

Since it was something he was familiar with, Ben easily recognizes it.

Hence, he takes a nut-like seed from his ring and places it on the floor. Then, he steps a bit back. Once he was a dozen meters away, he does the same. And a third time. And fourth. Only when he was walking already outside the pit radius does something move from inside the lake of dead bodies.

A small animal jumps from the pit and picks the nut. Immediately, it starts to munch at it. Before it even finishes eating the first, it runs towards the second nut and picks it up. Then the third and fourth, before arriving at Ben’s feet.

The bloodied squirrel looks at Ben while trying to munch at everything in its hand. Due to its rapid motions, a few nuts fall, but it quickly picks it up again and continues eating it. The cycle repeats a few times, but the little animal stays staring at Ben like it was asking for more.

Ben crouches and put another fruit before it, looking at it with skeptical eyes.

“Mutated Golden Squirrel. Whatcha doin’?”

Ben was very familiar with this mutated species, as he used them before as a source of inspiration. His research on them in the past helped him tremendously.

Golden Squirrel has nothing unusual going for them. They live throughout the continent, but their population isn’t enormous. They don’t have high cultivation abilities or produce some material humans seek. At best, they are recognized to have high intelligence when compared to their level of power.

Nevertheless, in between the regular accounts, Ben heard tales of some of them mutating to have an impressive characteristic. Some of their mutated members can feign death to an astounding precision. Because of the subject intrigued him, he decided to study the species.

After his research on them, the results went to become a good part of the foundation of what today is Ben’s ability to manipulate his body to an incredible extent. This study case helped Ben break through the hurdle of formulating something practical.

“You are quite good at it if you even deceived the ritual.”

While Ben talked to it, the squirrel became unable to hold all the food given to him and begun showing signs of annoyance.