The instant the timer struck zero, I felt the change. Another prismatic tide of divinity rolled across the field, and in the very same breath, the world drained into gray. The leaves that had been tumbling from the sky halted where they were mid-fall. The wounded monster stopped bleeding, every drifting bead of ichor locked in place exactly as it had been.

  I took it all in without blinking, caught somewhere between awe and attention. Even Denis was staring wide-eyed at the frozen scene. The only one who seemed entirely unmoved was Moru, whose interest remained solely on me and the continuation of his belly rubs. I obliged him without really thinking about it, my hands working by habit while my eyes never left the battlefield around us.

  Then came another shift. From the forest, at the very edges of the battlefield the Colosseum had raised for us, the world began to come apart. It wasn’t sudden. It was slow, stripping itself away piece by piece. White motes of light drifted upward like rising ash from the trees beyond. One by one, swirling rifts tore open in space all around us.

  [First trial is over.]

  [Please hastily proceed into the spatial rifts to return and receive your appraisal, oh brave champion.]

  I dismissed the message with a sigh and pushed myself to my feet. At last. Time to take what I came for before that so-called appraisal arrived.

  From the records, I already knew how this part went. This was when surveillance across the battlefield ceased. Soon, rifts would open throughout the arena, and the surviving champions would begin stepping out one by one before the cheering crowd, marking the end of the first phase.

  Which meant I would finally have a small window beyond prying eyes. A rare stretch of privacy. Perfect for gathering a few precious morphogens.

  “There’s one last thing I need to take care of,” I said to Denis as we stopped before the swirling blue rift. “You go on. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Denis gave me a questioning look, then shrugged it off, by now, he was clearly accustomed to my habits. Moru tried to linger with me, but in the end followed his master through the rift as well. And just like that, the field was empty of everyone but me.

  I watched the motes of light drift and thin as the battlefield’s disintegration sped up. An uneasy feeling settled over me. It wasn’t fear. Not quite. More like a subtle wrongness— an incompatibility I couldn’t put into clean words, mixed with the discomfort of not knowing what waited beyond the next moment.

  What would happen if I simply chose not to enter the rift before everything finished coming apart?

  From what I had uncovered in my research, the Colosseum reconstructed fragments of the waking world’s memories inside the Spirit Plane. That meant once this place fully unraveled, the most likely outcome was simple enough: I would fall into the Spirit Plane myself.

  The possibility made sense. It fit too neatly to be coincidence. And even so, I knew with complete certainty that it was not a place I ever wished to stumble into willingly.

  The reason was simple. First, I was functionally blind to the Spirit Plane. I had no true idea what it looked like, what laws it followed, or what kinds of beings truly existed there. Second, on the rare occasions I had managed to gather even the smallest scraps of information, one fact was always consistent, the Spirit Plane was not a realm where physical things were meant to exist. And from there came that growing sense of incompatibility.

  Just watching the slow disintegration of this bubble, this illusion the Colosseum had woven as our battlefield, peeling back to expose the true Spirit Plane, made me feel as if something inside me was being tugged loose. Slowly. Patiently. Quietly undone.

  I didn’t believe I would survive if I ever fell into whatever lay beyond. Not because of some overwhelming monster waiting on the other side, but simply because it was not a plane where something like me was meant to remain.

  I shook my head. There was still time. And this constant thrum of incompatibility was starting to get on my nerves. Whatever. Time to do this and leave.

  I split into three clones at once.

  “Track down the monsters I killed, or anyone else killed,” I ordered. “Devour them. Gather as much morphogen as you can, and do it efficiently.”

  The terrorist clone looked thrilled. The curious one snapped a neat salute. I had to smack the lazy one sharply on the head just to get her moving. Or him. It was hard to say, since all of us currently wore Tomas’s face. In the end, it didn’t matter. Moments later, all three vanished from sight.

  After all, whatever they devoured would feed back to me as morphogen. There was no reason not to use every advantage available.

  I nodded once and turned toward the massive corpse of the black bird-like fiend. Up close, it was truly enormous. Even in my full dragon form, it would have taken real time to work through it properly. Thankfully, I had picked up a few new tricks to hasten the process.

  One of them was Transfiguration.

  To reshape something of that size was difficult, far more than what I could normally manage with proper mastery. But that was only true if I wanted to make the result stable. And stability wasn’t required. I only needed to eat it.

  Using a layered combination of Transfiguration spells, I targeted the entire body of the fiend at once. It began to shrink under the pressure as I focused and clenched my teeth, forcing the spell through brute will rather than refined control. It wasn’t elegant but it was effective.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Within seconds, the mass collapsed down into a single bite-sized, violently unstable lump of meat.

  It landed in my hand.

  Even then, I could feel it struggling against the spell, pushing against the compressed form, trying to tear itself apart. I had to keep pouring mana into it just to stop it from bursting free in my grip.

  There was another reason I wanted to test this. Once I ate it, the compressed mass was absolutely going to explode. The only difference was that it would do so inside my stomach instead of in my hand. That alone would be enough to kill an ordinary beast on the spot.

  But my… biology as a dragon was different.

  To this day, I still wasn’t entirely sure where all the food I consumed actually went. It felt as though there was some kind of void within my stomach. There was a brief phase where my stomach processed what I ate, but after that, it was simply gone—digested and devoured by whatever operated beyond normal flesh. I was placing my bet on that same process working here as well. If it was fast enough, I wouldn’t explode from the inside.

  And if I did…

  Well. I could always chew my way back to having proper insides again. Probably.

  Hopefully.

  No. Who was I trying to fool. Please don’t explode.

  I took a deep breath and swallowed the unstable piece of meat.

  Almost immediately, I felt my body go to work on it. I held still, nerves tight, tracking every sensation as the compressed mass was slowly broken down within me. To my surprise, it didn’t take long at all. Within a few seconds, I felt my magic unravel and fade into that internal void, along with the piece of meat it had been holding together. A grin formed on my face as a system message appeared before me.

  10 morphogen!

  Ten whole morphogen. From a single bird monster.

  Another screen followed right after.

  [+6 Maximum Mana.]

  That was the Mana Devourer ability at work. Since I had transfigured the entire monster, core and all, devouring that single compressed piece counted as devouring the core too. One thing I had confirmed long ago was that higher-tier monster cores were absurdly expensive. So expensive that I simply could not obtain them at all. They were valuable reagents and prized materials for magi-crafting. Because of that, I had more or less stopped relying on Mana Devourer, especially since lower-tier cores no longer gave me any increase at all.

  Now, finally, it had paid off again.

  Six mana wasn’t nearly as thrilling as it had been back when my total reserves hovered around a measly hundred. Back then, every single point felt vital. Even so, six was still six. And over time, it would add up. Every point of mana would matter someday, no matter how deep my reserves became.

  And lastly, while I already knew that special “blessed” monsters granted extra experience, extra morphogen too? That was more than I’d hoped for. That alone made this worth the effort.

  More notifications began appearing in quick succession: additional morphogen gains, further increases to my maximum mana. That meant my clones were following the same method, using Transfiguration just as I was. Of course they were. They were me, after all. Efficiency was unavoidable.

  And the most important part was that I didn’t feel full.

  A monster of that size should normally have filled at least a sixth of my satiety. Instead, because the portion I devoured was physically so small, I barely felt it at all. It was as if I were tricking my own biology by compressing quantity into negligible form.

  With that realization, I moved even faster as the world around me began to break apart at an accelerating pace. I stuffed myself with what I could, as efficiently as possible, all while trying to ignore the tightening pressure in the air, and the slow, creeping dread rising from the Spirit Plane that lay beneath this fading fa?ade.

  ***

  I knew my time was limited, but this was far worse than I had expected. In the span of barely five minutes, the rate of disintegration had surged to something absurd. The pressure of the Spirit Plane pushing through the widening cracks in reality multiplied with terrifying speed. For the first time in a long while, I felt my heart hammer against my ribs, driven by that long-forgotten emotion — dread.

  It was pure instinct. Something deeper than conscious thought, as if the very flesh of this body was screaming at me to get away as fast as I possibly could. And if not for that instinct, I doubt I would be standing here now.

  So I listened.

  There were still plenty of monster corpses scattered across the battlefield, more than enough to tempt my growing greed. But I already had what I could safely take. There simply wasn’t enough time. With one last lingering glance into the distance, I dashed toward the nearest swirling blue rift, dismissed my clones in a single breath, and finally fled the collapsing forest.

  I didn’t step directly back into the arena as I had expected.

  Instead, I found myself somewhere… in between.

  There was solid ground beneath my feet, yet when I looked down, the floor itself seemed to be made of the same swirling blue substance as the rift. It shifted and flowed constantly, as if I were standing inside motion made solid.

  Before I could dwell on it, my attention was seized by the system screen that rose before me.

  [Your appraisal has been concluded.]

  Final Points: 152

  Final Rank: #1

  Then came the so-called appraisal.

  [A most duplicitous entity has slithered through the halls, her true face obscured. Her methodology was a masterclass in underhanded theatre. Righteous opponents were eliminated not just by strength, but also by strategic perfidy. Even Blessed Proctors, dispatched to temper the worthy, found themselves undone by elegant deception. To cloak cunning in a veneer of virtue, and to commit sins to preserve that very cloak… a truly formidable, utterly reprehensible fiend. Applause, of the most disgusted variety, is warranted.]

  I cocked an eyebrow.

  What in the ever-loving, multicoloured fuck was this?

  I stared, outright offended. Who was this sanctimonious screen calling treacherous? There’s no dragon more noble than yours truly. I did what needed doing. That’s it.

  Still, setting aside my personal offense, the message confirmed something important. The Colosseum did know what I was doing. Or at least, what I had achieved through my actions. What it truly was, however, remained unclear. I knew it was some kind of artifact— but sapient? I hadn’t been sure before. Now, doubt had well and truly taken root.

  Another window burst forth, this one in aggressively cheerful gold and cyan.

  [Appraisal Status: Excellent! Truly worthy of the #1 spot!]

  It sounded oddly enthusiastic.

  [Rewards have been granted.]

  [All your stats have increased by +100.]

  Then, as if that weren’t enough—

  BONUS REWARDS!

  EXTRA TAILORED REWARDS FOR:

  1) STEALING THE TOP SPOT.

  2) BEING SO DELIGHTFULLY DREADFUL.

  [All Stats receive an ADDITIONAL +100!]

  Oh. That was… generous. Very generous.

  But it still wasn’t done.

  [Skill Points: +10, Morphogen: +100]

  That was nothing to scoff at either. And then came the final message, the one that made my eyes widen despite myself.

  [A concept has been made manifest. A rule has been offered an exception. Feed well, little abyss.]

  [ABILITY GRANTED: QUANTUM DEVOURER.]

  Jade (the Responsible Researcher?):

  Findings: Compression Meat Bomb safe for consumption.

  Risks: Internal implosion, external implosion, philosophical implosion.

  “See? Totally safe. Perfect plan. Zero percent risk. Trust me, I’m a professional.”

  (Stomach makes ominous wet void-noise.)

  “…That was normal.”

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