Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 18: A Terrible Mistake!

Chapter 18: A Terrible Mistake!
The ancestor’s soul descended like a falling star, its spectral form growing more solid and defined with each passing second.
The formation’s red energy wrapped around both Zeph and the spirit, creating a bridge between the living and the dead.
Zeph’s mind raced through his limited options. Enhanced durability had bought him time, but it couldn’t stop a direct assault on his soul. His body might be steel, but his consciousness was still vulnerable to metaphysical attack.
’Fight it!’ he commanded himself, drawing on every scrap of willpower he possessed. ’It’s just another enemy. Just another threat to survive.’
The spirit’s eyes locked onto his, and Zeph felt the first tendrils of foreign consciousness probing at the boundaries of his mind. Not violent or forceful, but inexorable—like water finding cracks in a dam, seeping through defenses with patient inevitability.
He pushed back mentally, trying to reinforce his sense of self against the intrusion. For a moment, he felt resistance, his willpower creating a barrier that the ancestor’s soul couldn’t immediately penetrate.
Then the spirit smiled—a predatory expression that suggested it had fought this battle a thousand times before and never lost.
Crack!
The dam broke!
Zeph’s consciousness reeled as the ancestor’s soul crashed through his mental defenses like they were made of tissue paper.
Ancient memories flooded his mind—centuries of battles, tactical knowledge accumulated over a lifetime of warfare, the weight of leading an entire tribe through impossible odds.
The goblin ancestor wasn’t just trying to possess him. It was trying to overwrite him, replacing his personality and memories with its own until nothing of Zephyr remained except meat and bone.
’No,’ Zeph thought desperately, but his mental voice was already growing weaker. ’Not like this! Not after everything—’
His consciousness was being compressed, squeezed into a smaller and smaller corner of his own mind while the ancestor expanded to fill the available space. He could feel his sense of self fragmenting, personality dissolving like sugar in water.
The goblin warriors’ chanting reached a crescendo. They could see their ancestor taking control, see the change in their vessel’s posture and expression as foreign intelligence animated familiar features.
Zeph was losing. Not gradually, but catastrophically, like a dam collapsing all at once.
Then something impossible happened.
[ALERT: FOREIGN SOUL FRAGMENT DETECTED]
[CLASSIFICATION: COMPLETE CONSCIOUSNESS - THREAT LEVEL CRITICAL]
[PRIMORDIAL ARCHITECT DEFENSIVE PROTOCOLS ENGAGED]
The notification blazed across Zeph’s fragmenting consciousness like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man. His Primordial Architect system—the cheat that had followed him from death and across dimensions—was responding to the possession attempt.
[ANALYSIS COMPLETE]
[SOUL FRAGMENT CONTAINS: 847,392 PP EQUIVALENT ENERGY]
[CONVERSION OPTION AVAILABLE]
[QUERY: DOES HOST WISH TO CONVERT SOUL FRAGMENT TO PRIMORDIAL POINTS?]
[ESTIMATED YIELD: 1,000,000 PP]
Hope exploded through Zeph’s compressed consciousness like sunlight breaking through storm clouds.
One million Primordial Points!
The ancestor’s soul wasn’t just a threat, it was the greatest resource he’d ever encountered!
His analytical mind cut through the panic with razor precision. The Primordial Architect had responded to a soul-based threat by offering to convert it into advancement currency.
Which meant it could interact with souls directly. Which meant it could protect him from possession by consuming what was trying to possess him.
’Brilliant,’ he thought, already formulating his response. ’Turn the enemy’s strength into my power. Classic gaming strategy.’
But even as his mental voice shaped the word "yes," something flickered at the edge of his awareness.
The system interface glitched.
Not dramatically—just a momentary distortion, like static on an old television screen. But in that microsecond of corruption, a second notification materialized beneath the first.
[DOES HOST WISH TO DEVOUR FRAGMENT?]
Zeph’s thoughts stuttered to a halt. The wording was different. Not "convert"—devour.
And the notification carried something the first hadn’t—a sensation of hunger that made his soul recoil instinctively. Like standing next to an open furnace and feeling the heat that wanted to consume everything in its path.
’That’s wrong,’ his instincts screamed. ’That notification feels wrong.’
But the ancestor’s soul was crushing his consciousness with increasing force, and he had maybe seconds before the possession became irreversible. No time for analysis or caution.
The first notification offered what he needed—massive PP to fuel his advancement. That was the logical choice. The safe choice.
"Yes!" he projected mentally, directing his intention specifically at the conversion option. "Convert the soul fragment!"
The second notification blazed brilliant crimson.
[DEVOUR CONFIRMED]
’What?! No, that’s not—’
But it was already happening.
The ancestor’s soul, in the middle of its triumphant possession, suddenly stopped. Its ancient consciousness registered confusion, then alarm, then absolute terror as it realized something was consuming it from within.
Not converting. Not processing. Devouring.
The goblin spirit tried to retreat, tried to pull back from Zeph’s mind and escape the formation, but invisible chains had already wrapped around its essence. It was trapped, bound by the very ritual meant to give it new life.
The soul began to disintegrate.
Not cleanly, not peacefully, but torn apart piece by piece as something vast and hungry fed on its existence.
Zeph could see the fragments—glowing particles of crystallized consciousness that only he seemed to perceive—being pulled into some infinite void that existed somewhere behind his eyes.
The sensation was indescribable.
Warmth flooded through Zeph’s being like divine grace, a soothing comfort that touched places in his soul he hadn’t known existed. It felt like coming home after a long journey, like recognition from something that had been waiting for him since before he was born.
His soul sang with satisfaction as it absorbed the ancestor’s essence, not just energy but knowledge, experience, the fundamental patterns that made up a consciousness that had existed for centuries.
And somewhere in the depths of that comfort, Zeph felt something else.
Satisfaction that wasn’t entirely his own. Hunger that had been momentarily sated but would inevitably return. The sense of something vast and terrible that had just woken up inside him after a very long sleep.
’What the fuck did I just do?’
The goblins’ triumphant chanting transformed into screams of horror as they watched their ancestor’s soul crumble to nothing.
The shamans staggered backward from the pit’s edge, staffs falling from nerveless fingers as their centuries-long plan collapsed into impossibility.
Then the world began to scream.
Screeeeeeeeeeeee!
The ground beneath the clearing shuddered violently, throwing goblins to their knees as localized earthquakes radiated outward from the ritual pit. Trees swayed and cracked, their roots tearing free from soil that suddenly couldn’t hold them.
But that was nothing compared to what happened in the sky.
The heavens rippled like water disturbed by a stone, reality itself distorting as something responded to what had just occurred. The distortion grew, expanded, twisted into something that hurt to perceive.
Crack!
Then space tore!
Not metaphorically, not symbolically, but literally tore open like fabric subjected to too much stress. A wound in reality appeared above the clearing, edges crackling with energies that shouldn’t exist in normal space.
Through that tear, Zeph caught a glimpse of something impossible—colors that didn’t exist in standard physics, shapes that twisted perspective just by being perceived, and worst of all, the sense of vast attention turning toward the rent in space with terrible, hungry interest.
The goblins fled in absolute panic, their coordination and discipline forgotten in the face of cosmic horror their primitive minds couldn’t process.
And Zeph stood in the pit, chains still binding his wrists, staring up at the wound in space that his Primordial Architect had apparently caused by eating an ancestor’s soul.
’I might have,’ he thought distantly, ’made a terrible mistake.’