At the center of the ruined clearing, where the forty meter titan had stood, Lily’s small humanoid form knelt in a shallow pit of compressed earth. Her body was damaged, wounds visible across her frame.

But she was "alive."

Michael exhaled a breath he had been holding without fully realizing it.

"...You made it."

Michael was about to fly over to Lily when a surge of energy filled him.

He stopped mid-motion.

He understood immediately what was happening. This was the feedback from his undead advancing in rank.

Michael let himself settle into the experience.

He didn’t know whether it was because Lily was now a Rank 4 undead, crossing a rank he himself had not yet reached, or whether it was something specific to her nature that made the quality of the feedback this dense.

Lily was not ordinary. Just like his other main undead, thanks to his talent, her qualities were not easily categorized. Though she was a three star extraordinary creature, Michael felt she was probably half an epic grade with all the resources that had been poured into her over time.

Whatever the reason, the feedback was rich. In quality and in quantity.

Michael stayed still and let it move through him, feeling his strength adjust upward.

When was the last time he had felt feedback this intense?

Only when his undead were first entering ranks he hadn’t yet reached had the feedback been substantial every time. But at some point the returns had begun to diminish, and then for many of his undead they had stopped producing meaningful feedback entirely.

The reason was not complicated. It was two things working together.

The first was that once he entered the same rank as an undead, the feedback from that undead advancing further within the rank became considerably less. There was less distance between them, less of a gap for the feedback to bridge.

The second was his own stats. They had grown to a point where the numbers coming back through the feedback loop simply did not register as meaningfully against what he already had. What would have been a significant gain at an earlier stage became something closer to rounding.

The two were connected. Higher rank meant closer proximity to his undead’s level, which meant less gap, which meant less feedback.

This was why the first ten to twenty feedbacks from a new undead tended to give him the most substantial gains before the returns tapered, shifting toward accumulation from a large number of undead advancing later.

Soon the surge finished and Michael turned to check his stats.

"What the—?!"

Each of his attributes had increased by at least a hundred points. Not a combined total across all four. Each one individually. Strength, agility, constitution, intelligence, all of them had climbed by a hundred points or more from a single feedback event.

Michael stared at the numbers in shock. After all, even leveling up to level 75 wouldn’t produce that kind of growth without using his accumulated attribute points.

He had known the feedback from a Rank 4 undead would be significant. But seeing the actual numbers in the panel was a different experience from knowing something in the abstract.

Unfortunately and expectedly, there were no new skills. Michael noticed that without particular surprise. He had grown accustomed to it. The stronger one grew, the less frequently skills appeared through natural stat increments, and the skills that did eventually appear were correspondingly stronger to compensate for the reduced frequency. Quantity in the early stages, quality in the later ones.

He could live with that. He already had more skills than he could comfortably rotate through in a standard fight.

Michael brought his excitement down slightly and descended toward the clearing.

The lingering energy from the tribulation washed over him the moment he entered the perimeter, but he could handle it. This was just residual, not the actual lightning itself. Even so, the area around Lily’s position would be inaccessible to most for a while. An ordinary person would not have made it two steps in before the residual charge tore through them. And it wasn’t only ordinary people who would struggle. Weaker supernaturals would have difficulty enduring it as well.

The moment Michael reached Lily’s position, the first thing he wanted to do was check her condition.

A lightning tribulation was the heavens’ acknowledgment and came with its benefits, but it did not leave the one who survived it in a clean state. The lightning could cause lingering damage that sat beneath the surface.

He was already considering whether to call out the healing worm when he noticed something.

Not only were Lily’s injuries healing on their own, her aura was growing.

The first he could accept. That was not a new ability. But the latter left him briefly confused.

It took a moment for Michael to understand what was actually happening.

"The Elven treasures."

Lily had, to put it plainly, eaten things that were not hers to eat. Stolen was the more accurate word.

Michael had assumed those treasures were fully devoured. She had gone from the mid levels of Rank 3 to the peak almost immediately after waking him, which had led him to conclude the resources had been processed completely.

It turned out that was not quite right.

She had not finished digesting everything. Some portion of what she had taken in had remained stored inside her, sitting in a state of partial absorption, held there by whatever internal process Lily used to manage energy she hadn’t fully processed yet.

Now, after ascending, everything she had been holding back was being absorbed at once.

Michael watched her aura continue to expand and said nothing for a moment.

He wasn’t sure whether he was more amused or impressed. Probably both.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Michael, together with his other Rank 4 undead standing at a distance, kept still to guard Lily as she digested the gains from her ascension.

A few minutes passed. Then her aura settled, the growth tapering off into something stable and contained.

Michael turned to check her progress.

[Undead Titan- Level 83]

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A/N: Thank you for the support dear readers!!!!