My fight was drawing a lot of attention, and the demons heading towards my position had reached the level that was attacking the Adepts

I should have been shaken when the fourth wave hit the eastern wall and pressed against the lip, before spilling over like a tide made from bodies. There should be about five hundred, but with the wave of magic flowing through me, I did not necessarily see numbers, but bodies.

Also, I think the endless waves of warmth pouring into me from the slain demons were making me crazy... maybe a bit.

Despite my body holding up as I unleashed so much power, I know I should be in great pain. I was not totally immune to the ravages of the elements after all, and Lightning Resonance was pushing my lightning infinitely closer to what an Adept was meant to wield.

However, with the relentless waves of warmth flowing into me, the pain and the discomfort were pushed aside, and this became the only sensation that my mind latched onto.

Forty Percent Anima inside the tank. Right, I was not insane; somehow, I was unleashing more power than I ever did, while spending less Anima than I ever had. I even suspected that most of the cost was due to Surge, and not Lightning Cascade.

Hundreds of demons thundered towards me; the shaking ground from their combined weight was their battle cry.

My grin widened as I met them with lightning. I cast Cascade through the staff with Surge sustained, and I held the channel for fifteen seconds.

In fifteen seconds, the cast killed two hundred and ten.

I think all of my hair had burned off at this point, including my eyebrows, and my Acolyte robes were beginning to smoke, and a single spark would... there.

My robes came alit, and I was on fire.

Silly me, worrying about my staff when I should have been worrying about my clothes.

Thankfully, I did not burn for long, maybe two seconds, before the waves of force erupting around me scattered the remnants of my robes, leaving me naked, and glowing like a Sun Mushroom, you know the ones that glow blue in the dark if you place them in sunlight.

I don’t know why this thought made me burst into laughter.

The eastern half of the bowl was a charred ruin. The grass was burned to the soil, and the remnants of the chitin demon corpses were piled three and four bodies deep along the lines where the branches had run.

The chitin demons in the impact zone did not die clean; the supercharged Cascade cooked them, the chitin shells boiling outward in cracks that vented superheated insectoid fluid in arcs that hissed where they hit the grass.

[Stored Essence: 598]

[Demon Slayer — First Earth Gate: Evolution complete]

[New skill: Ascendant Earth Gate (Epic)- Growth]

[Bonus: +5 Anima Depth, +20 Endurance] [Anima Depth: 53 → 58]

[Second Earth Gate - Unlock Requirement - Stored Essence: 10,000]

-I Charge You, Go Into Creation And Wipe Out The Children of Abaddon.

The notifications tore at me, and even if I could ignore them, there was no way to ignore the five-point Anima Depth increase that made the reservoir beneath my breastbone ache, in addition to the twenty-point increase in endurance that suddenly made me feel as if my bones had just transformed into steel.

My body had barely settled under the three-point increase from the last loop when I gained another five points.

This was impossible as far as I know, except you followed specific methodologies that involved training, potions, and other magical methodologies; you could not just gain attributes like this.

To move from 50 to 60, in Anima Depth, was slow, and a normal Acolyte took years to cross this gap. From Initiate 1 to Acolyte 49, it was rather easy, and if push came to shove, a very talented Acolyte could do this in six months, but the final part was supposed to take years.

My case was different because it seemed as if I was blazing past the hardest part of an Acolyte training. There also seemed to be something different about my soul, as it seemed to be brighter, almost as if there was something different about these five points of Anima that I had just received.

And as much as this shocked me, nothing could prepare me for the sudden jump of Endurance reaching the Adept Tier.

Endurance 44 → 64 (Adept)

I did not have time to analyze Ascendant Earth Gate, the bonus it had just given me, or my first Adept Tier skill, as the staff in my hand did something else.

The hum inside of it became audible, as the warm brown wood of the Elemental Fuchsia that I had held by my side for two years began to sing.

It was a low tone, but one that I could hear in my soul; it was the song of lightning.

The grain of the wood lit up as thin lines of blue-white light traced themselves through the wood from the base of the staff to the silver claw at the head, mapping the pathways that Staff Resonance had been carving across two years of casting.

The blue crystal at the head intensified, its color deepening from the pale blue I had been carrying into a saturated electric blue that was no longer reflecting light from outside the crystal but emitting light from within it.

It was the last spark before the end, as the crystal fully melted into my staff, and what I held in my hand began to transform while I was still in combat... However, this did not stop the lightning that I was channeling through it from becoming interrupted; in fact, it seemed to be accelerating the process of the staff’s transformation.

The transformation took perhaps three seconds, and I watched the staff become something else.

[Staff Transformation: complete] [Elemental Fuchsia → Stormbound Fuchsia] [New properties: Lightning Conduit, Sustained Channel, Resonant Amplification]

The notifications were the system’s quiet acknowledgment that the staff was now a different tool than it had been.

It did not need to tell me, because in my hands was an Adept-Tier staff. It was lighter, ridiculously stronger, and when the fifth wave came over the ridge, trampling on the bodies of the shattered demons underneath their feet, even with twenty percent Anima Depth left inside me, I was the one stepping forward.