SSS Evolution: Upgrading My Trash Grade Skeleton to Godhood-Chapter 65: Investigation (I)

Lukas opened and closed his fist.

The motion was simple — the kind of thing a person does without thinking, a reflex check, a way of confirming that the hand still responds the way it should. But what answered the movement was not what had answered it an hour ago. The strength that moved through his fingers, through his palm, up through the architecture of his forearm and shoulder, was not an upgrade of his previous physical output. It was a different order of thing entirely — seven hundred kilograms of raw force packed into a frame that looked, from the outside, exactly as it had before.

He held the fist closed for a moment and thought about what it meant practically.

A casual strike. No technique. No star energy channeled deliberately over the top of it, no skill activated, nothing beyond the baseline output of a body that had just spent several hours being systematically rebuilt from the inside. That casual strike would end a normal human being without requiring a follow-up. Early body refining cultivators — people who had dedicated real time and effort to hardening themselves against exactly this kind of force — would not fare meaningfully better.

That was not the part that made his heartbeat accelerate.

Second rank to seventh. In a few hours.

The thought had a quality that the physical sensation of the strength itself hadn’t quite produced — a kind of vertigo that had nothing to do with his body and everything to do with what the number meant in the context of the world he was operating in. He had not gradually worked his way through five ranks of body refining over weeks of careful cultivation. He had sat in a cavern, eaten a serpent, and crossed a distance that most dedicated practitioners spent years covering.

If this became known — if even the bare outline of the method and its results found its way into the wider awareness of the star awakened world — the implications would not be contained. They would spread outward and keep spreading, touching every power structure and every established hierarchy that had organized itself around the assumption that certain rates of progress were simply not possible.

The use of beast mass to temper the body was not a secret. It never had been. The principle was understood, the application was widespread, and there existed at least one major power back on Earth whose entire cultivation philosophy was built around consuming star beasts as the primary engine of physical growth. It was a legitimate path. A proven one.

It was also a dangerous one. The ferocious energies accumulated through beast consumption had a character of their own — wild, cumulative, resistant to direction — and even the most disciplined practitioners of beast-consumption techniques maintained a genuine, ongoing relationship with the possibility of going mad. The energies didn’t ask permission. They simply built until they couldn’t be managed anymore, and then they stopped being manageable.

The Star Eater Body Refining Method had produced seven ranks of advancement and left his mind cleaner than it had been before he started.

Compared to every other technique operating in this space, the gap was not marginal. It was not a matter of degree. Dogshit was, if anything, a generous characterization of what the alternatives looked like from where Lukas was currently standing.

And this was the Epic grade First Sequence version.

The thought of what the technique would become at Second Sequence — what advancement would look like once the technique itself had crossed the threshold his body was currently approaching — was not something he could fully model. The gap between sequences was not linear. It was not the kind of distance that yielded to straightforward extrapolation. It was vast in the specific way that certain gaps are vast, where the far side is genuinely beyond the horizon of the near side’s imagination.

He filed it. Kept moving.

The cavern had changed character as they moved deeper into it — the ceiling pressing lower in places, the walls narrowing and then widening in irregular intervals that suggested the space had been shaped by something other than deliberate construction. Tommy moved ahead, his hollow eye sockets sweeping the path with the patient, unglamorous thoroughness of a creature that understood its role in this formation and performed it without needing to be reminded. Behind Lukas, the Astral Bone Vanguard held the rear, its presence a consistent point of coverage against whatever the darkness behind them might decide to offer.

The medallion had stopped behaving like an occasional reminder.

It was vibrating continuously now — a sustained, insistent pulse against his chest that had crossed the threshold from urgency into something closer to demand. Whatever the medallion was responding to had been growing stronger with each step they took into the deeper sections of the cavern, the signal intensifying the way a sound intensifies as the distance to its source closes, until there was no longer any ambiguity about the fact that they were close.

It’s somewhere here.

Lukas slowed his pace and looked around.

Rock. In every direction — above, beside, below — unbroken, undifferentiated stone. The cavern’s deeper section offered nothing visually that distinguished itself from the rest of what he had been walking through. No alcove. No unusual formation. No faint glow emanating from a crack in the wall or a break in the floor that might indicate something worth examining more closely. The darkness was complete enough that the absence of obvious indicators was not entirely conclusive, but his instincts — which had been calibrated by enough time in environments like this one — were not finding purchase on anything.

He crouched slightly and angled the medallion toward the ground.

The vibration eased.

Not stopped — eased, the pulse losing some of its intensity the moment the medallion’s face was directed downward, as if whatever it was oriented toward had moved further away simply because the angle had changed. The signal was directional. Whatever was generating it was not beneath the surface.

He straightened and turned his attention upward.

The ceiling of the cavern hung above him in the uneven, irregular geometry of natural stone — surfaces that caught the ambient light at odd angles, shallow protrusions casting shadows that shifted depending on where he stood. He moved the medallion slowly, tracking the response with the careful attention of someone calibrating an instrument, watching for the subtle intensification that would indicate he was pointing it at the right section of the ceiling.

The vibration shifted.

Not dramatically — but enough. A change in character, a slight increase in the frequency of the pulse, the medallion’s response sharpening the way a signal sharpens when you stop searching for it and find the exact angle it’s broadcasting from.

He held the angle steady and looked up at the section of ceiling the medallion had identified.

It looked, from this distance, exactly like everything else up there.

But the medallion did not lie.

Hmm...?

The thought arrived quietly, the way noticing always does — not as a conclusion but as a question mark forming at the edge of awareness, prompting the eyes to stop moving and look again more carefully at what they had almost passed over.

There was something on the walls.

Not obvious. Not the kind of detail that announced itself and waited to be acknowledged. These were faint — extraordinarily faint — traces worn down by an amount of time that Lukas couldn’t calculate from the evidence alone but could feel in the quality of the erosion. Not holes, exactly, though that had been his first instinct when his gaze caught the first irregularity. More like markings — carved, once, with evident intention and evident care, into the surface of the stone at a point so distant in the past that the passage of time had done everything it could to erase them and had almost succeeded.

Almost.