Ayla smoothly pulled her awareness out of Kenji’s mind, leaving his transparent soul form completely alone in the vast white expanse.

Her liquid blue mass slid back into her own body, gathering itself together before she activated her newly enhanced Voidling form.

She moved through the heavy iron bars of the dark cell like an invisible passing breeze, completely leaving Kenji to coordinate the recovering, confused soldiers of the militaryi division behind her.

She began her solitary journey out of the deep subterranean dungeon.

As she glided up the long, dark stone staircase that wound toward the upper barracks, she ran into numerous guards stationed at the lower checkpoints.

They wore the standard crimson armor of the human vanguard, but their posture was stiff and their eyes were completely blank.

Ayla did not waste any time. Operating entirely in her Voidling form, she slid up their legs like a silent wave of nothingness, penetrated their spiritual pathways, and devoured the parasitic Voidlings nesting inside them.

But to her surprise, none of these lower guards survived the extraction. The very moment she pulled the cold pockets of emptiness out of their chests, the soldiers collapsed onto the stone steps.

Their jaws stretched incredibly wide, breaking past their natural limits, and their dark eyes bulged out of their sockets as they died instantly.

Their souls had already been completely eaten away and replaced by the parasites before she ever arrived.

They were nothing more than empty meat walking around on a pre-written script.

Ayla furrowed her brows in deep dissatisfaction. She tried to devour one dead soldier’s brain and biomass to see if she could harvest something useful.

To her great disappointment, even their standard human traits and memories had been entirely swallowed and digested by the Voidling.

There was absolutely nothing left for her Perfect Assimilation to copy. By the time she finally came out of the underground dungeon levels, more than hundreds of soldiers had died inside the cells and corridors behind her, their lifeless bodies cluttering the dark stairs.

She paused at the top of the stairwell, looking down at her visual status canvas to inspect her current progression line:

[TRAIT: EMPTINESS (COMMON-D+)]

Ayla quickly realized a frustrating mechanical limitation of her new power.

Devouring the exact same low-level parasite over and over again did not give massive evolutionary results like the first time she did it.

The system parameters were very rigid. She calculated that she would need to harvest at least ten thousand common Voidlings to upgrade the trait to another quality tier.

The only alternative shortcut was to locate and devour much more powerful variants of the Voidlings, the ones that possessed higher stats and powerful traits.

She glanced around the upper levels of the barracks. The human settlement in Solgrace was now a perfect place for this kind of hunt. The infection was everywhere.

Ayla smirked, her eyes flashing with a predatory light as she moved forward in her dense Voidling form.

She completely forgot about the physical proof she was supposed to collect for the Nexus system terminal.

The primitive monster inside her only cared about the massive, delicious buffet waiting in the corridors.

She glided through the central barracks like an invisible reaper, sliding into private quarters, security stations, and strategy rooms.

Every time she encountered a possessed human soldier, she opened her mouth and extracted the cold entity from their soul.

Days passed in a silent, terrifying blur of systematic harvesting.

Ayla moved like a ghost, leaving a trail of wide-mouthed, stiff corpses in every single room she touched.

[TRAIT UPGRADE: EMPTINESS (COMMON-D+) -> EMPTINESS (COMMON-C+)]

If Kenji had been present to witness the upper levels, he would have been completely horrified by the sheer scale of the carnage.

Almost every single human soldier operating under the thoughtless Marshal had already been heavily infested with the hidden Voidlings. The purge was absolute.

Except for a few powerful Silver and Gold ranked Crusaders who possessed enough internal soul density to resist the initial assimilation, the rest of the common rankers did not survive the extraction.

The moment Ayla devoured the Voidling from their spiritual realm, their hollowed-out physical vessels simply broke down and perished.

Even Ayla herself was a bit apprehended by how far the infection of the Voidlings had actually spread across the military lines.

She was a primitive monster who loved to eat, but the speed of this disease was abnormal.

As she mapped the layout of the fort, she noticed a very specific anatomical pattern. The density of the infection lessened considerably the further she moved away from the central barracks and the main gatehouse.

It behaved exactly like a highly contagious biological disease, systematically spreading from one central person to another across the human grid.

Currently, Ayla’s Voidling form had become incredibly dense due to the massive influx of C+ tier energy. Her presence was so heavy that she was no longer just a shadowless hole in reality.

Wherever her Voidling form moved across the floorboards, the localized space around her body seemed to literally tear and crack bit by bit, creating tiny, microscopic fissures in the air.

Ayla stopped moving. She floated in the center of an empty hallway, her golden pupils focusing entirely on the tiny spatial tears surrounding her form.

She studied these structural tears with deep curiosity.

To her absolute delight, she discovered that a strange, highly delicious energy was passively sweeping outside from the interior of those microscopic cracks.

It didn’t smell like human blood, and it didn’t taste like a standard mana core. It was a raw, primordial flavor that carried the absolute weight of non-existence.

She opened her mouth and swallowed a small pocket of the leaking energy.

The moment the substance touched her core channels, a pleasant, freezing wave of satisfaction rippled through her entire biological structure.

The system didn’t even flash a notification, but she could explicitly feel that the mystery energy was passively improving and stabilizing her Emptiness trait without requiring her to run around hunting more common soldiers!

Ayla sat down on the floorboards right in the middle of the corridor, her Voidling form completely surrounding itself with the spatial tears.

The taste of the leaking void force was so intoxicating, so overwhelmingly superior to the cold ice cubes of the common parasites, that she completely postponed her planned meeting with the Nexus system terminal.

"Nexus can wait," Ayla whispered to herself, her mental voice filled with absolute greed as she opened her mouth wide to swallow another wave of the delicious energy bit by bit. "This is much more important."

Down in the dark dungeon, the atmosphere had changed completely. Lieutenant Maren was standing near the bars, her hands gripping the cold iron tightly as she looked at Kenji.

"Young master, what is taking so long?" Maren whispered, her voice rough with exhaustion. "The air up there feels incredibly heavy. I can feel the space itself vibrating."

Kenji remained seated against the wall, his hazel eyes completely vacant as he tracked the telepathic resonance of his shared soul bond.

Through their connection, he could feel a massive, freezing weight accumulating on the upper floors.

It was Ayla.

"She might’ve find some clue." He said, but his voice lacked the conviction.

"How can you be so sure?" Maren asked, her brows furrowing.

Kenji just shrugged his shoulders.

Upstairs, Ayla continued her absolute feast.

The spatial cracks around her grew wider, humming with a dark, silent frequency that slowly eroded the metal walls of the corridor into fine grey dust.

She didn’t care about the Crusade, she didn’t care about the Marshal, and she didn’t care about the system’s laws.

She only cared about filling herself.

More..." she chirped inside her own mind, her Voidling form expanding as she prepared to swallow the entire sector’s leakage.

*

* *

The dark, swirling vortex above the Ghoul Spire did not stop its chaotic churning. Across the entire barren landscape, the air remained freezing and thick with the heavy scent of gray ash.

Millions of Ghouls were still tightly packed together within the jagged valleys, their elongated limbs trembling as the liquid shadow of the dark light continued to pour down from the chest of their dead, floating Conqueror.

The massive, thousands-of-meters-long colossus hung suspended in the black sky like a hollowed-out building.

It was supposed to be a flawless pipeline, a perfect conductor designed to systematically funnel the thoughtless voidlings directly into the soul containers of the kneeling crowd.

Every single minute, thousands of common Ghouls were supposed to open their spiritual channels, accept the parasite, and instantly transform into Silver-ranked voidlings to expand the absolute continuity of the invasion.

But high above the floating monstrosity, right at the boundary where the material plane met thev void, a sudden and violent ripple shattered the peace.

The vast, eerie consciousness of the Void King surged with a wave of pure disbelief.

The cold, amused condescension that had filled his voice a few minutes ago completely vanished, replaced by an unsettling, hollow panic that caused the surrounding spatial dimensions to crack like brittle glass.

"What’s going on? How’s the Void being devoured..." the colossal form mumbled in utter disbelief, his multi-layered voice echoing through the empty space like a rolling wave of thunder.

Down on the ash-covered ground, several hundred newly baptized Silver voidlings suddenly froze in unison.

Their uniform, hollowed-out black eyes flickered wildly, and their mechanical posture buckled as a bizarre, suffocating vacuum resonated through their shared spiritual network.

They didn’t feel pain, and they didn’t possess individual thoughts, but their core programming registered a massive, unexpected deletion.

Deep within the transmission lines leading to the human front at the Solgrace sector, a huge chunk of their collective continuity force was simply disappearing.

Not just dissappearing, but simply being erased by something.

The Void King’s vast awareness traced the leakage, trying to locate the source of the anomaly. But every time his sensory grid brushed against the world, Nexus blocked it.

"Nexus, what the hell are you doing?" the Void King roared, his voice dripping with an accusatory rage.

He was absolutely certain that this sudden, absurd counter-offensive had to be a manual intervention by the system itself.

A single millisecond later, the female, highly melodic voice of Nexus drifted out from the empty space.

Her tone was completely smooth and filled with a casual, mocking amusement that made the Void King’s teeth click together in frustration.

"Oh, look at you, crying like a pathetic little child the moment things don’t go exactly according to your clumsy little script," Nexus replied, her voice echoing perfectly through the spatial channels.

A small, bright blue notification box flickered momentarily in the black sky, casually displaying a series of perfect running logs before vanishing.

"Why are you looking at me, you hideous trash? You think you can mess with the world under my administration. You must be joking. No. You aren’t joking. Because, just like your existence your brain is also a void..."

"You..."

"What meeee! Wanna fight?"