The Extra Wants Control

Chapter 118 - 118: Six months

As she neared the castle, a young woman with now cut red hair and red eyes materialized on the balcony. It was Eliana the exact copy of Valeriana .

"Mother!" Eliana exclaimed, her voice laced with surprise. "You are back! But… it has been a day! Where were you? Are you okay?" She shot a barrage of questions.

Valeriana landed gracefully on the balcony, her crimson robes billowing in the wind. "Indeed," she replied, a hint of a smile playing on her lips. "It seems time has a different meaning on the other side."

Eliana's brow furrowed. "You left in a rather… awful state," she ventured cautiously, her gaze flickering over Valeriana's face,

Neveah closed his eyes, a wave of exhaustion washing over him.

Six months of unrelenting torment had yielded undeniable results. Neveah's body, battered and broken countless times, had rebuilt itself stronger each time. It was a testament to his dual nature – human resilience and adaptivity intertwined with vampiric regeneration. His physical form comparable to a pseudo 7-star being. Yet, a crucial qualitative leap remained elusive.

Frustration gnawed at Verona. Every training session ended the same way – Neveah, he was so close to the leap. She'd pushed him to his limits, exploring the boundaries of his human and vampire sides, but the qualitative shift that marked the 7-star threshold remained frustratingly out of reach.

Teaching him to control and aborbythe chaotic energy within was out of the question. Verona didn't understand what would happen of one side of the energies became greater than the other, and unleashing it could have catastrophic consequences. They were stuck.

Then, a daring thought flickered in Verona's mind. Neveah's body had adapted remarkably, but perhaps it needed a… nudge. A forced evolution. Her crimson eyes narrowed, a predatory glint igniting within them. 'You are what you eat', she thought.

Neveah needed a power boost, something to supercharge his growth. Verona knew exactly what – the blood of her father, the very first Vampire King, the progenitor of their entire race, her inheritance which she never took. His blood could be the catalyst Neveah needed.

A cruel twist of fate, she thought with a wry smile. One of the locations the two figures had instructed Neveah to visit just happened to be her father's "grave." Grave wasn't quite the right word as it didn't have the Progenitor's corpse. It was more of a hidden vault, a repository of her father's legacy.

Verona glanced at Neveah, who lay sprawled on the cold stone floor,.

With a flick of her wrist, she conjured a swirling portal, a gateway to the hidden vault.