SSS Awakening: Rebirth of the Strongest Vampire God Chapter 813: We meet again, my dear friend

Damon floated in the air as a mountain of corpses lay in front of him. His blood tendrils then rushed toward the pile, spreading across it in a crimson wave. They slipped between broken armor and shattered shells, burrowing into the bodies beneath until the entire mountain began to shift.

Corpses sank against one another as their flesh withered, and thick streams of blood and essence rose toward Damon from every direction.

He closed his eyes as the first surge entered him. There were too many bodies to distinguish one from another, their power mingling into a constant torrent that spread through his muscles and bones. None of them possessed Origin Energy, but there were millions of them, and for once, his bloodline had enough to keep it occupied.

A long breath escaped his lips. The pressure inside his head eased a little, allowing him to follow the changes taking place within his body. His mana reserves were already full, yet his bloodline continued drawing power from the corpses, forcing his flesh to accommodate more.

His skin split along one forearm. Damon glanced down as blood welled from the opening, only for the wound to close over denser muscle a moment later. The same uncomfortable pressure spread through his shoulders and chest, accompanied by a deep ache in his bones.

He grinned despite the pain. This was what he had been looking for.

Below him, the mountain collapsed inward. Weapons and armor clattered down the shrinking slopes, exposing another layer of bodies that his tendrils immediately pierced. The blood soaking the earth rose too, gathering into winding streams that emptied into the crimson mass surrounding him.

Damon widened his senses across the battlefield. Beyond the pile lay trenches packed with dead, ruined siege beasts sprawled across broken walls, and entire stretches of ground where the bodies had been trampled into the mud. He sent thinner strands toward them, extending his reach while the thicker tendrils continued feeding.

He had nearly gotten himself killed trying to fight another god when all of this had been waiting here.

The thought brought back a flash of the spear moving toward him, and his smile faltered. He remembered the helpless certainty that he was going to die, followed by the terror that had driven him to spend so much of his Origin Energy in one attack. Even now, safely away from that man, he couldn’t quite separate what had been forced into his mind from what he had truly believed.

Damon looked down at his hands. Stronger fingers would not have helped if he had been too frightened to move them.

“I need to focus on my strong point.” Damon once again settled his mind as he tried to get more control over his bloodline talent. He then paused and decided to try something else. Perhaps he was not aiming high enough.

Ordering his blood tendrils to retreat, Damon shot into the sky. He continued flying higher and higher until he was standing in outer space, where he could perceive the entire world comfortably.

Damon stared at the small world. It had to be smaller than even Earth. Then he began to attempt the impossible. He willed his blood tendrils to cover the entire world.

They burst from his back in a spreading mass, branching as they descended toward the atmosphere. Damon poured mana into them, watching the thickest strands stretch across the clouds while thinner ones peeled away toward the surface. Within moments, a crimson web had begun forming above the battlefield, its edges expanding toward the distant mountains.

Then the growth slowed.

Damon frowned and pushed harder. More tendrils emerged, but those farthest from him began to thin, trembling beneath the strain of maintaining their reach. He could extend them farther or keep them strong enough to devour what they touched, but doing both was becoming increasingly difficult.

Of course it wasn’t going to be that fucking easy.

He stopped producing new strands and examined what he already had. An absurd amount of mana was going into the empty stretches between him and the ground. He was trying to feed an entire world through tendrils that all began at his own body, and the farther they traveled, the more power he spent simply keeping them intact.

Below him, the blood he had abandoned was already settling into the soil.

Damon stared at it. Why was he making more when there was so much waiting down there?

He guided one tendril toward a trench filled with blood and submerged its tip. Instead of drawing the blood toward himself, he pushed his influence outward, willing the pool to respond as an extension of his body. The surface stirred, rose slightly, and collapsed when his concentration slipped.

Damon tried again.

This time, he kept the connection narrow and focused on a single movement. A thin strand lifted from the pool, stretching toward a corpse lying beside it. When it pierced the flesh, he felt the familiar rush of essence entering the blood beneath it.

His eyes widened.

The pool thickened. More blood seeped from the corpse, mingling with the portion already under his control, and Damon carefully extended his influence into that too. He formed a second strand, then a third, sending them toward the other bodies piled along the trench.

“Holy shit.”

He almost pulled the gathered essence toward himself out of habit. Instead, he left most of it where it was, feeding the growing cluster while drawing only enough back to confirm the connection held. The local tendrils strengthened immediately, spreading through the trench without requiring him to supply all their power.

Damon grinned and turned toward the next blood-soaked stretch of ground.

He sent a strand there, established another pool, and repeated the process. Soon, dozens of crimson patches were spreading beneath the clouds, each feeding on the bodies around it and using what it absorbed to extend farther. The threads linking them to Damon remained thin, carrying his will while the battlefield supplied the blood and essence.

His headache returned for an entirely different reason.

Every cluster demanded attention. He could feel thousands of tendrils piercing flesh, branching through buried remains, and searching for the next source of power. When he tried to direct them all individually, several tangled around one another while others stopped moving altogether.

Damon clenched his teeth and simplified the command.

Feed on the dead. Grow. Spread.

The nearest clusters resumed moving. He held back the urge to interfere with every strand and focused instead on their boundaries, steering the larger masses toward places where his senses detected more corpses. It was still exhausting, but at least he no longer felt as though he were trying to move ten thousand fingers separately.

Crimson lines followed the trenches, gathered beneath ruined fortresses, and spread along the paths the armies had taken. Some reached barren ground and stalled. Others encountered burial pits and swelled so quickly that Damon had to strengthen their connections to contain the sudden rush.

The network was uneven, riddled with gaps, and nowhere near covering the whole world.

It was also growing without him having to force every inch of it into existence.

Damon watched two spreading masses meet at the edge of a ruined city. The moment they joined, the strain on their individual connections eased. Power passed between them, allowing the smaller cluster to draw from the larger one instead of demanding more from him.

He went still, following the exchange with his senses.

Then he began connecting the others.

Far below, blood flowed uphill through dry channels and beneath heaps of shattered stone. Separate feeding grounds became one expanding network, carrying essence toward whichever section needed it most. Damon allowed it to keep a share of everything it gathered, and the surplus began rising toward him through the strands descending from his body.

His muscles tightened as the first sustained torrent arrived. He had thought the mountain of corpses impressive, but that had only been one place on a battlefield that stretched across continents. Now he could reach the places he hadn’t even seen.

Damon spread his arms, holding himself steady as crimson veins slowly spread across the world beneath him.

It took a few minutes, but eventually the entire world submitted. The world now had a red sheen, with thick crimson veins winding across its continents and finer strands spreading beneath the clouds. Even the oceans carried traces of his blood, thin currents moving through the water toward the remains of creatures that had sunk beneath the surface. From where Damon hovered, the whole world looked as though it had been wrapped in a living net.

He could feel all of it.

The sensation nearly overwhelmed him. He felt blood passing through a ruined fortress on the far side of the world while another part of the network burrowed beneath a collapsed mountain. Thousands of feeding sites sent their discoveries back at once, and he hurriedly shut out everything except the flow of power connecting them.

“Alright. Slowly,” he muttered, though his bloodline was hardly interested in that particular instruction.

The tendrils descending from his body thickened. What had been a steady stream became a torrent, carrying the combined essence of countless dead toward a single point. Damon’s back arched as it entered him, and for a moment he lost control of his limbs entirely.

His body began to tear.

Cracks opened across his chest and spread toward his shoulders, spilling blood that the surrounding tendrils immediately caught. His muscles swelled, ruptured, and knitted together while his bones strained beneath the pressure. Damon clenched his teeth so hard that he felt one crack.

Unable to balance anymore, he let go, and everything snapped. His network collapsed, all the blood returning to him with a good jolt of backlash.

“Fuck.” Damon prepared to suck it up and try one more time when a familiar voice interrupted him.

“Chewing more than you can swallow? We meet again, my dear friend.”