Ning felt the burning in his stomach, and worse, it was slowly moving onto other parts of his body.
He did not feel any pain, so the burning was the only thing he could feel. If he had pain receptors, he was sure he would be on the ground, writhing with pain.
Suddenly he felt something happening. A rush of liquid came up his Esophagus, and he vomited it out.
Ning looked at it and saw a mixture of blood, food, and something that was destroying them both.
'Shit! Have I been poisoned?' he wondered.
Just as he thought that he felt his right knee buckled. He dropped to the ground and smacked his head on the ground.
"What the hell?" He thought and looked at his knees, only to find it fully rotten, with bones sticking out of it.
His skin and muscle writhed over his bones, trying to fix themselves, but the toxin kept his body had kept destroying them.
"System, what's going on?" he asked.
<You have a powerful toxin in your body that is destroying your body from the inside.>
"And my regeneration can't keep up?" Ning asked in surprise as he felt the other parts of his body start to tear themselves up as well.
<Yes. The toxin is destroying your cells and using them to produce more toxins that continue destroying your cells>
<at this rate, the toxin will overtake your body until nothing remains>
"What the hell? Will my body not regenerate?" Ning asked.
<it will, but the toxin will destroy it again>
"Dammit. What the hell did that guy do?" Ning thought back to the Lord of the tower's glass bottle. That was what likely held this toxin.
'To think such a powerful toxin existed,' he thought.
"System, can you remove it please," he asked.
<It will cost you 52 Trillion Energy. Are you sure?>
"Wait, what the hell?" Ning asked. "That's half of what I have right now. Why the hell is it is so expensive to fix it?"
<The Toxin is really powerful, and removing it from your body not only requires the toxin to the removed, but also part of your body which has been eaten away by the toxin.>
<it is your body part that makes this task so expensive>
<if the Toxin alone were to be removed, it would only cost you 1.5 Trillion energy>
'Dammit!' Ning cried out. He couldn't do that. He wasn't going to spend half of his energy on his body.
"Is there any other way?" Ning asked.
<There is a cure you can prepare using the ingredients found in this world>
"Oh, that makes it easy. Give me the list of ingredients and where I can find them," Ning said.
The system did what it was told and gave him a bunch of information. Ning looked through all of that information, but there was something missing.
"Hey, why does this Scarlet Blood Lily have no location assigned to it?" Ning asked.
<there isn't one mature enough for use in this world yet.>
"Fuck! When is the soonest that one will mature?" Ning asked.
<5 years>
"Oh, that's not bad. I can wait for 5 years," Ning thought. Without wasting any more time, Ning brought out his spear from his storage and switched bodies with it before taking his body into his storage.
With the time stopped in the storage, the toxin couldn't keep eating away at it like it was just now.
"5 years huh? I guess I will have to go back to the same routine as I did for hundreds of years before this," Ning thought.
"Although, before that, let's go gather all the ingredients I will need," Ning said.
After that, Ning teleported around the world, which mostly just led him to the forest that separated the continent.
Within it, he found many of the ingredients he needed. All except for the Scarlet blood Lily.
He found multiple of them as well, but not a single one mature enough to be useful.
When he asked why there were none of such flowers available even though it wasn't the rarest flower in the forest, the system had told him that it had to do with the lifetime of the flower.
After the flower blossomed, which was it maturing, the flower would only stay matured for about 5 days worth of time.
If not picked within that time period, the flower would then disappear and in its place, it would form a fruit. Unfortunately, Ning didn't need the fruit.
"So I just have to pick it up when it matures huh? That's simple. Let me know when that happens, okay system?" Ning asked.
<Confirmed.>
Ning decided to stay in the forest. He was still in his spear, so he told the system.
"I will go sleep. Wake me up when my energy cap has reset or if I am moved from this place," Ning said.
<Understood>
Ning slowly felt his consciousness leave him. As soon as it was gone, he felt it coming back.
Ning heard some rattling sounds from around him as well as an up and down motion on his body. He also heard sounds of horses neighing.
'A carriage?' Ning thought confusedly. He looked around him and saw that he was in fact in the back of an ancient-looking carriage.
He was currently being held by a woman to her left who looked to the back of the carriage.
The woman, if described as anything, was beautiful. That was all Ning could think at the moment.
Long slender arms that were barely hidden by the see-through fabric of hers. An oval face of fair complexion with skin so smooth that Ning thought it was a statue for a moment.
The woman blinked, her long eyelashes moving, further accentuating the beautiful, dark Purple eyes of hers.
Her long flowing dark auburn hair fell down to her chest, not a single hair gone stray from it.
Along with the rest of her body, Ning really thought she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen in his life.
And that… was weird. Whatever he was feeling was definitely weird. He had never felt this much attraction towards a person in all of his life, even when his emotions were amplified.
It was as if, the woman sitting in front of him, was supposed to be the epitome of what human beauty could be.
'No, something is wrong. I can't stay here,' Ning thought. He wasn't sure how he was here in the first place, so he decided to leave back to the forest near the Scarlet Blood Lilies.
With a thought, he disappeared from the location.
His scenery changed, but not all that much. All he had somehow managed to do was go from being on the left side of the woman to being on the right side.
'What the hell is going—'
Just then, he looked at the woman. She was looking back at him and smiling towards him as well.
"You can stop trying to leave me," she said. "I have been watching you for a while now. I know all of your tricks."
Ning felt scared and weirdly attracted to her smile at the same time.
"Did you really think that I would let you go after you go around claiming to be my Apostle?" she asked.
Ning's eyes went wide as he realized who she was.
The Goddess of Aether.. Alexis.
