…consume five slaughter points to receive information?
'You were listening. Good. Consume them as you please.'
Followers reside on body. When the monster consumed the limb, the followers responded to the need to be embraced by the Dreaded soul, thus they removed restraints and degraded the monster from the inside. One remained and consumed the soul thus fully taking possession of the corpse. Now that it has acquired vessel it cannot rejoin Knight's soul. The follower can be reabsorbed; soul will be lost including the vessel.
The Knight was having another suspicion, this one centred around how it earned the greed skill, because that follower could have let the Knight have its soul and just proceeded to join up with the body, but instead it hungered for the monster's soul. This was still just conjecture, but greed is the skill that most describes the followers. The Knight was about to get slightly furious with the follower when it felt something.
There are a couple of things that do not need the grain of darkness to explain, the first was the state of the Knight. The Knight could always feel the meaning and purposes of its skills and power. An example would be that it could feel use of its skills, but the visage of terror power had to be explained by the grain of darkness. Even earlier when the soul craft skill was made the Knight could, intuitionally feel what its use is. This intuition also included crafted items. There would be the occasional feeling about how to use its powers, even the ones gained from the feather.
This feeling had just arisen from inside the Knight. It was strange though; the Knight had not crafted an item or imbued it with an ability using soul craft. A skill had not been made from the use of slaughter points, but somehow the Knight felt the skill of the Nared hunter, the ability to spatially move around, and the feather was still whole. That was when the Knight realised what had happened it possessed the skill due to the Nared hunter, or now to be known as the Vile hunter.
The Vile hunter had lost 10 levels, making it level 125, but in turn it learned a couple new skills. It seems, the evolution consumed levels, similar to how the Knight had lost a level when it did not have slaughter points. The follower, whatever it is, used the 10 power levels to sync up its skills with the Knight. The Knight was getting curious, since this means that the followers have their own powers.
***
This is a piece of the book of souls, only used to explain this situation, the Knight has no idea about this:
There are two ways in which a creature can be stronger, first are the skills, skills are used freely such as the teleportation and battle monger, then there are powers which are earned. Only certain types of souls can possess them. The visage of terror is one such power, but it is bound to the specific dreaded soul. Unlike skills only a truly outstanding soul, which is usually one being in existence, although there are special cases, can wield a certain power. Skills are able to evolve while powers do not, because they exist in a singular state. Not all souls have power, but of the ones that do, even fewer possess multiple.
So, in the situation with the Knight and its follower, the follower used its power to decrease the strength of its vessel to share the skills of its vessels with its current liege, and vice versa. So, the followers are still as much as an enigma as ever, their own skills, powers, level, and origins are still a mystery. There was a mention of 'restriction' by the grain of darkness, maybe that means something. The Knight might clarify some of these mysteries once it gets its vile hands on the BOOK OF SOULS.
***
The Knight realised what this gain could mean; teleporting in front of the hunter the Knight placed its hand on the snout of the disturbing beast and thought.
'I was just starting to think what's a Knight without an army.'
The Knight tried to feed the arm to the Alluga to no avail. It seems that a soul is needed, and the follower had to want its vessel. At least it was a start, building the army might be slow, but with how greedy the followers were, it will be one powerful army. The Knight realised that for now it was restricted to 10, because the void counter had just given the Knight the feeling that only nine more could be added after the Vile hunter was created.
The Knight tried to give it weapons, but it seems even with the battle monger skill it was not effective at using the weapons, so the Knight just equipped it with some of the equipment that the Knight did not need often. The Knight was done experimenting for now though. The arm was refusing to reattach, like a normal arm should. So, the night tried feeding the arm a soul, a level 127 Arginol. It was a monster that used sound to move, confusing but effective. It would hear a sound and amplify it and turn into that sound, when anything close to that frequency is made, its source is obliterated. It would amplify the sound of footsteps, of the clangour of armour. Its soul surprisingly worked.
It was not that the followers needed a soul to come back, but more like expressing their anger for the Knights carelessness, and getting the soul was just to punish it, it seems they are very well acquainted with the greed skill. The Knight was just glad they did not ask for the level 137 soul. After they attached the arm back, they went dormant as they usually are. Now the Knight could focus on the Alluga soul. The Knight made it into a chain. When bound to something, it acquires the strength of what it is binding, thus making it impossible to break free. What the Knight had in mind for the chain, was to tie it to one end of the monster and use it as a whip since it was proficient at all forms of weaponry, using soul craft the Knight made it capable of extending its length.
The Knight cut the thin light wings of the Alluga, the scythe was used to also remove the claws of the Kingris, and sewing them to the skin of the Alluga, which was hard to remove. The bones were also carved out, the Knight chewed on the flesh, but it did nothing to appease its strange hunger. It seems it really does not have to eat flesh or drink water to live, even thought it had forgotten what it was to be human, the instincts were still missing supervening on one.
The Knight made a net to capture monsters, and experiment on making creating more vessels for its followers. At least for anything not strong enough to rip through the level 137 hide. The Knight might be the weakest in the dungeon, but with an army, it could try to kill a level 140, of which it had not yet had the unfortunate pleasure of meeting one.
After a week of preparations, the Knight was ready to continue. It readied its weapons, checked on its new pal, being 3.5 meters tall, the Knight could ride it, a worthy steed. The Knight had mostly recovered from the previous battle. It was in no rush to challenge so many power houses at once, even with a companion. The last battle was barely survivable, and it was not going to risk facing the more dangerous, killing those three was a feat on its own, and the Knight was not going to make habit of being a miracle worker.
Now it was more cautious after the realisation that it could not leave even if it wanted to, the void was not letting it go. The Knight even had the thought of whether it could send its new companion, but it was not willing to try. With a sigh the Knight mentally told the Vile hunter to march forward, giving out orders was not noisy at least. Being the second weakest being, it did not look it, it marched onwards with confidence in each step. Technically the Knight did not know how strong the actual being was inside the vessel. And with that the Knight continued deeper into the abysmal dungeon.
The Knight eventually made the scroll, for one it was helping keep to a schedule. There was no night or day in the dungeon, but the Knight had a good enough sense of time to precisely estimate the time. It did possess a yearly hourglass, which aligned with it, to make sure that it could keep to the cycle deadline. Even though the Knight had a sharp memory, it was good to keep record of things, in case it loses its memory like it did when it was created. So, it was sure that about fifty years had passed since entering the dungeon, its grotesque body did not age though.
Problems the Knight had not planned on encountering were adding to its list of problems. The first and most pressing of them all was starting to debilitate the Knight. It was a form of hunger, starvation or even fatigue, which emerged due to its soul. The Yiril had said that void beings need to consume the soul of a human once every cycle. A cycle being close to a hundred years is a big enough gap for even a spawn to get its hands on one before perishing. One could consume the blood river, which possessed traces of human souls, enough to survive, if you can get past the maidens. The savage spawn, with no knowledge stats tend to survive by eating the other void beings which works out just fine, before an extermination team sent by the lord eradicates or subjugates them.
The Knight was slowly getting sluggish, and without the ability to go back to the void, all those options were closed. The blood river, purchasing or trading for some, or even the desperate tactic of second-hand absorption – eating ones of the void – were all options in the void. If the Knight had not sent the Yiril back, it would have been absorbed by now. The issue though was that the Knight had the inexhaustible source of humans above ground, somewhere deep inland, after all the dungeons are in the world with humans, where the purchased souls are hunted by the armies of the lord.
All of it was useless, the Knight could not leave the dungeon until it was finished. It could have stocked up on some souls before it left but without anything to trade with, it was futile and time was not on the Knights side. Unlike the followers that seem boundless, and able to consume monster souls, the Knight was slowly shrivelling up.
The Knight could consume monster souls, but except for a momentary boost in power they did not sustain the Knight. Where was the knight supposed to get a soul all the way in the depth of this forsaken dungeon. This is an abysmal dungeon, not only has only one known to have been conquered, but their perilous danger, even for the stronger, deters other void beings as well as humans. This whole mission was getting boresome, it was supposed to finish in two cycles if the Knight wanted the reward, but four cycles otherwise, meaning at the minimum the Knight needed two human souls to survive. It was going to die before even making it through the first cycle.