Gluttonous Nen Beast

"I feel terrible..."

Rosen felt his throat tearing, blood pouring into his stomach. The more it flowed, the weaker he became.

If he were a Beast Knight, his body would have begun restructuring his digestive system, mimicking the extraordinary biological organs of magical creatures. But Rosen followed the Noble Sequence, which didn't alter its bloodline through physical transformation.

Even when merging with an extraordinary bloodline, the modifications were constrained by his noble source essence. Therefore, the Nightmare Slime's supernatural bloodline couldn't modify Rosen's digestive system. However, the awakening of his Sequence 8 bloodline continued, and soon the Gluttony ability would manifest differently.

Just as Rosen felt on the verge of death, nearly ready to abandon the process, his extraordinary bloodline finally awakened the Gluttony ability. But without a proper digestive system, this Gluttony was incomplete.

Rosen began channeling all his Nen, attempting to merge it with the gluttonous power.

Nen, being an incredible energy, was capable of even creating intelligent Nen Beasts. Since Rosen's body couldn't sustain a digestive system for Gluttony, he could craft a Nen Beast to shoulder the burden of digesting whatever he consumed, and then feed the benefits back to him.

Several days later, Rosen held a blood-red slime in his hand.

While the Nightmare Slime was his pet, this blood-red slime was his Nen Beast.

Unlike pets, which could share abilities with a Hunter, Nen Beasts were extensions of their creator's own life force. This Gluttonous Nen Beast had the ability to devour and digest any supernatural elements below Sequence 3, transferring all the benefits of digestion back to Rosen. It was purely supportive and was the second Nen ability Rosen had developed, alongside the Godslayer Crossbow.

In theory, Nen users in the world of Hunter x Hunter could develop multiple or even unlimited Nen abilities. However, due to personal talent and aura limitations, most Nen users specialized in just one ability. Only a rare few developed additional abilities, but dividing focus often weakened each one.

Rosen had originally planned to develop only the Godslayer Crossbow as his Nen ability. But Gluttony was too tempting, and creating a new Nen ability to harness its power was worthwhile.

Of course, to avoid weakening his Godslayer Crossbow, Rosen refrained from expanding the Gluttonous Nen Beast into additional Nen abilities.

He grabbed the Gluttonous Nen Beast, which immediately transformed into blood-red aura and flowed down his throat into his stomach. The previously undigested Penalty Revolver components were quickly devoured and processed by the Nen Beast.

For the first time, the Gluttonous Nen Beast fed its energy back to Rosen. He immediately noticed the benefit he had gained from consuming the revolver.

The Nightmare Slime had improved its defense after consuming the knight's armor, and after Rosen digested the Penalty Revolver through his Nen Beast, his Nen now possessed a faint elemental damage property.

Not stopping there, Rosen fed the Nen Beast various unused supernatural items in his possession.

Within a short period, his Nen had gained over ten different elemental properties.

However, each of these properties was weak and chaotic. The true potential of Gluttony became apparent when the Nen Beast consumed the attributes again for a second digestion. This process allowed Rosen to refine and strengthen a specific element while discarding the others.

After several rounds of digestion, all the elemental properties faded except for the one Rosen had selected—elemental damage.

Yet, when he saw the final result, Rosen realized something was wrong.

The second digestion process of Gluttony had been incredibly costly. The beast had consumed more than ten supernatural items of Sequence 9 and Sequence 8 to strengthen Rosen's elemental damage, but the result was underwhelming. The freezing power he gained was only strong enough to freeze a bucket of water.

Rosen recalled how Bennett had used the Penalty Revolver to freeze an entire house with a single shot. Despite devouring the revolver and additional items, Rosen could barely manage a fraction of that power.

Such a large sacrifice for such minimal gain left Rosen realizing that the second digestion process came with enormous energy loss.

The first digestion gave Rosen various attributes, but to truly strengthen a specific one, he would need to continually feed the Gluttonous Nen Beast with related materials.

Only by repeatedly consuming similar materials could he amplify the elemental damage with minimal cost.

Over the next few hours, Rosen tested the Nen Beast by feeding it different materials to observe how it digested them. It could consume almost anything, but some materials were digested faster than others.

The most difficult to process was supernatural essence. Although supernatural essence from extraordinary creatures was manageable, the essence from human Nine Sequences was painfully slow to digest.

However, this further confirmed what was widely believed—human Nine Sequences were far superior to other supernatural sequences.

After numerous trials, Rosen discovered that the most efficient and easiest material for his Gluttonous Nen Beast to digest was spiritual crystals. As the beast consumed spiritual crystals, Rosen's Nen quality began to improve steadily.

And as his Nen improved, both his Godslayer Crossbow and Gluttonous Nen Beast would grow stronger in tandem.

While Rosen hid away in the Mysterious Study Room, constantly improving himself, chaos erupted in the Void Wasteland spiritual realm due to his sudden disappearance.

The spiritual realm was littered with discarded trash. Although Gray Rats were distantly related to ordinary rats, as an intelligent race, they despised filth and disorder. This hatred was especially strong for the Gray Rat Patriarch, the leader of their race.

"Still no trace?" The Gray Rat Patriarch squinted his beady eyes, glaring at his commanders.

"We've searched the entire realm, but nothing matches the description," one particularly brave Gray Rat commander reported.

"Leave."

The Gray Rat Patriarch suppressed his fury, speaking with unsettling calm.

This wasn't the first time he had received bad news, and several commanders had already died for their failures. It wasn't that the Gray Rats weren't doing their best—the human they were hunting was simply hiding too well.

But according to his divination from a supernatural artifact, that human was definitely within this realm.

If he could find that human, the patriarch might be able to extend his life in the spiritual realm for a few more years.

If not, in a few days, his time would be up.

But even if death awaited him, the Gray Rat Patriarch vowed that the humans who had blocked his path to survival wouldn't escape unscathed.