GREED: ALL FOR WHAT?

What he learned improved his already good mood. He couldn't help but brag to Legion-8. "Looks like our competition isn't done yet. You haven't won yet."

"Hmm. I know it is unlikely but you can still die in the blood crucible."

Aeternus joined in, "That will be very funny and very embarrassing. It is like Soverick losing to baby Kayla."

It would be truly shameful if he died in the blood crucible to some young ignorant mana entity whereas Soverick fought mana entities that are ancient gods with many years of fighting experience and didn't fail.

It would be as shameful as being defeated by Kayla as a baby. Kayla is a battle sage monkey without a bloodline. Soverick didn't lose to those who had bloodlines so it would be terribly shameful to die in the blood crucible.

They joked about it but Legion-5 took it seriously. It is unlikely for him to die but he decided not to let his pride get the better of him. Pride goes before a fall after all. He is confident of his victory but he won't let overconfidence be his doom. The repercussion of failure is death. So he decided to take the blood crucible seriously and make sure to use it to increase the amount of divine abilities that he could use.

He decided to review what he learned about the history of Supreme Beasts. The ancient supreme beasts, or Shapiro were weak. They were short and weak physically and magically. They didn't take after the positive aspects of their demon or elven ancestry.

Not only, did they not have the physical strength of demons or the magical prowess of elves. Their senses were also bad. If not for their ability to shapeshift, then they wouldn't have survived at all.

It was their ability to shapeshift that set them apart from other creatures. If not for it, they would have been as useless as the goblins they were occasionally called. Or worse, they would have gone extinct and be forgotten.

The ability of the Shapiros to shapeshift awakened at the mana stage. It didn't make them powerful like it does to high elves. They still remained weak since they couldn't copy the physical prowess of creatures they shapeshifted into.

Their shapeshifting was only skin deep or at the surface level. They might look like someone but they didn't possess the strength of that person. But their shapeshifting did make it easier for them to avoid predators.

They could hide themselves by disguising themselves. The one thing they were very good at was assassinations. It is because, unlike high elves, they could maintain their shapeshifting forever and not just for short bursts of time. They used this to their advantage and made a name for themselves as the Skin Changers. It made a lot of races fear them instead of mocking them as white goblins.

But for all the terror that they struck in the hearts of others, their demon ancestry made it very difficult for them to become transcendents. Their half-demon body was weak and had stunted their potential. Most of them couldn't survive the breakthrough process.

So it took a long time for the race to achieve a high transcendent population and for their divine ability to awaken a second time. It was then that they realized that they could copy the divine abilities of others too. This is a terrifying ability. It increased their power immensely. But the curse of their ancestry never left them.

The Shapiro are not real demons of envy like their parent who raped their elven ancestor. Their ability to steal other divine abilities came from their ancestor but it also came with severe disadvantages.

Divine abilities are not like the abilities contained within the mark of sin. They are nascent concepts that contain the life signature of the entity they belong to. This made it so that the very act of imbibing the divine ability of others contaminated them and made the Shapiros unable to grow stronger any longer.

It is the same situation that occurs when a titan of law at the end of their lifespan decides to fuse with the seed of power of a fallen Sovereign. They will become weak Sovereigns with eternal life but they will not be able to become Origin gods unless they gain the help of Mother High Heaven through the trial of heaven.

The ancient Shapiro experienced the same thing. Any transcendent that steals the divine ability of another will remain a transcendent forever. Their newly gained power became stunted just like their height and their senses.

There was an obvious solution to it. And that is for the transcendent Shapiro not to steal divine abilities at all. They were not willing to let their divine ability go to waste so they looked for another solution.

The next solution they found was to fuse with a stronger divine ability that would raise their potential instead of crippling them or fuse with a second divine ability from a stronger entity for them to advance. Fortunately, these two solutions are not mutually exclusive. They could be performed together. However, both of them had their own issues.

The issue with the first one is that they were weak without a divine ability so it was difficult for them to acquire the divine ability of stronger creatures. After all, creatures with a powerful divine ability are very strong themselves.

The problem with the second is that the Shapiros only have the capacity for one divine ability just like the current Legion-5. They couldn't get another divine ability after their first one.

So if they settled for a weak divine ability so that they could get the strength to hunt strong creatures with powerful divine abilities, they would be stuck with the weak divine ability and be incapable of using the new divine ability.

The ancient Shapiro sought to find a solution for this crippling problem. They tried a lot of things which didn't work. The solution they found at the end of the day was obvious in retrospect. It was to steal the divine ability of another Shapiro.