Author's note: Second chapter for today! Hope you guys like it.

I guess this marks the end of the first 'introductory' arc...? Are 7 chapters enough to be even called an arc...? Anyways, the story has finally reached up to the point where the action really starts!

As always, I am open to any form of criticism, suggestions or other kind of feedback. Thanks a lot for all the support so far and thanks a lot for reading!

_________________________________________________

I immediately pushed the large guy away and he flew over and smashed his head against the wall, then slid down. I just knocked him unconscious… well he deserved it! Although I did unconsciously use a lot of my enhanced strength then was needed…

Blood successfully absorbed. Ability gained: Regeneration. You will now be able to regenerate lost limbs in a matter of a few hours.

Blood successfully absorbed. Ability gained: Fire manipulation. You will now be able to manipulate fire and make it do what you wish.

Blood successfully absorbed. Ability gained: Water manipulation. You will now be able to manipulate water and make it do what you wish.

Blood successfully absorbed. Ability gained: Earth manipulation. You will now be able to manipulate Earth and make it do what you wish.

Blood successfully absorbed. Ability gained: Invisibility. You can now turn your body invisible.

Blood successfully absorbed. Ability gained: Night vision. You can now see much more clearly in the dark.

Blood successfully absorbed. Ability gained: Heat-vision. You will now be able to see heat signatures around you.

Blood successfully absorbed. Ability gained: Steel-skin. You now have skin as hard as steel, but it will still retain its flexibility and will look like normal skin.

…..

…..

Crap! I completely forgot about all the blood I swallowed during the fights with the animals! Luckily I only took the blood from animals who had nice abilities… although I have no idea how I got the heat-vision and night-vision abilities, most probably some drops of blood had entered my mouth as I fought. If I hadn't gone after only particular abilities, I would have gotten so many abilities it would be hard to keep track of them! Which reminds me, I really should take time to list down all abilities I have absorbed so far before I start to forget about them all...

I guess what I thought earlier about the mind voice being ‘active’ only when you are awake was right, as I drank the blood for all these abilities long ago but it only triggered the mind voice when I regained consciousness.

It also seems like the mind voice doesn’t say anything while I am ‘in-combat’. I had been drinking the blood from useful animals throughout the day but I didn’t hear the mind voice even once during all that time. Only when I got unconscious and got ‘out of combat’ did the the mind voice start speaking about my newly absorbed abilities. I’m not sure if this is really how it works, but if this is the case then it’s good as it won’t distract me while I’m fighting.

Now, before I start getting excited and start experimenting with my newly gained abilities, I have a problem to take care of. I looked at the still unconscious guy and went over to him.

He said his ability was healing, but what I don’t know is if the ability allows the ability user to only heal others or if it can heal the ability-holder too. If it can heal only others then it isn’t very useful for me, but if I can heal myself with the ability too then it will be a very useful ability indeed! Well, time to find out…

I took my knife, went over to the guy and nicked him… the cut was a bit deeper then needed but oh well, who cares. I didn’t have any syringes or such stuff so I prepared myself mentally and started sucking the blood directly from the cut with my mouth. It felt as if I was a vampire, only difference was I was sucking the blood from his palm instead of his neck… The palm was the least hairy spot I could find…

After drinking a sufficient amount of blood I waited for the message… I didn’t have to wait long before it came.

Blood successfully absorbed. Ability gained: Healing. You can now heal injuries and bruises of yourself and others, however diseases cannot be healed with this ability.

Excellent. I can heal myself too with this ability! With regeneration and healing abilities combined, coupled with my steel-skin, it could make me unstoppable! I think I am getting too powerful for my own good, must not let it get to me…

Suddenly the big oaf started stirring and groaning. I immediately healed the cut on his palm, picked up my other knife and turned invisible. I checked my body and was relieved to find out that my clothes also turned invisible. I did drink a lot of blood from that invisible rat… the little shit bit me so many times I think I completely sucked him dry of blood as payback!

“Huh.. what happened…?”

Damn.. the big guy is awake. I must slip out quickly. I turned around and started making my way towards the door while floating a few inches off the ground so that I won’t make any noise with footsteps…

“Hero? HERO! Where are you? Why did you leave?? HEEEROOOOOOO!!! NOOOOOOO!!!”

What the fuck? What’s this hero crap? Does he think I’m some kind of a hero because I saved his sorry ass by mistake? Was that why he was looking at me with that disturbing look in his eyes…? Whatever, I’m getting away from him!

I opened the door and ignored the “Who’s there? Hero is that you?” comment from behind me and climbed up into the sky.

The view I saw was something I expected, but it was still shocking to actually look at it. The whole city was practically in ruins, with smoke coming out of numerous places and many houses and buildings were now reduced to rubble. There were buildings 10 stories high which were covered completely with vines, and I could still see some moving trees in the distance thrashing about. The houses closer to me had their windows smashed up and walls covered with blood.

The streets were filled with corpses of humans and animals. Some corpses looked fine, while others were smashed beyond recognition. Guts, organs, severed limbs, severed heads, and blood filled the streets. Some humans corpses were burned completely black, some were frozen in an ice-block while some had been impaled by spikes from below in the earth. Blood was actually flowing down the streets. It would look like a river of red-wine if not for the numerous corpses and other body parts mixed in between...

Animals, mainly dogs, cats and rats, were feasting on the corpses hungrily. Birds kept diving from the air and flying away with bits of human flesh in their beaks. As far as I could see I was the only human still left alive in here, and the only reason I’m not getting attacked right now is because of my invisibility.

The strange thing is how am I still alive after being unconscious for so long? I could see the sun starting to sink, and when I lost consciousness the sun had just risen. Did that oaf actually manage to keep me alive for so long? …. Nah, I don’t think the oaf was capable of anything with the way he was acting, it must be that all the blood was masking our scents. We were right next to the whole pile of stinking animal bodies that had died by my hands after all…

Tearing my eyes off a pigeon pecking at a girl’s eyeball, I turned around and headed for my house. Among all the carnage, some houses stood out because of how clean they were. There were no blemishes on them, no blood splatters and their windows and doors were still intact too. They would have looked like completely normal houses, if not for the piles of seemingly sleeping humans all around them.

These were obviously the houses which had poisonous plants in them. Somehow the sight of all the normal and intact human bodies piled up around these houses seemed a lot more eerie then the smashed up bodies out in the streets...

My parent’s house was in a similar condition. I went inside through the still open window of my room and was greeted with the same sweet-smell from before. I had eaten away all the plants in the hallway but hadn’t gone around to eating the ones in the ground floor, which is why the air was still filled with poison.

I went towards my parent’s bedroom, looked at their lifeless bodies and then picked up my mother and went to our backyard carrying her. The backyard was surprisingly corpse-free, which was great for what I was about to do. I lowered my mother gently on the ground and started my work…

______________________

30 minutes later I was standing in front of 5 gravestones. I had made graves and gravestones for all my family members by manipulating the Earth. The least I could do for my family was to properly bury them. They had after all continued to love me while I paid them minimal attention and always tried to stay alone and keep away from them...

With my work done, I took off, went to the roof and retrieved the bag I had stashed away earlier. I had decided to keep the plants still inside the house alive for now, so that they may keep animals away from the house and not let dogs etc dig up the bodies of my family. I took off from the roof and went towards the nearest house with the clean and tidy looking appearance and intact bodies all around.

I smashed through a window in the first floor and found myself in a room full of that same scent and the dead body of a young boy around 8-9 years old.

Moving through the house I was able to find 5 plants that were giving off the sweet scent, but there were also some potted plants that had vines which were moving about threateningly. I ignored the vine plants, I didn’t want an ability that could turn me into some kind of vine monster after all, and ate all the 5 poisonous plants.

Unfortunately, I got the same message from before about improving my poison-resistance, and not any message relating to evolution…

I continued moving from house to house until I had eaten about 40-45 plants in total, before I got what I was waiting for!

Plant-blood absorbed. Poison resistance ability has now evolved! New ability is: Weak-poison immunity. You are now completely immune to all weak poisons. However, stronger poisons will still affect you. Consuming plants and animals with stronger poisons can evolve this ability further.

Alright! As expected, the poison resistance evolved into poison immunity, but only for weak poisons… and how exactly am I supposed to know which poisons are weak and which aren’t…? *sigh*

The good thing is that the ability can evolve further. This time though the message mentioned that I could consume both plants and animals to evolve the ability, if I remember correctly it only said plants before…

I ate another leaf off the same plant that got me this evolution and waited…. 5 minutes passed by but I got no message. Alright, seems like eating anymore of these plants is completely useless…

I got out of the house and went over to the next ‘poisonous’ house. As usual, I smashed straight through a window and started looking for the poisonous plants. I ate a leaf to see if this one had a stronger poison, but it didn’t trigger any messages…

I then proceeded to check out all the rooms till I found one with an attached bathroom, 2 windows and a comfy looking bed. The main requirement was two windows, so that I had 3 escape routes in case something happened: 2 through each window and one through the door. It looked like the master bedroom, as there was a couple lying lifeless on the bed. I opened up one of the windows, picked up the couple and threw them out, along with the sheets, pillows and covers.

I rummaged around the cupboards, found clean sheets, pillows and covers and dumped them on the bed. Then I went downstairs to find the fridge full of food. Amazingly, the electricity was still working in the city. I had triggered quite a few burglar alarms too by smashing through windows of the numerous houses I had visited, and had to hurry up and eat the plants before moving out as animals had started to surround the house.

I ate my fill, went back upstairs, made the bed and went to sleep. The sun had long since went down and I was too tired to do anything else…

____________

A whole day had passed by since I started staying at this house, and I had spent the whole day coming to terms with my newly gained abilities. I figured it was much smarter to practice and perfect a few good abilities, then go on a blood sucking frenzy and end up with a whole lot of abilities but not be good in any of them.

I had made a lot of progress in all the new abilities, and I was currently flying over the city completely invisible wearing my backpack. The reason for that was because I wanted to see what other shitstorm would take place…

I realized it yesterday that there was some sort of pattern going on. One night every human got abilities, two nights later animals and plants got them and two nights later they went completely crazy and started killing off everything. I also realized that all this had happened around the 1 am mark, and it was 12:58am right now, which is why I was flying in the air so that I could see just what kind of fucked up shit happens next. If microorganisms and insects get abilities… I’ll just kill myself...

My wristwatch changed from 12:59 to 1:00 and a few seconds later all the lights went out! A lot of houses had lights still on when the animals went crazy, and some light posts were still up, but now they had all turned off. I looked at my watch but it too had shut off for some reason. What’s going on…? No more technology…? Is that it…?

A few seconds later I found out that the lack of technology was the least of my worries. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I had night-vision now, and with it I saw all manners of creatures pop up into existence!

They just simply appeared… but the alarming thing was that all creatures that appeared were certainly not from anywhere around here…

I could see minotaurs, slimes, large saber-toothed lion-type creatures, chimeras, imps, goblins and a number of other monstrosities! All of these things immediately started attacking anything they could see. They attacked each other, animals from earth or simply started eating away the corpses still present on the streets.

I stared wide-eyed at the spectacle below me, as fights between monsters vs animals, and monsters vs monsters erupted all around me! A shiver ran down my spine as I saw most of the monsters make short work of the Earth animals that I had to use a combination of abilities to fight against. Another jolt ran through my body as I saw the monsters casually entering the ‘poisonous’ houses, seemingly unaffected by the poison. I suddenly realized that all that poison really was weak….

I couldn’t fathom what was going on at first, but then I remembered all that time I had spent reading novels and watching animes. Things like this happened all the time during those stories and animes, and I had wished for such an ‘apocalypse’ event happening on Earth many times as it seemed fun...

I believe I just found out the hard way why people always said “be careful what you wish for...”

______________________________________

PS: I don't have the time to proof-read this chapter right now. So if anyone finds any mistakes do let me know!

PS(2): I have a list of all the abilities the MC has absorbed so far. Would you guys like me to post it as a separate 'abilities so far' chapter? Or should I wait for a few more chapters and let the MC gain more abilities before releasing the list? Comment below and I will do what the majority of you want.