Level 1 to Infinity: My Bloodline Is the Ultimate Cheat!-Chapter 899: A Meal Too Powerful to Ignore

Ethan naturally noticed that Blackie was awake. The moment their eyes met, he raised an eyebrow and asked, "You’re up?"

Blackie didn’t bother answering properly. He bounded over at once, reaching straight for the grill, moving so fast that Ethan barely had time to register what was happening before it already went wrong. Ethan didn’t even have the chance to react, but Garm did.

The Infernal Hound launched himself forward like a cannonball, slamming into Blackie’s chest with a heavy thud that echoed through the clearing. The two of them crashed together, fur and limbs tangling as they rolled, and then, in perfect and infuriating unison, they shouted, "The hell are you doing?"

Ethan pinched the bridge of his nose. "Knock it off, both of you. Blackie, you’re way too impatient. It’s not cooked yet."

Blackie glanced at him, let out an unbothered grunt of acknowledgment, and circled around the much larger black dog to return to the grill, but he clearly had no intention of keeping quiet. Staring openly at Garm, he said, "Boss, where’d this guy come from? He’s got some muscle on him too. That lean, solid meat... toss him in a pot with some stew, and damn, that’d be a real meal."

Ethan facepalmed hard.

This guy had a real talent for starting trouble without even trying.

What he hadn’t expected was Garm’s reaction.

"Dog meat... is good?" The Infernal Hound’s eyes widened as if Blackie had just revealed a great secret of the universe.

"Good?" Blackie snorted, warming to the topic immediately. "You stew it then throw in a handful of soybeans, let it simmer, and damn..." He actually swallowed, as if imagining it too vividly. "The smell alone’ll finish you."

Garm’s eyes lit up. "That settles it," he said decisively. "Change of plans. I’m sticking with you. For now."

He turned and fixed Ethan with an intense stare, full of absolute conviction.

"Uh..." Ethan blinked, completely thrown off.

The way Garm said it made it sound like he’d just made some life-altering, deeply philosophical decision. Ethan wasn’t stupid, though. The reason was obvious, and it made his skin crawl a little.

He shot the hound a sideways look.

"Boss... seriously, where did this freak come from? He’s talking about eating his own kind." Blackie leaned in and muttered it under his breath, just loud enough for Ethan to hear.

Ethan could only shake his head slowly in response.

It took a while longer, but eventually Blackie cranked up the heat with his fire abilities, pushing the flames high enough to finish roasting the two massive wings. Ethan hesitated for only a moment before forcing himself past the mental block, tearing off a small piece and putting it into his mouth.

The instant it touched his tongue, all hesitation vanished. The flavor was rich and savory, the meat so tender it practically melted apart, and Ethan’s eyes widened in shock.

He finished the rest of the piece without a second thought, completely abandoning his earlier reluctance. And just like that, he was fully in.

Blackie and Garm weren’t any different. The two of them tore into the wings with the same unrestrained enthusiasm, and within minutes, the massive portions were completely gone, reduced to nothing but bones.

Blackie was the first to tap out. The moment he swallowed his final bite, golden light erupted around him, his four different types of energy surging and colliding as they churned violently within his body. Ethan wasn’t far behind. Heat flooded through him in heavy waves, massive currents of power spiraling out of control, and the same golden mist began to seep from his skin. His bones and muscles went numb, tingling as if they were being remade from the inside out.

"HAHAHA!" Garm burst into laughter at the sight of them.

"How are you fine?" Ethan demanded, staring at the hound in disbelief. Logically speaking, Garm should have been the weakest of the three, and he had eaten the most by far.

"Please," Garm scoffed. "This is nothing. I’ve swallowed more than a hundred four-winged feathered freaks in one go. This is amateur stuff."

He said it so casually that it left Ethan speechless.

Before obtaining the pearl’s inheritance, Ethan had struggled just to survive against two-winged angels, and this guy was claiming he’d devoured hundreds of four-winged ones in a single sitting. It sounded absurd, borderline ridiculous, but the way Garm spoke made it hard to dismiss outright.

Maybe his true form was something else entirely.

Back in the Sea of Death, that hadn’t been his real body either. Whatever Garm truly was, crossing realms clearly wasn’t simple. The stronger you were, the harder it became to breach the boundaries between worlds, and the cost could be staggering, sometimes making it outright impossible to leave your own realm in physical form.

Garm kept insisting he came from the Demon Realm. Ethan had no idea what that place was supposed to be like, whether it was some nightmare world straight out of a movie or something far worse. Either way, it wasn’t his problem right now.

His body was currently in chaos. He felt like he was on the verge of exploding. He hadn’t expected the angel wings to contain this much energy, and if all that holy power detonated at once, he wouldn’t survive it.

Garm noticed the tension in his expression. "And this still isn’t much. If you’d ripped out their brain core in one clean move, that’s when you’d really feel the energy hit."

That reminded Ethan of something that had been bothering him.

Why had that angel killed itself?

When he asked, Garm shrugged. "The two-wingers are all human. Those bastards use forced empowerment. They dump energy into them, reshape them completely. The humans lose their free will, and an angel core forms in their head. That’s their power source. But the idiots lining up for it don’t realize the four-wingers can snuff them out with a single thought. Like what you saw. Instantly turn to statues. The core energy degrades from the brain outward until the wings disappear. If you extract the core before it breaks down and swallow it..." He let the sentence trail off.

Ethan’s eyes widened as the implications sank in.

So that was how they expanded their numbers. Twisted didn’t even begin to cover it. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

But if that was their method, why were angels so rare on Earth? Ethan had never even seen one before this encounter.

Garm answered before he could ask. "You can’t force it completely. The person getting the upgrade has to accept it willingly. No resistance or hesitation."

Ethan nodded slowly. "So... brainwashing."

Garm bared his teeth in something that wasn’t quite a smile. "Filthy. I fucking hate those feathered bastards."

He bit down hard on one of the wing bones, crushing it with a loud crunch, chewing as if he were venting his hatred through it.

Ethan struggled to rein in the raging energy inside him, but the more he tried to suppress it, the harder it pushed back. Blackie, on the other hand, suddenly shot to his feet. The golden mist around him vanished in an instant, replaced by a sharp spike of fire, water, and wind energy all stabilizing at once.

"HA! Finally balanced!" he shouted, before launching himself toward the black lake like a missile.

Ethan’s eyes lit up.

Blackie had done it. He’d absorbed and refined the energy successfully.

’Right, refining.’ He could do that too.

Ethan closed his eyes, and the moment he did, a faint figure appeared in his mind, its form outlined by countless glowing points of light. It was the same figure he had seen in that strange inner space when he touched the milky-white pearl at the bottom of the lake, the one that had shown him that bizarre but effective method of circulating energy.

He focused inward, sinking fully into his body, and only then did he realize that he was no longer touching the ground. His body was floating, slowly rising into the air as the energy finally began to obey him.