Monsters did possess some rudimentary intelligence, however, they could not compare to humans. At their core, they were still predators who acted mostly on instinct. Their cunning was beastly in nature and was not that hard to overcome. That gave the three Sleepers a chance to leverage their advantage.
After finalizing the plan, they made some preparations.
While Changing Star was getting ready, Sunny had retrieved the soul shards from the eight dead scavengers. After delivering them to the silver-haired girl, he watched as she brought them to her chest and crushed them in her fist one after another, absorbing the essence of each shard into her soul core. After a few minutes, when the changes caused by the absorption were over, Nephis opened her eyes and slowly inhaled.
Starting with this chapter, the novel will be going premium. I hope you will stick with it! On my side, I will try to keep up the quality and stability of updates as best as I can.
Because of how WN works, at the moment of going premium, the last two published chapters will be locked behind "Privilege" (which costs one coin to access). To offset that, I prepared two additional chapters in advance, so that there's no pause in daily uploads. However, the timing of the whole thing is a bit tricky. If premium comes online when I'm away from the computer, there might be a delay in access to the latest chapters.
If that happens, know that it's just temporary. I'll resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Thank you for your time and support!
[Edit: Oh my, it's me from the future. What magic is this?!
Anyway, I'm here to leave a small note because I see a lot of confusion about the pricing of unlocking premium chapters.
I think the terminology of web novels is partially to blame. When people see something called a web "novel", they think of a physical book. Therefore, they often feel bewildered by its price. However, it would be more correct to call these stories web series - most of them are epic tales that span a few million words in length, while the length of an average printed novel is somewhere around 90,000 words. The whole Harry Potter series, for example, accounts to one million words.
So, buying a completed web novel of respectable size would be like buying three sets of all the Harry Potter books, or 33 average printed novels. In return, web novels allow the reader to lose themselves in a vast and sprawling adventure that will hopefully last them hundreds of enthralling hours.
Additionally, there are ways to read web novels for free, as long as you are satisfied with doing it the way concurrent readers are experiencing the story - a couple chapters per day. As an avid reader of web novels myself, I feel rather satisfied with these conditions. Others may have a different view of the matter, though, which is alright as long as they make the judgment based on sound information.
Hope this clears things up. Cheers!]