Date: Unspecified
Ti: Unspecified
Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Southern Region, Blossom District, Sky Blossom City, TSR Guild Headquarters
Being hugged and thanked by Corey, my first instinct was to mock her for being too gullible. I didn’t have much attachnt to the Wyatt family Sansa had killed, and I wasn’t making any grand sacrifice. I was simply choosing the path that brought closer to the result I wanted.
Yet the words never ca out.
That small gesture left oddly speechless. For a mont, even my sharper instincts seed dulled in the warmth of her sincerity. It seed I had underestimated the weight a simple hug and a quiet thank you could carry.
It wasn’t just Corey. Dredre too.
The little pink god of death was far too sincere for her own good. In my hair she laid down, her arms spread on my scalp in a soft, affectionate hug. I responded in kind, using my hair to cradle her while my arms remained around Corey.
At first, I was only trying to ss with Corey, to use the mont to discuss with Sansa. But sowhere between Dredre’s quiet warmth and Corey’s lingering grip, the impulse faded. Instead, I found myself realizing sothing I hadn’t paid attention to before. I had surrounded myself with good people. If nothing else, I had that.
"I’ll be damned," Park muttered under her breath, clearly stunned that Corey’s naive sincerity had actually managed to disarm my mind gas.
Lil’Baem stood off by Park’s side, wrapped in jealousy as she watched her mother hugging soone so openly affectionate that wasn’t her.
I noticed the hug lingering longer than it should have and gently pulled back. "Corey, let go. Don’t make it awkward."
"Right." Corey imdiately stepped away, her face flushing with embarrassnt.
She had beco conscious of the hug midway through, but by the ti she realized she should pull back, the mont to do so naturally had already passed. The longer she hesitated, the harder it beca to break away, until she was reminded all she had to do was let go.
Ignoring Corey for the mont, I passed Agony’s unholy core to Sansa so she could remove the remnants of Agony’s mories and craft them into a card.
As I said, Sansa was a pro at this. It took her only a couple of minutes to extract the mory of Agony’s will from the unholy core and craft it into a card for later use. She had done this thousands of tis before on paw clan mbers. Besides, she was only facing the remnant will of a devil, not an actual devil.
When she finished, Sansa handed the card containing Agony’s mories to Corey and returned the unholy core containing clueless will to . Without another word, she dissolved and left to continue monitoring the new three mischiefs.
"Alright," I said, locking eyes with Corey. "Now that we have all the ingredients, let’s begin."
Park retreated into her title demon core, while Lil’ Baem shrank down and coiled around Corey’s waist, forming a white snake bracelet.
The title demon core Corey forged, Eternal Fla of Agony, was absurdly powerful. It was also far too righteous for the dark races, which made both unpopular and feared among them.
Though the dark races sought strength, this title demon core didn’t align with their nature. This title demon core was forged using one’s righteous will, sothing the dark races instinctively rejected. No matter how powerful it was, they despised it.
To them, it was like offering a technique that granted imasurable strength at the cost of sothing fundantal. No one would willingly choose it. The dark races resented the Eternal Fla of Agony.
And yet, it existed. It had been created by a native of the Dark Realm itself. At one point, it was even popular among the misfits and outcasts of their society. But tis changed. Now it was rarely practiced. Many believed that the righteous will required to forge it would beco a fatal weakness, sothing their enemies could exploit against them.
In the end, it was the sa old irony. Those who stole and sched the most were the ones most afraid of being robbed.
At the sa ti, Agony’s Undead Fla of Agony was just as powerful as Corey’s version. The difference was that it didn’t require a righteous will to forge. That alone made it far more acceptable to the dark races. But it ca with its own price.
The Undead Fla of Agony was incredibly demanding. It was not sothing just anyone could cultivate. For starters, the wielder had to be undead. And that was only the first condition of many to co. Beyond that, there were nurous restrictions and requirents, each narrowing the pool of candidates even further.
Despite their obvious limitations, there was a ti when both techniques were highly sought after for forging titled demon cores. Their raw power was simply too tempting to ignore.
That was why I was able to find not only the original forging thods in the Infinity Library, but also an overwhelming amount of research dedicated to them. Countless researchers had tried to bypass their restrictions, hoping to harness their strength without having to limit to the rigid frawork of these techniques.
None of them succeeded, of course. Otherwise, they would have been forgotten.
But failure did not an uselessness. Each paper offered a different perspective, a different angle to explore these techniques. Individually, they were incomplete. Together, they provided with sothing far more valuable: a starting point.
It gave a starting point to figure out how to assimilate the two cores into a single, superior core, one powerful enough to serve my purpose and help Corey acquire the soul trait I had planned for her.
With my primordial soul pupils, succeeding where they had stalled was not particularly difficult. Nor was designing a thod to rge the two cores and refine them into sothing greater while helping my friend ascend in strength was simply a matter of execution.
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