[You have consud The Blind Scryer.]
[You have completed {Daggers in Shadows}]
[You have obtained {Soul Letting Lantern}]
[You have obtained the soul of {Teresia the Blind Scryer.}]
[Your Soul Letting Lantern has Upgraded!]
[You have obtained 227,114 Unused souls from the {Blind Scryer} Soul Letting Lantern.]
[You can now proceed with [Eternal Quest III]
[The Blind Scryer has been imprisoned in your Soul Letting Lantern]
The notifications stacked over the ruined villa like verdicts stamped onto parchnt, clean and indifferent compared to the chaos around him. Ludwig let himself imitate a deep breath out of old habit, the reflex of relief still present even if his body did not truly need air.
The pressure of the tir was gone now, replaced by that colder satisfaction that ca when a task finally ended and the system agreed that it was done.
With the death of the Scryer, and the souls he obtained from it, he could already feel the weight of possibility settling in his mind.
Numbers like that were not just currency, they were leverage. Each soul was a rung on the ladder, another margin of power he could convert into sothing tangible, sothing that would keep him alive in a world that tried to punish him for breathing wrong, or standing in the wrong place, or existing near the wrong kind of magic.
He was close now, close enough that the thought of [Noctivex], the armor Morde’Xander wore, stopped being a distant fantasy and started being a pending purchase.
However, he was still missing the final elent before he could do sothing like that. The thought hit him with the sa irritation as a loose nail under a boot. Progress always ca with a list attached.
’I still need to learn about tallurgy.’
Andre’s na followed imdiately after, along with the mory of thick hands, callused fingers, and the way true craftsn looked at weapons like they were living promises. Ludwig had ant it when he agreed to return. He would go back once this ss was fully contained, once the imdiate problems stopped trying to multiply.
Yet, there was still sothing in his hand that seed too shocked to realize what happened to it. The duke’s neck was still in Ludwig’s grip, and the creature hung there like a mistake caught mid fall, limbs trembling and eyes wide in frantic disbelief.
"Now then, what am I going to do with you?" Ludwig asked.
Panic gripped the Duke’s heart as he struggled more to escape Ludwig’s grasp. Futile and useless. His grafted hands scrabbled at Ludwig’s wrist and forearm, and the cube kept bumping against his own chest as he clung to it like it could still rewrite the outco. Ludwig did not even bother adjusting his stance. The duke could thrash until his joints tore. It would not change what had already happened to his plan.
"Whatever it is you wish to do, do it fast," the Knight King’s form disappeared from next to Ludwig. lting back to shadow and ink and returned to the invisible Codex Necros on his side. The Knight King added once he was completely invisible from sight, "People are coming here. If they see you use Dark magic it will be a problem to you."
"I see," Ludwig said as he looked at the accursed being. The villa around them was a cratered ruin, open to the city like a wound that refused to close, and sound carried far too easily through broken stone.
"I should hand you over to the emperor, you looking like this can easily pin all the bla and dark magic residues I’ve used onto you."
The suggestion wasn’t rcy. It was logistics, the kind of logistics Ludwig had learned to treat as survival. A grafted duke, warped beyond recognition, could absorb a lot of bla, especially when he was holding the very cube that had twisted this place into a dungeon. It was an easy story to sell, the kind people accepted because it let them keep their beliefs intact.
"Ah, just spare please, yes you can take to be trialed! Yes, just don’t kill please!" The Duke said.
Ludwig smiled. The man’s begging ca too fast, too eager, like a rchant agreeing to a deal he planned to twist later.
"Again, I see hope in your eyes. Did you really think I’ll do that? Send you to the capital? So you can try and bribe your way out? Or even na as a dark user? I’ve already been blad for that a couple tis, more and it’ll be more than just suspicion." Ludwig tightened his grip as the duke gasped for breath, his hands clawing at Ludwig’s face and body.
"Stop!" he shouted with struggling breath as he used all his arms to claw at Ludwig.
His claws did injure Ludwig’s skin, but it imdiately recovered, and the instant the duke felt that recovery he only beca more frantic.
The more he fought, the less control he had, and Ludwig’s hand beca a vise. The duke’s fingernails broke first, little cracks and snaps of keratin against sothing that refused to yield, and his teeth snapped next as he clenched his jaw too hard against the pain.
The black fla did not scorch flesh the way normal fire did. It kissed the soul, and that made every sensation echo through him with cruel multiplication, like agony had been taught how to sing.
"This is what your kind deserves for stealing what doesn’t belong to you. But," Ludwig stopped before the man could die. He dropped him to the ground.
The duke hit the stone like discarded at, coughing and dragging in air that did nothing but hurt. His body was a ss of stolen parts and stitched seams, and all of it twitched with the aftertaste of soul burn. His eyes rolled up toward Ludwig, pleading so hard it almost looked like worship, but Ludwig had seen that look on too many monsters and too many n who thought consequences were sothing that happened to other people.
"If you die, it’ll be too unfair for those that you abused... but if I let you go, you’ll go on and blabber to the emperor about this."
"I... cough, I swear, I shall say nothing! Please!" he begged more.
"Oh," Ludwig bent his knees as he t the downed Duke’s eyes. "I know you won’t," he smiled wide. "I shall make sure you’ll both pay the price, and never say anything." He pointed his finger forward.
"Did you know that everything that is currently making your body... has once belonged to soone else. Soone with a soul?" Ludwig said.
The duke’s gaze flicked, confused, trying to understand what angle Ludwig was taking, still clinging to the belief that this could beco a negotiation if he said the right words.
"I... don’t follow," the Duke said.
"No need to understand what I say, you’ll feel it. [Rise Undead]." Ludwig said as the magic left his index finger and applied itself onto the Duke.
The spell didn’t arrive like a hamr. It seeped into him, into every stitched seam, every stolen tendon, every organ that did not belong to the man trying to wear it. For a heartbeat there was stillness, the kind before a trap snaps shut, and then the duke’s body betrayed him.
Suddenly, every bit of the Duke’s body began shuddering and morphing.
"What have you done!" the Duke howled as he realized he began losing control over his body.
His arms began twisting and shaking, not in spasm but in rebellion, moving with their own will as if the parts had rembered they were not his. His skin began shivering in patches, sections tightening and loosening out of rhythm, and his eyes closed and opened as if each one belonged to a different owner arguing over control. Inside him, sothing knotted and pulled, innards turning like rope under tension. It was not just pain. It was a dozen stolen lives waking up as Undeath, bound to Necros by a contract the duke never bothered to respect.
Agony, pain, the lives of a dozen and more people that were killed and used to ’improve’ this man’s body have now regained Undeath.
Suddenly, the man could only scream as the pain beca more powerful than he could ever believe.
He was bound by Undeath though he wasn’t undead himself. His stolen organs were bound by contract to Necros to co back to life. Only they were attached to soone alive.
Agony and misery mixed in one package delivered by a young man who had a smile worse than the devil.
The feeling of being both dead and alive was sothing only this Duke would know. And his screams sounded like a divine tune in Ludwig’s ears. Not because Ludwig enjoyed noise, but because the duke finally understood consequence in a language he could not bribe his way out of.
"Didn’t I tell you before," Ludwig stood up as he watched the man writhe in eternal pain, unable to even speak his own words since his own throat was probably stolen from soone else and could only scream.
"I was never a hero. So don’t expect rcy from , foul thing," Ludwig grabbed the cube that finally left the Duke’s hands as his entire body was twisting around itself. His back broke onto itself along with his legs and all arms. Protruding bones that didn’t allow blood to spill.
The cube slid free easily, as if it was relieved to leave the duke’s grasp. Ludwig held it for a mont, feeling its faint vibration, the residue of warped space still clinging to it. Behind him the duke continued to fold and contort, bones jutting in wrong angles, limbs bending where limbs should not bend. The worst part was that sothing in him still remained conscious enough to register it, trapped in a body that was no longer obeying a single owner.
Endless agony to what felt like only a brain that wasn’t replaced.
That was the pain he deserved, only being like this could probably appease those unfortunate Souls.
[You have Obtained the Dinsional Cube]
Ludwig pocketed the item. It was too good to be left in the hand of scum like the duke, and the system itself had already recognized the transfer. He didn’t waste ti admiring it. Tools were ant to be used, and this one had already proven it could rewrite rooms and distance. That made it valuable, and dangerous.
Just as he turned to leave the villa, in the distance at the broken gate, a mob of people had gathered. They filled the shattered entrance in a loose mass, not organized, not brave, just pulled by hunger and curiosity and the instinct that sothing important had happened where the duke used to be untouchable.
Beggars, thieves, and commoners that haven’t had the luxury of a proper warm al in years. Their faces were hollow, their eyes sharp, and their hands hovered near pockets and belts the way hands did when desperation had taught them to be ready for violence. None of them stepped fully inside yet, not while the air still tasted like magic and dust and death.
Ludwig walked forward until he t the mob of people. "The House of Drak has fallen. Take what you want from it. You’re no longer bound or are enslaved by this family anymore. Oh, and don’t kill him, it’ll be a rcy he doesn’t deserve. Let the Imperial Family handle this matter." Ludwig said and headed between the stunned mob toward the gate.
He didn’t wait to see if they believed him. He didn’t wait to see if greed would turn them into sothing worse. His part was done. The scryer was imprisoned, the lantern upgraded, the cube claid, and the duke was left with a punishnt that would outlast any speech. Behind him, the mob’s silence cracked into movent, and Ludwig walked out of the ruin without looking back.
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