Sowhere in the Galestine Ocean.
The giant Coral Island continued to flow westward at a slow, steady pace. At one of the far ends of the island, a colossal turtle head rose above the surface of the water.
"What's wrong with Brother?" Valerian, seated atop Tebu's head, asked in a crestfallen mood.
"It's like... he wants to cry, but he just ends up laughing," he added. "I've never seen him like this. Maybe he's gone a little crazy while I was asleep?"
Tebu blinked his eyes slowly.
"Little Valerian," he began. "Just what did he find within the inheritance ground?"
The little gray cat tilted his head and said innocently, "He found a coffin. With soone frozen in it. So it wasn't exactly an inheritance ground, but a tomb." "A tomb..." The ancient turtle murmured, though his voice rang like thunder.
His mory of the ti was hazy and fragnted due to Wagner casting a spell on him. So Tebu wasn't quite sure if he'd seen the man leave after coming to the island the last ti.
"Wagner's tomb?" he asked.
"Mm, I don't know." Valerian shook his head. "I tried to ask Brother, but he just laughed."
Tebu exhaled a heavy sigh, his breath causing large waves to form around his head.
"He was like that all those years ago as well, when I first found him. He just laughed repeatedly. He was also quite... not right in the head. But now, he seems to be doing fine."
"Lord Tebu," Valerian said in a low voice. "Do you think Brother will be all right?"
"Rest assured, Little Valerian." Tebu smiled fondly. "Your brother is a steadfast individual. There is nothing he cannot overco."
"If you say so..."
Valerian's topaz eyes suddenly glead. "Lord Tebu, do you want to eat fish? I can catch so! I'm very powerful now, so the little fishies are afraid of ."
The ancient turtle chuckled. "You go ahead. I'm quite fine."
"Okay!"
Valerian leapt off the giant turtle's head and dove into the sea. A gray light flashed, and he transford into his majestic draconic form. And then, he disappeared beneath the blue expanse.
Watching his transformation, Tebu couldn't help but sigh.
"I still can't believe my eyes..."
***
Sowhere on the other side of the Coral Island, constant laughter echoed in the air.
Adam lay sprawled on the ground, surrounded by empty bottles and overturned barrels - yes, barrels of wine. The sharp scent of alcohol perated the air, thick and pungent.
He laughed and laughed and laughed, yet his eyes told a different story. They were dull and unfocused, heavy with grief. Even as laughter shook his chest, heartbreak lingered in his gaze.
No amount of wine could ever drown his overwhelming sadness.
"Bastard!" he cursed out loud. "I looked up to you! I wanted to be you! And yet..."
He laughed.
Adam had learned much from Aldo Wagner. He may not have learned magic, but he did learn how to be a man- a good man, who strove to do the right things in life.
Wagner's philosophy and how he viewed the world shaped Adam's own beliefs.
And now, learning that the man he had looked up to all his life was in fact his sworn enemy, the one who had ruined his life, dealt him a devastating psychological blow.
"You fuckin' liar!" He roared in anguish.
The raven-haired youth remained lying on the ground for a long ti. His dark eyes glead with clarity as he willed the Lotus to clear the fog of intoxication.
He sat back up and mumbled to himself, "But... he went mad after visiting the Dark Valley. Before that, he was normal... right?"
Adam rose to his feet and started pacing around. Although he didn't know if his assumptions were true, he desperately hoped they were.
He did not want to believe in the fact that his role model was his archnesis
all along.
Maybe... he was never evil? Adam's lips curled into a hopeful smile.
It's very likely. I an, his earlier journal entries suggested that he was an upright, honorable man. But his journey to the Dark Valley changed him. Hell, even turning into a lich would have changed him!
He recalled so bits and pieces of knowledge about liches, drawn from the experts whose mories he had once devoured.
Adam rembered that lichdom stripped a person of empathy and moral emotions. Once the soul was bound to a phylactery, compassion, love, guilt, and fear gradually fade away, leaving only cold intellect and obsession. Even those who were not evil before were slowly corrupted. Sustaining undeath eroded their humanity until life beca aningless to them, and cruelty turned inevitable, not by choice, but because they no longer understood why it was wrong.
Adam clung to that belief with desperation. He held onto it as if it were a lifeline, hoping that the man he had admired had not truly deceived him. If lichdom itself was to bla, if it had twisted Wagner into sothing unrecognizable, then perhaps the man he had once looked up to had not always been a monster.
Add to that, he had already been corrupted by the abomination in the Dark Valley, he mused.
I had the Lotus to protect my mind and soul, but he did not.
And I'm fairly certain that the devil must also have twisted his desires toward
the end. After all, that is what those fiends specialize in.
I refuse to believe Wagner was a vile, despicable human!
And there's also the lich's phylactery, which turns them cold and... indifferent...
Wait...
In that mont, sothing clicked inside Adam's mind.
The reason Wagner had hidden his so-called inheritance ground so carefully, why he had even gone as far as altering Tebu's mories, and why a coffin lay
buried deep within this island.
Everything slowly fell into place.
Tebu himself was the key. A being that constantly road the world, spending
most of his ti in the dark depths, was the perfect hiding place. There could be no safe vault for the one thing most precious to a lich.
The Phylactery!
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