Caroline sent an erald-like dagger flying toward the door. It burst with a verdant wave of energy, proving she wasn’t bluffing.
But it caused no real damage. As the wooden door splintered, the Marquis appeared in its place. He reeked of blood, and a massive cloak enveloped him, its surface a writhing, flowing mass of shadows.
"Another large group, brazenly trespassing on my domain. Will you never stop? Despite my repeated warnings, you continue to gather, seeking to shatter the tranquility of my land!"
As the Knight Order comnced its crackdown, a growing number of people had been entering the Shadow Land through the Golden Harp Theater and other passages. The Marquis, acting as the land’s agent, had felt their arrival, and he was furious.
He believed that if this continued, the Shadow City would be dragged into the conflict between El Island, the Kingdom, and the Sect.
"Lord Marquis, you’ve misunderstood..." Caroline said, trying to calm him down. "We’ll leave right now..."
"I was wrong... I was wrong..." the Marquis muttered, paying her no heed. His voice grew deeper. "When you arrived, I thought I had gained another strong hand against the Cultists..."
He pointed at Caroline, then turned to Benedict. "As for people like you... I turn a blind eye, but only because you bring supplies into the Shadow Land."
His finger finally landed on Rorschach. "And you! You and that foolish Dwarf were nothing but criminals! I pardoned you once on account of the Black Cultivators... but because of my tolerance, you’ve all started treating this place as your own! The audacity! The sheer audacity! Now, all of you will die!"
As the Marquis delivered his sentence, his drab, withered hair whipped about wildly. An overwhelming power radiated from his body—it was the very incarnation of the Shadow Land’s laws.
Strictly speaking, neither Caroline’s party nor Benedict’s had violated the rules of the Shadow Land. The land itself was willing to welco more living souls to devour, but the Marquis was now using his own will to temporarily warp all reality, intent on punishing them.
A dismal aura surged from the Marquis. It swept through the doorway and across the entire living room like a tangible shadow, and any object it passed through instantly began to weather and decay. At the sa ti, the shadow coalesced into figures—specters holding the very spears that had just pierced the door.
The spearheads aid at the five people in the room. Connor and Jeff, who were closest to the Marquis, were instantly run through. With a tug from the specters, two spectral forms were seemingly pulled from their bodies and sucked into the Marquis’s cloak.
Soul-piercing wails echoed through the Core Area, and everyone who heard them shuddered. The older residents all knew what it ant: the Marquis was enraged again, carrying out his most severe punishnt—imprisoning the souls of criminals within his Magical Artifact.
Rorschach had been gathering power since the mont the spears burst through the door. He now unleashed a Great Splitting Technique directly at the Marquis. His opponent made no move to dodge. The oppressive mass of shadows disintegrated, and the Marquis’s form vanished from sight.
But his voice never stopped. It roared at Rorschach, "I’ve already seen this trick of yours on Harold Avenue! Unless you can Decompose the entire Shadow Land, you have no hope of defeating with that Magic!"
The Yin Spirit Guards retracted their spears and intertwined, reforming the Marquis’s shape. Though the Shadow Soldiers had withdrawn, the Marquis’s Domain continued to press in. The aging floorboards burst into dust, and the walls, their structural integrity gone, began to collapse.
’If this keeps up, we’re actually going to die of old age. Just the express version—faster than a premium cloud download.’
Rorschach noticed the form of the Marquis’s power was sowhat similar to that of the Black Cultivators. He raised a Blue Light Barrier in front of himself, but it was effortlessly pierced. So, he attempted to replicate what he had accomplished in the Inverted Church.
In the Inverted Church, Rorschach had only been able to achieve a self-sustaining cycle of gathering Magic Power because of the Black Cultivator’s relentless, all-encompassing pressure. The two Domains had been complentary.
But here, with the space behind him still open, the Magic Power he converted would just continuously dissipate. As he drew upon the protective power of the Blue Light Barrier, a faint Spiritual Light began to perate the air around him.
Caroline repeatedly threw up Force Field Walls and other Protective Spells, but the Marquis’s shadows advanced relentlessly, about to press the three of them into a corner.
’The Magic Power here is unruly...’ Rorschach thought. It was clear the Shadow City obeyed the Marquis’s commands, making it difficult to wield Magic Power within this space. Nevertheless, Rorschach persisted until he finally reached a critical threshold, establishing a cycle of absorbing, converting, and expelling Magic Power.
From the Marquis’s perspective, a blue radiance blood in the darkness, resembling a small, spherical Vesicle. Not only could his "punishnt" no longer reach the three criminals, but he had also lost all sensation of the space within the "Vesicle."
It was a terrible feeling; he would not permit a lawless pocket of reality, one outside his control, to exist within the Core Area.
However, when he increased his power output, the Vesicle, far from weakening, actually began to expand. Incomprehensible symbols floated across its surface. A mont later, the faint, embossed lines of a tree-like pattern beca visible.
The face of the Elf, Connor, erged from within the Yin Spirits under the Marquis’s control. He greedily pressed against the surface of the blue bubble, making a low, guttural sound.
Inside the barrier, Benedict stared up at the silhouette of the oak tree, his mouth hanging slightly open in disbelief.
’What about Singrev?’ Now with so breathing room, Rorschach took other action. He removed Balan’s Pearl from where it hung on his chest, poured an unprecedented amount of Magic Power into it, and commanded, "Find a way on your own. Get Singrev and Freddy out of the Core Area."
With that said, he shot the pearl forward. The entire Vesicle was now filled with his converted Magic Power. Because the field he deployed was based on the Blue Light Barrier, it was tinged with the aura of the Deryats. Rorschach could only hope this would be enough to constrain the remnant Soul of the God of Deceit.
As the pearl shot out, the Marquis sensed a hint of danger. The seemingly ordinary glass bead pierced straight through several Yin Spirits without weakening or shattering in the slightest.
As it brushed past him, the pearl flashed once. For a single, terrifying instant, the Marquis lost all control over the power of the Shadow Land. Countless souls erupted, clashing with his own consciousness as his very self seed to Split into multiple personalities:
"Comrade of the Protector..." "A casual follower of Is..." "Betrayer..." "He who saw the Queen to her throne..." "The Fallen..." Fragnts of countless mories echoed, reshaping the Marquis into his various past selves.
Luckily, his control returned. He no longer insisted on the death penalty for them. Instead, he opted for the punishnt of exile, handing this unsolvable problem over to the more fundantal power of the Shadow Land.
"Are we sinking?" Rorschach suddenly felt a slight sense of weightlessness. The Vesicle had no solid form, and the floorboards beneath their feet had dissolved into a black sludge that frantically tried to drag the three of them down.
Caroline tried to cast a spell to make herself and Rorschach levitate, but the black sludge bore a resemblance to a "Living Water Body." It crept up their legs, enveloping all three of them.
The Marquis stared as the detestable blue Vesicle was caught in a black whirlpool. It swirled like water down a toilet drain, sinking into a gaping hole that led to the Abyss.
The na of the Abyss was the "Deep Diving Area."
He dispatched the Yin Spirits from his body. Howling, they raised their spears to hunt down mbers of the resistance. Then, several more figures, n made of shadow, split off from his form. Drawing a Sharp Sword, he cut them all down, his own face contorted in an expression of extre agony.
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