Deus Necros

Kaiser’s response was immediate. No pause to admire. No pause to concede. Just a clean cut through Ludwig’s satisfaction.

Ludwig’s mouth tightened, the irritation shifting into something colder. The books didn’t become useless because they were translations, but the idea that something deeper existed, and was being held elsewhere, dug into him.

Ludwig frowned, “I know they’re banned, but still, isn’t a translation just the same as the original?” Ludwig asked.

He asked it like someone who already knew the answer would be unpleasant. The room remained cold, the ice coffin beside them shedding a faint mist that crawled along the floor before thinning out.

Ludwig’s breath came steady, but he could feel the small tension in his shoulders, as if his body expected an argument to turn into violence.

“Not even remotely, the original that I saw wasn’t written in our language, it was written in stranger letters, and even when a former hero got their hands on them, he couldn’t tell head or tail from what the books meant, they simply transcribed the words bit by bit, quite literally, and the mages afterward deduced the meaning to what you have in you hands.”

As Kaiser spoke, Ludwig’s eyes narrowed, not in anger but in calculation. Stranger letters. A former hero. Transcribed bit by bit. Deduced meaning. It was the kind of chain that turned precision into guesswork.

Ludwig’s lips pressed together as he imagined a room full of scholars squinting at something they couldn’t read and declaring they’d captured its intent. The thought made him want to laugh, but there wasn’t humor in it, just the familiar irritation of realizing competence was rare, and authority was loud.

“Knowledge lost in translation, I suppose?” Ludwig asked.

“Yes.”

The single-word answer shut the door on debate. Ludwig let the books drift down and away, dismissing them back into whatever space he used to store necessities and sins. The air felt lighter without them, but his mind didn’t.

Ludwig had an inkling of what happened; the book was probably not written in the language of Ikos, and if a former hero, a summoned one, was called there to translate, it was probably written in the language of Earth.

Meaning that if Ludwig ever gets his hands on the book, even if the book was written in any of the three main languages of earth, Hindi, English or Chinese, he could easily understand them, even Spanish, since his father insisted on learning them all.

The thought sat in his head like a quiet advantage he didn’t need to announce. It wasn’t pride. It was practicality. If the world wanted to hide knowledge behind language, then the world was sloppy. Ludwig didn’t feel grateful for it. He felt mildly offended that it might actually be useful.

“Where did you say you saw that book? I didn’t notice it inside your storage.”

He didn’t look at the finger when he asked. He kept his focus on the idea of the book, because the finger had a way of pulling attention like a hook.

“The Holy Order still keeps it to this day.”

The words dropped into place with the weight of an obstacle. The Holy Order. The phrase carried images: polished stone halls, sanctimonious gazes, and people who smiled while they sharpened knives behind scripture. Ludwig felt a faint twitch of annoyance. The fact that the holy order is keeping the book already tells enough of how powerful it is. Obtaining it would be a pain, having to go into the Sacrosanctum alone would be an even bigger pain. Even with most of their powers concentrated at Solania’s Peaks, where the wave of monsters is rushing, it’ll stiill not be easier to obtain said book.

[Side Quest!]

The notification appeared immediately in front of Ludwig.

It was crisp, bright, and utterly indifferent to the tension in the room, the kind of system intrusion that treated reality like a ledger.

[Find a way to obtain the book that Kaiser spoke of from the treasury of the Holy Order.]

“I see,” Ludwig said, if he received a quest for the book, then it means it was useful.

He let the words settle without drama. Useful meant necessary. Necessary meant inevitable. Ludwig didn’t like inevitability unless it was something he controlled, or something like Necros where he absolutely had to obey.

“Anyways, let us begin now, so what am I supposed to do with the finger?” Ludwig asked.

He forced his attention back to the task in front of him. The ice coffin sat nearby, sealed in frost, the preserved body within barely visible through the glaze. The chamber’s air felt colder around it, as if the coffin radiated its own refusal to change.

“It is irrelevant now, I need to be inside the child’s body first,” he said.

Kaiser’s voice carried that same patient certainty. Ludwig didn’t argue. He’d already decided to proceed, and Ludwig hated wasting words on decisions already made.

“Fine, let’s start then,” he said as he raised both palms above the ice coffin.

His hands hovered inches above the ice. The cold rose to meet them, biting at his skin. He felt the faint sting in his fingertips, the way frost wanted to cling, but his mana kept it back.

Blood began dripping from Ludwig’s fingers as the magic of the necrotic ritual began.

The blood didn’t come with pain the way it should have. It came like a toll being paid, steady drops, dark and viscous, falling at a measured pace. Each droplet left his finger and fell with a soft, heavy sound that didn’t belong in a silent room.

It fell on the ice, and instead of freezing or slipping to the side, it seeped through it.

The ice drank it. No resistance. No hesitation. The red sank beneath the surface like ink being pulled into parchment, leaving faint trails that vanished as quickly as they appeared.

“The conduit is linked. Now time for adding my mana.”

Ludwig inhaled once and pushed.

But just as Ludwig tried to do that, some form of resistance seemed to occur.

It hit him like a wall, silent but absolute. His mana pressed forward and met something that pressed back. The sensation crawled up his arms, a harsh vibration that made his wrists ache.

It was resisting!