Shadow Slave

The ancient tower groaned as impossible forces clashed beneath the surface of the world. Within the King of Nothing, his Will and the inevitability of his demise clashed in a ferocious conflagration of force, both his soul and the world around him suffering from the fallout.

Cassie was pushed back, slamming into the wall of the Ebony Tower with enough momentum to make obsidian dust rain from above.

In front of her, Mordret was attempting to form a new soul core — a Sacred soul core — from the vast nebula of luminous shards that spun in the eye of the storm ravaging his Soul Sea. His Will was like a tyrannical force of attraction, subjecting the shattered cores to an impossible pressure. Crushed by it, the shards were slowly fusing into a diamond-like sphere.

And all the while, his soul was crumbling, held together only by his ferocious determination to live… to be something instead of dissolving into nothingness and disappearing forever.

There had to be more to it — some secret that Mordret knew, some mystery he had discovered in his journeys, while Cassie had not — she could not even guess what it was. All she could do was wait and observe, surrounded by darkness.

In her mind, the runes describing Mordret were changing slowly.

They read:

Rank: Supreme.

Class: —

Soul Cores: [0/7]… [1/7]… [0/7]…

It was as if even the Nightmare Spell did not know how to interpret the liminal state of his crumbling soul.

Mordret was going to die — he was meant to die.

And yet, as time passed, he did not.

The Ebony Island continued to quake as somewhere outside, the Dreamspawn drew closer and closer to the tower of the Demon of Destiny. Mordret, meanwhile, staggered and sank to his knees, a tortured groan escaping through his lips.

The groan turned into a growl, and then into a maddened laugh.

It sounded like he was greatly amused.

The soul storm raging within him only grew more furious as the nebula of brilliant shards spun faster, faster, and faster still, all of them being crushed into the shape of a sphere and reforged under obliterating pressure.

Solidifying into something new, something vast and unfathomable…

Into the core of a deity.

Struggling to remain upright, Cassie drew a shallow breath.

Was he really going to succeed?

She did not know.

‘I don’t know…’

But she had a suspicion.

His runes continued to change, describing a state of cosmic uncertainty.

Rank: Supreme.

Rank: S… me…

Rank: S…

Rank: Sa… cre…

Rank: …red

In her mind’s eye, it was as if two sets of runes were superimposed over each other, both struggling to outshine the other.

But, at the same time, the runes describing the number of Mordret’s soul cores were arriving at a less ambivalent state. There seemed to be two sets of them, as well, but one was gradually displacing the other. The shimmer of these runes was growing brighter, while the glow of the other set was growing dimmer and dimmer, ready to disappear altogether.

Soul Cores: [0/7]… [1/7]… [1/7]… [0/7]… (1/7)… 1/7]. [1/7].

Until the second string of runes was completely gone.

Cassie forgot to breathe.

There, in the darkness surrounding her, a string of runes blazed with a blinding radiance, its silver glow painted in hues of pale gold.

Soul Cores: [1/7].

The runes remained the same after that. And there, in Mordret’s soul, the colossal soul core was almost fully formed. Its outer layers were still in flux, permeated by fractures that were slowly fusing into a monolithic whole, but its heart had already become stable.

And as the soul core achieved a state of equilibrium, its presence began to affect his soul in a benign manner instead of destroying it.

The force that had been tearing Mordret’s soul apart now served to stabilize it, exerting a force that held the crumbling pieces together, serving as a spiritual anchor that prevented it from coming undone.

Cassie’s eye widened.

The runes changed once more.

Rank: S… d…

Rank: Sa.. cr…

Rank: Sac… e…

And then, after a long moment of shifting ambiguity, the glow of the runes suddenly became firm and brilliant.

Unshakeable.

The runes said:

Rank: Sacred.

Cassie leaned on the wall, holding her breath.

She was stunned.

‘He… he did it? He actually did it?’

There was a long moment of silence. Everything in the world seemed to grow still.

The invisible force pressing Cassie back seemed to grow weaker, and countless items floating in the air were on the verge of falling down…

‘He did it!’

Cassie opened her mouth, wanting to say something.

But then, a terrifying premonition suddenly grasped her heart, and a terrible sense of wariness flooded her mind.

And a moment later, a harrowing scream shattered the silence, making her clutch at her ears.

It was Mordret… Mordret was screaming,

his voice full of such indescribable agony that it cut Cassie like a knife.

‘W-what… what is…’

What could have made the King of Nothing, who remained nonchalant while thousands of his vessels were being slaughtered in a myriad of ghastly ways, scream that way? Cassie could not see…

But if she could, she would have witnessed a subtle change happening to the enormous soul core shining brilliantly in the somber sky of his inner Realm.

There was a flaw in its radiance now, having appeared there at some point…

There was a tiny, barely noticeable drop of darkness in its very heart.

However, that drop of darkness did not remain small for more than a moment.

It expanded with a dreadful speed, growing like a virulent tumor. The tendrils of the vile darkness pierced the heart of Mordret’s soul core like veins, and then snaked outward, permeating its entire great mass.

The fractures that had almost fused were torn open, and the outer layers of the core began to crumble as its heart was being consumed by the darkness.

By the Corruption.

Mordret’s chilling, inhuman screams echoed in the great hall of the Ebony Tower like a deafening litany of curses, making Cassie shiver from a terrifying cold.

And in her mind’s eye, the runes changed once more.

Rank: Sacred.

Rank: Sa… ed…

Rank: Sup… me…

Rank: Supreme.

Rank: Sup… e…

Rank: Gr… t…

And finally, the string of runes describing him as a Supreme being began to falter, while a new string began to take its place. Cassie shuddered when she saw the new string of runes, which was gradually becoming the only one.

The runes told her something that she had hoped never to hear.

They said:

..Rank: Great.

She froze, feeling stunned, not ready yet to comprehend the meaning of what she saw. It was at that moment that the island quaked one final time, more violently than before, and something broke down the great gate of the Ebony Tower by sending it flying inward and crushing onto the floor.