Path to Transcendence

Chapter 720: Wring His Neck

While he chained Julius down, Thorik walked over to a cabinet and removed something from the drawer. Julius had no idea what it was, but seeing all of the wires didn’t fill him with confidence. He continued trying to break free of the chains, but he couldn’t move a single inch. He was completely immobilized.

“What is that thing?” Julius asked while he thought of ways to escape. He tried to contact Drasil or Seraphyne, but he didn’t sense anything from them. It would seem that his connection to them was cut off.

Thorik held the device up and began infusing mana into it, activating the enchantments layered within.

“This is something I made a while ago. It should ensure that there is minimal loss during the transfer.”

“You’re really going to do this? I already said I was willing to let you siphon my soul? Is that not enough?”

“By the time your soul is recovered enough to pull more soul energy, too much will have passed. I’ve determined that this is a more efficient method, especially since time isn’t on my side.”

“This is messed up. You’re going to drain my soul after all of this?”

Thorik suddenly slammed the device down onto the bench with such force that it collapsed the enchanted wood like a sandcastle being crushed. He snarled as he turned to Julius. “I know it’s messed up! I know! But this is the best way to help my people. You have no idea how cruel and vicious some demons can be. They will torture my people and only kill them once they extract every bit of value from their lives.”

Julius stared at him with steely eyes. “Like you said. You don’t even know if they are still alive.”

“Yes, which is why I can’t afford to waste any more time.”

“Lucky me.”

“Look, you’re going to live, kid. I’ve already made the adjustments to the array, keeping my own soul intact. When it’s finished, you will be supported by that very same array. I’ve also transferred control over the realm to you. You will have full autonomy over it when I’m gone. You won’t be able to leave until your soul heals, but you’ll be able to control the time dilation enchantments and other useful things. With this and your healing skill, you should be able to heal your soul in around a year in the outside world.”

Julius’s eyes widened. “Outside world?”

Thorik grimaced. “Yeah, I can’t exactly slow down time out there. But I’ve sped up time inside here to help heal my own soul. You can do the same while you use your phoenix healing skill to heal your soul.”

“How long have you been stuck in here?”

“From my perspective, around half a century,” Thorik admitted reluctantly.

“Oh, you fucking asshole,” Julius said with a horrified expression.

“Don’t worry. It won’t take you that long. Not that your body would be able to handle that level of extreme time dilation in the first place.”

“You’re still a goddamn asshole.”

“Yes, I am,” Thorik said, walking over to Julius, holding the device and all its wires in his hand.

“Don’t you dare touch me with that,” he said, trying to lean away as far as possible, but the chains made it impossible. The only thing he could do was puff his lips up and blow as hard as he could against the device.

Thorik frowned. “I am truly sorry about this.”

There was nothing he could do as the device latched onto his chest. The wires, which had been limp, suddenly flared up, glowing bright white and turning into transparent tendrils. Then they dove directly into his chest. It hurt, but not as badly as he thought it would.

That was until the siphoning actually began. He did his best to hold it back, but he started to feel a powerful suction pulling on his soul. Then it was like he was being attacked by the most invasive vacuum in history, and his soul energy was swiftly drained from his soul.

Julius groaned in pain as his soul was stretched in ways he never imagined. He’d never experienced something like this. He’d gotten his soul damaged by that soul attack before, but this was different. Instead of being damaged, it was being drained.

He did everything in his power to stop it. He leveraged every skill, concept, and technique he had. He drew upon his Authority so recklessly that he feared permanently damaging it, but to no avail. The chains atop the enchantments around him and the device on his chest made it impossible.

He could do nothing but lie there as his soul energy was forcibly snatched from him. He started to see weird flashing lights from all sides. It was like every one of his senses was being overloaded and then shattered. It was the most bizarre sensation he’d ever felt.

The only silver lining was that it didn’t take long. It didn’t take very long for the suction to peter out, and his senses were no longer being assaulted.

Unfortunately, the side effects of getting one’s soul drained were pretty severe. He could barely form a thought in his mind. He was completely disoriented, and his soul was a mess. He couldn’t even tell up from down. He felt something shift in his stomach and hurled the contents of his stomach all over the floor.

He didn’t know where in the hell he was. He barely even knew who the hell he was. Everything was so cloudy and murky that just thinking was a struggle. He was doing his best to clear the fog, but more and more came in to replace it.

[Phoenix Incarnate] was desperately trying to activate, but something was still preventing it. The same interference that prevented him from using his other skills. It wasn’t just that, though. Even if he could activate it, he didn’t think he’d be able to use it very well. His soul was in such a precarious state that he didn’t know if it could handle such a powerful skill at the moment.

“I’m sorry about this,” he heard a sorrowful voice say to him. But he was disoriented because he didn’t recognize the voice. He knew he should have. Something in his gut told him he should know who was speaking to him, but it took all his might not to devolve into a puddle of drool. Something in his gut also told him that he should be angry with this person, but he couldn’t remember why.

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He tried to look and see who had been talking, but when he turned his head, he didn’t see anyone. He shook his head and even gave it a few slaps to try to restart something. It didn’t work, and so he just sat on the ground, scratching his throbbing head.

Then it felt like someone smashed something over the back of his head, because he was suddenly falling to the floor, barely conscious. He tried everything to stay awake, but it was a losing battle, and soon he succumbed to sleep.

***

When he woke up, his head was still killing him. It was as if someone had taken a hammer and continuously bashed his skull in for the past ten hours. He looked around and saw that he was lying on the dirty floor.

He stayed that way, rubbing his eyes, until he finally mustered the energy to get up. His head was still pounding, but the good news was that he was starting to remember who he was after about another half-hour.

Memories started to flood back in, which only made his headache worse. However, this also meant he got some clarity on the situation. Unfortunately, this only made him angrier as time passed, as he recalled what he was doing here and what Thorik had done to him.

He didn’t see or sense Thorik anywhere. His spatial perception barely worked, though; its effective distance was restricted to almost nothing. Not only that, but his skills were still failing to activate.

The only thing that was working was his passive regeneration. Luckily for him, his passive regeneration was stronger than most people’s ordinary self-regeneration skill. It was a very slow process, but he could feel that his passive regeneration was already helping his injured soul.

On another note, he still couldn’t believe Thorik had actually done that to him. Betrayal wasn’t something new, but even when Selene had “betrayed” him, he had sort of expected it. Or was able to understand the reason behind it.

However, Thorik’s betrayal was different. He seemed very sure that waiting for Julius to recover his soul naturally would take too long. Then it came to the thing about saving his people, whom Julius assumed were more dwarves. But where was this happening at? And why were demons trying to kill them?

He knew that demons were strong; he still recalled that a replica, or rather a simulated version of the one he faced in the rift, was still one of the few people who actually gave him a hard fight. Not to mention, he wasn’t real, so who knew how much stronger the actual Savath was. But Savath also didn’t come across as absurdly cruel either. So why was Thorik so eager to get back to his people?

Did it have to do with something about the Noble Demon Houses? He had no idea what they were, but Thorik seemed convinced that they were bad news. He wondered which Noble House Savath came from, if he came from any of them at all.

Perhaps he should go and visit the Demon Continent when he has the time. He suspected it would be an interesting place.

He shook his head. He really shouldn’t be thinking about that kind of thing at the moment. He needed to be a bit more attentive to his soul. Speaking of said soul, it was barely hanging on by a few threads. It was so bad that he couldn’t even fully connect with his soul space. He was being blocked from it.

This had a few issues. For one, he wasn’t able to [Phoenix Incarnate] as he should have. This was probably one reason Thorik decided to just suck as much as possible from Julius. He didn’t want to wait for Julius’s soul to heal, so he could use [Phoenix Incarnate].

The other issue he realized was his lack of connection to his other soul-related things. His connection to Drasil and Seraphyne had fallen silent. He could tell it was still there, but the bridge connecting their souls had been temporarily blocked. That wasn’t the only issue, either. It was his access to his dimensional space. It was directly connected to his soul, so he couldn’t access it.

It wasn’t like his connection with his familiars either. He had no idea if the connection was still active. There was no way to tell, and until he could heal his soul to a suitable degree, he would need to wait.

Unfortunately, his Soul Stabilization Token was inside that dimensional space. He had a feeling that the token would have come in handy at this moment. Or maybe it was better that he didn’t have it. Who knew what effect a powerful pinnacle-grade token would have on his severely injured soul?

That being said, he also sensed that he was connected to several things. For one, Thorik had been truthful and had keyed Julius’s in the enchantments of this realm. He didn’t understand even a small fraction of what these enchantments were or how he was supposed to access them.

But he did seem to have an intuitive understanding of a few of these functions. The first one was the overall isolation barrier that kept this realm safe from outsiders. He somehow knew how to control the realm to prevent people from entering the door from the outside world. The other thing he found particularly important was the time-dilation enchantments that Thorik had briefly mentioned.

The method to control them was simple. In fact, he was surprised by the simplicity and ease. He would have thought something as complicated as time dilation would be more complex. Perhaps Thorik had done something about it, but all he really needed to do was to maneuver a small knob. If he wanted to up the time dilation, he only needed to crank the knob more.

If he wasn’t so pissed at Thorik, Julius might actually have believed the dwarf was genuinely sorry for what heʼd done to him. There was no way he could have understood this information or gained the knowledge to control these enchantments without Thorik doing something.

He took another look at the time-dilation enchantments, then inspected his soul and body. His body was in quite good shape. He didn’t have any damage except the strain on his head.

Thorik said something about his Tier 4 body not being able to handle extreme time dilation. But Julius was also a little pissed and wanted to prove the treacherous dwarf wrong, so he already planned to push it quite far.

He had no plans of staying here for half a century while his soul healed. He already had a plan. He would use time dilation so that too much time wouldn’t pass in the outside world. While this was going on, he would focus entirely on his soul’s recovery. Something he hoped wouldn’t take too long. But he had dealt with worse, and honestly, he was just glad to be alive.

He wasn’t about to be grateful to Thorik, but Julius understood that Thorik didn’t have to set him up like this. He could feel the soul array doing much of the heavy lifting in keeping his soul somewhat stable while his passive regeneration did its job.

Once his soul was healed enough to use his skills and take out that Soul Stabilization Token, he would accelerate the process.

Thorik said something about it taking him years to get better. But the man severely underestimated Julius’s stubbornness and resilience. He doubted he would take nearly as long as that.

If he was being honest, though, now that he was calming down, he wasn’t as angry as he initially was. Now he had some time for introspection.

First of all, he’d become a little too lax around Tier 6s, thinking they were too strong to bother doing anything to him. He was clearly wrong about that.

Secondly, this wasn’t exactly a terrible situation for him.

He had to remember what he’d just done. How many Tier 4s were able to achieve a third soul evolution before reaching Tier 5? It was quite telling that even he couldn’t achieve this evolution without help.

Someone like him, who had a skill set full of epic skills and two legendary skills. His soul was already strengthened by the process of his reincarnation, a huge advantage by any standard. Yet, he hadn’t been able to cross that gap until Thorik gave him that soul juice.

The fact that he was able to gain a second level to his Feat was another indicator that something rare occurred. If he were offered the chance to enter a rift that promised to evolve his soul, would he have accepted? Even if it meant he had to stay there for a year?

He already knew the answer to that. And so he couldn’t help but think that despite Thorik’s betrayal, this wasn’t exactly a terrible situation either. In fact, once he recovered, he’d be stronger than ever.

Still, once Julius finally got out of here, he was going to hunt Thorik down and wring that stupid dwarf’s neck like a dishrag after he bashed his soul to pieces. Just out of general principle and pride.

However, in the meantime, he had work to do.