The Sinful Young Master

Chapter 457: The malice of the dreadland depths

They had been moving for hours, Jolthar cutting through clusters of nynthralls with the quiet ease of someone who had long since stopped finding the work challenging. He was conserving his strength, using minimal energy to deal with these low-level creatures. It had been a week since he had come to the depths, but he was nowhere near his goal. Haryntha was also unable to locate the Dukes because of the malice in the depths.

She hadn’t expected the amount of thick, foul energy to penetrate so deeply, and it was keeping her magic from probing. It had been many years since she had been to the depths, and a lot had changed during that time, which she hadn’t foreseen.

Also, the mortal realm weakens her divine abilities, which was one of the reasons she had been affected easily.

Jolthar didn’t say anything about her inability to help him, and he made up for it with the warm bed she provided him during their rest intervals. She was just like him in these depths, a helpless deity.

The Depths had thrown increasingly larger groups at them as they moved deeper, as if whatever collective intelligence governed the corrupted zone was gradually escalating its response to their intrusion.

Haryntha navigated; Jolthar cleared the path. The arrangement worked with a smoothness that neither of them commented on.

Then Jolthar stopped.

Ahead, in a small depression between two formations of blackened rock that had twisted into shapes resembling melted architecture, a man was fighting. He moved with genuine skill — sword techniques that spoke of serious training and footwork that placed him correctly despite the unstable ground.

He was holding his own against a cluster of nynthralls that would have killed most warriors instantly.

But something was wrong with the way he moved. Too frantic. Too desperate. The precision of his technique was there, but underneath it was something unraveling, like watching a master musician play perfectly while screaming.

Jolthar moved forward instinctively.

Haryntha’s hand caught his arm.

“Don’t,” she said quietly.

“He’s fighting alone. He needs—”

“Look at him,” Haryntha interrupted, her voice carrying the gentleness of someone delivering news they wished they didn’t have to deliver.

“Notice the marks on his body and the way he moves.”

Jolthar looked at him, narrowing his gaze on that man.

The man’s skin, visible at his neck and hands, was traced with black veins that spread in branching patterns like lightning frozen beneath flesh. They pulsed with each heartbeat, dark and wrong, carrying something that wasn’t blood through channels that were no longer entirely human. The veins had reached his face, threading upward toward his eyes, which caught the corrupted light in ways that suggested they were no longer seeing quite the same world everyone else saw.

“The malice,” Haryntha said. “It’s a corruption material of the depths, and once it enters the body, there is nothing you can do.”

“It enters through prolonged exposure or direct contact with certain classes of nynthrall. Once it’s in the bloodstream, it begins rewriting the body’s fundamental nature, replacing what a person is with something the Depths want them to become.”

Her voice was steady but not cold. “It depends entirely on individual constitution how quickly it progresses. Strong cultivators can resist it longer. But resistance only delays the inevitable once it reaches this stage.”

“Even in the past, there were very few individuals who had withstood its full force and came out unharmed.”

“How long has he been in here?” Jolthar asked.

“Given how far the corruption has spread? Months, possibly longer. Long enough that whatever he came here for, he’s long past the point of achieving it or leaving.”

She paused, staring at that man.

“He’s not fighting those nynthralls to survive. He’s fighting because the malice hasn’t finished consuming his will yet, and the part of him that’s still human is trying to do the only thing that feels like agency. But he can’t feel pain properly anymore. He can’t feel exhaustion. He’s burning through everything he has left on a fire that the malice lit and he can no longer control.”

“Is there no way we can save him?”

She shook her head solemnly. “Once the malice has taken hold like this, there’s no turning back. He’s a lost cause.”

Jolthar watched the man fight. Watched the desperate mechanical precision of it. Watched someone spending the last currency of their humanity on violence because there was nothing else left to spend it on.

The man’s eyes swept across the depression, and for just a moment, through the black corruption threading through them, something looked back that recognized another human presence. Something that was understood. Something that was tired in a way that went beyond the body entirely.

Jolthar raised his hand.

A swift arc of chaos aura — clean, precise and merciful in its efficiency. It struck the man at the base of his skull and he dropped instantly, the frantic movement simply stopping; the terrible burning engine of corrupted will simply switched off.

The nynthralls he had been fighting scattered immediately, apparently lacking interest in a target that was no longer generating the energized desperation they had been feeding on.

Silence settled over the depression.

“He was trying to get out,” Jolthar said quietly.

“That’s what it looked like. Like he was trying to fight his way toward something.”

“They always are,” Haryntha replied.

“At that stage, the malice creates the sensation of being trapped and pursued even when nothing is chasing them. The fighting is an attempt to escape something that lives inside them.”

She looked at the still body. “You ended something that would have taken considerably longer and hurt considerably more to finish on its own.”

Jolthar nodded slowly, filing the information away with the practical grimness of someone who had learned to process difficult realities without letting them become paralysis.

They stood there; the nynthralls were spread in all directions. Jolthar’s shield, which was like a circle erected around them, stopped those creatures from attacking them.

As they were about to leave, something happened where the man was lying dead.

The dead man’s body finally went still and the creatures stopped attacking him and moved other ways and started running around aimlessly. The entire area went still except where Jolthar was present.

The corrupted wind moved through the ruined landscape with its low, unnatural howl, carrying distant shrieks from somewhere deep within the Dreadland Depths. Blackened soil twitched faintly beneath patches of malformed moss, as though the land itself suffered from restless dreams.