Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1177: Requiem

The battlefield below had shifted again. The Fujimori had recovered their footing excellently. Their frontlines now moved in practiced rhythm.

Quinlan, watching from his aura farming position with a gorgeous babe in his hands, looked on with quiet interest as his soul soldiers crashed against that living wall.

When he had sent the first wave in, the Fujimori lost nearly three hundred in the opening exchange. But by the end, they collected themselves. Now, the enemy cut through his troops more efficiently. He doubted they would reach even two hundred kills before being extinguished.

But he didn’t mind.

The lesser souls that formed the ranks of his army of the damned were valuable only up to a point. He needed level fifty and above souls to rank his elites to the next stage, to Rank 5. Anything lower merely served as fuel for getting them to Rank 4.

As such, Quinlan did not feel it was a waste to use them up.

Especially because, in a sense, letting them die was maintenance.

He watched a spectral soldier be impaled through the chest, followed by its light fading to nothing. Another was eliminated right after. Each one returned, in theory, to the Goddess of Thalorind, Lilyanna. She was the rightful custodian of Thalorind’s souls, tasked with ensuring the world continued functioning as intended.

For that to happen, she needed a healthy soul ecosystem, where the souls of the dead returned to her so she could recycle them, giving way to new life being born.

But, well...

Quinlan’s lips curved into a sly smirk.

The Goddess might throw a hissy fit after this one.

Quinlan desired to see her reaction to what he was about to do very badly.

He lifted his hand and spoke the command.

”[Soul Requiem].”

—

[Soul Requiem]

”Even spent souls still serve.”

Souls used in [March of the Damned] are now semi-reusable.

When minions die or their duration ends, they have a 30% chance to return as unstable echoes that rejoin the Soul Vault.

Unstable echoes may be stabilized by channeling mana.

—

The air shifted.

A low sound rolled across the field, at first mistaken for the wind. But then it grew, layering on itself as hundreds of voices were blended into one long, aching note.

The fallen souls that had begun their journey to the Goddess’s domain twisted in their paths. The ghostly glimmers of blue - only visible to Quinlan’s eyes - that had been rising to the skies stopped in their tracks, then began to sink back down.

They screamed as they were pulled from their destination, dragged against the current of the afterlife itself.

It was not a song of peace. It was a requiem.

The kind of sound that made mortal hearts tighten without knowing why.

Below, the Fujimori soldiers began to hesitate. They couldn’t see what was happening, but they could feel it. The hairs on their necks stood up. A chill pressed against their spines, especially when they saw Quinlan’s Soul Reaper, hovering next to the man, lit up with brilliant blue flames, shining brightly.

A chuckle escaped him as he angled his neck and looked high into the skies. ”Don’t smite me down, alright?”

His lovers and allies, who knew what was going on, looked at the man incredibly dryly. To them all, the Goddess was everything divine. From their birth up until they got to know him, she was Almighty. Bigger than life.

But now... Their own lover/boss was chatting the Goddess up, knowing that likely she was watching, angrily, in this very moment.

Captain Rynne’s head snapped toward the eerie sound of his spell being cast. The note was unlike anything she had ever heard. A long, mournful vibration that clung to her ears even after silence returned.

”What... was that?” she muttered, turning to where Quinlan sat in the air.

The man was cross-legged, as calm as if he were meditating. The air bent around him, a quiet sign of the mana gathering beneath his skin. All this while, his eyes remained focused, tracking the battlefield below.

She didn’t need to ask twice. She’d learned by now: when something strange happened, this man was involved.

”... What did you do?” she called up, forced to angle her neck to look at him.

Quinlan’s lips curled. ”We might be on the same side, Captain, but I’m not an open book. A little mystery keeps a partnership healthy.”

Rynne exhaled through her nose. ”Of course it does.”

Then her eyes darkened. ’This guy shows quite the attitude... Wait, now that I think about it, he even dared to tell me to bleed for his harem back then!’

The woman grimaced as the realization struck. ’And I listened...’

He gave her a lazy smile and turned back to his work.

The Soul Reaper floated beside him, its blade suspended upright, burning with cold blue fire. The Necromantic Codex hovered to his other side with pages fluttering without wind and text shifting across them like living ink. It was keeping track of Quinlan’s soul reserves, noting his many losses but also the kills he secured.

Quinlan reached forward and pressed his palm against the flaming sword.

The fire licked up his fingers without leaving a mark. He was not hurt by the touch.

Quinlan’s fingers pressed deeper into the blue flame until his hand disappeared past the blade’s surface. The weapon shuddered, making the onlookers note that it looked akin to something that was alive but didn’t want to give up what it held.

He narrowed his eyes and began to pull.

The resistance was tangible. But as it turned out, it was not the Soul Reaper that resisted him; it was his target.

His arms tensed as a dark, sluggish substance clung to his grip, refusing to separate. It dragged back against him, stretching and trembling before snapping forward in uneven jerks.

Thin strands of shadow clung to his hands, twisting and knotting around his wrist, but he managed to draw the last of it free.

That was when it formed into a thick blob, built of condensed shadows and faint lights. It was ugly; half-transparent, flickering.

Inside it, vague shapes writhed and split apart, screaming in muffled silence. These were the unstable echoes: fragments of souls caught between being and unbeing.

He pulled the mass into his palm. It felt heavy, incredibly so, because it was resisting, fighting to stay undone.

Quinlan drew a slow breath, straightened his posture, and set both hands around the blob. The air dimmed as his mana began to flow.

A pulse of pressure spread out from him. The Soul Reaper’s flames bent, feeding the dark sphere, while lines of script from the Codex spiraled around it like a binding circle. The orb thrashed once, twice, before quieting.

Then came the hard part.

Purification was costly. It demanded that his mana replace the decay within the soul, strand by strand, until what was left could return to stability. Every second drew a chunk of his reserves away.

Quinlan glanced briefly at his status window only to see that his mana bar was already dropping far faster than expected.

’What a greedy blob...’ he complained, but did not stop.

His breathing slowed. His back straightened further. A shimmer of energy formed around him, the calm, cyclical rhythm of the cultivation state he’d unlocked after the Zhenwu trial. The mana that flowed out of him now began to loop back, drawing from the air, feeding itself.

The synergy clicked into place.