Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1517  Awaken

”And in this new order,” he said, his hand moving to the saber at his side, ”not even death itself is the end.”

He drew his saber.

The crowd flinched backward. Soldiers raised weapons. A woman screamed.

Quinlan held the blade at his side and spoke a single phrase that rolled across the square like distant thunder.

”[Eternal Damnation].”

The saberʼs edge ignited with pale blue light.

Every soul he had the right to claim since the siege began had been held in suspension. He hadnʼt activated the collection. Every fallen defender, every soldier whose life had ended under his armyʼs advance, their departing essence had lingered at the edge of the saberʼs pull, uncollected, waiting.

Heʼd left them waiting on purpose.

The light erupted outward. Threads of spectral energy lanced from the saber in every direction, reaching through walls, through streets, through the rubble of collapsed barricades, finding every soul that had fallen in the siege and pulling them inward. The sky above the square darkened as hundreds of luminous threads converged on the blade, each one carrying a faint silhouette, each one screaming across the gap between death and undeath.

The saber drank them in.

Hundreds of souls compressed into the weaponʼs core, and the pale blue glow intensified until the blade itself was hard to look at.

The square had gone completely silent. Every face was upturned, every mouth open. The threads of light faded as the last soul entered the saber, and Quinlan stood on the platform holding a weapon that hummed with the captured dead of an entire cityʼs defense force.

He raised his free hand, palm up.

”[Necromantic Codex].”

A massive tome materialized above his outstretched palm, its covers bound in dark leather etched with runes that pulsed in time with the saberʼs glow. The pages fanned open on their own, rustling in a wind that didnʼt exist.

He released the saber.

It hung in the air beside the Codex, the two artifacts orbiting each other in a slow rotation, the pale blue light of the blade and the pale luminescence of the pages casting overlapping shadows across the platform. The crowd watched with the horrified fascination of people witnessing something they had no framework to understand.

Quinlan raised both hands toward the hovering artifacts.

”[Soul Fusion].”

The Codexʼs pages erupted with light as the saberʼs light turned blinding in its intensity. The pale blue flames rushed toward the Codex.

The air above the platform split as it began.

Cracks of light tore through the empty space, each one widening to reveal a silhouette forming within. The energy pouring from the saber fed into these rifts, filling the shapes with substance, with color, with form. The energy and pale fire were reshaping raw soul essence into forms that could exist in the mortal plane.

The light faded.

Quinlan caught the saber as it fell from the air, the Codex snapping shut and vanishing.

He looked out over the crowd, then raised the saber high above his head.

”[Awaken].”

The figures materialized on the platform beside him.

Blue-skinned, sharp-featured, dressed in the spectral echo of the armor theyʼd worn in life. Their eyes opened with the alert, present gaze of people waking from a deep sleep.

A woman in the garb of a western gate healer blinked and looked at her own hands. A soldier with the insignia of the city watch touched his chest where a wound should have been and found smooth blue skin. An older man in an officerʼs cloak straightened his shoulders and drew a breath he no longer needed but remembered how to take.

The crowd watched.

The soldier near the eastern edge of the square, the one who had screamed about his brother, was staring at one of the figures on the platform. His face went white.

”…Dorian?”

For a single breath, the square teetered between shock and silence.

Then it shattered.

”YOU BASTARD!” The soldier lunged forward, shoving through the crowd with his sword raised. ”Thatʼs my brother! You turned him into one of those disgusting creatures!”

The dam broke.

”My mother! Thatʼs my mother up there!” Maren screamed, pointing at the healer on the platform. ”He desecrated her body! He took her and made her into a puppet!”

”Monster! Grave robber!”

”Heʼs no different from the filthy undead!”

The fury that erupted from the crowd dwarfed everything that came before it. This was personal. Sacred. The dead were supposed to rest. The dead were supposed to return to the Goddessʼs embrace, cleansed and whole, free from the burdens of the mortal world.

And this man had dragged them back.

Velaraʼs staff cracked against the stone so hard a tile split beneath it.

”This is an abomination!” Her voice cut through the chaos, loud enough to carry across the entire square. ”You stood on this platform and swore that you would not desecrate the dead of your own people! You promised, before the Goddess and before these very civilians, that the dead of your citizens would rest in peace!”

”Arch Priestess.” Quinlanʼs voice was calm. ”When the deal was made, these people were soldiers of a hostile nation who chose to fight against me. They were my enemies. The terms were clear: the dead of my enemies serve my nation.” He tilted his head. ”I did not break our agreement.”

Velaraʼs mouth opened. Closed. Her grip on the staff shook.

The terms were the terms, and she had agreed to them, and he had followed them to the letter.

”You planned this,” she hissed.

”I planned everything, Arch Priestess. That shouldnʼt surprise you by now.”

On the platform, the soul soldiers had been watching the exchange in silence. The figures stood in a row, their eyes moving across the crowd, finding the faces they recognized, the voices they knew.

Dorian found his brother.

The soldier, Havel, was still trying to push through the crowd with his sword drawn, tears streaming down his face, screaming obscenities at Quinlan with the raw grief of a man who had just watched his dead brother be turned into a monster.

”HAVEL!”

The voice exploded across the square like a whip.

Havel froze.

Dorian stood at the edge of the platform, blue-skinned and sharp-featured, his arms folded across his chest and his face twisted with a fury that was entirely, unmistakably human.

”You dare speak to him like that?” Dorian snapped. ”I taught you to address your betters with respect! Did those lessons leave your skull the moment I died?”

Havelʼs sword arm dropped. His mouth hung open. ”D-Dorian…?”

”Donʼt you ʼDorianʼ me! I can hear you screaming from up here like a child throwing a tantrum in the market! Have you no composure?!”

The square went silent for a very different reason.

Maren was clutching her mouth with both hands, because the woman in healerʼs whites had descended from the platform and was walking toward her. A blue-skinned hand reached out and cupped her daughterʼs face, tilting it upward with the same touch sheʼd used a thousand times before, when Maren had come home crying from schoolyard fights or fallen running through the market.

”Oh, sweetheart,” the healer murmured. ”Look at the state of you.”

Maren broke.