Stygian Mage

Upon hearing Soren’s command, the Zombies and the Skeleton jumped towards the tied up girls. The girls screamed as hard as they could and started thrashing around while still tied up with all their strengths, trying to fight against the undeads.

But alas…. they were not strong enough. The two Zombies and the Skeleton Soldier easily overpowered them and began their fulfilling the command they were given. The Skeleton Soldier went around the girls and used its bony hands to hold them down in one place. There were two Zombies remaining and there were two girls. The division was perfect as each Zombie got one girl.

Everything was good except for the loud screams of the girls, which made Soren a little apprehensive. If they kept shouting like that, it could attract anything to their position, and that would not be good for him. So Soren gave another order to his undeads which they followed to a tee. Before feasting on the soft meat of the girls, the Zombies shoved one of their hands inside their mouth and grabbed their tongue hard. This action completely rendered the girls ‘speechless’ and made the surroundings suddenly go silent.

After finishing that, the Zombies finally started their feast. Soren had given the order to eat them—slowly, and the Zombies tried their best to follow just that. The girls were held down tightly by the Skeleton as the Zombies first sank their rotten teeth in the girl’s legs. They slowly bit and chewed the flesh, muscle, and skin from the girl’s legs.

The loud screams of the girls were completely muffled by both the Zombie’s hands but it still fell lightly on Soren’s ears. The girls felt a tremendous amount of pain and mostly, they felt despair. Because they knew—this was just the beginning.

….

The Zombies slowly started moving upwards after making a mess of their food that they were eating just now. Both the girl’s legs were completely unrecognizable now and all that was left was some mangled flesh and minced meat, covered in blood.

The girls had lost too much blood and were barely able to keep themselves conscious but they were still trying to struggle.

“MMPPHH!!!”

“MMMPPHH!!”

Whatever they wanted to say became a garbled mess in the end. The pain and despair in their voice were more than obvious but it went unnoticed. Soren disregarded whatever they were feeling as he watched the scene without averting his eyes.

…

The Zombies had now torn apart both the girl’s sternum and Soren could easily see their barely beating red heart through all that mangled flesh and blood. There was only red in his vision. All he saw was blood and blood and more blood. His eyes never faltered as he kept looking at the last flicker of life that was left in these girls.

As the Zombies started their dinner on the upper body of the girls, the last bit of life they had, left them.

Soren had thought before that he would feel excitement or pleasure after watching them suffer like this, but what he was actually feeling was complete indifference; indifference in regards of what was happening in front of his eyes. Instead, different unrelated thoughts kept coming into his mind. One of them was about the Vestige situation while other was about the antidote of the poison in his body. He also thought about what had happened before with the change in his mindset. It was a very weird and a new feeling for him. He understood that as he was before, he still would have had no problem killing someone. But now, it felt more like he had no restraint in terms of morality or emotion. He understood that there could be things far worse than just killing someone, and he had a feeling that he would have no problem doing any of that for achieving his purpose. It was just a feeling for now so he didn’t completely understand himself what he was capable of.

In regards to the situation in front of him, he didn’t think about if he had gone overboard with this or not. Inside that indifference, he felt a weird satisfaction. He was fully aware that his fate someday might be even worse than this, and he was ready to accept that. But that didn’t mean that he would just roll over and die. He would fight for his life no matter how ugly the situation became in the future, but he was not stupid enough to believe that he was someone special; that he would somehow be spared from everything due to some miracle.

Actions had their consequences. Soren knew that very well by now. He believed that the one performing those actions should be ready to deal with it. He had already prepared himself when he made the choice of killing those two girls in a cruel manner.

……….

Soren looked upon the bloody scene with all these thoughts going through his head. But he quickly shook them off as he didn’t have time for thinking about these things right now.

The sun had already slept and right now, it was the moon’s turn to have the sky as its playground.

Soren was already strong enough now to survive the night of the jungle alone. His ‘Powered Vision’, which had developed together with him, had brought him the same advantage as any night predator. But he was still feeling weak as the effect of the drug or poison was still there. He had just kept himself awake till now by using the Soul shock. But that was not going to work for very long.

…

He sat down on the ground as he spread the things the girls had in front of him. There were many things in their bag but what surprised Soren the most was that they had dozens of money pouches with them. There were also many things that didn’t seem to fit together.

Soren looked at all the things in front of him and realized something, something that seemed very obvious after looking at how the girls acted: He was not their first target. They had already robbed, and most probably killed, several people before aiming for him. He shook his head at that revelation and decided to just focus on the things in front of him. There was another thing he realized from this situation: Robbing a thief was sure to bring a big haul. He laughed delightedly upon the thought of gathering so many Mana Crystals without much effort.

No, that was not right. He did make effort as he survived the encounter and came on top of it.

The first thing he did was to find the antidote for the drug they had given him. He still didn’t know how they had given him the drug though. He never ate any food that was touched by them, never drank water that came near them nor did he ever come in direct contact with them. But the most important thing right now was to find the antidote as he could feel the drug effect coming back. It might not be a deadly poison according to them but he wasn’t going to take their word for it. They might or might not have lied to him about that and he wasn’t willing to take the risk.

Fortunately, there were not many medicines and drugs in their bag. He only found two things in there resembling a drug. One was a small glass bottle with white powder inside while another was also a bottle of glass but with transparent liquid in it. He had no idea which one was the antidote though. He then looked around to see if he could find any animal to test them upon. But given that it was already night time, all the small animals had gone to sleep and the only ones still roaming the jungle were the night Beasts, which Soren wanted to avoid right now as he was still not cured.

He finally released a sigh upon not finding any test subject. He couldn’t test it on his undeads as they were already ‘dead’. So, the only option he had left was to test both the drugs on his own body.

Isaac, can you check if the drug is harmful to the human body or not?

“There’s not enough data to make a distinction, Master. The only way it’s possible to do that is to ingest the drug and then to check if it’s harmful to your body or not.”

Isaac could only check if any item is harmful to Soren or not based on the data that he already had. Before, he could only confirm that the ‘Draconic Blood’ was not harmful to Soren based on the data of the biology that Soren had gathered during his experiments and research for ‘Create Undead’. But for this situation, Isaac had little to no data regarding drugs and antidotes.

Soren thought about it for a few minutes. As time passed, the symptoms of the drug came back slowly. He didn’t have much time now so he just made a decision to gamble—but carefully.

Isaac, can you make a confirmation about the drug even if the ingested quantity is very less?

“Yes, Master. If the drug does any kind of damage to your body, regardless of the amount, I can figure it out.”

Ok then. I’ll leave it to you…

There was one more thing supporting his chances in the gamble: There were only two medicines in their bags. One of them had to be the antidote and the other one, the drug that they gave him. His bet was also based on the fact that he had already been given the ‘poison’, so even if he did ingest the wrong one, it wouldn’t do much damage and at most would only increase the effects that he was already suffering from.

…

Soren took a long breath and first decided to ingest the transparent liquid. He opened the bottle and very carefully, drank a few small drops out of it.

“Starting manual scanning process….Scan in process…”

“Checking for any sign of change in the body…”

“.……”

“…….”

Soren suddenly felt a little nauseated after taking the medicine. He felt like the whole world started spinning and soon he couldn’t support himself as he lay down flat on the ground. The only thought going through his mind was: Fuck!! It was the wrong one.

He gritted his teeth hard and then forced himself up. He then opened another bottle, one with the white powder, and took it out on his hand….

“Master, the liquid was the antidote. What you are feeling right now is the side effect of the antidote.”

Soren suddenly stopped what he was doing and threw the powder away.

Are you sure? I don’t feel any better though.

“You will. It will take some time as the antidote is destroying the poison inside your body.”

Ok…if you say so.

Soren put down the bottle in his hand and closed his eyes as he was starting to feel dizzy with the whole world spinning in front of him like that. Even with his eyes closed, he could feel that black world spinning and spinning, making him want to vomit.

But it didn’t take long and as Isaac had said, the effect slowly started to fade and Soren started to feel much better.

GRRR!!

He wasn’t given much time to rest though as a beast growled at him from the dense trees, slowly coming towards him.

In the silence of the night, the crackling woods were very loud as the bonfire kept burning. The beast slowly walked towards Soren with its shadow casting a huge monster on the ground. It was a black wolf. It looked very similar to any normal wolf with the only difference being that it was huge, around 2.5 meters in height, and its eyes were shining with a green light. Soren knew that there were many types of the same beast in this world. This one belonged to the Wolf race and was called ‘Shadow Wolf’.

Soren stood up with the support of the cliff wall to face the beast as it got closer. He had already taken out his Grimoire and his undeads were already in position to fight for him.

GRRR!! Howl!!

Suddenly, the beast growled and then howled weakly. Its steps became a little unstable and it stumbled forward. Finally, it couldn’t keep itself standing and fell down on the ground with a weak growling voice. Soren was quite stubbed upon seeing this scene. Then suddenly, his eyes went towards something, something that he had totally ignored and could have very well been the source of the ‘poison’.

He looked towards the still burning bonfire and quickly backed off a few steps, getting away from it. It was the bonfire, that the girls had started, that contained the poison. He had thought, with his minimal experience, that they would add something to his food or drink, but it turned out to be the fucking bonfire. A string of curses went out of Soren’s mouth as this realization came upon him.

Most probably, they had already taken the antidote. That’s why it didn’t affect them and only Soren suffered from the impact. No, now the beast had joined him in his misery. Soren had nothing he could say at this point, other than the fact that he was still totally inexperienced; he still had many things to learn.

………

Soren killed the beast with his knife and ended its misery very soon. He had already ingested the antidote so the smoke was not affecting him anymore but he was still careful. He extinguished the fire and then threw some water on the still smoking wood. He waited for the smoke from the added water to fade and then only he got closer.

He then released his Stygian Grimoire and started using ‘Devour’. The Mana released by the girls after their death was still there and it mixed together with the beast that had just died. The dense white mist surged and flew towards the black book floating in front of Soren. The book absorbed the dense white mist and then released the black mist that surrounded Soren, finally permeating into his body.

Soren’s CP started rising—90%

91%

92%

It became slightly faster as his speed of absorbing the black mist increased, but soon, it slowed down. As he kept absorbing, the Mana kept becoming sparse and sparse and finally, everything was absorbed into his body in the form of black mist. His CP stopped at 95%. He was very close to breaking through to the next Layer now. He just needed one little push and he would be able to advance one more step.

Soren then took out the Beast Core using his knife from the beast’s skull. He could tell that the beast was Rank 0: Layer-7 without even scanning it, just with the size of its Mana Core. He had already hunted a few beasts before meeting the girls and had gathered a few Beast Cores. The total amount of Beast Cores he had right now was 16. Few of them still had their Mana intact as he had used his ‘Dead Rising’ to seal them.

………

He still hadn’t checked all the things that he had gotten from the girl's bags. So, he sat down there and started to organize ‘his’stuff. Most of the things were useless for him but some of it he could still use while others, he could sell. There were also around 4000 Low-Grade Mana Crystals in those money pouches. He put them all in his own backpack and then moved on to other stuff. He ignored the weapons they had on them because he didn’t want to carry all that extra weight with him for nothing, as they wouldn’t sell for much anyway.

The next thing he found was a Cultivation Technique book. Soren couldn’t exactly determine its quality and grade but after reading it, he guessed that it might be a middle-grade one.

……….

Cultivation Techniques, in general, were not divided in any category. Any single technique could be used by both the Warriors and the Spell Casters, without any problem. But it didn’t mean that all the Cultivation Techniques were the same. There were many kinds of techniques and more new techniques were being developed every day.

Some Cultivation Techniques were specially made for Warriors as they focused more on physical stats while some were made especially for Spell Casters which focused more on the stats related to spells. Some techniques focused on some specific stat development, some gave their user a unique skill. Majority of the techniques, that were sold, allowed the user to fully control their stat development; as the former Cultivation Techniques were fairly uncommon and expensive.

The Cultivation Techniques that focused more on any particular stat or stats might seem worse than the one that gave its user full control over their stat development, but it was not so. Most people actually preferred the former kind instead of the latter when they had to choose a Cultivation Technique. The reason behind it was such: The latter one relied on the Initiator to use the method provided in the Cultivation Technique and distribute the Quintessence to the stat nodes that they planned to develop. This kind of free control was good, but sometimes it did more harm.

During a breakthrough, Initiators could easily make a mistake in using the method and then they would miss the stat node that they had planned for, screwing up their development plan. Some Initiators, who didn’t have enough knowledge, could also choose to distribute the Quintessence equally in every stat node and make themselves a good for nothing all-rounder.

Focused Cultivation Technique, on the other hand, created a focused and a more guaranteed path for any Initiator. They just had to choose the path that they wanted to follow and then, they could use a focused Cultivation Technique that would take them forward on that path. This restricted their freedom but most people were willing to depend completely on the Cultivation Technique rather than make any mistake and screw up the development plan of their path.

….

It was also not possible to focus only on the stats that they wanted to develop and forget about everything else. Even with a focused Cultivation Technique, the ‘Quintessence’ released during a breakthrough would disperse a little when being added to the Core Matrix; that dispersed ‘Quintessence’ would then get absorbed by all the stat nodes. The dispersed amount was also not random, though. This was because, regardless of the technique, only a certain percentage of the ‘Quintessence’ could be controlled when being added to the Core Matrix. The rest would just disperse and then get absorbed by all the stat nodes.

After that, the controlled percentage of Quintessence could be added to any stat node; depending on the Initiator’s choice or the focused Cultivation Technique.

…

Soren was lucky that he had Isaac to control the ‘Quintessence’ during his breakthrough. Isaac could control the ‘Quintessence’ perfectly without any mistakes and then add it to the stat nodes that Soren wanted to develop. Of course, even Isaac could only control a certain percentage of the ‘Quintessence’ and the rest would just disperse and get absorbed by all the stat nodes; this fact was the same for everyone.

The combination of Soren’s ‘Devour’ Bloodline Talent and Isaac had created a setting for him that resembled a really high-quality Cultivation Technique. It gave Soren the freedom to choose his own path and stat nodes while guaranteeing the development of his chosen stat because of Isaac’s perfect control over the ‘Quintessence’.