Death Performer

Joshua's suggestion worked. In the end, the Bone Duke readily accepted Joshua's request, turning Joshua and his companions from rude intruders who had barged into his territory into honored guests who had traveled a great distance to attend his concert.

But from a human perspective, the live experience of this concert... was a little hair-raising.

The Bone Duke had a performance hall in his castle dedicated specifically to playing music. It contained everything from pianos to violins, fully capable of hosting a grand classical music concert.

Some of the musicians playing those instruments were skeletons, while the others were rotting corpses with scraps of flesh still hanging from their bodies.

Their attire resembled that of nineteenth-century Victorian Era British gentlemen, and it made them appear quite elegant when they picked up their instruments.

The only flaw was that they had a little too little flesh on their bodies. Bare skeletons could hardly be described with words like elegant or gentlemanly, let alone those rotting corpses whose eyeballs had fallen onto the floor.

The Bone Duke was not the conductor of this unusual orchestra. He was the pianist for this performance!

His long, excessively pale fingers struck the piano, and a string of bizarre melodies flowed forth, officially beginning this classical concert held by the undead.

"What's going on..."

Ciri did not understand how to appreciate classical music. She only felt a bone-deep chill when those notes entered her ears, making her shiver. She had no choice but to hug her own arms.

Just moments ago, she had stood in a snow-covered forest wearing these clothes without feeling the slightest bit cold. Yet these strange notes made her feel as if she had been thrown beneath a sheet of ice.

Worse still, in the dim lake beneath that ice, an unknown water monster seemed to be staring intently at her!

The sensation made Ciri shudder.

"Hugging yourself won't help. Try imagining things like the sun or flames," Joshua told Ciri.

"How am I supposed to imagine anything pleasant while listening to this performance?!"

Ciri's complaint also voiced Joshua's true thoughts.

From the very beginning, Joshua had noticed that this performance was fundamentally different from anything he had heard before.

The Bone Duke's performance was not an ordinary concert. The notes flowing from the Bone Duke's piano were not perceived by Joshua through hearing alone. His sense of touch, sight, taste, and other senses all understood what those notes were trying to convey...

Coldness. Silence. The loneliness of drifting beneath a frozen lake, so cold it made one feel as though they were suffocating.

It felt as though frost had formed over Joshua's skin, while icy lake water flooded into his mouth.

Magic capable of affecting the mind?

When the piece ended, Joshua finally snapped out of that piercing cold. He discovered that white frost had formed on his hands, and his body temperature had dropped to an alarming level.

This was far more than a simple mental influence! Joshua wiped the frost from his arm, and the cold breath he exhaled turned into white mist.

If the Bone Duke had continued playing, the listeners' body temperatures might have fallen directly into hypothermia. Their lives could even have been taken!

Death Singer? For some reason, that phrase surfaced in Joshua's mind.

Joshua, as a chaos demon, could still endure it, but Ciri was in far worse condition.

Her lips had begun to turn pale, and frost had appeared on her long eyelashes. She looked as if she had been walking for hours through a harsh environment more than ten degrees below zero.

Joshua immediately took off his coat and draped it over Ciri.

"Y-you... your clothes... are wet!"

Ciri's trembling voice was nearly tearful, but if her tears fell, they might freeze into icicles.

Joshua took Ciri's hand and found it as cold as ice.

At this rate... Ciri would die from hypothermia!

It seemed that appreciating the Bone Duke's performance was not as simple as buying a ticket. If one was not strong enough, one had to pay with one's life for admission.

"You cannot even make it through one piece? Human bodies truly are so weak that they cannot withstand a single blow."

The Bone Duke noticed Ciri's weakened condition and stopped playing the piano. The frost gathered on the tips of his bony fingers fell away.

The moment the music stopped, the symptoms of hypothermia in Joshua's body eased somewhat.

At that moment, Joshua clapped with his already frozen hands. It was not because the performance had been particularly outstanding, but simply the most basic courtesy expected of an audience member.

Hearing Joshua's applause, the Bone Duke's expression improved slightly... no, not his expression. The soul fire swaying within his eye sockets became a little steadier.

"Duke, your performance truly is extraordinary. Listening to it felt as though I were there in person..."

More than there in person. If he had kept playing, Joshua would have frozen to death.

Joshua had experienced, through this performance, the virtual sensory experience that countless game designers on Earth had hoped to achieve.

"But Duke, not only humans—perhaps most people in the Demon Realm would be unable to appreciate your performance through to the end."

Joshua could swear that if the Bone Duke went to the capital and performed the same piece, more than half of the capital's residents would freeze into ice statues.

"They lack the ability."

The Bone Duke was every bit the arrogant classical musician... He did not believe there was anything wrong with his performance. It was simply that those ignorant, weak fools lacked the ability to appreciate it.

"Indeed, they lack the ability to appreciate your performance, Duke. But... don't you think you yourself are shivering a little from the cold?"

Joshua first acknowledged that the Bone Duke's performance sounded quite good.

The piece itself had a quiet, cold, lonely quality. If it were used as music in a horror game, it would definitely be the sort of track that enhanced the game's overall atmosphere.

Joshua had always believed that music itself had no distinction between sounding good or bad. Aside from certain noises, every kind of music had people who appreciated it. Just as some liked classical music and kept their distance from electronic music, while others liked pop music but had little interest in traditional folk songs.

No one could rank different genres of music as good or bad. Anyone who tried was simply arrogant!

Whether something sounded good or not was a matter of personal perception.

If the Bone Duke's performance had not been too "real"—so real that Joshua wanted to listen while hugging a heater—he would certainly have stayed until the end.

It was not only Ciri and Joshua who had been affected. Even the performer himself had been affected.

For instance, the Bone Duke's fingers were already covered in frost, forcing him to move his fingers to remove it.

"That is an effect necessary for the performance."

The Bone Duke did not deny Joshua's claim.