The Dagger

Chapter 46

The instant he stepped into the royal palace, it felt as though he had crossed from the black night of eternal sleep into a false, radiant day.

A gentle breeze drifted in, carrying faint fragrances of rosemary, sage, hyacinths, and wisps of incense smoke, along with the aroma of fine fruit wine permeating the garden. Vines as green as jade adorned layer upon layer of pure white gauze curtains, deep purple roses blooming among them in pleasing disarray. It was like a hanging garden, a paradise upon earth.

Walking amid this beauty, Mors's bloodstained black cloth and robes seemed utterly out of place. He did not slow his pace. With every step, more filthy blood and fragments of flesh slipped from his robes, dragging a trail of blood across the garden path.

After a brief thought, he drove the heavy blade in his hand into the ground. The sword tip dragged onward, slicing through the exquisite creamy-white pebbles as though tearing open a painting. Layer upon layer of blazing fire ignited and refused to die, violently shattering the intoxicating harmony of the place.

A soft, girlish chuckle came from afar. Mors tapped the sword hilt with one finger, making the flames burn brighter as he continued deeper into the palace.

His mind was highly focused, extending beyond the transformed palace and spreading across the planet's surface, constantly monitoring the overall situation.

When he saw Peturabo's army reorganize after the ambush and swiftly decide to press the attack, he paused briefly before invisibly channeling more marks of power through the hidden sigil he had previously left on the child's shoulder, delivering temporary support and marking him.

As he ventured deeper into the palace, Mors ignored the countless sounds of laughter. The crackling roar of the flames replaced all the decadent music.

Only one thing deserved his particular attention: all along the way, he had encountered no resistance whatsoever. Not even symbolic emissaries of pain or phantoms of feeble daemonettes had appeared.

The Prince of Pleasure had exhausted every means of expressing an endless welcome for Mors's arrival.

Or rather, he could not wait to use a more direct method to consume Mors's soul, along with the vessel intimately fused with it.

Mors cleaved open the enormous doors of the royal inner court, which were covered in lavish reliefs, and threw the sack containing Prince Harkon inside first.

There were more people present—or rather, more things—than he had expected.

The one seated upon the throne should have been Dameks. His aged head lay in the center of the floor, while his body sprawled over the armrest of a couch, a golden scepter passing through him from top to bottom.

Upon seeing Dameks, Mors determined that he had, by a remarkable coincidence, arrived seven to ten minutes too late.

Since the usurper was already dead, there was no need to spare Prince Harkon. A flash of light, swift as lightning and cold as frost, passed by, and Harkon died.

He did not turn around. Within his sensory range, dense spiderwebs had climbed across the shattered doors.

Every layer of web was delicately embroidered with different geometric patterns. Viewed separately, they were alluring enough to seize the mind; layered one over another, they wove a complicated design of spatial confusion, a dazzling display of beauty.

The longer he observed them, the more the bloody taste on his tongue transformed into sweet, delectable nectar.

The entire space began to sway rhythmically, making everything rock from side to side. More ornaments fell to the floor.

Behind the overlapping webs, multicolored light surged across the surface of a vast ocean like drops of oil falling into water, creating the sensory illusion that those in the room were adrift in a small boat amid the waves.

That was no longer a path of retreat.

The sword blade scraped across the ground, its tip pointing toward two unknown, twisted creatures beside the couch.

A string of runes flowed from the sword tip, traveling over the smooth, damp, skin-like floor paved with snow-white marble, crossing several distorted corpses made of crimson curtains and withered flowers, passing over the unevenness caused by scattered gold and silver ornaments that could no longer be identified, and cutting into the creatures' skin.

Like separating the peel from the flesh of a ripe fruit, amid the creatures' miserable howls, every mutation in their outer layers fell away. Serpent scales, wings, and all manner of proliferating, twisted limbs were forcibly sliced off by the runes and crushed against the soft, warped floor.

Whether the transformation within them had stopped or not, ignoring the muscles that continuously seeped fragrant pink blood, they at least looked somewhat human now.

The spell became golden spikes, piercing and pinning down the remaining hands and feet on the two things.

Then Mors silently used the sword tip to dissect the chaotic, filthy shells that formed the creatures.

He heard the calls of the two things, and he understood them.

But he would not answer.

If there had been a creature here that had truly fallen to the path of pleasure, it would surely have drawn endless delight from the first creature's anguished cries.

Its pain was utterly real, enough to make the heart of any feeling being ache as though cut by a blade. Every sob began with a despairing apology and ended with an indistinct plea.

"It's all my fault, Mors... I shouldn't have listened to her... my ignorance... this isn't what I wanted..."

Mors patiently cut open its skin. Direct contact with the power of the Lord of Pleasure had completely altered its internal structure. All he could see was a mass of flowing chaos, ceaselessly churning like seawater.

The thing beside it laughed shrilly. "I killed him! Are you angry... thing of nothingness? Did you foresee this fate? Hee hee, I told my brother Harkon too. I told him he should act, and if he failed to betray them, he would drown in wine..."

A bottle of aged wine that had been sitting on a square table fell to the floor as the space swayed. Scarlet wine spilled everywhere, soaking into Prince Harkon's shattered limbs.

In an unnoticed corner of the room, a bird statue representing Isis, god of vultures, fell from its stand, its feathers gleaming a glass-like deep blue.

An overpoweringly sweet fragrance, so thick it made breathing impossible, rapidly spread from the fallen wine bottle.

Mors stopped breathing. More spells emerged from beneath the black cloth.

He cut away the second layer of that unnamable thing. The seawater-like contents flowed out completely, leaving behind an unknown gelatinous substance.

"I finished that painting. You were right, it's beautiful..." the thing said. "I didn't have time to finish your model. Back then, I could no longer hold a pen... Mors, Mors, Mors..."

It called Mors's name again and again, perhaps trying to grasp the last straw that could stabilize his mind amid the boundless waves.

"Mors, can you tell me... how are they? My family... my citizens... and your child..."

Mors crouched down, laying the longsword across his knees as his hand wrapped in black cloth reached deep into the gelatin.

"I... Mors, can you answer me..." The creature's voice became increasingly indistinct.

After waiting a long time without receiving an answer, its pinned limbs trembled once, resisting the instinctive struggle for survival.

"I understand... I'm sorry. Kill me..."

The other thing cackled, its infinite delight raising its pitch. "How wonderful, no answer! Look what you've done! How painful! Cruz's brother, falling into a fate of suffering alongside Cruz! Fate, change... You won't answer him, so he thinks every disaster was caused by him, my dear brother. He doesn't even dare to beg..."

By the end, the thing suddenly shed violet-blue tears.

Mors yanked sharply with his hand and drew out a slender, exquisite golden needle, carved in the shape of a dagger, between two fingers.

At the dagger's edge seemed to lie a mysterious opening, around which endless corruptive radiance lingered.

If an ordinary mortal had been present at that moment, even if he neither looked, listened, nor smelled, avoiding all sensory stimulation, the density of chaos here would have been enough to make him learn how to play chess with his own blood in an instant.

Mors threw out his longsword, casually pinning the other chattering thing dead. Then he pulled back the sword and sat down on the ground.

Runes circled his fingertips as he focused on sealing the source of contamination in his hand. At the same time, the power distributed around the outskirts of the royal palace began cleansing and burning inward layer by layer, destroying every trace of surreal corruption.

Killing daemons was always the easiest part of the entire process.

Barring any surprises, once the contamination here had been completely purified, the crisis would end.

At that exact moment, the smell of rust mingled with blood erupted hundreds of miles away. The rune beacon Mors had placed on Peturabo urgently sounded its warning.

After swiftly weighing the costs and benefits, he sent part of his power toward his apprentice. The price was that the veil of reality around him suddenly rippled from the imbalance of energy.

The six sources of contamination that had previously been completely isolated abruptly shattered, their presence intertwining with the three important corpses already here. The entire scene shook violently as if struck by a hurricane upon the ocean, every object tumbling and shifting.

A long string of shrill, high-pitched laughter exploded beside his ears, while the cloying scent surged at the same time.

Mors drove all five fingers into the marble to anchor himself. At the instant the longsword fell from his embrace, the golden dagger happened to stab into his palm.

The last thing he had time to do was complete the runes on the longsword.