Unedited*

The messages from the headless spirit were repeated twice, and the same went for the weeping spirit. At the end, there was one telling him that he had killed a Ritualist Wandering Spirit and that it had given him 500 Experience Points.

With a trace of bewilderment in his eyes, Edward studied each message closely.

At the end, there was even another one, an even more shocking one:

[Total Experience Points: 15,400/15,617]

His fire beast was about to reach level 30.

’It wasn’t an illusion...’ He swallowed hard.

Although he couldn’t understand exactly what it had been, it didn’t seem to be a simple illusion.

He shook his head to clear his mind of nonsense and returned to the present. He was on the verge of leveling up, so he felt a little excited.

He looked at Malakor and smiled. "I understand. What happened was that I was mentally attacked, but it’s nothing serious." He replied after gathering his thoughts.

Although Malakor watched him closely, he eventually nodded. "We should start collecting these death shards. Right now they aren’t much help, but in the future, in battles against Corrupted Sanguines, they’ll be very useful."

Malakor approached the surrounding bones and very carefully began searching for death shards.

Edward watched him pick up the fragments and skip over some. Not because they were bad, simply because he hadn’t seen them.

So he approached him and began collecting as well, but with greater skill.

-

"You have very good eyesight," Malakor said, surprised that Edward could see more fragments than he could.

Edward was more surprised by something else... Every time he picked up one of those fragments for the first time, he saw a vision of these beings in life. The only problem was that the vision was very confusing and happened too quickly. He couldn’t quite make out what he was seeing.

The two of them continued on the long road ahead.

No one bothered them for many hours. When night fell again, the faint light coming from the distant reflection off the rocks disappeared, and the darkness was total.

"Can you walk at night?" Edward asked, confused.

"What makes you think I couldn’t?"

"Last night I saw you suffering like never before," Edward recalled.

Malakor laughed. "Well, I’ll be able to control it. Yesterday I did more damage than necessary to keep myself in great pain today. The pain caused by the wounds I inflicted on myself will help me mitigate the pain of the curse."

"I didn’t know it worked that way."

Malakor shrugged. "These are tricks you learn when you’ve been walking with pain for over 100 years. And if I can’t stand it, then I’ll just have to take out my stress on this place. The spirits won’t matter at that point."

Edward shook his head. He felt like he was walking around with a time bomb that was bound to explode at any moment.

’Well, whatever. It’s the only option I have.’

At midnight, the pain in Malakor’s body began to grow more and more intense.

However, the Archbishop’s willpower and his desire to control his pain kept him walking without stopping. Although his pace slowed, he still didn’t stop.

His eyes were bloodshot, and blood occasionally oozed from his body.

’What a dangerous curse,’ he thought.

They hadn’t been attacked at all along the way. "I hope it stays that way..." he thought.

Almost at that very moment, he realized he’d made a mistake.

Whenever he thought that way, the very thing he wanted to avoid would happen.

And as if the world were mocking him, he immediately sensed the presence of several of those same spirits.

Suddenly, he was, once again, in an illusion. Although it was different from the first time.

’I can’t stay in this illusion for too long. Malakor can’t attack much in that state.’ Edward practically let go of all the weight on his shoulder and stared intently at the spirits in the darkness.

A faint smile played on his lips. "You made the mistake of showing me all your cards last time and of coming at a moment of urgency this time... You will pay for it." He smiled slightly and his body shot toward one of the spirits.

The ritualist.

He was so fast that the female spirit hadn’t even had time to let out a scream before he had already decapitated his enemy.

With the ritualist out of the way, Edward was able to avoid the attack coming from the female spirit simply by controlling his mind to perfection. When he was focused, there was no way he could fail.

This spirit wasn’t powerful enough to make him fail at such a simple mission.

As he dodged the attack, Edward was able to run up close to the female spirit and decapitated her with bold, ferocious movements.

With no one to stop him, he was able to focus on the two headless, armed spirits coming toward him. They looked desperate.

"Of course they are... your strategy failed." Edward leaped toward the one in the lead and struck him.

CLANK!

The sword struck the rusty blade and split it in half. Edward executed an exquisite footwork maneuver that carried him to the other side of the spirit’s body, slicing through much of the left half of his enemy.

Simultaneously, he swung his sword forward to block the incoming attack from the other spirit.

CLANK!

This blow wasn’t from a sword—it was from a giant axe. It was rusty and filled with cursed energy that had corroded its heavy features, but it still struck hard.

The wandering spirit on the other side had unusually long legs and a sturdy torso. It was a spirit reminiscent of a great warrior. It wasn’t like the others.

With his feet firmly planted on the ground after absorbing the impact, Edward slid his sword through the spirit’s rusty axe and delivered a firm blow to its shoulder, severing it from its body. The attack continued downward until it had completely cut the spirit in half.

With such damage, the spirit shattered.

But just then, the death fragments he had been watching for a while—scattered throughout the area—began to vibrate.

"Huh?" Edward suddenly saw a large number of death fragments shooting toward him from all directions.

No one had thrown them. They simply moved in succession, as if something magical were launching them.

There were no other spirits nearby, so it couldn’t be a spirit.

Edward tensed for a moment, until he remembered where he was.

And he remembered the power his eyes possessed.

"Fragments of Death..." Edward stared at them, one by one. He realized he had to do something more to shatter the illusion.

Before, it had been broken because he died; now he had to find its root cause.

And the answer had to be among this pile of fragments of death flying toward him. Perhaps they were fake, since it was an illusion, but he didn’t want to risk there being a spirit hidden in a place impossible to see, waiting for him to think that.

So instead of thinking it was an illusion and that it wouldn’t harm him, he decided to find a way out without having to die. Mainly because Malakor was in this illusion, but he wasn’t moving, and the difference between the illusion and reality was hard to tell.

However, what should he do to break this illusion without dying?

The shards of death flew past him, but he managed to dodge them just in time. They flew in a straight line as if they were going to crash into the walls and debris, but just before they did, they changed direction and found their way back toward Edward.

"They’re peculiar," he nodded.

The answer must lie in the death shards.

’Each death shard carries a story corroded by cursed energy... Often, this story is vague precisely because of that,’ he thought.

’Maybe I need to find a story?’ he thought.

Before, he had needed to touch the shard to see its story, but touching these shards would be difficult while moving, and if he did, it would divert them from their path and they might crash and explode. He didn’t think that would be a good idea.

So he had to look for alternatives... with his eyes.

He fixed his gaze on them, and his eyes glinted faintly. At the same time, an almost perfect line of sight was drawn between his eyes and one of the fragments, connecting with it.

The mystical sensation that was transmitted to him... was brimming with cursed energy. The curse clouded his eyes for an instant.

Edward had to look away, knowing that it was corrupted and would not provide him with any information. He had to look for another one.

The problem was that doing so while dodging fragments and, on top of that, trying to memorize which fragment he had seen a moment earlier to avoid looking at it, was too difficult a challenge.

However, he had no other choice.

Dodging and observing, he quickly found a peculiar fragment.

In it, a tall, muscular man swung an axe in what appeared to be a great war. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

The giant trees, the cities laid out almost in a straight line, and the towering mountains evoked a sense of antiquity and glory.

A great battle was raging there...

The world had succumbed to chaos, and he was the warrior who would defend it.

Suddenly, in the vision, a black cloud settled over the entire region, like a cursed blight threatening to swallow everything. This black cloud seemed to have eyes. It was a cloud, but it seemed to have a mouth.

It was black, but... it couldn’t be looked at directly.

The vision ended.

Edward froze.