Sunny tried to speak.
He opened his mouth, prepared to scream, to curse, to demand answers from the suffocating void.
He felt the phantom sensation of a jaw unhinging, the memory of a tongue and teeth—but no sound came out.
There was no air to push through nonexistent vocal cords.
There were no lungs to fill.
‘Right…’
The thought was slow, sluggish, dragging itself through the absolute pitch of the dark realm like a dying insect.
‘Why can’t I sense anything?’
He was not blind, yet he possessed no eyes.
He was not deaf, yet there was nothing to hear.
He was trapped in a state of pure, terrifying sensory deprivation, reduced to a singular, agonizing point of awareness.
He was a shadow.
Just a shadow, standing in a boundless ocean of absolute black.
All around him, standing in perfect, unbroken silence, were thousands of other shadows.
They were arranged in an infinite, spiraling legion.
As Sunny’s incorporeal perception swept over them, a profound, chilling realization slowly seeped into his fracturing mind.
He recognized this place.
It was a soul sea.
His soul sea.
Or rather, the soul sea of the monster that wore his face.
He looked at the silent figures surrounding him.
Some of the shadows were intimately familiar.t.
But for every shadow he knew, there were a hundred he did not.
There were towering leviathans of the deep, twisted horrors of the Void, and colossal abominations whose very geometries made his spiritual core ache.
These were the kills he did not remember.
The centuries of slaughter committed by a version of himself that had long since abandoned his humanity.
The Mad Prince’s trophies.
Sunny tried to hold onto his mind.
He tried to remember the blinding light of the waking world, the smell of rain, the bitter taste of synthetic nutrient paste.
But he was not his mind anymore.
The memories were bleeding out of him, dissolving into the endless dark.
He could no longer determine the flow of time.
A second felt like a millennium; a millennium felt like a single, fleeting heartbeat.
The very concept of ‘Sunny’ was unraveling, thread by thread, consumed by the absolute authority of the entity that had cast him down.
The remaining fragment of consciousness, the stubborn little spark that had allowed him to think, to fear, to rebel…
began to fade away.
Slowly, the panic subsided into a cold, hollow tranquility.
The phantom sensation of having a mouth, of having a body, vanished entirely.
Just like that, the shadow of Sunless ceased its struggling.
It stood perfectly still among the endless ranks of the dead, blending into the silent legion without a single sound, trapped forever in the soul sea of the Mad Prince.
High above, standing on the scorched, soot-stained carapace of the dead leviathan, the Mad Prince tilted his head and closed his eyes.
He felt a tiny, almost imperceptible ripple in his soul sea.
A new shadow had settled into its rightful place among the thousands.
The paradox was fully severed.
The boy was gone.
A cruel, dry smile touched his pale lips.
For the first time since he had been swallowed by the Defilement, the voice of the Nightmare Spell had returned to him.
With a simple exertion of will, he called upon the Spell.
Instantly, a shimmering tapestry of runes materialized in the air before him.
They did not glow with the familiar, pure silver light that Sunny had known.
These runes burned with a dark, abyssal violet hue, dripping with the heavy, sickening weight of Corruption.
The Mad Prince saw his runes.
And the Spell saw him.
Name: Mad Prince.
True Name: Lost from Light.
Rank: Transcendent.
Class: Titan.
Shadow Cores: [7/7].
Shadow Fragments: [7000/7000].
Memories: [Morgan’s War Bow], [Silver Bell], [Extraordinary Rock], [Covetous Coffer], [Spring Tunic], [Autumn Leaf], [Distant Spark], [Memory of Fire], [Endless Spring], [Cruel Sight], [Sin of Solace], [Midnight Shard], [Puppeteer’s Shroud], [Starlight Shroud], [Moonlight Shard], [Silent Dagger], [Weaver’s Mask], [Shadow Lantern].
Echoes: None.
Shadows: None.
Master: None.
Attributes: [Fated], [Master of Shadows], [Onyx Shell], [Blood Weave], [Bone Weave], [Soul Weave].
Aspect: [Shadow Slave].
Aspect Rank: Divine.
Innate Ability: [Shadow Bond].
Aspect Abilities: [Shadow Control], [Shadow Step], [Shadow Manifestation].
Aspect Legacy: [Shadow Dance].
Mastery Level: [5/7].
The Mad Prince stared at the shimmering violet runes for a long time, his obsidian eyes reflecting the dark light.
He read the first line and chuckled.
The sound was low, rasping, and utterly devoid of warmth.
“Name: Mad Prince.”
Even the Spell, the cold, impartial arbiter of reality, had accepted his madness as his absolute identity.
Sunless was truly dead.
There was only the Prince now.
His eyes trailed down the list.
Rank: Transcendent.
Class: Titan.
It was an interesting classification.
As a Corrupted entity, his true strength transcended the standard metrics of the Spell.
He held the power, the density, and the domain of a Supreme Titan.
But to the Nightmare Spell, a Challenger inside the Tomb of Ariel could only be judged by the parameters of their progression.
He was a master who had forced his way to the pinnacle of the transcendent class.
The Mad Prince’s gaze lingered on a specific, damning line of the runes.
Shadows: none .
A dark, amused hum vibrated in his chest.
The boy, Sunless, would have wept blood if he understood what that single word meant.
They were dead.
To achieve the impossible—to gorge his shadow cores with enough essence to evolve into a Titan while trapped in the endless, maddening loops of the Great River—the Mad Prince had done the unthinkable.
When the Defilement first took root in his mind, he had not nurtured his Shadows.
He had killed Saint.
He had butchered Fiend.
He had shattered Nightmare and Soul Serpent .
One by one, he had slaughtered his own loyal companions, absorbing their divine shadow fragments directly into his own soul to forcibly birth his final cores.
The figures that he commanded now were nothing more than empty husks.
Shadows: none.
Yes, that was accurate.
He had no Shadows left.
He was the shadow.
The Mad Prince shifted his gaze further down the violet tapestry, inspecting his Attributes.
Fated, Master of Shadows, Onyx Shell, Blood Weave, Bone Weave, Soul Weave…
His smile widened, pulling the pale skin of his face taut.
Something was missing.
The [Flame of Divinity] attribute was gone.
The Mad Prince threw his head back and let out a genuine, unhinged laugh.
The sound echoed over the endless expanse of the Great River, dark and triumphant.
The Flame of Divinity was a remnant of the Divinity.
It was a spark of pure, unyielding light that had resided within his soul—a spark intimately tied to Nephis, to the Changing Star, to the warmth he had foolishly craved.
But Corruption and Divinity could not share the same vessel.
When he gave himself over to the Defilement, the dark waters of the river had violently extinguished that stubborn little flame.and his soul steeped in absolute darkness, the last remaining shackle to his humanity had evaporated.
He was no longer a child of light and shadow.
He was purely, utterly, a creature of the dark.
The Mad Prince waved a pale, clawed hand, and the violet runes shattered into a cloud of dark sparks, dissolving into the wind.
He had reclaimed his place in the Nightmare.
He possessed the power of a Titan.
He had no master.
But the trial was not over.
To break the Tomb of Ariel, to tear down the walls of this accursed temporal prison and escape into the waking world, he needed to clear the Nightmare without any unforeseen complications.
He was not the only anomaly wandering the Great River.
The Plagues.
The other Defiled members of his former cohort.
Most of them were mindless beasts, easily manipulated or destroyed.
But one of them posed a genuine threat to his grand design.
The blind oracle.
Cassie.
Or rather, the grotesque, corrupted spider she had become in the future.
Torment.
Her webs spanned across the currents of time.
Even in her Defiled state, her ability to see the future and manipulate the board was a dangerous variable.
Furthermore, the present version of Cassie—the fragile, uncorrupted girl who was currently wandering the river, charting her naive little plans—had to be dealt with before she could glimpse his true intentions.
He had to rip out the oracle’s eyes once and for all.
Both versions of her.
The Mad Prince turned his gaze toward the distant horizon, where the crimson dusk met the lilac dawn.
His obsidian eyes narrowed, glowing with a cold, absolute malice.
“Cassie,” he whispered, the name tasting like ash on his tongue.
He chuckled, the dark sound vibrating through the scorched air of the island-beast.
“That Torment bitch…”