The Mad Prince slowly withdrew his hand.
His cold, cracked fingers broke contact with the shadow’s pale cheek, leaving behind a faint, lingering whisper of dark essence.
The shadow of Torment remained perfectly motionless on the surface of the black water, her silver-ashen hair drifting in the dead air of his soul sea, her dark ribbon hiding the empty sockets beneath.
She did not flinch.
She did not draw breath.
She merely stood there, an invincible, hollow doll forged from three hundred fragments of his own Transcendent essence.
The Mad Prince stepped back, his obsidian eyes drifting upward toward the shimmering tapestry of violet runes suspended in the dark sky above his soul sea.
As he watched, the runes began to shift.
The dark, abyssal light bled outward, rearranging the glowing lines into new, intricate patterns.
The Nightmare Spell, having recognized the successful conversion of the Echo into a true Shadow, was updating the parameters of her existence.
A new line of text materialized beneath her attributes, burning with a cold, terrifying clarity:
[Ability: Memory Master]
Ability Description:
[The oracle’s gaze, though veiled in shadow, pierces the deepest sanctuaries of the mind. By locking eyes with a target or forcing them to stare into the lightless void beneath her blindfold the Shadow can enter the target’s soul sea and manipulate their mental weave. She is capable of reading, altering, overwriting, or completely erasing their memories at the master’s command.]
The Mad Prince stood in the absolute silence of his soul sea, staring at the description for a long, suspended moment.
Then, his shoulders began to tremble.
It started as a low, dry vibration in his chest—a sound so soft it was almost drowned out by the lightless expanse of his mind.
But slowly, inevitably, the vibration bubbled up into a sharp, rasping chuckle.
The chuckle escalated, swelling into a loud, unhinged laugh that echoed across the dark waters, bouncing off the silent legion of millions of dead shadows.
“Ha… ha ha ha!”
It was not a cold, sardonic laugh born of malice.
It was a sound of pure, unadulterated, childlike joy.
It was the exact expression of a cruel child who had just been handed his absolute favorite toy—a toy capable of tearing the wings off every fly in the garden.
A manic, terrifying smile carved itself across his pale face, pulling his skin taut over his cheekbones.
‘Memory Master…’
His mind, a flawless engine of tactical calculation and ancient madness, instantly mapped out the glorious, game-changing implications of the ability.
In every previous iteration of the loop—in every bloody, catastrophic attempt to navigate the paradoxes of the Tomb of Ariel—there had been one specific barrier that had consistently proved to be a nightmarish, agonizing ordeal.
The Dread Lord.
Kai.
Or rather, the terrifying, dragon-like abomination he had become after giving himself over to the Defilement.
In life, Kai’s Aspect was built around trust, perception, and the compelling power of his voice.
But when elevated to the rank of a Corrupted Transcendent—and eventually a Corrupted Titan—that voice had mutated into something apocalyptic.
The Dread Lord possessed the Dragon’s Command: a vocal authority so absolute, so heavy with corrupted weight, that a single spoken word from his throat could force an entire army of Awakened to tear out their own hearts.
And he is my master.
After helping me kill Nephis, he invoked my True Name and bound me as his slave.
In their previous encounters, when the Mad Prince had fought the Dread Lord high above the clouds of Verge, the battle had always devolved into a bloody nightmare of psychological warfare. Visit NovelPing for the full chapter.
Kai knew his face.
Kai knew his history.
And if the Dread Lord ever managed to speak his True Name—or issue an absolute command during the chaos of combat—the Mad Prince’s own body would lock up, forced into compliance by the weight of the Dragon’s Voice.
He had been forced to fight with his ears severed, his mind shielded by layers of dark essence, constantly calculating ways to strike before the dragon could speak.
But now?
The Mad Prince looked at the quiet, blindfolded shadow standing before him.
The equation had been violently rewritten.
He no longer needed to engage in a desperate battle of attrition against the Dread Lord.
He did not need to worry about the Dragon’s Voice or the threat of his True Name being weaponized against him.
With Torment at his side, he held the ultimate trump card.
The moment the battle began, he could deploy her.
While he held the Dread Lord’s physical attention, Torment’s [Near Sight] would allow her to evade every dragon-fire strike effortlessly.
And the second Kai’s eyes locked onto her blindfold—or the second she breached his mental defenses—she could activate [Memory Master].
She could reach directly into the Dread Lord’s corrupted mind and rip out every memory of Sunless.
She could erase his knowledge of the True Name.
She could strip away his tactical awareness, delete his memories of his Aspect abilities, or completely rewrite his perception of who was friend and who was foe.
She could reduce the mighty dragon-emperor of Verge to a hollow, clueless beast before he even realized a fight had begun.
‘I hold the ace of cards now,’ the Mad Prince thought, his obsidian eyes dancing with a lightless, predatory delight.
‘No one in this accursed Nightmare is capable of defeating me now.
Not the dragon.
Not the butcher.
Not the beast.’
He looked at the shadow of Torment one last time.
Her pale, flawless face remained completely blank, waiting for his will to direct her.
“Rest now, Torment,” the Mad Prince whispered, his voice dropping into a soft, terrifying purr.
“I will play with you later.”
With a slight flick of his wrist, he dismissed her.
The shadow of the blind oracle bowed her head in absolute, silent submission, before dissolving into a cloud of midnight mist, settling peacefully into the dark ocean of his soul sea among the millions of other dead trophies.
SWOOSH.
The Mad Prince’s consciousness snapped back into his physical vessel.
His eyes opened to the blinding, radiant light of the seven suns hanging above the Great River.
The warm, ash-laden wind whipped his raven hair across his pale forehead.
He was standing on the deck of the Chain Breaker.
At his feet, the physical remains of Torment were already gone.
The dark, bifurcated halves of the Corrupted Terror had completely decayed, leaving behind only vast, dark stains of dried, corrupted blood marring the sacred wood of the ship.
The ship drifted silently downstream, its golden sails fluttering uselessly in the dead breeze.
The Mad Prince turned slowly, stepping over the blood-stained planks as he walked toward the bow of the vessel.
He rested his pale, clawed hands against the wooden railing, staring down the wide, shimmering expanse of the Great River.
The time for waiting was over.
The paradox was severed.
The boy was dead.
The oracle was his Shadow.
He possessed the full, unbridled power of a Transcendent Titan, unchained from the leashes of his past self and the Changing Star.
His objective was simple: clear the Third Nightmare as fast as possible.
Break the Tomb of Ariel, tear down the temporal walls of this accursed prison, and walk out into the waking world as his own sovereign master.
To clear a Nightmare of this magnitude, the Spell required the resolution of its core trial.
In the context of the Tomb of Ariel, that meant eradicating the source of the Defilement that choked the currents of time—which meant the absolute, merciless extermination of every single Plague wandering the river.
He needed to hunt them down, one by one, and butcher them all.
The Mad Prince closed his eyes, his mind rapidly mapping out the remaining targets on the board.
He began to tally the lives he had already claimed, and the lives that were still waiting for his blade.
‘First…
Sunless.’
‘Second…
Nephis.’
‘Third…
Torment.’
Torment.
Ripped apart on this very deck, her eyes harvested, her soul converted into his loyal Shadow.
Dead.
The Mad Prince opened his eyes, his obsidian pupils narrowing as he counted the remaining members of the cohort—the Corrupted monstrosities that had once been his closest companions.
‘Who remains?’
He ran through the list of the Plagues, evaluating their locations and threat levels with cold, clinical detachment.
Soul Stealer,Mordret,Undying Slaughter, Jet,Devouring Beast, Effie,Dread Lord and Kai
The Mad Prince’s lips curled into a cold, satisfied line.
Four Plagues left.
Total eight targets to slaughter before the path to the Estuary would be completely cleared.
With his seven Titan cores, and the newly acquired abilities of Torment, exterminating them was no longer a question of if, but when.
It was merely a matter of logistics and hunting them down in the correct order.
He raised his hand, preparing to channel his essence into the Chain Breaker to force the ship to accelerate downstream toward the domain of Undying Slaughter.
And then…
his hand froze mid-air.