Ohsen Ruwena was furiously writing in his notebook as he watched his test test subject silently squirming while hanging from the Chains of Silence currently attached to the ceiling. They were keeping the human man he had lured from the International District in pce above the ritual circle on the stone floor. While a more conventional gag was keeping the subject quiet, not that anyone would hear the man’s screams down here; he just hated noise.

  It was a rather advanced diagram for being Sapphire Caste, and he found himself wishing the blood moon had begun sooner so he would have had more Monster Seeds by now. He had been able to cultivate his Caste much faster since the surplus of Seeds began with the increased spawning the blood moon blessed them with. Emerald felt so close yet so far. He knew that if he wanted to pull off his ultimate pn, then he would need to be able to cast the Emerald version of this ritual.

  He left the Reality Rift to his wife, while his true passion y in amassing others’ power as his own. The Soul Cages the Reapers had brought to this world had been such a boon to his work, and he was closer to figuring out the best way to reach his current goal. He just needed to upgrade his Caste and then upgrade the items he could now reproduce.

  Despite the Renseres forces they were currently working with assuring them that the Soul Reapers would accept them all into the fold, they hadn’t passed on any knowledge about these wonderful devices to him. Instead, he had to reverse engineer it all from the handful that had been initially collected by various Adventurers and Hunters, which had then been passed along to the OOM for further study.

  The nobleman lifted the item up again, the sleek bck hand forming a spindly cage around nothing currently. He modified this particur one to be more in tune with human souls, and he would confirm its efficiency momentarily.

  Ohsen stroked one of the long fingers, and the device opened as though to grab something. He purposely walked over to the restrained man, careful not to disturb the ritual circle, and expined, “Now, this should only take a few minutes and be extremely painful, but afterward, you won’t feel anything, so please bear with it.”

  As he pced the palm of the Soul Cage over the man’s sternum, he touched a rune on the back of it. The device snapped down, puncturing the human’s flesh and tching on to its new potential host. The man tried to scream through the gag and struggled in vain.

  Ohsen retraced his steps and then activated the complex ritual. His mana got siphoned into the circle, and he spoke the incantation in a nguage he barely understood. It seemed to work better than the transted version, and he hypothesized there were some key concepts he wasn’t quite transting properly to make the magic work as intended.

  Once the ritual began taking effect, he retreated to his table and downed a mana potion before beginning to take notes once more. He wrote down everything he observed and timed the stages as the bck hand first dug into the man’s flesh. It then seemed to meld with the human, sinking into the skin like a half-merged Familiar. Bck veins began to appear across the tan skin, spreading out from the source of the Soul Cage as it began to cim its new body.

  He frowned as the subject began coughing, and blood dribbled from the man’s mouth. That wasn’t a good sign. Then, blood began leaking from the eyes and ears. Also, not a positive symptom. When the blood turned bck, and the man stopped screaming or moving at all, the Magi gave a frustrated groan and banged his forehead against the table.

  “Another failure…” he muttered, then dragged himself up to go study what exactly went wrong this time.

  After a few minutes of making notes in his journal and running a wand around the quickly cooling corpse, the door to his workshop opened, and a feminine voice filled the once-pleasant silence, “Hey Uncle Ohsen, the Fraser– woah, what happened to that guy?”

  He didn’t gnce up at Arktis as he finished his current test and answered in annoyance, “Extreme mana poisoning. This is simir to what happens if a Mundane ate an Emerald Mana Bit.”

  “Yikes. Now I get why my mum got so mad when I tried to eat a Sapphire one as a kid, thinking it would make me super strong,” she said warily, eyeing the body that had begun leaking bck blood from its pores now, “That is seriously messed up…”

  “Is there a reason you’re here disturbing my research, Arktis?” he asked, cutting off any further tangents.

  “Ah, right. The Fraser girl is alive,” his niece answered, still distracted by the wet corpse.

  Ohsen almost snapped his pen as he stared at her and stated, “How? You said you saw her lifeless body fall into the sea. Were you lying?”

  Arktis turned her attention back to him finally and crossed her arms, “I wouldn’t be here telling you then. I know she was dead. Her weird aura vanished, and I saw her body turn to dust under the water. She was dead.”

  “That’s not possible,” he stated ftly.

  “I’m telling you what I saw! Unless she’s really, really good at faking it, that girl was dead.”

  “People don’t just come back to life,” the Magi continued in frustration, “Many powerful Casters throughout history have been chasing the power of resurrection for millennia. Coming back to life as you once were is simply not possible. Dead is dead.”

  “Well, she’s different then,” the assassin said with a shrug, “She wasn’t human. Maybe it’s a species thing? I didn’t recognize what she was. Whatever it is, she was dead, and now she’s not, so what are we going to do? I don’t want that Emerald Padin coming after me next if she tells him who I am.”

  “How would she know?” the lord asked in confusion as he made another note in his book about the subject’s skin beginning to liquefy and slide off the muscle; definitely severe mana poisoning.

  “Because when I tried to pull her aside and ask how in the abyss she was walking around and breathing, her party member recognized me and told her my name,” she grumbled, crossing her arms defensively, “It’s not like I normally have to hide my identity.”

  Ohsen sighed in annoyance and sat in his chair, staring at the ceiling in thought. The wet sound of the subject slipping free of the chains to slump into a wet mess on the floor brought his attention back as he wrote down the symptoms and time.

  “That is super gross, Uncle.”

  “Well, if you don’t want to end up as a puddle either, then we need to make sure that Fraser doesn’t talk,” he snapped. Then a marvelous idea came to mind, “Actually, that’s exactly what we’ll do. How stealthy can you be?”

  She gave him an incredulous look, “I’m a Stone Juggernaut. I don’t do stealth.”

  “Fine, I’ll take care of getting her here myself, but you had best be here to assist.”

  Arktis gnced at the pile of goo and asked, “When?”

  “Find out her schedule,” he ordered, “The next time she goes to sleep will be her st moment of rest.”

  Dazien was frustrated as he made his way through the inner city that he had been frequenting more and more often tely. Most of his memories were of life confined to the temple district as an underage orphan. At sixteen, he had been ecstatic to join Uriel in the International District, where he didn’t stand out quite so much, and the rent was cheaper.

  While he had always talked about becoming a noble and eventually founding his own kingdom, he never really imagined roaming the noble district within the inner city of Tulimeir so frequently. Not that it mattered when his friend was getting threatened by the hired thug of a noble house.

  When he found the residence he had been searching for, never really wanting to visit the woman who clung to him like the frost on the walls from the Quicksteam, he hesitated only a moment before knocking.

  “Yes?” a cinderen man asked as he answered the door, then gnced him over before saying, “Sorry, we’ve already got a perfectly working magiduster.”

  “Seriously?” Dazien asked incredulously, then looked himself over, taking in his simple yet clean bck tunic with gold trim and grey pants tucked into bck boots that could probably use a little more polish, but it’s not like anybody really noticed other people’s feet, right?

  “I’m looking for Noble Murinah,” he added quickly before the staff member could shut the door in his face, “Is she home?”

  The staff gave him a pitiful look and said, “Young man, give up your pining.”

  “No, I’m not– Why does everyone think that’s all I’m after?” he asked in frustration before expining, “I just want to talk to her about her cousin, Arktis, coming after my friend.”

  The cinderen narrowed his eyes as he stated a bit more bitterly, “The young nobles do not deal with Miss Arktis, and even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to help you.”

  “Look, I promise you that she’ll want to see me if you just tell her that I’m–”

  “Noble Murinah died almost three weeks ago, young man. Now leave before I call for the city guard,” the man snapped and smmed the door shut with finality.

  It took him a moment to process the news as he ran a hand through his amethyst hair, which was getting much longer than he normally let it grow. His mind was racing with what might have happened, and pieces started clicking together.

  Phoenix being constantly on edge and running away for a week. Paul asking him to agree with going on a long road mission that would keep them out of the city. Murinah dying while they were gone. Arktis threatening Phoenix, who had looked so scared when he had found her clinging to his partner.

  It was all beginning to form a picture that he was worried would mean more danger for his friend from an enemy he couldn’t face alone.

  The door opened again, and he wondered if the staff member was going to actually chase him off when he found himself face to face with Arktis Neired. She looked him up and down, then gave a sneer, “Come to beg for scraps, orphan king?”

  His eyes narrowed, and he said as calmly as he could, “I came to tell you to stay away from Phoenix.”

  She ughed, “Oh, that’s rich. A Crystal trying to order around a Sapphire. Did they not teach you basic rules in that pitiful temple?”

  “They taught me to protect my friends, and I won’t idly stand by while you torment one of them,” he retorted.

  “How… noble,” she commented, then asked, “It’s getting rather te; don’t you need to sleep before pying with the other orphans in the morning?”

  “I’m an Adventurer,” he firmly stated, “Most of our missions are at night during the blood moon, so we sleep in the morning. You would know that if you were honorable yourself and actually helped protect the city instead of terrorizing its people.”

  “Yes, yes, I’m a terrible person who will never measure up to the righteous Adventurers who hold back the monster hordes to protect the innocent. I’ve heard the sales pitch before, and I much prefer enemies with fewer teeth and cws. Not to mention the smells those monsters can spawn with, gross,” the henchman waved her hand dismissively through the air as she moved to pass him.

  “Hey, I’m not done,” he began saying, but she turned and smmed her aura into his, catching him off guard and making him take a step back.

  “Yes, you are, orphan king,” she said ftly, “Learn the Rule of Caste and go back to the temple full of sniveling children where you belong. Don’t cross my path again, or I will not be so noble.”

  She pulled back her aura, and Dazien felt like he could breathe again. He gred but remained silent while she walked away.

  He abruptly turned and made his way towards the only person who could answer the many questions he had to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle before him. Dazien only hoped the woman from another world wouldn’t run away from him again.