novelraw Chapter 577 - 576 - Engraving a Soul
Chapter 577 - 576 - Engraving a Soul
"Great Lord Frey, here are–" Glenda was carrying the other 5 Soulless but found Lind floating and glowing with his harmony around him.
She had heard the enemy was on the move but carefully set the new bodies down. Like the 5 demons, they barely breathed but a wisp of life was still in them. Four more of them were demons but the last one was not.
Glenda had been shocked as she had not seen one in living memory.
The skin was dark and crimson and he looked very young but he was undoubtedly an aether child. Where had he come from?
She recalled Lind claiming he ascended by force but the Law Binding should have kept him out. So why did it fail? Was the Law Binding weakening at last?
She pushed it aside as she laid them next to the rest on the slabs. The other prisoners were looking on in a bit of fear but said nothing.
Lind's glow extended to the other 5 instantly. She looked at him but he seemed to not be aware of her.
"All 10 are connected, huh?" She frowned at that. It showed that the same controller had sent out their Soulless too far but that seemed far fetched. How could they be so stupid?
She pushed it away as she had to prepare with the others.
[Third jade slip on my desk from the left.]
His voice suddenly entered her head and she smirked at him. She bowed and left.
"Always putting work on me!" She teased him but no response came. He was too engrossed in whatever he was trying to learn from the Soulless.
⬧⬧⬧⬧
Lind was lost in a maze of pain and suffering. Soulless was the wrong term for what was done to those people.
Their voices were so faint but he could almost hear them in the dark space he held the soul battle before.
Having reached it once, he attempted to draw in the Soulless. It worked.
In that dark place, however, he saw faint forms wailing and crying. They screamed in pain and wished for their tortured existence to end. Lind now knew Orbas was right. Death was a mercy to them, but he refused to not try and help.
If after that, they still wished to die, he would not stop them. The demons' souls were difficult for him to sense.
If a human was like a small storm of chaos, then demons were vicious blades of wind and death. Their obsession with battle might be related but it was also simply his feeling.
Beasts were across the spectrum so they were hard to classify.
The unexpected aspect was the aether child.
They were manifested beings but Lind never imagined their souls were so wonderful. It broke his heart to see something that felt so naive and innocent being trapped by the terrible formations.
The closest thing he had ever felt was a harmony!
His mind began to understand something critical to his harmony but it was not important at that moment. He would regret the chance he was missing but he focused on the aether child.
He had a goal and not even an opportunity for his cultivation would stop him.
He gently felt the connection between the last bit of the boy's soul and the thread leading off into the air. His Heaven Touch was actually far more effective for keeping the trail in his mind but it was too far to see the other end.
"Tch, frustrating." Lind spoke out loud but his floating body never wavered. He then examined how the arrays worked instead. While he was a weaver, his wife was a genius formation master.
She put him to shame in many ways but she always broke it down for him. He could not create formations to save his life but analyzing them from what he did know was not a problem.
What he saw was a violation of everything he was taught as a weaver. He also felt even more strongly it was Fiend inspired or based on the Fiend thrall technique.
Rage tried to threaten his control but he had come too far to let his control be shaken. He focused on the formation before he noticed something odd.
"Why are there no sigils?" Inscribing a body with formations was fine. It allowed a better flow of Qi and control remotely like a puppet, but a soul would need a sigil. All he found was the same brand in the dantian as always.
His eyes narrowed at that thought.
He looked at the brand and realized the formations bypassed it. Why?
He looked at the brand and suddenly realized how the Soulless would interfere with the brand! They had to bypass it!
The Soulmancers would never approve of that!
Lind did not mind his discovery but it was currently useless. He could remove the brand now but it would do nothing expect allow the Soulless to cultivate…
His eyes narrowed. He re-examined the brand and the formation before a daring plan came to mind but he frowned. If he tried this, it could be far worse than death. His soul could disperse.
Lind calculated all he could but the odds of oblivion for the aether child was too high.
He could not see any way to anchor the soul if he messed with the brand. It was actually helping keep the wisp of a soul in the body. He actually felt frustrated he knew so little about using souls in weaving at that moment.
He cursed the thought before a different thought took hold.
"I don't want to use the soul, but can I help it?" He recalled seeing the nascent elementals that used sigils to be their essence as Qi was their flesh. He suddenly had an idea that was far better!
"If I cannot remove the brand, can I overwrite it?" He was not a Heaven grade 6 weaver but the brand was not Heaven grade either. He had studied it for more than a decade but still did not understand how it was applied to the natives.
He ignored that and simply considered what he wanted to do and for the first time in a long time, he felt resistance. Normally, he would conjure an image and the lines of a sigil would form if he did not already know it.
He found that odd but then realized he was messing with things that Heaven and Earth did not like.
"I want to save them. I need to transform the brand into something I can use." Lind had felt more and more that Heaven and Earth listened to him. He wondered if Ethry felt the same way but there was no response he could tell.
He took another tack and imagined unifying the soul but still no sigil appeared. He frowned but then realized it was simply too complex for a single sigil. The process involved with the brand was one thing, but the formation of the Soulless was woven so completely it was blocking his idea.
Lind felt frustration until he had one last idea. According to Glenda, there were 10 at most to a controller so trying to separate one was the issue as well. The artifact or formation would fight him if he tried to do it one at a time.
His eyes snapped open and looked at the other prisoners in the cells. They all shivered save one. Logan was still defiant but looking at those all too still beings he felt revolted.
He had heard enough to know what had been done to those 10 people and for the first time in a long time he questioned his empire's leaders.
"Do not touch the bars." Lind's voice made them all jump but a screen snapped into place and Logan narrowed his eyes. His cultivation was sealed but he could feel that the screen was not purely defensive.
Sigils began to appear around the prone bodies but Logan quickly understood what those sigils were! What was their keeper doing?
A profound feeling descended on the room but the screen protected the prisoners. At first all were confused but then 10 faint souls emerged from all 10 at once. Sneers crossed many faces but the Perot prisoners narrowed their eyes.
The bodies were not dead! They still lived?!
Scales began to stretch over Lind's body but he did not transform. Instead, a faint dragon shape began to appear and encircle the room. Once again, the screen protected them but the faint souls had a gem like object on each of them.
"There they are. I hope this works." Lind's reptilian eyes narrowed as his fingers began to engrave directly on all 10 at once! He was not harvesting the souls, he was doing something else!
Far above the Two Rivers the sky shimmered suddenly. Across the 6 empires every Soulmancer shivered as they looked up but none knew why. Xing snapped out of her cultivation as shock flooded her body.
Something had shifted in the Law Binding!
Orbas and Levira both smiled as they felt Heaven and Earth rejoice. Humans were dull to it but beasts were far closer to them.
Lind was sweating as the brand tried to resist him but he chipped it away and all the connections to the Law Binding was removed! The brands were now true anchors but he was not done.
"RETURN!" The formations flared as they were shredded by the power of peak grade 6 weaving yet Lind's eyes narrowed. More weavings appeared and became a column of demonic and normal Qi.
No other profession could blend 2 sets of Qi but weaving could on the spiritual level.
Far away, in the slowly advancing army, Marsh sharply looked at the currently ownerless artifacts as they shattered to powder. His dark eyes narrowed but was not sure what just happened.
The shimmer in the Law Binding was far more concerning but he had a foe to fight and proceeded to move on. Suzen's Seal had seemed to cry out for a moment but it had passed.
Lind saw the flow of souls and spirit Qi as his dantian bottomed out and it all came crashing down. The weavings he was supporting dispersed safely and the screen lifted. He was covered in sweat and exhausted but he had tried.
He felt frustrated but at least they were free. He was about to down an elixir from his backup pouch when a cough drew his eye. He slowly looked up to see 10 people slowly sit up on the slabs.
The aether child's black and crimson eyes looked in awe at him and the demons followed. It was weird. He could tell the brand was still there but it simply made their soul anchored! The anchor had given them a path to follow!
"Disperse." Lind whispered a word and all 10 jumped as the brand on their dantians vanished. They still had the hardware inside them but he could fix that too. He smiled wide before collapsing.
Logan and the others looked on in shock. Some that had been loyal to their empires felt it weaken. A Soulmancer that saved people was unheard of, yet they had seen it! Silence descended on the 2 groups and none knew what would happen next.