< < Player Leaderboard > >
< Adam (MVP) — 43967 Points >
< Závislost — 40717 Points >
< Luo Zihao — 14967 Points >
< Sofia Olivares — Deceased >
< Aeran — Deceased >
Even though he had never earned so many points all at once before, Adam was filled with anger when he returned to Interim Island. It had given him the credit for two player kills.
“Why did I get the bonus for Sofia’s death!?” he roared at the cube.
[Since you contributed the most to Player Sofia Olivares’ death, you were deed to be her killer.]
The revelation was like a punch to the stomach and Adam gasped for air, struggling to breathe.
“How…?”
[You utilised your blood magic to infect her body from within with tainted blood.]
Adam clenched his fists so hard that the bones in his left hand cracked and snapped.
[You are hurting yourself. While Interim Island recovers your lost Health, it is inadvisable to use your own powers to damage your body.]
“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up.”
Adam stomped up to the altar in the front of him and placed his broken hand on it, ignoring the MVP chest. The bones were already starting to repair themselves. Above the altar the two fragnts of the Godstone hovered, one last piece missing.
< < Now Entering > >
< The Rotten Core >
His feet imdiately sank down into the floor. All of his clothes, his backpack, and collected relics were gone and he was naked. He thought for a mont that it was akin to when he activated the altar in stage five, but he was not back to his original self. He could still feel his power, and he looked like a bloodfiend, not to ntion, he retained his glass hand.
THUMP-THUMP.
The room tensed and squeezed itself inward, pushing Adam up a little bit.
It’s a muscle of so kind.
He looked around, his eyes slowly adjusting to the gloom.
The floor and walls were made of smooth muscle, and he was in a tunnel of sorts.
Blood should be pumping through here, he thought, realising he was inside a heart.
A wet slobbering scream rolled through the tunnel and Adam knew to follow it. He had a good idea about what the Flayed Lady wanted to show him.
Since walking was slow, given that each step sank down into the floor and it shifted intermittently, Adam lifted his body and floated through the tunnel. It curved around strangely, nothing like the anatomy of any heart he was familiar with.
Then suddenly he erged into a large hall. Narrow and tall spikes of crimson glass sprouted from the floor, reaching high into the air. Each of them was adorned with a red humanoid shape. Their blood ran down the transparent glass spikes and was consud the mont it touched the floor. The eyes and mouths were untouched, but the noses and ears were gone, removed from their bodies along with their skin.
All of them were screaming silently, their mouths agape but no sound coming out. It reminded him of the large rose tree he’d witnessed in the Garden of Thorns.
These must be the bloodfiends I killed.
Two figures stood at the front, their bodies in the process of being flayed, and before them stood a tall and handso woman. These two were unmistakeably the Patriarch and Matriarch, and while the female bloodfiend endured her torture, the Patriarch was screaming in agony, his voice a wet rasp.
His tongue is gone, Adam realised.
The Patriarch’s face had been unzipped from his head and hung limply below his neck. His original appearance might have been beautiful, like all of the bloodfiends.
For a few seconds, Adam didn’t register that the tall woman undertaking the flaying was his patron, because she looked nothing like when he’d seen her before. The reason was that she looked human, because skin covered her body. It was as though he was glimpsing her true visage, the person she had been before ascending to beco an Absolute, although she was taller than any human he’d encountered.
She was bald and two elf-like ears poked out from the sides of her head. Her eyes were hazel-brown, and her skin was pale-beige. She was naked like her two victims, and her figure was lithe and thin like a ballet dancer. On her face was a hideous grin which pulled the skin of her cheeks high, and the way she furrowed her hairless brow created creases on her forehead and the corners of her eyes.
Adam had at first thought she looked similar to the elphin queen, but now she reminded him more of the statue of the first light’s angel, the one that had been inside the reliquary of Father Mathias’ church.
She turned her head to Adam, and for so reason she scared him more now than ever. While staring at him, she ran the long nail of her index finger down the side of the Matriarch’s torso, the already loose skin releasing with ease. The bloodfiend gasped.
“I left her the use of her tongue, but she refuses to scream for ,” the Flayed Lady said while staring Adam in the eyes. She pulled her fingernail free and took a simple step towards the Patriarch, poking her finger into the skin below his neck, slowly unzipping him further.
He imdiately started to scream, the sound inhuman and terrified, like a wounded animal crying out in the woods as it died, begging the world to acknowledge its fleeting existence.
“This one will not stop once he gets going,” the Flayed Lady said and laughed.
“I completed your quest,” Adam said.
“So you did!” she replied excitedly, running her nail from the Patriarch’s shoulder to his wrist in a single move. The scream that followed made the air shake.
“I truly enjoyed your performance,” the Absolute remarked, and Adam couldn’t help but feel proud, despite inwardly despising her. “My favourite was of course the thief. Those who steal my power without even bothering to offer in my na, they deserve the worst fate.”
Adam felt bad for condemning Cienna to the sa fate as the other bloodfiends, but he hadn’t felt like he had a choice if he wanted to see stage nine. He had even been prepared to kill Kat to accomplish his goal.
The Flayed Lady rapidly sliced the sides of each of the Patriarch’s fingers before finishing unsleeving the rest of the arm. Then she took a step to put her on his right side where she repeated the motions. He howled, but it was to no avail. Given the way his body was pierced through by the glass spike, there was no conceivable way for him to fight back, and it was clear that the Flayed Lady was controlling the blood and flesh of everyone who she pierced, since none of them could move anything except their faces.
“What is my reward?” he asked.
“It will co, once I am done. You may join
in this work. If you can make her scream, I shall reward you well.”
Adam didn’t hesitate and went over to stand next to his patron where the Matriarch was speared through. He shaped a floating blade with blood, flesh, and bone, inserting it into her flank where the Flayed Lady had stopped.
“You do not comprehend the evils that are to co,” the Matriarch told Adam. It was either a warning about his worship or a promise about next ti they’d et, though he doubted the latter, since she shouldn’t be aware of his looping power.
“Remove her left eye first,” the Flayed Lady said.
Adam obeyed and used his knife to pull it out, being ssy on purpose in an attempt to elicit a reaction from the bloodfiend.
She didn’t make a single sound, even as he yanked it free of her wet face and crushed it in his hand.
“Sloppy work will not suffice,” the Absolute scolded him. “To maximise pain, you must resonate your power with their blood to amplify what they feel.”
Adam wanted to say he didn’t understand what she ant, but it wasn’t entirely true. Since he could sense the Matriarch’s lody, it only took a little bit of experintation to recreate it with his sculpted blade. He added onto it emotions he thought might be terrifying to the bloodfiend, such as inferiority, weakness, defeat, and other things any proud creature would abhor.
When his blade carved into her side, continuing the flaying process, the adapted lody of his knife radiated into the Matriarch’s, slowly taking it over.
He had only dragged the blade down to her hip before she gasped.
“Stop,” she pleaded him.
The Flayed Lady paused her work on the screaming Patriarch to regard Adam with a pleased smile. “Continue,” she encouraged him.
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Adam obeyed.
As he worked, the Matriarch’s pleading turned into shouting, then yelling. She begged him to stop tainting her feelings. It was not the pain that terrified her, such as was the case for the Patriarch, it was how he was perverting her mind to accept her loss. Even speared on the Flayed Lady’s crimson glass, she had not admitted her defeat, but Adam was changing it with his blade that radiated all of those feelings.
Adam felt as though he’d obtained so truly cursed power. After all, he had been horrified of how the Siren’s power flowing through Kate had infected his mind, but from the Flayed Lady’s lesson, he had gained the sa ability. It was scary how, with just a few words, the Absolute could open Adam’s mind to the possibilities of his magic.
How much could I gain from the other Absolutes if they were as open and encouraging? he wondered.
Once they were done, the Matriarch wouldn’t stop screaming, just like the Patriarch next to her. The Flayed Lady quickly grew tired of the sound and removed her tongue.
“Good work,” she praised Adam, lifting the flayed skin of the two powerful bloodfiends.
Adam blinked and suddenly found himself in a new chamber, just as large as the previous one, and still within a giant heart, given how the floor, walls, and ceiling shifted rhythmically.
Within were skeletons of crimson glass and thorny vines.
They were not shaped in any way that made sense to Adam, but then the Flayed Lady approached one, the skin of a flayed woman draped over her forearm like a towel. As he watched, she furbished the glass skeleton, bringing out the skin of six other individuals to complete it, fusing them together with a simple application of flesh magic. Once it was done, she had made herself a lounge sofa, each of the seven faces featured prominently on the front, and all of them locked in silent screams.
She laid down on the furniture she had made, dragging one of her long nails along its surface and making all seven faces contort in pain.
“Your turn. Pick one and sleeve it how you see fit.”
Adam obeyed, and as he approached a glass fra, the skin of a bloodfiend flew to his hands.
Its horrified expression shifted when it recognised him.
Adam frowned as he t Cienna’s judging face.
The sight snapped him out of his blind obedience.
Clearly the Flayed Lady sensed his hesitation, because she was suddenly behind him, pressing her body into his back and grabbing his hands. He felt as her mana entered him, pushing all the control of his arms out of his reach. With a re touch, she had turned his body to her will.
She could so easily puppeteer
to do heinous things, but I think she finds more joy from her adherents committing such acts of their own volition.
Adam could only watch as his patron moved his hands through the motions, fusing one flayed skin after another and pulling over more skeletal glass fras, expanding the creation.
Once complete, the Flayed Lady, through Adam’s hands, had created a podium with different tiers. Each of the faces of the skins used were placed on the flat tops of the stands, such that they would be forced to look upon whatever was placed above them. It was a mockery of how the System’s cubes operated, he thought.
She worked through the rest of the many bloodfiends with Adam’s forced help, filling up the large podium with many strange creations, so so odd that they would easily qualify as modern art.
There was no sense to the furniture and sculptures that the Absolute conjured. The only unifying the was that she found amusent in their design.
“A sha that Kate??ina is not part of this collection. But I will forgive you for your simple desires.”
Adam wanted to argue that he hadn’t saved Kat for sothing as base as that, but he knew it wouldn’t matter to her. Unsurprisingly, she had witnessed even their intimate monts, but he assud that all of the Absolutes watched their adherents to the sa extent.
“You completed my task and for now that is sufficient. Never before has an adherent of mine accomplished this. A few ca close, but it is often the little thief that gives them pause. In truth, my previous gift to you may have trivialised this undertaking, but I have gifted more to others, only for them to squander their power or fall victim to their own inherent weaknesses.”
“Will my reward match the challenge?” Adam asked.
“You are too fixated on these petty gifts,” she scolded him. “Your greed brings to mind the little boy. In his boundless avarice, he takes what does not belong to him and claims it as his own, building a hoard around himself. Take care to not beco like him. It is a pitiful existence.”
“Are you able to observe him?” Adam asked.
“Does blood not flow through his servants? Are they not possessed of flesh, of bone? Eyeless as I am, I see as much as the Seeing One itself.”
“Eyeless?”
“As the little boy must have told you, we are ascended from mortal creatures like yourself. Our brief ti in those vessels profoundly shaped the visage we took upon our ascension. The Masked Whore was a monstrous siren that longed for love, and she beca such a despicable entity as a result, her entire existence centred on the need for lust and affection. The Disfigured One was once naught but an actor who wore many guises, ascending to beco the very idea of change and transformation. And while the little boy was granted his ascension in acknowledgent of his imagination and curiosity, it was truly his curse to seek knowledge that defines him now, turning him into a paragon of avarice.
“And to think, his ntor was such a promising adherent of mine. But for his failure to halt the little boy’s ascension, he was given a place at the very core within which we stand.”
“His ntor?” Adam wondered. Once again, he was struggling a bit to follow along with what the Flayed Lady was saying, but he was guessing that the Disfigured One had to be Nharlla, given his power over transformation.
The Absolute didn’t elaborate, and instead went on, “When I was but a child, orphaned by war, the priests of the First Light took
under their wing. They were renowned for their boundless charity and appreciation of life.”
She paused, a sour and wretched expression transforming her humanoid face into one of a monster.
“I was the first to discover the power of the Blood, and for my sin, I was crucified, my eyes ripped from my skull, my skin torn from my flesh. I was left to die in such an inhuman state. Instead I took my revenge on all those who betrayed , and from their flesh I wrought an altar, tearing my mandate from above and ascending to beco what I am now.”
“Why would the priests of the First Light do such a thing?” Adam asked, thinking back to Father Mathias.
“Their healing power is finite. It is powerful, but flawed. Every soul is a light, but when a light shines brightly, it is quickly consud. There are no masters of healing within their order who see old age, for their life force is devoured by their own power.
“I offered a solution to such wasteful existence, but to challenge the zealotry of the devout, for whom the self-sacrifice is itself the point of their madness, it is the gravest of offences imaginable to them.”
“So the First Light inadvertently created you?”
“It is said that every Ascendant was a devout believer of an Absolute, but it is not the only way. It is possible to ascend in spite of the Absolutes, to deny their power and claim a mandate for yourself. The Headless One was the first to prove this. He too despised the First Light and its rigid nature.”
Adam could understand what she ant. After all, the To Keeper revered the All-Seeing System, but Adam had nothing but contempt for it and its vile machinations.
“Would I be able to ascend?” he asked.
The Flayed Lady laughed. “Nothing makes you unique, what mandate would there be for you to claim? Do not mistake your foolish power to traverse the coil as one you have any agency over. After all, you do not even possess the knowledge of how to guide yourself to the place you wish to find the most.”
Adam paused. “Is that possible?”
“Serve
well and I will show you how,” she replied.
He knew he’d been baited and hooked.
It’s a trap. It has to be. I cannot trust her words, only her actions.
But if it’s true…
The crimson glass to appeared in her hand, and she quickly flipped through it with a bored expression.
“I would like to keep that,” Adam said.
“He believed himself to be so wise, but these musings are trivial. The spells and rituals within are not worth studying,” she remarked. “I will teach you a real spell, though I am sure the Seeing One will limit its reach.”
She tossed the book to Adam, and he caught it with his glass hand.
Then she crossed the distance between them in an instant, her hand wrapping around Adam’s forehead.
A spike of knowledge was fired into his brain, and he saw the pattern and requirents for a unique spell called ‘Covetous Vessel’. Its effect was disturbing. Once fed with the blood and flesh of a chosen type of foe, a creature would co forth and hunt down any similar foe that was in the vicinity. And it would continue, each new death fuelling the next, until all were devoured by the spell or it ran out of energy.
If I’d had this in Moonport, I could’ve eliminated all of the bloodfiends in a single day…
There’s no way I’ll be allowed to keep such power.
The Flayed Lady took a step back and blood flowed from under her index nail, swirling around to beco a crimson glass halo with a portion missing.
“Since you will combine your sigils once I send you back to your little sanctuary island, I have decided to gift you this.”
< < Unique Relic Obtained > >
< Crown of the Red King (Uncommon) — Doubles Adam’s manipulation of simultaneous Red King invocations >
She placed the broken halo above Adam’s head where it remained floating.
That’s a lot of power without any derits, though I won’t be able to use it until after I’ve fused my sigils.
She gave its title away already, but I have no idea what effect the fusion will actually have.
“Continue to serve
well and I will make this stronger,” she told him.
Adam’s montary greed must’ve flashed across his face, because she grinned at him.
The Flayed Lady continued. “Moonport has been ridden of its bloodspawn filth, but now you must punish those that twisted them out of my grace. The hateful Masked Whore, the Guardian, the Headless One, and the First Light. As you venture into the Forlorn Kingdom, two mbers of your group will be worshipping these Absolutes. They must be sacrificed in my na.”
She reached out and grabbed his head again, flinging another spike of knowledge into his mind.
It was a twisted ritual, and Adam knew exactly its purpose.
“If I sacrifice soone with this, will they be forever removed from the Trials of Defiance?” he asked, since it was clear to him that the ritual would send anyone offered onto it to the Rotten Core of the Flayed Lady’s domain.
“I am no glutton. Only the Abyssal One is of such boundless base desire. To take from the past is not my intent, and I do not benefit from causing such devastating ripples across the Seeing One’s little ga.”
“For what purpose am I sacrificing these players?” Adam asked.
She shifted her hand from his forehead to his cheek, lifting him up so their eyes were level.
“Do not disappoint , Adam,” she said, her voice taking a dangerous turn. “My goal has not changed, but to twist the Godstone into a weapon, I must pri its power. To that end, those that wronged
shall be its fuel.
“The First Light is yet revered within the old kingdom, and their little resistance is slowly being crushed under the wave of shadow. Find their leader before he is slain, and offer him up to . The Headless One, whose blight is the sickness that has turned the kingdom forlorn, his vassal sits upon the king’s throne. You possess the ans to reveal his true nature, and once defeated, you must take the shadow from him and bring it here upon your return.”
Anyone I send here will be flayed and tortured for an eternity.
< Patron Quest >
< The Flayed Lady >
< Complete the sacrifices >
< Reward: Relic evolution >
“I know you will not disappoint ,” the Flayed Lady said and let go of Adam.
When his feet hit the floor, they were sucked down and the rest of his body followed.
Then, he was inexplicably back in front of the altar in the middle of Interim Island.
Adam let out a deep sigh.
I don’t think I can complete this quest. I have already been told by Elia and Alexander Nova that taking on the Forlorn Shadow revealed by the True Fla’s Icon is going to get
killed.
And the idea of submitting players to the sa fate as those bloodfiends…
The face of Cienna flashed before his eyes.
I will have to take drastic asures to avoid her punishnt, Adam thought, before rembering the strange note and missing mory from before stage eight.
I wonder if I already set a plan in motion by talking to the To Keeper.
Regardless, I should talk to him again.
I want to know what options are available to , because staying in the Flayed Lady’s worship will do more than just get
killed. Already, I feel as if my humanity is slipping away again.
He could still feel the motions of his hands forcefully draping the skin of Cienna across the cruel furniture fra. The way her eyes had stared at him, and how her face had contorted…
Despite the power she offers and how much I wish to possess it, its price is clear.
It’s a price I refuse to pay.
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