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Na: Samael Kaizer Theosbane
Spirit Essence: 48,799/50,000
Soul Rank: B 『Absorb 1,201 Essence to level up』
Soul Potential: SS
Origin Card: Matterweave
Acquire Cards: —
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Ahh.
It was a sad, sad sight.
I didn’t have any Acquire Cards left anymore. Not on and neither in my Soul Arsenal. Truly sad.
My robe was also damaged so badly that its dinsional storage pocket was completely inaccessible. I had lost everything stored in it, a few extra Cards being among those items.
And as for the ones in my Soul Arsenal...
Well, it turns out that when you die, the Essence in your soul evaporates out of your body. It literally leaves your flesh.
And since all the Cards are nothing but crystallized Essence themselves, they dissolve back into it and vanish as well.
You see where this is going, right?
The mont my heart stopped, the Cards I had painstakingly collected turned into raw Essence and drifted away like sparkling dandelion seeds, leaving my soul.
Now my arsenal was empty.
Sad, as I said.
But at least I still had my Origin Card.
I’d never heard of an Awakened dying for seven minutes and coming back to life, so I didn’t know what to expect or what the procedure was.
But if all my Acquire Cards had faded... well, then I could only call it a miracle that my Origin Card still remained.
...Or was it?
Was it really a miracle?
It had been three days since I woke up.
The first thing I noticed after inspecting my body thoroughly was that my Shade Mark had shifted to the right of my lower abdon.
It sprawled across my stomach and hip like so sort of tribal tattoo, twisting and curving into dark strings of unfamiliar letters in the center.
Juliana comnted on that, saying she didn’t know I had gotten a new tattoo and asked when did I get it.
I had no answer for her. Because I never got it. It had simply moved from lost my right forearm to my lower belly.
For so reason, that creeped the fuck out of . Because that ant I couldn’t escape whatever this mark was — not by any usual ans, at least.
If I asked my aunt to put my soul in another body, would it follow there as well?
I shuddered at the thought, when suddenly another eerie realization hit .
What if it really wasn’t a miracle that I was revived?
Kang said I had been dead for seven minutes.
Alexia had patched up and healed all my fatal wounds, yes, but she hadn’t brought back to life. She just restored my body.
I still wasn’t breathing, my heart still wasn’t beating, and my body was still as cold as the ice I had lain upon.
So... how?
The answer was apparent.
If Asmodeus’ words were to be believed, then I was a Shade of the Mother of rcy — the Primordial Deity of Death, Mistress of the Oldest Death.
And through this Mark, I had once already tapped into the ability to inflict the Oldest Death, whatever it was.
So the connection was undeniable.
Then would it really be so far-fetched to theorize that the Mark didn’t just allow to deal death, but to define my own terms with it?
But, no.
Wait...
Unless what I tapped into before was just one facet of her power, Mother of rcy’s domain shouldn’t be death— it should be erasure.
Death is a transition. You live, you die, you reincarnate, and then you repeat the cycle.
I could guess as much with my own firsthand experience with death. I had lived Noah, I had died, and then I had reincarnated as my current self before rembering my prior life.
So death was indeed a transition.
But Mother of rcy’s authority felt much more final than simple death. It was much more absolute than simple death.
It was utter and complete erasure.
It was the return of sothing to nothing at all.
So then...
"Oh, damn," I muttered.
Then maybe I didn’t co back to life as much as I simply refused to leave. Maybe the reason I never truly died was that my soul never parted from my flesh.
I gazed inside my toga and stared at the tribal pattern on my lower abdon.
Maybe...
Maybe this Mark wasn’t just etched on my body. Maybe it was etched onto my soul itself, anchoring to this plane like a curse so I wouldn’t re-enter the cycle of reincarnation...
That... was a much scarier thought.
That ant I would never die.
I either needed to be completely erased from existence or my soul would forever be trapped in the mortal realm...
"Sam! Stop brooding and co help us with the mast!"
I blinked.
Vince’s shout tore out of my internal monologue.
Looking up and squinting against the shimring glare of the Lake of Grief, I spotted the majestic structure of the ship we were going to use to sail out of this purgatory.
And when I say majestic, I an majestic.
It was a glorious, iridescent monstrosity.
In shape and size, it resembled a slightly smaller version of a Greek warship — over twenty-five ters long with a narrow beam of seven to eight ters. Its keel was built from logs and saplings harvested from the jungle. But the hull... oh, the hull was what drew the eye.
Alexia had truly outdone herself. I was so impressed by her it wasn’t even a joke. She had layered the translucent carapaces of giant crabs like dragon scales across the wooden fra, raising the walls of the vessel to more than five ters from its base.
Also, the shells didn’t just provide defense. They were naturally buoyant and possessed a strange prismatic quality that seed to turn them invisible in water.
So it gave our ship a stealth edge, which was good since the Lake of Grief was supposedly full of sea monsters the size of skyscrapers.
While it was still docked on the beach, I had no doubts about its sturdiness in water.
What I did have doubt in was my companions.
Vince, Lily, and Michael were struggling to lash a tall black trunk that was going to serve as our mast into place.
There was also one tiny problem.
...We didn’t have a sailcloth. Obviously.
So Alexia and Juliana were patching saplings and thin, leathery mbranes peeled off from crab legs to fashion a makeshift replacent.
anwhile, Kang and Ray had ventured into the forest to gather the last vines that we were going to need on our voyage. It was a dangerous task now that ferocious beasts were beginning to repopulate the jungle.
Not to ntion, since God Who Eats Is was dead now, those beasts were also likely to spill into the valley and maybe even reach the shore.
In short, we needed to get the fuck out of there as fast as possible.
So it made sense why Vince was asking for my help.
But could that idiot not see that I was one hand down?
"Help you how, you dumb fuck?!" I barked, getting up. "Do you expect to lift the mast with my teeth?!"
"Use your power, you dramatic princess!" Vince hollered back, tugging at the root-rope securing the massive trunk.
I wanted to smack him. "My power doesn’t work on organic matter yet!"
His face turned a delightful shade of beet-red, either because I was annoying him or because the mast was threatening to tilt and slam down onto Michael.
"Do sothing or Mikey will be crushed!" he cried.
I rolled my eyes and turned toward the cabin. "You got this. Trust yourself."
"Arghhhh!"
Thaaaawm—!!
I heard Michael’s scream and the bone-rattling thud of heavy timber falling.
Gods, so dramatic.
Without looking back, I went inside.
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