Felix landed in the excessively large yard of some estate off to the east and immediately began sorting through the remnants he had grabbed in the alchemy lab. His identification skill was only mildly helpful since apparently alchemical identification required a different skill than item identification. It did give him some information but unfortunately it all seemed to be useless to him. There were multiple antidotes, but he had no way of knowing which of them were for the crap in his body, if any of them. His identification also helpfully included warnings that the antidotes would act as poisons themselves if not used as an antidote and in the right quantities.
Felix.
What?
Relax.
What do you mean? I have at least three different forms of poison currently chewing through my body and only half of my health left.
Listen, in my universe, poisons are only effective if they are way stronger than you or you're distracted. Someone trying to kill you with poison will typically get a few hits off but their main goal is to keep you occupied. If the victim of a poison is left alone and their body is allowed to just rest and fight it, it's completely useless. So the attacker needs to keep them occupied in a fight, keep their victims focused on them. They land a few extra scratches along the way, and all of a sudden your system is overwhelmed. Luckily for you, you didn't sustain many injuries.
Felix took a breath and processed, So you're saying I don't need an antidote?
I suspect only poisons that are at least a grade or two above you would stand any chance. I don't think these poisons are multiple grades above you so you should be able to just consciously attack them one by one. It would really suck if someone could just hit you once with a poisoned arrow or weapon then run away and you were just dead on the spot.
Ok, so…
Just flood your system with mana and energy, as much as you can. Then direct your immune system to kill them off one by one. You'll be fine. You also have way more control over your body than is normal so you could manually fight them if you wanted to.
Felix took another breath then sat down and entered a meditation. His consciousness turned to his body and assessed the situation. The necrotic poison he had first been infected with had spread itself out but it had weakened itself by doing so. Even now it was starting to lose strength as it had no way to replicate itself and had mostly been consumed. Switching his attention to the poison that had been delivered via the bolt in his neck, which he just now pulled out with a slight wince, Felix saw it hadn't spread itself very far. It was slowly being washed away and diluted by his blood stream but it had latched onto the tissue in the area and was in the process of transforming the cells into more little poison factories.
Felix immediately latched onto that one and completely stopped it's mutations then slowly killed off the cells it had already transformed, replacing them with new cells. Once he had minimized the effect to the point where it should just wash away, Felix moved his attention to his lungs. The spores were in the process of planting themselves in his alveoli, slowly growing roots and feeding off of his body.
Felix had no doubt they would simply reproduce forever if left alone so he immediately killed them off in batches. While an absurd number of spores had entered his lungs, luckily only a small percentage had managed to plant themselves. It took him a half hour to finally get through the vast majority of them. He wasn't worried about any left behind because his body was already attacking them on it's own, his conscious effort was just helping it not be overwhelmed.
Inspecting the remains of the necrotic poison once again, Felix began consciously stamping it out even though he knew it wasn't necessary. He did a couple passes over his body to make sure the poisons were shrinking instead of growing and to make sure there weren't any other poisons that had infected him without him knowing.
By the time he was done, his health had returned to about 90% so he exited his meditation and stowed the various vials and bottles. He pulled out the general's corpse and began feeling his way through it until he pinpointed the seal in their head. Using the axe, Felix opened the general's skull and found it was completely empty, save for a deep blue gemstone rattling around. He knew immediately that it was the seal without identifying it, though did anyways to confirm, and stowed it in his soul space.
[Sealed] Seal
Hey Grim? Thanks.
Course.
Poisons really would be pretty insane if a tiny pin prick could just kill you outright.
Yeah, that would be wild.
Any ideas how we deal with Erolan now that we can examine two seals?
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Sort of? I keep trying to think of another way… I haven't come up with anything though.
What is it?
You have to do the impossible, twice. First you have to kill a being who is at least an entire grade up on you, or more. Then you have to find a way to destroy a powerful magical item. The first one is doable, kind of. You can incinerate the body before opening the seal, then you just have to destroy one of the pieces, which is a tragic but necessary, before he resurrects himself.
Once he does, I have to kill him for real. Actually fight him.
Right, which is impossible.
Won't that risk making the soul ring unusable?
We won't know unless we open the seal.
Which starts the timer anyways.
Not necessarily. You could open the seal within your soul space. Normally I would never suggest someone do that, because it could potentially explode and cause soul death.
But I'm special?
Yeah. You'll probably be fine.
Probably?
Almost definitely.
I don't love the sound of almost.
Would you rather open it outside your soul space?
No. I still don't like the almost.
It is what it is. He might not be able to come back when you destroy one piece, but I wouldn't bet on that. If you could destroy it immediately, he probably wouldn't but we don't exactly have any black holes in our pockets.
So I guess we get our hands on the last one then figure it out from there.
Yeah. Hopefully they haven't found too many keys up there.
Hopefully Amani isn't dead.
She'll be fine. How's Nova?
Quickly tuning into his bond, Felix sensed Nova was having a lot of fun, Seems to be having a blast.
She's probably fine then.
If you had to guess, how long till they find all the key fragments?
It took them just over a day to search through the second level. Assuming they speed up a little because they learn things and find new items and generally get into the groove… The outer layer is denser and much bigger… Rough math says about… 2 weeks or so since you last saw them.
That was my conclusion as well. We've been in here for 10 days now already, minus a day for the second level so that gives me about 5 days to find the last seal. Let's say 4 to be safe.
Then there's the final vault. Are you going to try to get all this done before that?
I'm going to open the seals while that's happening. I want as many people out of the world event as possible before I attempt to resurrect a super demon.
Good call.
Plus, the loot in there probably isn't as good as this set is, for me at least.
Hopefully not.
Do I even bother searching the rest of the kingdom?
You already know the answer to that. You can sense it too.
Yeah… I was just hoping… Damn.
Felix's thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the sound of a massive explosion off to his right. Swinging his head over, Felix saw a brief flash of light as a pillar of pink fire erupted from the encampment he had just left. After the explosion, the fire died down to a multicolored blaze as the remnants of the Devoured and the camp itself slowly disintegrated.
Now that he was out of danger, Felix did something he had been looking forward to for what felt like hours now. Now that he was bound to it, Felix identified the axe.
[D - Ancient] Eretheas
[Soul Bound][Growth]
A great axe commissioned by a king to help them choose an heir among his many children. The weapon was designed to only be wielded by those that represented the qualities the king aspired to have as a ruler. It was designed to grow with them, become a weapon that would allow it's wielder to slay any evil. Unfortunately, none of the king's children were deemed worthy by Eretheas so one of the children, fed up with their father's antics, killed him and took the throne by force.
They carried the axe with them as a symbol of their power and slew the creator, the greatest soul smith in the universe, so that the axe would remain completely unique. This caused the axe to be the soul smith's greatest achievement, since their chance to surpass it and grow further was stolen from them. The forceful claiming of the throne sparked a civil war among the children who each led a faction that ultimately contributed to the demise of every single citizen in the kingdom. The axe was lost to time only to reappear in another universe, some time later.
This axe's weight is always right at the limit of it's wielder's strength unless it is soul bound. It is effectively indestructible due to the materials used along with the infused soul.
While bound, the wielder may alter the weight of the axe at will, within a certain range. The wielder may also provide mana to summon a shade. The shade will appear at the desired location in the desired orientation, based on the user's will. The shade will mimic every movement and action the wielder takes, within it's power. Two shades may be summoned at a time. Shades will dissipate upon taking damage higher than the mana used to summon them. Mana may be supplied to the axe once both shades have been summoned to recharge the mana pools of both shades, equally and at once.
Shade is a way better name than shadow men. Also how do I embody the qualities of a ruler?
Who knows what convictions the king had implanted into it. It's also possible… it's just been long enough.
What do you mean?
Being in the presence of your soul, or rather the axe reading your soul, just degraded it. Also it's been sitting around for a long time, it might have just gotten lonely.
That can happen?
Sort of… convictions, implanted ones especially, usually degrade, the question is just how long will it take. It's also totally possible the king just wanted someone who wouldn't give up and you standing against that army of Devoured was enough?
I see. Is this going to be a problem in the future? My soul degrading things?
We don't actually know that that's what happened but… probably not? Just be aware it's a possibility I guess.
Having two seals now, Felix knew what to look for when trying to sense the last seal and could sense the general direction of the last one from very far away. He had hoped for a short moment that perhaps the seal was past the castle, instead of in it but he finally resigned himself to his fate. The last seal seemed to be in the dead center of the castle. That meant he had about 3 days to train and prepare himself to take on the castle and all the Devoured in and around it. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .