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Name: Lucrio Law

Titles:

* {Bearer of the Emperor’s Curse}: You can only learn and level Bloodline Skills. You cannot learn and level normal Skills.

Bloodline Skills:

* [Kneel]: Command the unfaithful to serve you.

Skills:

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The lid of the stone coffin did not move. Scowling, Luc pushed harder, putting all of his bodyweight behind his arms. Several unsuccessful moments later, Luc collapsed to the ground, wheezing. He wouldn’t call himself the pinnacle of strength in Tosa, but having spent a fair share of time running from angry lovers, he considered himself able-bodied enough to push the lid off the top of a stone coffin. That meant that there was something up with the lid.

Luc clambered to his feet and gave the stone coffin a second glance. On closer inspection, the gold engravings did not seem completely random. Tracing the ridges of gold with a finger, Luc followed the swirls and jagged lines to one end of the coffin. They all culminated at the top of the coffin, where a circle was carved into the stone. However, unlike the rest of the engravings, the circle was not filled with gold.

“Unsatisfying again,” said Luc. Then a thought came to him. Maybe this is a hidden mechanism as well.

Just as he had done with the raised floor tile, Luc pressed down on the carved circle with his hands. It did not budge an inch. Scowling, Luc smacked the circle with an open palm, banging his knee against the side of the coffin in the process.

“Blasted coffin!” Luc spat, hopping on one foot and massaging his knee. As he did so, the crown slipped from his hands and clattered onto the ground once again.

Muttering curses under his breath, Luc hobbled over to the crown and picked it up. As he held the crown in his hands, he noted the circular shape of the crown. Tracing the crown’s base with his hands, Luc turned back to the coffin. From what he could tell, the carved circle on the coffin was about the same size as the base of the crown.

Swallowing, Luc took the crown in his hands and placed it onto the carved circle. After fiddling with the crown’s positioning, there was a clink as the crown slid into the ruts of the carved circle. Luc took several steps backwards and glanced around the room.

Nothing happened.

“I should’ve known,” muttered Luc. He walked up to the coffin once more and jiggled the crown around, making sure that it was actually in the engraved circle. In the process, he twisted the crown as it sat within the circle, rotating it until he heard a click.

A click?

A rumbling sound echoed throughout the chamber, and the entire room began to shake. Luc dropped into a crouch and held onto the coffin. As the rumbles continued, a grinding noise joined the cacophony. Peering out over the coffin, Luc saw openings in the stone walls appearing as hidden gates slid upwards. Dust billowed from the openings, clouding Luc’s vision and coating the air with a musty, damp odor. At last, when the gates had opened, the rumbling and grinding stopped.

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Luc rose to his feet, keeping a hand on the coffin in case the shaking started again. Glancing around the circular chamber, Luc saw that three entrances had opened up, all evenly spaced out along the wall. They were all pitch black, preventing Luc from seeing where and what they led to. But inside Luc’s head, a single thought engulfed all others.

Could this be the way out?

Luc, feeling a small glimmer of hope rising in his body, forced himself to knock down his expectations. He wasn’t a dreamer; he was a realist. And the realist inside told him that he was going to be trapped in the tomb until he died. Unless…

Don’t think about that! Luc turned back to the coffin and grabbed the crown. Even when he pulled on it, it did not move from its position in the coffin’s lid. Luc tried rotating the crown once more but to no avail. The crown was stuck firmly on the top of the coffin. That’s when Luc noticed a foul odor emanating through the air, a scent he had not smelled before. Leaning down, Luc saw that the lid of the coffin had risen, revealing a small crack where the stench was leaking from.

Looks like that crown really was the key to everything. Luc grabbed the edge of the coffin lid and pushed with all his might. This time, the lid of the coffin slid smoothly to the side, some mechanism allowing for it to rotate clockwise. The rotation of the lid revealed one side of the coffin, keeping the other shrouded in shadows. Heart pounding, Luc glanced down.

Inside the coffin was the body of a man.

Luc stumbled backwards and covered his mouth, trying not to vomit. Even though he had been expecting it, seeing an actual dead body still shocked him. After making sure that his dinner was going to stay in his stomach, Luc approached the coffin once more.

The corpse inside the coffin was remarkably well preserved. While the skin of the man had grayed, it was only slightly wrinkled and intact from any signs of decay. Along with the skin, the hair of the man had also lost its color, completely bleached to white. Because of the well-preserved features of the corpse, Luc could tell that the man in the coffin was on the younger side.

Luc could also tell that the man had been upper class, even among nobility. He wore golden silk robes, and his long white hair had been braided in the fashion of the Court Nobles and the Emperor. Maybe Ryko wasn’t lying about everything, Luc mused. This might actually be the tomb of an Emperor.

Luc reached over and once again tried to pull the crown off the coffin lid. The crown remained embedded in the lid, not moving despite Luc’s best efforts. Luc made a rude gesture at the crown and turned to look down at the dead body, pinching his nose. If this guy really is an Emperor, he’d better have something in here that’s worth as much as that crown!

The only thing that caught Luc’s eye was a pendant hanging around the man’s neck. But frankly, the pendant did not seem to be fitting of an Emperor. The pendant’s chain looked to be made of a cheap metal, colored a dull gray instead of gold or silver. The pendant itself seemed to be even cheaper than the chain, as it consisted of a flat wooden circle with a square hole in its center. Cursing his luck, Luc gingerly picked up the pendant and turned it over in his hands.

On closer inspection, the hole in the center of the pendant was not a hole, but rather a kind of transparent gemstone. Or, judging by the rest of the pendant’s quality, maybe it was just glass.

Oh well, thought Luc. Might as well take a gamble on it. With [Gambler’s Fortune], I should be –

Luc grimaced, remembering that all of his hard-earned skills had been eradicated by the Emperor’s Curse thing. He had only heard stories about curses before. And in all of those stories, there was never any mention on how curses could be erased. Not that I should think about that when I’m about to waste to death in this tomb.

“Is it you who cursed me?” asked Luc, staring down at the man in the coffin. “If it was, how dare you curse me on my land! I’ll be taking this as a little penance.”

Luc grabbed the pendant and yanked it off the man’s neck. The next instant, two things happened in rapid succession. First, a loud hiss sounded from the side of the coffin that was still covered by the lid. The hiss did not sound like the sound of a cat. Instead, the hiss was sharper and more “metallic”, more akin to the hiss of a snake. Second, as Luc was about to investigate the sound, there was a loud crash as something dropped from the ceiling of the room, causing tremors to shake the entire vicinity. Head whipping up, Luc’s eyes widened.

A spider the size of several horses standing side by side stood about a dozen feet away, eight beady eyes staring right at him.