Griffin awoke with a startled gasp, his sword hand shooting forward in a lancing blow. Except there was no sword in his hand and no enemy in sight, besides a startled Jun-Ra.

“Are you okay?” Jun-Ra asked and perhaps for the first time since they had met, Griffin truly looked at her. Not as an alien-cultivator whose purposes aligned with his own, but as a woman who had offered him shelter where none was due. Her brown eyes glimmered in a kindness that was, as Griffin had come to realize, uncommon for Aeldfane, her slightly round face endearing with her lightly powdered cheeks and earnest expression.

“No,” Griffin rasped in response, before his gaze shifted to the blaring system notifications that were consuming his vision.

[Congratulations on taking your first step as the Apostle of Greed.

Calling Quest: Greed’s Sword has been completed.

Reward:

+21,000 Experience

+ Greed’s Sword]

Griffin marveled at how the experience he had fought and nearly died for was simply and effortlessly thrust upon him. Until that moment, he had thought experience to be akin to a set of laws, where every creature had their own experience— the accumulation of their self and strength— that could be taken from them by taking their life. Perhaps it was still the case, but the system seemed to have large reserves of its own that it could give out as a reward… or perhaps he was completely mistaken in his assumption from the very beginning.

[Level 7 (11.53%) -> Level 7 (97.76%)]

Before Griffin could gloat at having near skipped a level, his expression drastically changed.

‘Hungry,’ A raspy snarl echoed in his mind before he could even begin to command the system to reveal the capabilities of the sword he had almost died for.

“Ack!” Griffin intoned a thing somewhere between a scream and a cough, clutching his head in clear but not visible pain.

‘Hungry!’ The voice repeated. ‘Hungry!’ ‘Hungry!’ ‘Hungry!’

With every successive repetition of the word, the voice that demanded got shriller, louder and more vicious, until a booming chant pounded at his senses. Two trails of tears trickled down his cheeks as Griffin tried to nurse the worst headache he had ever experienced, his expression warped in horror as he tried to think, if only for a moment.

He could no longer afford to think of Jun-Ra, who undoubtedly would have noticed the anomaly in his behavior by now.

Griffin could barely form coherent thoughts as his mindspace was intruded upon by a malevolent entity, his intelligence countering with two words as a response.

‘Greed’s Sword.’

“What do you want!?” Griffin screamed in an agony tinged with rage, sounding out a question that he deeply hoped not to be a rhetorical one.

The incessant chants in his mind stopped, replaced by a thinking, deliberating ‘hmmm’.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

‘Free..dom,’ The answer came broken and garbled, but it arrived nonetheless.

Griffin’s right hand shot forward instinctively as he called out the mental command a moment later.

‘Inventory,’ He willed and a recess in space that he could sense but not see opened up. In desperation, he reached into the void.

Griffin didn’t even have to shuffle around for the right object, as the hilt of a sword brushed against his palm. The metal was bone-chillingly cold to the touch, definitely unlike anything else he had stored in his spatial inventory.

Seeking respite, he pulled the sword outward.

It slipped out of the void far too easily, far too quickly.

The haze clouding his mind cleared just enough for him to snap out of reality.

“What is that?” Jun-Ra’s shocked exclamation sounded in his ears, a hint of fear audible in her tone.

‘What is it? It’s a sword of…’

Griffin held the thought as he brought his clenched fist before him.

“The hell,” He blurted out, as he discovered not a sword but a stub of one. A blackened quarter blade attached to a simple, unassuming wooden hilt that too had degraded over time, it’s surface too dirty and grimy for any further details to be made out.

‘Analyse,’ Griffin thought-commanded.

[Analyzing….]

[Name: Greed’s Sword

Classification: ???

Level : 1

Status: Hungry

Assessment: Unknown ]

“Status, Hungry?” Griffin muttered out loud, his tone tinged with a hint of disbelief. How could a damn sword be hungry and what in the blasted hells was he supposed to feed it.

‘Hungry!’ The voice roared in his head, almost as if it could read his mind. Just as Griffin was getting overwhelmed by the mental assault, the incursion ceased, replaced by a different style of getting the message across.

A different way to communicate.

The image of a silver dagger inlaid with a dull-red gem forced its way into his mind.

‘Oh,’ Griffin thought.

“Jun-Ra,” Griffin spoke as he turned his gaze to face Jun-Ra’s visage. “I need to do this. Please don’t interfere.”

Without giving her a chance to quiz him, Griffin reached into his inventory and pulled out the dagger of dissension from within, the sin-alignment blade that she had explicitly warned him not to bring out into the open within the Yushan Sect’s territory.

[Do you wish to transfer ownership of the Dagger of Decension (Epic, Growth) to Greed’s Sword (???)]

‘Yes.’

“What are you—,” Jun-Ra began, her voice an angry hiss, before she stopped. And then she watched in stupefaction as a Rare or higher level blade that neither she nor her master, Elder Shirong, could shatter began to dissolve into motes of gray-black energy, flowing towards the broken sword that had impressed upon her an ancient, primordial aura that had left her shuddering, before it disappeared entirely as if she had imagined it.

A few seconds later, all evidence of the sin-alignment blade ever existing was wiped away, leaving behind Griffin Thorne, a filthy quarter-blade that seemed a touch less filthy and a very royally pissed off Jun-Ra.

[Greed’s Sword has authorized status sharing.

Updating Status….

Classification: Semi-Sapient Unique (Growth)

Level: 1 (0.00%)-> 5 (2.47%)

Status: Satiated

Artifact Skills:

1. Limitless Greed

Assessment: Analyze Skill too low.]

‘Semi-Sapient Unique… I asked the system for a reward and it…. It gave me nanny duties. You have got to be fucking kidding me.’