The Runic Alchemist

Damian cut through the darkness with his lasers carefully. It took some time to go through the darkness meter by meter, but at last, Damian found the first person—Maelor.

His whole body had become dark—it wasn’t just the darkness. The skin itself of Maelor had turned black, just like the pigmen army. Damian felt a heartache thinking of the implication it held. Was he.. turned? Maelor was not moving. All his efforts to wake him had failed. Damian did not waste any more time thinking about it and immediately went back into the dark goo to find his other friends.

It took around an hour and a half, but Damian finally managed to find all of them: Sam, Lucian, and even the damned Shadecaster.

Should he kill him?

But what if that left Lucian and the others permanently like that.. No. He had seen the pigmen turn back to their original selves. It was possible if.. the Demon Lord used the darkness held inside them. Why was Shadecaster unconscious, though? Wasn’t he supposed to be the one responsible for using—or at least controlling—this skill, or whatever it was?

The source of the skill had to be from the Demon Lord. Only he could take control over people. Shadecaster was only a medium for using it.

Gritting his teeth, Damian decisively summoned his spear and aimed directly at the head of the darkened body of Shadecaster, killing him in a single attack. The darkness trapped inside his body started to leak out in a dark cloud. It held a bit of mana—that was odd. Damian immediately used an invisible box to trap the body of Shadecaster along with all the dark energy leaving his body. The dark smoke was unable to escape.

The other three were outside the invisible box. Damian noticed a thread of mana connecting all three of them to the dark energy trapped inside—it was about to break. Damian felt really anxious about the mana thread breaking. What if it was his only chance to connect with his friends?

Making a decision on the spur of the moment, Damian released hundreds of his mana threads and enveloped the whole dark energy inside them. Connecting mana threads with another person’s mana threads always returned with unexpected results—making one of them poisoned by the other’s mana. But the dark energy was not just mana—it was the absence of mana, with very few mana particles present in it, belonging to Shadecaster, which were also breaking as the guy died and his body slowly lost all its mana.

Damian captured all the dark energy and removed the invisible box, then connected his own mana threads to the ones that were Shadecaster’s and were connected to his friends’ darkened bodies. He had no idea what this would even result in, but he hoped against hope for just one chance to remove whatever this place had done to his friends. Even after Shadecaster’s death, the white place remaining intact was a clear indication that this skill belonged to the Demon Lord.

Was he here? Could he see or sense this?

Damian lost all his thoughts as his consciousness seemed to make a hard reset. In a second, the scene before his eyes changed completely. The empty white world was nowhere to be seen—it was now replaced by a vast open land. The breeze hitting him and the vast sky above him felt so.. real. But they couldn’t be. The sky was grey. So was the tree, the grass, the mountain, the river, and even the distant village.

It was like Damian had suddenly been transported inside a black-and-white old movie. There was not a speck of color anywhere—just black, white, and shades of grey and black everywhere. What was this place?

There were a couple of mountains around him, the biggest of which had a village at its foot. Damian closed his eyes and checked for his mana—nothing. Not a speck of mana. His senses seemed fuzzy, his eyesight barely able to make out the shape of the distant village. His body.. huh? Damian looked at his own hands and legs.. He was back.

He remembered this body, this feeling. Damian quickly ran towards the flowing river to the side and checked his appearance. Yes, the same face. The face of Ben Carter. His old life. The age was the same as when he had died—around his early twenties.

Everything was the same. It felt so.. weak. He was really weak and vulnerable. It was so odd feeling like this after his overflowing strength as a third ranker.

What was this place? Some kind of mind trap to give Shadecaster and the Demon Lord full access to a person’s mind? Otherwise, showing such illusions to people inflicted by the darkness had no other use. This must be how they kept the minds of their slaves busy, so they could not fight back. It was a fucked-up skill.

Damian turned towards the village and started walking. His clothes were simple, only one level above rags. He perfectly fit the look of a poor villager. When he came close to the village entrance, barred by high logs and a wooden gate—someone shouted,

“Hold there. Who are you?”

Damian looked up. Two men were aiming at him with their wooden bows from the top of the makeshift wooden watchgate. They didn’t recognize him. He could use that.

He answered, looking out of breath and terrified, “I am Dan. My father and I were hunting.. There was a bear, and I ran.. I don’t know where.. I just kept running. The screams.. Oh my god, the screams! Father!”

“Calm down, kid. We understand.”

“Easy there, kid.”

The wooden gate opened, and they escorted him inside. Damian had thought crying would be hard, but it wasn’t—not sure if that was a good sign or not. He had no idea how he would leave this nightmare, or if he could even find the three people he had come looking for. It was indeed a perfect time to cry.

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