First: the next chapter will be out tomorrow, and it'll be the continuation of the French woman's OMAKE. I'll be posting it the day after this one, since people complained whenever an OMAKE took up a regular release slot. So this time, I'll be releasing them back-to-back.
Second: I wrote the final part of this chapter while listening to Bastoria by Jay Ragsdale. If anyone wants to listen along near the end, feel free.
Good night, and enjoy the read!
(P)(A)(T)/CalleumArtori.
[...]---[...]
Sensing the spirituality within the Blasphemy Card stir, the human opened his fingers and let it go. For a brief moment, the card seemed to ignore gravity, hovering above his palm for a second before losing its physical form.
The item melted and condensed into a beam of pure, orange light that shot straight into the center of his forehead.
The ray struck exactly where the Demon Slayer Mark lay dormant, sinking into the skin and vanishing without leaving any physical trace, embedding itself directly into his Spiritual Realm.
The human remained silent for a second.
Heavy rain continued to fall over his shattered body and the dragon's carcass behind him.
With his right hand—black, formed entirely from the dense shadows of the Bone Helm—he pulled out the rib he had been holding between his teeth.
"I didn't expect this..." he murmured, his voice strained and dragging.
The human knew that whatever came out of [The Blank Card] would be useful. The item had absorbed the surrounding information—information that also belonged to the Nameless Foreign World—shaping itself into the best possible response to his situation.
But he had expected some kind of utility item, a weapon or accessory. Not the literal creation of an entire Pathway.
Focusing his exhausted mind, he absorbed the information echoing from his Spiritual Realm.
Of all the sequences within that new Pathway, he felt he only had access to the very first foundation.
Or rather, the Blasphemy Card could only reveal Sequence 9 for now:
-//-
Sequence 9: Tarnished.
"Those who were exiled from their homeland, who lost their place of belonging and their original 'light,' yet now feel a faint call to seek something lost. It is the initial state of desolation and the seed of ambition for a new purpose."
Formula:
Main Ingredients: At least 1,000 runes; A part of the body of the one who will drink the potion.
Secondary Ingredients: 42 milliliters of pure water or 42 milliliters of slime gel; 7 grams of soil from a world that is not the drinker's original one; 9 grams of flesh from a being that died far from home; 12 grams of something belonging to the drinker's original world.
Advancement Ritual: The potion must be consumed within the Nameless Foreign World.
-//-
Quickly absorbing the requirements, the human moved.
He extended his right hand of shadows and picked up the Chalice, which had already stopped pouring blood now that its internal supply had run dry.
Turning the item upright, he secured the Chalice's stem firmly between the middle and ring fingers of his black hand. If he were to use a container to prepare the potion, the Chalice would suffice.
Feeling his vision waver slightly, the human focused. There was no time to waste, and his body could barely hold itself together.
To free his left hand, he shoved the bloodied rib back into the gaping hole in his chest without care, letting the bone rest among torn flesh.
With his left hand free, the human opened the Voidbag.
First, he pulled out a handful of dark gray slime gel—nearly black—left over from his first wrong choice in Terraria.
Focusing through his blurred vision, he used Analyze: Item.
Removing the excess with his fingers until only the exact required amount remained, he poured 42 milliliters of the dense gel into the bottom of the Chalice.
Next, his left hand pulled a sealed container from his inventory.
Inside it was soil.
Soil from the world of the goddess who had placed him in this situation. He had promised he would not forget what had happened…
He measured out 7 grams of that soil and dropped it into the Chalice, storing the container away afterward. Then, he pulled out a piece of dark, purplish, rotten-looking flesh.
The piece still exuded a biting cold and a constant sense of madness—the remains of a deer that, though the human did not know it, had a beginning very similar to his own.
He tore off exactly 9 grams of the chilled flesh, dropped it into the scarlet vessel, and returned the rest to the Voidbag.
To finish the secondary ingredients, the human grabbed something he had kept since the very first day he set foot in Terraria: a partially consumed pack of Halls.
Staring at the crumpled wrapper for a second, he opened it.
He pulled out one of the lozenges and broke off a piece, measuring exactly 12 grams of the menthol candy—one of the only physical things from his original world still in his possession.
He dropped the piece into the Chalice and stored the wrapper again.
The secondary ingredients were complete. The base mixture bubbled in a restrained manner.
Still using his left hand, he pulled the rib back out from his chest.
He could feel the golden runes clinging to the bone.
Using Analyze: Item directly on his own rib, the human read the information: 5,000 runes.
The potion required "at least 1,000 runes" and "a part of the body." There was no upper limit specified. Gripping the bone tightly, the human simply plunged the tip of his own rib into the Chalice, using it as a spoon to stir the base.
The moment the bone touched the mixture of gel, soil, flesh, and candy, the spirituality of the environment—emanating from the gray mist around his right hand—reacted violently.
As if it were a rule, the union of ingredients under the correct spirituality forced an immediate change of state.
The dark gel and solids began to hiss, bubble, and melt.
The human's rib, upon contact with the mixture, began to dissolve like sugar in boiling water.
The blood-red markings and runic dust covering the bone seeped into the fluid. The mixture hissed and boiled without emitting heat, absorbing the essence of the bone, the massive power of the 5,000 runes, and the "weight" of each secondary ingredient.
The madness-infused flesh melted into the soil from the underworld goddess's native world, which was then consumed by the gel tied to the world of Terraria. The pieces of Halls were the last to disappear—small white fragments dissolving into the mixture along with the rib.
After a few seconds, the reaction stopped.
All ingredients had fully dissolved, merging into a single gelatinous liquid that filled the Chalice halfway.
The liquid glowed with an intense, oppressive golden color, speckled with fragments and small bubbles that shimmered in a violent orange, flickering randomly like tiny stars trapped inside a bottled nebula.
The human stared at the mixture, then, without hesitating for even a millisecond, raised the Chalice to his mouth.
The advancement ritual—"The potion must be consumed within the Nameless Foreign World."—was completely ignored. The Nameless Foreign World was the Spiritual Realm, and the Spiritual Realm was a part of the human.
For all intents and purposes, the Nameless Foreign World was and is the human himself.
That potion could only be consumed by him, or by someone he granted access to his world.
Tilting his head, he let his broken neck hang back.
He did not swallow normally; he simply poured the dense, golden liquid into his mouth, letting gravity drag the potion down his throat while brutally forcing his torn muscles to perform the act of swallowing.
His tongue was numb, his body half-dead and cold, yet the potion somehow managed to convey its taste.
The first touch was warm and comforting—a fleeting sense of embrace—before abruptly transforming into something cold, harsh, and distant.
The exact sensation of pulling away from a comforting embrace, or an irreversible walk away from home.
The moment the potion settled, his spirituality, spiritual energy, and nightmare energy exploded, becoming violently more active.
Spiritual energy and nightmare energy converged to fight the "invaders," aggressively pushing the underworld's icy aura away from his vital organs and almost completely subduing the remnants of The Mist of Nothingness.
What little remained of The Mist of Nothingness was suppressed and devoured by the Shadowflame with ferocity, which also attacked the underworld's icy energy with extreme fury.
At the same time, his spirituality flooded every extremity of his body at once, as if he were being slowly submerged in the dense waters of a deep sea.
A wave of vitality filled his being.
His broken body was partially restored—bones cracked, cartilage aligned, and torn muscles reconnected at essential points.
It wasn't truly recovery, only a delay in degradation—his body was beyond that at the moment. That was why the human hadn't tried to heal himself or used a potion or similar item; it would have been useless.
He was like a rusted bucket riddled with thousands of holes—no matter how much water was poured in, it would always leak out.
However, the vitality granted by the potion was something more intrinsic to his being.
If drinking a potion served to refill the bucket with water, then the vitality provided by this potion helped seal some of the holes, made the bucket grow, polished away some of the rust, and hardened it slightly—very slightly.
It healed him momentarily, even as the human could feel his body beginning to deteriorate once more.
His blurred vision cleared, if only for a moment.
Where there had once been only rain and darkness—with the Transparent World deactivated to prevent overloading his already exhausted mind—thin golden threads began to appear, floating through the air in various places.
They looked like scattered paths pointing in different directions.
Some stretched away and quickly faded into the air; others remained thick and close. There were frayed threads that exuded a dangerous aura, and whole, unbroken ones that conveyed a clear sense of safety.
One thread in particular was thick and absurdly bright, structured like a large braid woven from strands of pure gold.
It led far into the distance, tearing through space with persistence, passing through trees, hills, and mountains, refusing to fade like the others.
The human's vision blurred for a moment, slipping into a kind of trance, and he saw far ahead: the colossal Erdtree, obscured by the raging storm.
The golden braid pierced through the clouds and connected directly to something deeply hidden within the great tree.
He blinked, and his vision returned to normal.
His hearing also returned partially—only to be immediately overwhelmed.
Delirious whispers, echoes of lost souls, screams of madness, and murmurs of insanity flooded his ears from every direction, both from outside and within.
It was an oppressive cacophony of horrific noise, an orchestra of deranged voices layering endlessly over one another.
It barely affected him.
The human was already intimately accustomed to the crawling voices of his Nightmares and the constant, echoing madness of humanity's sins.
Yet, amid the thousands of chaotic voices, he noticed one that rose above all the others with an almost regal presence.
It came precisely and distantly from the same direction indicated by the golden braid leading toward the Erdtree.
A female voice echoed—low, somewhere between a queen's command and a dying plea—yet clear within his mind:
"Find me… aid me…"
Then the voice vanished.
It was not drowned out by the sea of voices around him; it simply returned to silence on its own, as if those brief words had consumed the last remaining strength it had to call for help.
Frowning, the human stared into the distance through the heavy rain.
His single eye burned with an overwhelming orange intensity, so much so that the physical glow spilled out of its socket.
The light took on the form of dense smoke, wavering and fading after only a few centimeters in the air.
At the edge of where that smoke vanished, small golden glimmers—like tiny runes—flickered in the void before disappearing completely.
"Divine…" The word left his lips with a bitter taste.
His canines cracked on their own, strangely straight golden lines appearing across the white enamel like a poison slowly spreading, ready to be used.
He moved his tongue slowly, licking the inside of his teeth.
Staring into the distance for another second, the human looked away. First, he had other things to do; afterward, he could think about that voice and its plea for help.
Focusing inward, the human realized that, just like the instinctive knowledge injected by the "consciousness" into the "brain" of his soul regarding the abilities and paths of Seer, Apprentice, and Marauder, he now possessed a complete understanding of his new abilities.
This time, because it was his own sequence and pathway, the knowledge was deeper and structurally more complete.
Sequence 9: Tarnished granted him three abilities:
Glimpse of Light in the Abyss: A passive ability to sense the general direction of places of power, danger, safety, or "completion of purpose."
Desperate Will to Survive: As long as his will to live exists, he will always have one more second. Greatly enhances physical constitution, fatigue resistance, and the ability to keep fighting even when gravely wounded. Reflects the stubbornness of one who has already lost everything.
Versatile Fighter: Increased ease in learning a wide range of combat techniques, whether physical or magical. Slightly reduces the spiritual cost of basic physical abilities.
"So that explains the threads…" he murmured hoarsely, absorbing the information.
The threads did not truly exist—this was something the human knew.
They were more like "lines of order," structuring possibilities into coherent outcomes—paths through which events could align, whether in the future, the unfolding present, or already solidified in the past.
More than mere chance or destiny, they represented the silent organization of things—the way reality arranged itself into sequences of cause and effect, forming patterns that could be followed, disrupted, or misread.
Even though the human himself could not be bound to that structure—and in fact disturbed it by his very existence—the underlying order still governed everything around him. Especially those distant, untouched by his interference.
Different worlds had different orders. In this world, the threads revealed that arrangement, mapping how events tended to align.
Blinking, the human forced the threads to disappear.
Seeing them consumed spirituality, just like Spirit Vision; even if the cost was small, he had no room for waste.
He then mentally seized the delirious whispers still buzzing in his ears, crushing them mercilessly beneath the massive weight of humanity's sins and silencing the voices in his head.
The symbols, veins, and red markings across his skin glowed in a deep crimson.
He then turned toward Agheel's corpse.
The dragon's colossal body remained in ruins. Boiling blood still poured abundantly from its shattered chest and fractured bones.
A brutal amount of blood had already spread across the lake.
At least several thousand liters stained the entire area around the impact, mixing with mud and water and raising the level of the small crater to the human's knees.
He glanced to the side for a moment, sensing the Slick Cane along with the Voidbag, before pulling it into his inventory.
Raising the arm that held the Chalice, the human let the item fall from his hand. This time, the red vessel simply dropped, disappearing as it sank into the pool of blood, melting into it as well.
Immediately, the human began dumping bodies into the pool.
He threw in whole animal carcasses, goblin corpses, masses of zombies and monstrous creatures slain during the Blood Moon, various monsters, and thousands of Antlion remains.
Although Antlions did not possess "blood" in the conventional biological sense, the fluids that composed them were aggressively and immediately converted into pure blood the moment they came into contact with the hemolymph tied to the Chalice on the ground.
The human kept throwing dozens, hundreds, thousands of bodies into the blood.
The pool swelled monstrously beneath his feet, spilling over the shattered stones of the ruins and staining the dark lake water red.
Everything within the Voidbag that contained blood was fuel.
Each body, drained to the last drop and emptied by the Chalice at the bottom of the lake, the human would pull back into his inventory, replacing it with fresh carcasses from his reserve.
The repetitive process lasted nearly a full minute.
When the disposable creature carcasses inside the Voidbag finally ran out, the human stopped. Through his connection with the submerged Chalice, he estimated the stored volume.
Approximately four hundred thousand liters of blood.
The human frowned for a second.
He had deposited a raw total absurdly exceeding a million liters of blood and fluids.
Yet it seemed the conversion of blood from such weak creatures—whose vital quality was miserable compared to what the item required—had taken its toll.
The Chalice filtered and discarded the waste, condensing that rotten immensity into just four hundred thousand usable liters.
Quantity could only compensate for quality up to a point.
Even with the human's own blood and something like Agheel's in the mixture—which would be worth far more, partially offsetting the low quality—it was still insufficient for what he needed.
Far from showing any concern over the shortfall, the human pulled multiple circular items from the Voidbag: Blood Orbs.
The item's description remained clear in his exhausted mind:
-//-
Created from thousands of liters of blood, condensed and filtered with magic into a single orb the size of a grape. They contain immense vitality.
They can be consumed directly to restore vitality.
They are mainly used to assist in potion crafting, being able to replace several materials.
-//-
The part that mattered to him was the first line: Created from thousands of liters of blood.
To cover the remaining six hundred thousand liters and force the Chalice's ascension to the Green stage, the human grabbed around two hundred Blood Orbs—from the thousand he initially possessed—and threw them into the blood that had already reached the lower part of his waist.
The instant the grape-sized orbs of crystallized blood collided with the vast crimson pool, the volume exploded on a colossal scale.
The red mass boiled and multiplied aggressively.
Hundreds of thousands of liters of condensed blood expanded at once, creating successive waves and a violent rise within the scarlet crater.
A massive surge of blood erupted upward, swallowing the ruins' debris, climbing along Agheel's scales, and engulfing the human's shattered body entirely.
The human did not move as the blood rose, nor did he seem affected by the waves; the liquid did not push him, as if it lacked permission.
It did lack permission.
The blood climbed, covering his open chest, his broken neck, and then his face, partially concealed by the Bone Helm.
When he was fully submerged—and the only sign of his existence was the orange glow of his right eye, which not even the blood could hide—the human began the Chalice's advancement process.
Submerged, he extended his left hand forward.
He grasped a random portion of the red mass, which quickly shaped itself into the form of the Chalice between his fingers. Immediately, the item activated, aggressively siphoning the scarlet lake.
Normally, advancement would not require the sacrificed blood to be outside the Chalice's storage; inside or outside made no difference.
However, the human knew that converting the full quota of one million liters by having the Chalice absorb body after body—and then dissolving the Blood Orbs individually—would take far too long.
Dumping everything into an improvised lake and having the Chalice drain it all at once was a crude, "dirtier" method—but exponentially faster.
The surrounding blood began to churn and boil, violently flowing back into the Chalice.
The massive suction force formed a whirlpool, dragging the crimson liquid into a blood-red spiral and generating high-pressure wind currents that tore through the air.
Above, the crimson vortex stretched like a tornado of blood, piercing and repelling the falling storm, scattering the clouds and revealing once more the night sky of the Lands Between.
High above, the enormous Erdtree glowed in gold.
As the blood spun and was drained, the human activated the Voidbag and pulled Agheel's colossal, completely drained body into his inventory.
He also dispersed the illusory image of Excalibur Asura, causing the connection between the Lands Between and the Nameless Foreign World to be severed due to the absence of the anchor that sustained it.
At the center of the vortex, he remained still.
The violence of the current did not affect him; the blood circulating at absurd speeds simply diverted away from his skin or flowed gently past him.
After all, he was the Chalice's master.
Within seconds, the Chalice absorbed the one-million-liter mark. The item pulsed, reaching the Green stage.
Yet tens of thousands of liters of blood still remained.
The excess mass continued to spin around him, isolating the human from the outside world like a thick, impenetrable wall. Above, the blood frayed into a scattered tornado that rose dozens of meters.
The human did not command the Chalice to absorb the remainder.
He had another use for it.
With the new stage, an ability unlocked in his mind:
-//-
Ability Name: Blood Self
Effect:
Grants the Master absolute kinetic and biological control over their own blood—and only their own.
The Master gains precise control over the flow, pressure, and movement of their blood within their body.
Allows the Master to solidify their own blood into constructs of extreme hardness, such as weapons, projectiles, or armor.
The Master may accelerate tissue regeneration, instantly purge toxins and poisons from their bloodstream, and hyper-oxygenate muscles to achieve sudden bursts of strength and speed.
-//-
The human then began to patch himself together.
It was time to seal the "holes" in the "bucket," finally allowing his body to begin healing without leaking vitality.
First, he commanded the Chalice, forcing it to convert all the surrounding blood into his own. The spinning bubble shrank by nearly half.
He then absorbed part of the fluid directly through his open wounds and pores, forcing it to circulate through his body.
Using the blood, the human sealed the fractures.
The liquid thickened at the ends of cracked veins and torn arteries, restoring the channels of circulation.
It was not truly regeneration; he was using his own solidified blood as "plaster," paving pathways through which blood flow could pass.
Then he continued, restoring the rest of his shattered body.
Guided by the instinctive anatomical knowledge granted by Echo Humanitatis, the human shaped the blood.
He created thin strands and used them to stitch together frayed muscles and ruptured organs.
His initial focus was the lung; he wove a mesh of hardened blood over the holes in the membranes, sealing the thoracic vacuum so he could draw air without collapsing the structure.
He moved down to the abdomen. Rigid threads of blood wrapped around the crushed liver, binding the lobes back into place.
A dense, insulating film covered the torn stomach and perforated intestines, sealing the walls of the digestive tract and isolating the organs.
At the shoulders and knees, where the joints had been destroyed and the tendons ruptured, he replaced the severed fibers.
Thick cords of blood, layered repeatedly like small ropes, took the place of ligaments, anchoring flesh back to bone like improvised tension cables.
Entire chunks of mangled flesh and torn muscle were filled with solid masses of coagulated blood, plugging the literal gaps in his musculature and sealing his body against the external environment.
For the bones, he solidified blood into "nails" and "needles," condensing it until it reached extreme hardness.
He drove these constructs through fractures in the femur and arms, binding the pieces together.
He created two rings of blood, fixing one on each side of the femur, and connected them with rigid cords, keeping the bone firmly in place.
In his shattered ribcage, he shaped rigid plates and rods to replace the splintered ribs—along with replacing the bone he had torn out with his own hands, creating a sixth rib entirely made of hardened blood and condensing it until its color turned completely black—physically reconstructing the chest's protective framework.
Along the spine, small wedges and red supports were inserted into cracked vertebrae, stabilizing the spinal cord and preventing further damage when moving.
Moving up to the skull, the human repositioned the small fractures and fixed them with thin needles of hardened blood, driven directly into the bone to prevent displacement.
Then, he sealed the fissures with a dense layer of condensed blood, forming a rigid plate over the damaged areas.
On the right side, where the crack was deeper, he inserted short rods of solidified blood across the split, locking the structure in place.
Around the rods, he covered everything with blood like construction concrete and solidified the liquid until it hardened like bone.
As the restoration unfolded within the sphere of blood, his racial traits and energies reacted.
The blood-red veins, markings, and symbols of Echo Humanitatis glowed intensely across his exposed bones and skin, pulsing in sync with the blood stitches.
Interwoven with them, the golden, unnaturally straight lines of the Divine Anathema burned along his skeleton, crossing over the equally straight silver lines of the Anima, which stretched across his internal organs and musculature.
Forming dozens of small blood needles, the human stitched together his cracked, broken skin like a worn, tattered garment.
From the sealed areas, the red veins, markings, and symbols emerged, spreading once more across his entire skin.
Finally, in the hollow space within his chest, the human condensed a dense mass of blood.
The fibers hardened, intertwining and crossing, shaping themselves until they formed an artificial heart perfectly identical to the original.
The moment it was complete, the human manually commanded the heart to begin beating, forcing blood to pump through his reconstructed circulatory system.
It was still a manual process, but far less taxing than directly controlling the entire blood flow at once.
With his body properly patched and the "bucket" sealed, the human grasped at the air with his left hand and pulled items from the Voidbag.
He took one of his two Greater Healing Potions.
Without hesitation, he opened it and poured its contents directly into the sphere of blood still spinning rapidly around him. Then he pulled out five more smaller Healing Potions and another ten Blood Orbs.
He threw everything into the scarlet vortex, letting the potions' contents mix with the blood as the orbs were absorbed and dissolved completely.
Unlike before, the human allowed the vitality contained within the Blood Orbs to fully merge with the red mass around him.
He let the healing essence and the potions' chemical and spiritual effects spread through the fluid, until the constantly rotating blood began to change color, taking on a lighter hue and a soft glow.
Then, the human seized the blood.
He pulled it directly into his still-open chest in a dense, continuous flow, feeding it into the exposed valves of his new artificial heart.
The heart pumped, forcing the luminous, vitality-rich blood to violently flood his circulatory system.
The process proceeded in cycles.
Fresh blood flowed in and pushed the worn-out blood out, which leaked through pores and wound seams, returning to the rotating ring around him.
With each complete cycle—with fresh blood injected and the old expelled—the human added another Blood Orb to the ring, replenishing the mixture.
He absorbed the vitality as the blood circulated, using it to stabilize his internal structure before replacing it again with the next enriched batch.
The cycle repeated steadily and rhythmically for at least ten full exchanges.
At the same time, he began to breathe.
With his lungs no longer collapsing, sealed by the red stitching, he activated Sun Breathing and pushed it to the limit. Even with blood covering his body and mouth, nothing hindered him.
The moment he breathed with the technique—now with a functional body—the blood around him began to boil and superheat.
The heat radiating from him pierced through the liquid cocoon.
The lake water outside began to boil violently, sending thick columns of white steam into the night sky, while the bark and roots of nearby dead trees ignited instantly.
The nearest ground slowly turned red as the stone began to melt into magma.
The Demon Slayer Mark on his forehead, once dormant, reignited, glowing with a steady golden light that traced the fine veins around it.
His own veins began to glow as well—both from the blood's vitality and the extreme heat—illuminating the paths beneath his patched skin in a dense reddish-orange, like magma running through rock.
With the massive influx of vitality, the activity of the blood-red markings, veins, and symbols that circulated around and contained the "empty" holes in his left arm and shoulder intensified.
The lines twisted and churned aggressively.
The "void," which devoured his skin, flesh, and aura—until now merely contained—stopped expanding.
For the first time since he had been bitten by 'The Eye,' the nonexistent space in his flesh began to recede.
After being exposed to the true vacuum between worlds and submerged directly into the Apocryph, The Mist of Nothingness—suffering loss of vitality and the assault of a second "void"—his body finally began to adapt.
And to fight back...
At the edges of the "void" holes, where nothing existed, the tens of thousands of Nightmare eyes became even more active. They opened and began blinking chaotically.
They were insane, cruel, and hungry.
They stared at the fractures in the human's flesh with intensity.
One eye tore and split into two; two became four; four shattered into eight; eight fragmented into a spiral, becoming sixteen.
The numbers multiplied in a disordered frenzy, the eyes shifting across the regenerating flesh and the contained "void."
As vitality circulated, regeneration advanced.
Necrotic, grayish tissues sloughed off and fell away, replaced by new flesh that wrapped around the blood seams and reinforcements the human had created.
Skin stretched, covering portions of the repaired flesh, and smaller wounds sealed all at once.
At last, he finally closed the hole in his chest with hardened, concentrated blood of a deep black color.
The blood filled every gap, sealing it completely in an irregular shape that followed the contours of his skin, marked by a central fissure tracing the path of the torn sixth left rib.
It was still not a full restoration, but since the moment he had fallen into that world, death no longer whispered sweet, gentle words into his ears.
The human realized, upon analyzing the flaws that refused to close, that the damage was worse than he had estimated.
Beyond the residual energy of the underworld acting as a massive retardant—clinging to the flesh like a parasite and exuding the stagnant stench of death—the damage had penetrated to a microscopic level, affecting cells and genetic structure.
It was not incurable; he could feel his body rising above that "poison."
However, the process would take time. There was a limit to what sheer brute force could solve.
Running a quick calculation, the human estimated it would take two to three days to fully recover—perhaps less if he managed to retrieve his two rings.
Commanding the purple flames of the Shadowflame to emerge from the surface of his skin and spread across his body, he forced them to burn away the grime still embedded in his overheated flesh.
His suit, shoes, and even the organic bandages created by Alalia had long since been destroyed by the heat of his body—a heat he made no effort to restrain.
Still at the center of the boiling sphere of blood, the human moved his Nightmares.
One by one, eyes opened within his shadow—both its darker and lighter shades, now without the presence of the Shadow Puppet—before dispersing into dense black smoke.
The smoke rose, spiraling around him, and as it circled his body, it took on the shape of a rough cloak.
More or less stabilized, the human finally allowed himself a quiet breath of relief.
He had survived.
Looking at his right arm, where the black hand of the Bone Helm replaced what had been severed, the human opened and closed his fingers.
He hadn't focused on regenerating it.
Using the Bone Helm's shadow hand as a temporary substitute worked efficiently; regenerating an entire limb from scratch would demand an unnecessary expenditure of vitality at the moment—especially considering that the hand had been torn away largely due to the underworld's icy energy from Hardy.
He could still feel that energy at the end of the stump, consuming flesh and vitality.
That, and his original hand, were somewhere in this world—along with his two rings and the Teardrop Cleaver.
The human intended to reclaim them.
With everything finished, he dispersed the Chalice back into blood, which quickly flowed into his bloodstream and settled within the artificial heart made of blood.
He then commanded the sphere of blood to rise, floating a few meters above the warped ground and away from the magma.
Next, he moved the Shadowflame.
Purple flames appeared in fragments around the scarlet sphere. Instead of burning, they rapidly absorbed all the heat from the surrounding environment.
The fires in the trees were extinguished at once.
The bubbling magma on the ground cooled and cracked, solidifying back into black rock.
With the sudden drop in temperature, the moisture and dense columns of steam condensed in the same instant, creating a brief, heavy rainfall that fell over the newly cooled stone.
Floating at the center, arms relaxed at his sides and palms facing forward, the human released control over the blood.
The sphere collapsed instantly.
The mass of blood crashed down, slamming violently into the crater below. The scattered tornado of blood still spinning in the air lost cohesion and dispersed with the remaining rotational energy, falling as a brief rain of blood around him.
The massive volume of blood filled the rocky depression, flooding the impact site of Agheel and forming a considerable lake of blood.
With the sphere no longer obstructing the view, the human became fully visible.
His light-gray hair hung heavy, reaching the tops of his shoulders. His face, partially obscured, was nearly expressionless, save for a faint smile at the corner of his lips.
His exposed skin was pale, with veins faintly glowing beneath the flesh in a reddish-orange hue.
The cloak formed by the Nightmares draped over his body like a mass of darkness, somewhere between solid and smoky at the edges, falling over his shoulders, covering down to his forearms, and dropping straight to his ankles.
At random, eyes opened within the darkness, staring at the surroundings before closing again.
Across all visible skin—his bare ankles and feet lightly set together, his face, neck, and along his left forearm and hand—the blood-red symbols, markings, and veins of Echo Humanitatis were fully visible and pulsing, rippling and shifting at random while somehow always remaining the same.
The only exception was his right hand, which was not made of bone, flesh, or skin.
On his forehead, the sun-shaped Demon Slayer Mark glowed faintly in gold.
His right eye radiated a vibrant orange.
The color leaked from the socket like dense smoke, dispersing into the air and breaking into tiny rune-like golden motes before vanishing.
On the left side of his head, the gray bone mask of the Bone Helm covered half his face, leaving the empty socket of his left eye completely obscured in shadow.
From his feet, left hand, and cloak, blood dripped slowly into the lake below.
For a moment, the human seemed suspended in the air, like a beautiful and macabre, insane painting. Behind him, the reflection of the great Full Moon above shone for an instant, almost entirely obscured by his silhouette, like an eclipse.
Then he fell—into the blood, onto the blood—coming to stand atop the crimson surface.
When the human accepted the Rainbow mission to come to this world, another list of archetypes had appeared for him to choose from.
Because of the situation, he had not chosen, and the stream did not seem to care. But now, as he looked at the list that appeared before his eyes, he did not hesitate.
The Devil had been his archetype in the Amalgama World; in this world, it would be something else.
He had stopped playing around.
He was livid.
So he chose:
-//-
[The Threat]
Act as a constant, inevitable presence of danger.
Your mere presence is a threat. Your existence is a threat. Your actions are a threat.
You are not a threat.
You are The Threat.
-//-
Looking at the great golden Erdtree, at the enormous Full Moon above, and at the entire world around him—reeking of divinity and having welcomed him with a dragon trying to devour him—the human allowed a faint smile to form and spoke in a much softer voice.
A calm, almost kind voice, as if offering a gentle, friendly warning to everything around him:
"This won't be enough."
[...]---[...]
And with that, Devas' brief "welcome" moment to Elden Ring comes to an end.
As I said before, I really enjoyed writing these chapters. I got to let my imagination run wild with some "theoretical" descriptions I've been thinking about for a while now.
Devas drank the potion and became Sequence 9:Tarnished.
I've already planned things out up to Sequence 6. I'm skipping 5, 4, 3, and 2 for now, but I do have ideas for 1 and 0. It's still a work in progress—I've changed this path quite a lot while developing it over time. If you have any theories or ideas, feel free to share them.
As for the Amalgam World, there will still be things happening there—after all, the Shadow Puppet, which is Devas, is still there. Right now, Devas exists in both worlds.
As for the voice that asked for help, I think it's pretty obvious who it is.
I also think it's fairly obvious where Devas' arm ended up, given where he is and what's nearby.
Good night, everyone—and enjoy the read!