Chapter 108 — A King Tier Alchemist
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The entity didn't look at Socrates.
It looked at Amelia.
That alone told Socrates everything he needed to know about the gap between himself and what was standing inside that barrier — the way it dismissed his presence without effort, the way the air around it sat differently from the air around everything else, heavier and older and completely indifferent to the panic rising in his chest.
'Lady Achillia...' He reached inward — trying to connect with his sea of consciousness, trying to find her — but the barrier was doing something to that too, the connection slipping through his fingers like smoke.
The entity descended on Amelia.
It moved through her like it had every right to — her unconscious body accepting it the way the ground accepts rain — and then Amelia's mouth opened.
But the voice that came out wasn't hers.
"Trueblood." It said. Not a question. Not a greeting. Just an identification — flat and ancient and carrying the weight of something that had been waiting a very long time and was not particularly pleased about it.
Socrates threw himself at the barrier.
His body hit the invisible wall and the force that came back at him wasn't just physical — it pressed into him from every direction simultaneously, lifting him off his feet, rotating him in the air like something being inspected, and then dropping him.
He hit the ground and was back on his feet before the dust settled.
"Please—" His voice came out stripped of everything except what it needed to be. He dropped to his knees. Not from pressure. By choice. "Please don't kill my sister. Take my life instead. Take whatever you want from me. But spare her."
Beside him Sun Wukong dropped without hesitation, both knees hitting the stone, his golden armor catching the moonlight as he bowed his head.
"And spare my Master's life in her place..." The Monkey King said quietly — none of his usual theatrics anywhere in him. He knew what this was. He had lived long enough to know exactly what this was. "This subordinate begs."
Silence.
Then —
"Kill her?" The voice came from Amelia's mouth again — but this time something in it shifted. Not softer exactly. Just less like a weapon being pointed. "I cannot kill her even if I wished to. Without the Trueblood family — without what your ancestors did — I would not have survived to this era."
Socrates raised his head slowly.
The entity turned Amelia's face toward him — and for a moment it simply looked at him the way things look at things they have been expecting for a very long time.
"I don't understand." Socrates said.
"You don't need to." The voice was flat again. "Your ancestors sealed this part of my consciousness into this altar with one instruction. One. Whenever a Trueblood arrives who is deemed worthy — give it to them."
A veil of blood rose from the runes circling the altar — drawn upward slowly, contained in something transparent, dark red and dense, moving the way living things move.
"Over the years many Truebloods have stumbled their way here." The entity continued. "Some desperate. Some greedy. Some who thought the bloodline alone was enough to make them worthy."
The veil hovered.
"None of them were."
The silence that followed had teeth in it.
"But her—" The entity looked down at the body it was inhabiting — and something passed through the borrowed face that was difficult to name. Recognition. The particular quality of finding what you have been looking for after looking for a very long time. "She carries it fully. The bloodline is complete in her."
Socrates exhaled slowly. "Then—"
"Her sight is gone." The entity said it the way you state weather. Matter of fact. Without apology. "What that man did to her eyes — that I cannot recover. That is beyond the reach of what remains of me here."
The words landed on Socrates like physical weight.
He didn't speak.
"Brother—"
It was Amelia's voice this time. Real. Coming from somewhere underneath the entity — faint and searching, like someone calling out from the bottom of deep water.
"Amy—" Socrates moved toward the barrier instinctively and the invisible wall pressed back against him.
"She can hear everything." The entity said. "She has been able to hear since before I entered her."
The implications of that settled — Amelia had heard all of it. The ritual. The dagger. Shira's technique. All of it — conscious enough to hear, unable to stop any of it. Socrates felt something in his chest respond to that in a way he had no immediate outlet for.
The entity pulled itself free from Amelia's body.
What emerged was a consciousness in visible form — translucent, shifting, carrying an age in its outline that made even the old stone of the altar look recent. It looked at Amelia the way a craftsman looks at unfinished work — with the clear-eyed assessment of someone who already knows exactly what they intend to do.
"I am going to take her as my disciple."
Socrates blinked.
"I will pass everything I know to her. Every technique. Every art. Everything your ancestors preserved me here to give." The entity's eyes moved to Socrates. "Fetch me every Ice Flame crystal this dungeon holds. Every single one."
---
They didn't argue.
Socrates and the Monkey King moved immediately — back into the dungeon, back through the corridors that smelled of ash and old cold and the remnants of everything the last weeks had cost. They didn't discuss it. There was nothing to discuss.
What followed was two days of systematic hunting — moving through every section of the dungeon with the focused efficiency of people who had a singular purpose and no patience for anything that stood between them and it. The Monkey King was something else entirely when he was moving with intent — faster than he looked, more vicious than his commentary suggested, dispatching beasts with the practiced ease of something that had done this ten thousand times before across ten thousand years.
They came back with nearly ten thousand crystals.
The entity looked at the volume of it without visible reaction.
"The dungeon core." It said. "Take it. Close this place behind you. Your sister will remain here until her cultivation is complete."
"How long—"
"Do you want to ask me that question again?" The entity's voice dropped one register — and the temperature in the room dropped with it. "Cultivation is not hours. It is not days. It is what it is and it takes what it takes. And your stinking blood and that hideous monkey's face are already disturbing my concentration."
Sun Wukong opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Socrates straightened. "Then I'll—"
"There is something else." The entity cut through him without effort. "My true self exists in the outside world. When the time comes — if you survive long enough for the time to come — there is a task she will require of you."
"What task?"
"When the time comes, you will know." A pause. "But I will tell you the reward."
Socrates said nothing. Waiting.
"A Sixth Tier Energy Refinement pill."
The air in the room seemed to change quality.
Socrates stared at the entity.
"That pill—" his voice came out different. Lower. "That pill can fix broken meridians."
"Yes."
"How—" He stopped himself. Started again. "How can you promise something like that? A Sixth Tier Refinement pill is—"
"I am the only Alchemist King in Southeastern Europe." The entity said simply. "King Aspasia."
Socrates went completely still.
"King Aspasia..." He said the name slowly. As if testing whether it was real. "Of Aspasia City..."
"The Holy City of Alchemists." Sun Wukong finished quietly beside him — and for once there was no performance in his voice either. Just the flat acknowledgment of someone who understood the weight of what he had just heard.
Socrates' whole body was shaking slightly — not from fear. From something he hadn't let himself feel in a long time. The thing that lives underneath every goal that has ever mattered to him.
The possibility of it.
"So believe me or don't." King Aspasia said. "But your ancestors knew me. And they trusted me enough to leave a piece of my consciousness here for you. That should tell you something."
Socrates bowed.
Deep. Lower than he had bowed for anything or anyone in a long time.
"I will survive." He said to the stone floor beneath him. "I will reach Aspasia City. And I will complete whatever task your true self requires."
"See that you do." King Aspasia said. Then — "Your sister is in my hands now. I do not take disciples lightly and I do not abandon what I take on. She will be returned to you when she is ready — and when she is ready, she will be something worth waiting for."
A brief silence.
"Now get your stinking blood out of my temple."
Sun Wukong grabbed Socrates by the arm before he could say anything else — pulling him backward with the quiet efficiency of someone who recognized a conversation that had ended whether the other party knew it or not.
---
The entity waved its hand.
The force of it was casual and total — launching both of them backward through the temple entrance and out into the night air, the moonlight falling clean and cold across them as they landed.
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
Sun Wukong reduced himself — the golden armor folding inward, his form shrinking down from the size that filled a room to something that could sit comfortably on a shoulder. He hopped up onto Socrates and settled there without ceremony.
They found the dungeon core in the chamber guarded by a four-legged beast — the Monkey King dealt with it in minutes, barely breaking stride. Socrates stored the core in his pouch and felt the dungeon begin to respond immediately — the energy that had held the space together starting to unravel from the edges inward, the walls groaning quietly around them as they made their way toward the exit.
Socrates walked without speaking.
Amelia's face was in his mind — the blood tears, the searching hand, the way she had reached for his face without being able to find it. The way she had said *you came* like she had never completely stopped believing he would.
He hadn't protected her sight.
He had been fighting down there — cutting through men, proving something, being a warrior — and Shira had moved past a legendary beast and blinded his sister in the space of a single moment while Socrates watched from too far away.
He carried that.
The dungeon shuddered around him — stone shifting, ceiling cracking, the ancient structure giving up its shape gracefully as the core's energy dispersed. The cold that had lived in these corridors for longer than anyone currently alive began to release itself.
Socrates stepped out into the open air as the dungeon collapsed behind him — the sound of it filling the night briefly and then going quiet — and stood under the open sky for the first time in what felt like a lifetime.
Sun Wukong said nothing on his shoulder.
Socrates looked up at the sky — the moon still there, still full, completely indifferent to everything it had witnessed tonight — and something in him that had been held very tightly since the moment he saw the beam hit Amelia's eyes finally came loose.
Not tears. Not yet.
Just a breath. Long and uneven and honest.
Then he straightened.
"I can't slack off." He said it quietly at first — then louder, the words finding their shape. "I can't slack off." He looked at the collapsed dungeon behind him. At the night ahead of him. At all the distance between here and Aspasia City and everything that distance contained.
"I must survive." His grip tightened on Bloodsucker. "I must reach the Holy Lands of Aspasia. I must fix my meridians. I must become a cultivator."
He screamed it at the end — not from desperation but from somewhere deeper than that. The place where decisions get made that don't get unmade.
Sun Wukong held on as the sound of it went out into the night.
Then quietly, from the small monkey's direction —
"...Master. You're screaming into empty forest."
Socrates started walking.
"Shut up you Old Monkey..." He growled..
"But first things first.. I've to leave this Underworld.."
Only if he knew that Life has other plans for him....
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**THE END.**