Chapter 6 – Necromancy and Nightmare

Chapter 6 – Necromancy and Nightmare

Dinner went by in a blur. Vaelir patiently walked Liria through the prep work while cracking jokes, but she couldn’t help noticing how he kept a guarded distance from Seris the entire time.

She wasn’t the only one who noticed. Seris looked hurt by the snub, and when she tried comforting him, Vaelir had frowned at her disapprovingly.

Don’t get too attached, Liria. He admonished her.

My mission. My call. She shot back, more defensively than she would have liked.

Thank the Goddess her brother chose to drop the topic, but she could tell from the way Vaelir left immediately afterward that he wasn’t too pleased. He left her with a magic pouch filled with supplies anyway, his brows furrowed in worry as he made her promise to call the moment she needed help.

It was now late in the night. The fire had settled into steady, low-burning coals, throwing amber light across the clearing. Liria kept watch besides Seris while he slept, feeling more than a little conflicted.

Why am I fighting with my own family over the accursed Lich King?

She tried to get up—take a walk to clear her mind—but Seris clung to her with the desperation of a drowning man.

“Please don’t leave me.” He mumbled, his voice so vulnerable and broken that her heart clenched in her chest.

Liria settled back down.

She thought of how shy and nervous he had been when he first asked to hold her hand as he slept, cheeks pink, eyes averted. The way he had fallen on the pork roast with barely contained tears of joy, then paused halfway through and shyly pushed the choicest portion toward her.

She remembered the look of awe and hope on his face when they first met.

When was the last time Liria had sighed this much?

Not the Lich King. Seris. The child’s name is Seris.

Liria reminded herself once again. And she had a perfectly good reason for doing this beyond sentimental impulses.

Serivhal may have been the final survivor and bearer of the largest fragment, but he was not the only one who carried within him the essence of a dead god. Even if Liria stopped her ward from becoming the Lich King, there were others who could take his place. Helping Seris overcome his nature was not only an act of mercy. It was a golden opportunity to study necromancy at its source, to understand it well enough to prepare for whatever came next.

Therefore, Liria was being perfectly logical and pragmatic. Sentimentality had nothing to do with it.

She absentmindedly patted Seris’s head with her free hand. He made a small, contented sound and leaned into the touch, giggling softly in his sleep.

How could he be so cute?

Liria smiled a troubled smile and stared into the fire.

Though she wanted to help Seris, their opposing attributes made this extremely difficult.

Normally, a single glance would have told her everything she needed: a person’s strengths and weaknesses, their ailments, what they needed most. But the taint within Seris was so loud, so blinding to her senses that even after a full day together, she still couldn’t determine something as basic as whether the child was a boy or a girl. Diagnosing his condition properly felt like a distant dream.

And their clashing mana meant that any attempt to use magic on him would result in pain and injury. So where did that leave her?

One option immediately came to mind. An unfinished ritual. A long-held regret. A grand endeavor, interrupted before it could turn the tide of the war.

This was Liria’s chance to decisively resolve Seris’ problem while validating her past.

For a moment, she struggled with indecision, but ultimately decided to let it go. Seris was a fragile child, not a corrupted holy site. The ritual was too extreme; it should only be her last resort when all else had failed.

Liria watched the fire and waited.

Seris’s breathing gradually deepened, settling into the slow, even cadence of deep slumber. The night was very still. An owl called once from somewhere in the Silverwood and went quiet again. The coals ticked and shifted.

Any time now.

Green fire flickered under her gaze. Freed from the shackles of Seris’ restraint, the necromantic taint within him was leaking out into the world, threading through the air in slow, hungry tendrils, darkening the grass where it touched. A beetle near Liria’s feet went still, then began moving in the wrong direction, jerking and clumsy.

She gathered the worst of it into a contained barrier before it could spread further, then reached out with the art of Harmonic Ascension and drew a tiny wisp of corruption into herself.

Her current weakness wasn’t entirely a disadvantage, she reflected. In her prime, she had burned away necromantic taint the way sunlight burned away morning mist, reflexively and completely. The only exception had been Serivhal himself, and whenever she was close enough to study him, she was too busy trying not to die. Studying necromantic energy this closely, patiently and deliberately, would have been impossible then. Some things could only be done from a position of fragility.

The wisp Liria drew from Seris was ideal for study: exceptionally potent, but purposeless and undirected, carrying only the raw character of the dead god’s essence without the intent of a living practitioner behind it.

She just wished the process didn’t feel quite so much like pouring acid into her veins.

The corruption blazed through her mana pathways, corrosive and wrong in ways words could not describe. She felt hollow emptiness, the desire to consume all life, an endless hunger that sought to taint her being, and beyond it… the lingering resentment of a dead god.

She reached for it with her mind, tracing toward its source.

The wisp burned out within her before she could reach it.

Liria let out a slow, careful breath, eyes still closed.

This could work.

The essence of all magic and martial arts is to impose one’s will upon the world through the manipulation of mana. All that lived left behind traces of themselves after death to become part of the World Soul. The Three Goddesses’ will was part of the world’s guiding principles, and even now, a century after its death, the remnants of the dead Outer God still sought to corrupt the world’s natural order.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Divine magic was the union of mortal and divine will to create miracles, while necromancy was harnessing the dead god’s resentment to bring destruction and ruin.

If Liria could trace that resentment, isolate it, and snuff it out through the force of her will alone, she could create a method to negate necromancy that depended purely on the strength of her soul, independent of her physical limits.

While her soul had survived the time rewind mostly unscathed, her vessel was catastrophically weak. Even with a full day of nonstop cultivation, the Skill gain boost from her divine talent, the reward for completing her Epic-tier Personal Quest to purify the corrupted Silverwoods, and the XP gained from slaying every undead within its depths, Liria’s existence level barely scraped past 100.

She needed a way to work around that, and hopefully help Seris without hurting him in the process.

Again.

She dove back into that sea of hunger and corruption. Each time a wisp of taint burned out within her, she surfaced, caught her breath, and dove again. Each pass took her a little deeper, stripped a little more of the uncertainty away, until she finally felt it clearly beneath everything else.

Contact.

The lingering will of an Outer God who sought to consume the world, only to be slain by the Three Goddesses. The origin of necromancy. The remnants of that which is dead but should have never died, and with its disbelieving wrath, even death was denied.

I am eternal.

The thought was not language. It was instinct—a primordial certainty that sought to warp the world in its image: neither dead or alive, forever hungry, forever unable to move on.

You are dead. Liria answered it. Be gone.

Her voice was the voice of the world. The slow breathing of forests. The grinding patience of mountains. The endless, unhurried circulation of oceans and clouds.

For a moment, the ancient hatred struggled against her will, but the dying embers of a dead god’s divinity could not win against the World Tree’s beloved daughter.

The end came in silence, without fanfare.