Sylver Seeker

Sylver figured out the system they used after he raided and tested the 4th hidden room. On account of everyone moving around via teleportation, they didn’t bother too much with the emergency exits. Which was incredibly stupid, considering that one blackout was all that it took to trap them inside, with no way out.

But then again, considering that one of the groups Sylver had used to check for a match for Chrys’ blood cheered when he broke their door down, they were clearly waiting for someone to rescue them.

What they got instead was a creature that looked like a walking silhouette, who asked them a question in a language they didn’t know, and then shoved a finger into wherever blood was leaking from, and then flung them against one of the walls.

Most of them were armed, but the vast majority reacted far too slowly to pose a threat to Sylver. And the ones that did react, would have missed even if Sylver hadn’t traveled through the thin layer of fog covering the floor, and appeared directly behind them.

The question “where are all the guards,” was answered all at once, as Sylver watched as a giant snake looking monster slithered along the glass ceiling, and was followed by a heavily armed, and heavily armored, group of people, who thankfully were too busy shooting at it, to notice the oddly foggy floor from which Sylver was watching them.

But as lucky as Sylver considered himself for this turn of events, he felt that the luck was being actively canceled out by the fact that he’d already tested over 70 people, and still hadn’t found a match for Chrys.

Shit like this was exactly why he refused to travel with someone who wasn’t at least partially immortal. Sylver was good at a lot of things, but “healing” someone, wasn’t one of them.

For starters, as a pure dark, he was quite literally incapable of using healing magic. It wasn’t a matter of effort, or knowledge, or ability, it was an impassable biological limitation. He had a shade that could sort of use healing magic, and there were ways to transfer one creature’s life force into another, but both were a pain in the ass to use and unreliable.

It was part of the reason he loved having Edmund as backup. Even if Edmund was “destroyed” to the point only a single drop of blood remained, it was simply a matter of time before his remains absorbed enough mana to start the rebirthing process.

He wasn’t the son of the world’s greatest healer for nothing, the man could survive and heal from quite literally anything, even Sylver couldn’t permanently keep the idiot down. If not for that fucking sword the traitor used, Edmund never would have-

[High-Elf/??? (Scribe+Scribe Adept) Defeated!]

Sylver watched as the man’s body practically exploded as it collided with the wall, and showered the remaining researchers in a thick layer of gore. Sylver once again used [Deadly Darkness]to trip them up and stopped them from moving around too much. He then appeared behind them, grabbed them by the neck, checked to see if they had the same blood as Chrys, and flung them at the wall, albeit with significantly less force.

Sylver took a deep breath, as he kicked the door open on his way out, took 11 steps forward, and with a single concentrated punch, dented the top right of the next door, and funneled his way inside using [Fog Form].

The labs here were all modular, for lack of a better word. They were all the same shape and size, and if Sylver guessed correctly, could be moved around as desired using teleportation. The best way to think of it was to imagine the “corridor” as a large tube, and all the labs were simply attached to it.

Sylver very nearly left the room as Spring confirmed there weren’t any people here, but a faint movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. He looked up, and actually focused on his surroundings, and saw hundreds upon hundreds of tiny blobs floating around in green-colored tanks.

Sylver walked up to the nearest one and placed his hand on the glass.

He’d touched Chrys enough to have a rough outline of her primal energy field, and wasn’t all that thrilled at what he felt when he touched the floating blob of meat, floating around inside the tank.

Sylver didn’t bother trying to figure out how to properly open the cylinder, and simply punched the glass to shatter it. The blob fell out of the tank as the liquid rushed out of it, and Sylver caught it with his shadow, and just looked at it.

One of the glass shards had very lightly cut it, and Sylver was caught between a rock and a hard place as he touched the blood leaking out with the hand that still had Chrys’ charged up blood, and confirmed that it was a match.

Not just a match, it was a perfect match.

Which in Sylver’s experience only occurred in three circumstances.

The first was luck that was so improbable, Sylver felt comfortable describing it as impossible.

The second was a perfect copy, a homunculus grown from a piece of hair, or a drop of blood, a clone so to speak.

And the third, and the one Sylver’s gut seemed to consider most likely, was a direct blood relative.

Either a parent or in this particular case, a child…

“You don’t think these are…” Spring tapped out but hesitated to finish his thought.

“Well, her ovaries were missing… It isn’t exactly out of the realm of possibility...” Sylver tapped out, as he spent precious seconds weighing the pros and cons of his decision.

All the cons involved Ria or Chrys having a problem with it, to Sylver’s eyes there wasn’t much of an issue here. These things didn’t have a soul, and he couldn’t feel a heartbeat either, they were already dead.

Just floating bags of flesh and blood…

“Don’t tell anyone,” Sylver tapped out, as he extended his shadow away from him, while he looked around for something to hold them.

“I won’t,” Spring tapped back, as Sylver’s shadow started to chip away at the bottom part of the vats, to get the liquid to leak out.

While Sylver tore the cabinets apart in search of something to hold the corpses, he felt something approaching him. He turned into fog and poked a tendril outside the bent door, and saw a man wearing a white lab coat running in Sylver’s general direction, with a horrified look on his face.

If the circumstances were different, Sylver would have smiled as he materialized directly in the man’s path, and quite literally simply held his open hand out, as the man’s momentum brought his neck directly into Sylver’s grasp.

Sylver repeated what Ria said in dark elf, but with the physical contact, Sylver felt right away that the man had no idea what Sylver had just said.

“Wait, wait, wait, I can-”

[High-Elf/??? (Scribe+Chemist) Defeated!]

Sylver didn’t waste any time, and hid the corpse away into his [Bound Bones] storage, and materialized inside the room full of compatible corpses. Sylver pulled the man’s corpse out and used his shadow to slice open the man’s carotid artery, and used a small amount of [Necrotic Mutilation]to glue him upside down against the door, to make the blood drain as quickly as possible.

*

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[Necrotic Mutilation (III) Proficiency increased to 19%!]

[Mutating Override (II) Proficiency increased to 91%!]

It wasn’t Sylver’s best work, but as with most of his on-the-fly surgeries, it was good enough.

As he hid the partially hollow man’s corpse in his [Bound Bones] storage, Sylver was eternally grateful that he was undead, and had been for the vast majority of his unlife.

A living person would have had an issue with what he had just done, Sylver wouldn’t be surprised if they were downright revolted by the mere thought, let alone actually go through with it.

But to Sylver, everyone and everything was essentially just meat. [Mutating Override]saved him a great deal of stitching and attempts to get the scale right, and Sylver very quietly thanked the system for the help.

To save Chrys Sylver needed a working pair of lungs, some blood to replace what she’d lost, and if possible, a heart to help her while Sylver looked for a more permanent solution.

And while he didn’t manage to get his hands on a human-sized pair of lungs, or a human-sized heart, he had plenty of blood, 22 thumb-sized hearts, and 25 and a half palm-sized pairs of lungs, all stuffed together into an incredibly pale corpse.

Along with spares, in the event Chrys needed them. Sylver planned to burn them when Chrys was safe and he had a moment alone, but as disgusting as it was, he wasn’t going to throw away something that could save her life.

As Sylver materialized inside Chrys’ room, he saw the girl’s head turn to stare right at him, with her right eye aglow with a faint yellow light.

“She isn’t going to die,” Chrys said, without moving her jaw.

“How?” Sylver asked, as he walked over to her and crouched down to place a hand on her chest.

Chrys moved her left arm up to her head and pointed at her right ear.

“There’s an implant that’s supplying her brain with oxygen and some sort of chemical I can’t identify. Her skull is made out of some sort of extremely tough alloy, from the way the circuitry is lined up, even if she were to be decapitated, she won’t die,” Chrys explained, as Sylver used the primal energy sensing ability [Primal Override]provided him to get a feel for how Chrys was fairing.

Chrys, or rather Ria speaking through Chrys, was right. He struggled to figure out what was going on in the rest of her body, but her head and brain were perfectly fine, just mildly sedated. She wasn’t even bleeding.

Sylver’s voice caught in his throat for a half-second, before he spoke.

“I’m going to get the book from downstairs, and then we’re leaving,” Sylver explained, as Chrys/Ria nodded at him.

“Be quick, I can’t tell how much time she has,” Chrys said, as Sylver turned into fog, and appeared directly above where he had sensed Chrys’ magic coming from.

A very detached part of Sylver admired the idea, as he felt the floor out with his shadow, and looked for a hatch or a weak point.

The head was the important part for any creature, the rest of the body was technically speaking simply a tool to supply the brain with oxygen and nutrients. If the Garden had something to circumvent the need for a body, Sylver wouldn’t mind it if Lola or Ria managed to reverse engineer the implant, and created something similar for Sylver.

Sylver found a piece of metal that sounded hollow when his shadow tapped it, and Sylver summoned his ax into his hand and hit the spot as hard as he could. The ax tore through the metal as if it were tissue paper, and Spring immediately sent scouts inside to investigate. Sylver followed after them and found himself traveling down some sort of pipe that was almost completely filled up with glass-like wires.

Sylver hit a dead end as the wires continued going through the floor, but thankfully he could still use his shadow via [Deadly Darkness] to cut one of the wires open and push it through. The wire fell, and Sylver funneled himself through the hole and materialized inside a room that felt like nothing he’d ever felt before.

The room was roughly the size of Sylver’s current 3-floor mansion, except it was a near-perfect hollow sphere, with only a tiny pillar on which a much smaller sphere sat. Sylver looked around and could see oddly shaped discs lining the walls, which he half guessed, half recognized the purpose of.

The drones that interfered with Sylver’s magic used a much smaller version of these discs, barely the size of his thumb’s nail, while every one of the discs in this room was as wide as Sylver was tall.

The mana inside this room was tortured.

Sylver didn’t know how else to describe it, the feeling he got from simply existing in this space felt like he was swimming in a pool of souls screaming out in agony. It was a perversion of mana, in a way that caught even someone as callous as Sylver off guard.

Any mage worth their salt, any mage that considered magic as anything other than a tool, would be on their knees in shock right now. Sylver was lucky that the backlash from using 2nd tier magic was still coursing through his body in waves of pain because it let him focus on something that wasn’t a genocide-worthy affront to existence itself.

Sylver silently turned into fog and materialized on the walkway that connected the tiny sphere to the wall, and only exit, and approached it.

Kass’ note quite literally read “3 floors below Chrysanthemum’s room,” and while Sylver wasn’t the best at estimating distances, he didn’t doubt for a second he was in the right place. He could feel it on his skin, even with the thick layer of lead keeping it contained.

Sylver could see how the metal cover functioned, and thankfully the arms holding the lotus-shaped metal sheets weren’t made of lead, and Sylver was able to force them open.

Strictly speaking, the book itself looked so ordinary it could have easily passed for a used children’s storybook. The spine was cracked from repeated use, one of the corners was torn, and the bright red ribbon being used as a bookmark hung limp and frayed from the bottom of the pages.

The cover was bright red, with the edges of the pages lined with a yellow metal that was the wrong color for any metal or alloy that Sylver knew. On the front, Sylver couldn’t read the words, but he counted exactly 7 suns.

Sylver backed away from the book and walked to the only door in this spherical room. He didn’t look away from it, as his [Necrotic Mutilation]coated hands gripped the edges, and forced the door open. Sylver turned into fog as he moved through the pitch-black stairway leading upwards, and with a running start, slammed his shoulder into the hidden door leading into Chrys’ room.

The girl was standing on her feet and turned to look at Sylver, but there wasn’t any life in her wide-open eyes.

“You need to get out of her, and help me,” Sylver said with the kind of calmness only an intense shock could provide.

Chrys walked over to Sylver, and he very gently reinforced his limbs as he picked her up, and made sure her head didn’t hang without any support. As Sylver carried her downstairs, Ria slowly oozed out of Chrys’ ears and gathered herself on Sylver’s right shoulder.

Sylver actually hesitated to take the final step, because then he would be within the book’s line of sight. If his blood wasn’t kept at an acceptable temperature, it would have been freezing cold right now. With a suppressed shuddering breath, Sylver took the final step down the stairs and locked his eyes on the small red book.

It was barely as big as a letter and looked as if it had maybe 100 pages inside of it.

Ria stayed perfectly silent as Sylver slowly approached the book, and with a faint stutter explained himself.

“I-I need you to cover it completely, and under no circumstances stop covering it. Once we leave this room, you can’t let it out. We’re all dead if you let it out,” Sylver whispered, truly terrified in a way he hadn’t been in a very long time.

“What is it?” Ria asked, with a tone similar to Sylver’s, but afraid for a wholly different reason.

“Not while it can hear me. Please Ria, cover it and don’t let it touch anyone or anything,” Sylver repeated, without once looking away from the book.

Sylver watched as Ria slid down from his shoulder, and slithered along the metal walkway. She was in the shape of a snake as she gradually spiraled up the pillar holding the book, and stopped as she gathered the rest of her body into a rectangle on the surface the book was standing on.

“What’s going to happen when I touch it?” Ria asked, as a tiny face appeared on the metal rectangle, and looked as concerned as Ria sounded.

“Nothing, I promise. I need you to do this for me, quickly,” Sylver repeated, without moving a single muscle, as he just stared at the book.

If he was paying attention he would have noticed that he was not only holding his breath but was also leaking black soot all over the wall directly behind him.

Ria stared at Sylver, for a moment that felt like it lasted an eternity, before the metallic rectangle that was her body liquefied, and wrapped itself around the book as if someone dropped it in a bowl full of molten gold.

Sylver waited for 10 whole seconds, possibly the tensest 10 seconds of his very recently acquired life, as Ria’s face slowly appeared on the book’s cover.

“Now what?” she asked, with an unreadable expression on her face.

“What’s 27 multiplied by 51,” Sylver asked slowly, and almost burst out laughing as Ria raised an eyebrow at him.

“1,377. What do I do now?” Ria asked as the soot leaking out of Sylver’s shadow-covered form was sucked back into his body, along with whatever beads of sweat might have been building on his forehead.

“I’ll carry you. Focus on keeping it isolated from the rest of the world, I’ll handle the rest, everything is alright now,” Sylver explained, as he adjusted how he was holding Chrys, and almost skipped over towards the book.

“What is this?” Chrys asked, as Sylver reached out with his left hand towards the Ria-covered book, and hesitated for a final time, before he very gently grabbed it, and looked around for a place to keep it.

“If someone with even a drop of mana in their bodies were to touch it, they will die. And I don’t mean a proper death, I mean it will overwrite your very soul to make you do its bidding,” Sylver explained, as he placed the book on his spine and lower back, and glued it into place using darkness.

“Is that all? You made it sound like it would bring about the end of the world,” Ria said, with such a relaxed tone that Sylver started to laugh as he ran up the stairs.

Bursts of pain still coursed through his body, even as his stomach started to hurt from laughter, and for a split second, Sylver felt that he would lose his mind.

Rose didn’t give a fuck about the dark elves, or the high elves, this wasn’t just a domino piece, this was the domino piece.

“If that thing so much as grazes me, Chrys, even a fly, this world is done for. The only thing left to do is nuke it until no living thing remains. It is a virus, and once it’s out, that’s it. There’s no defense against it, there’s no cure, there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do about it,” Sylver explained, as he held Chrys’ unconscious body a little tighter, and placed one foot on the wall, and started to walk upwards, towards the broken open glass ceiling.

“I don’t get it,” Ria asked, as Sylver used his shadow to help him jump up from the wall, and land on top of the Garden’s glass roof.

“I don’t understand it myself, truth be told. But the only solution for something like this is to either destroy it, which is impossible once it has managed to touch at least 1 living creature, or to send it into another world,” Sylver explained, as he stopped his face from twisting into a smile.

He finally realized what the cunt in white meant when she described this realm as “familiar with the area.”

Of course, Sylver was familiar with the area, he had been the one who scouted it out, and deemed it empty enough of life to be used as a quarantine zone.

Although back then it wasn’t covered in ice, it didn’t even have a breathable atmosphere. Or a sun for that matter.

The cover had changed, but the feeling was unmistakable.

“Is it connected to someone now?” Ria asked.

“It wouldn’t be locked up like this if it were. Seems like someone populated this world with creatures that naturally didn’t have mana in their bodies. I wouldn’t be surprised if no one even knew what this was, or how much damage it could do. To the “high-elves” this is just a blank book, harmless,” Sylver explained, as he turned on his heel and saw an enormous upright lizard barreling towards him, that was roughly 3 times bigger than Texas had been.

Behind it, Sylver could see people wearing armor chasing after it, but every single one of them seemed to lock eyes with Sylver’s darkness-covered form, holding a darkness-covered figure in his arms.

“But it’s connected to Chrys somehow?” Ria asked calmly, as Sylver turned on his heel again and gradually started to run.

“Most likely they figured out that it has something to do with the future, and found a way to filter Chrys’ magic through it, so to speak, without allowing her to interact with it herself,” Sylver explained, as the Texas like lizard made an incredibly familiar sound, and took a long and deep breath.

“And taking it a step further, someone knew that if she actually touched it she needed to be killed, and loaded her up with machinery to make her death near-instant. But once they realized how valuable of a resource she was, they went the other way, and loaded her up with things to keep her alive, even against her will,” Sylver finished, as he glanced down, and could feel something approaching him.

“I still don’t understand what exactly this is?” Ria said as Sylver felt his robe getting closer and closer to him, along with a Sylver-like zombie tangled up within it.

“Well, there are gods, there are demons, and then there’s this thing. If it helps, think of it as a direct line to a god that wants nothing less than everyone and everything under his direct control,” Sylver explained, as he chucked a bomb ahead of him, and blew the glass floor/ceiling apart.

Pitch black smoke came out of the hole, along with Sylver’s robe, which was soaked through with [Necrotic Mutilation] and was very luckily within the range of Sylver’s [Dead Dominion].

As the giant lizard chasing after Sylver made that faint popping noise, and started to breathe fire, Sylver threw Chrys towards the hole with smoke coming out of it. He turned around, summoned a small mountain of explosives underneath him as he kept sliding on the glass, and with a catapult-like wave of his shadow, threw them towards the giant lizard, the fire, and the various armored and armed people directly behind it.

Sylver continued to slide towards the hole, now boosted by the explosion, and in an almost practiced motion, grabbed the unconscious Chrys that was now wearing his robe, blew the smoke towards the dazed pursuers, and disappeared back into the Garden.

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