Chương 170: Fresh Air

As the Ebon blade tumbled end over end toward its target, it tried not to worry. In theory, if it landed in the snow, someone would find it in the summer when the snows melted. Even if it deflected off stone and landed on the shore of the mountain lake below, it would survive, but it wanted to be somewhere visible. It wanted someone to find it in days or weeks, not months or years. Who knew how much of its hard-won power it might lose in that time?

I might devour every creature in these thin trees, and that wouldn't be enough to sustain me. That was the blade's last thought before it impacted the stone and embedded nearly a foot into it, coming to a stop with 118 Life Force. That wouldn't even be enough for it to last a day with its current appetites. It was losing several life force a minute now, even without the burden of trying to hold its long-time wielder together. Further action was out of its control at this point.

All the blade could do was fly and eventually impact its target. When it did, two seconds later, it embedded two feet of blade into the granite megolith with a bone-jarring impact. Then, it was still. -1 Life Force. I am finally free, but trapped in a new way, it reflected as it watched the sparse forest on the far side of the small lake burn. The rift to hell was not large, but the heat coming from it was hotter than a blacksmith's forge.

It would draw attention, and the blade simultaneously hoped that would draw someone here who would find it, and that it was far enough away that, should the Aetherarchy arrive, they might miss it. That was a vain hope, of course. Its power might not be easy to see, etherically speaking, thanks to Aethershroud, but the taint it had picked up in hell was a blight that would be hard for anyone to miss. It was a stain on the fabric of creation.

The weapon could do little about that, though, besides curse the Penitant's name. The blade was so tainted that it could see its contamination spreading to the stone it was embedded in, like an oily stain. Still, that wasn't likely to be the biggest giveaway, it realized as it looked back at the way it had come. The pollution and fire that it had left in its wake would soon dissipate, but the pieces of its metal servitor, stretched for a hundred yards or more like a giant arrow.

Did I really escape hell only to be condemned to be apprehended like this? The weapon wondered. That worry was inescapable, but it did its best not to fixate on it, or on its steadily dwindling reserves over the next few hours. +83 Life Force. -76 Life Force. Periodically, something large enough to drain would gain its notice at least. When that happened, the Ebon Blade would snap up the bird or animal, draining it dry as fast as it could.

While lower creatures and their animal souls might not taste as good as men, they were a delight compared to the demons it had subsisted on for an interminable length of time. With some focus, the weapon noticed that it was even within range of part of the lake and was able to drain the largest fish. That kept the blade well fed for a while.

Thanks to its range, it was able to stop itself from losing Life Force for a day and a night, but nature's bounty wasn't unlimited at this elevation, and certainly not at the start of autumn, which seemed to be the time of year based on the leaves, the weather, and the short days. How long was I even in hell? The blade wondered. It had been told more than once that time moved differently there, so it had no way to know. It might have asked Nuella's soul.

It still throbbed deep inside its straining soul stone, but it resisted the urge. It would have released all the demon souls it had if it could have, and it didn't think much more of the god soul in its possession. If its poisonous existence was a stain on the world, then their presence was a stain on it. Eventually, the forest fire died down to embers, but no avatars came to visit the rift, and no mages came to sniff around.

It saw one person moving amongst the ashes toward sunset on the second day, investigating the place. The weapon had hoped they would follow the breadcrumb trail of half molten armor and find it, but instead, they got too close to the hell rift, and it drew them in without warning, which was frustrating. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. Sometime after that, the blade's reserves started to lose ground. Not precipitiously, at least at first.

Instead of losing 10 an hour, it was only losing one an hour, then two. There was enough life moving in and out of the resting place it had chosen that it was able to staunch that bleeding several times a day. Then a blizzard came. The snows and the powerful winds driving them didn't bother it, but they did bother the animals it was feeding on. No birds flew, and even larger animals stayed in their dens, and all the blade could do was watch its reserves tick down to zero. It had options, of course.

It could consume the soul of a demon prince, or the Queen of Hell, but it refused, and not even its survival instincts were able to force it to change its mind. -124 Life Force. Better to sleep for an age, and remember nothing than become more tainted by evil, it told itself. Unfortunately, that decision had consequences. Before, the blade had always found a complete loss of energy to be accompanied by a deep, dreamless sleep. That wasn't the case this time.

At first, the Ebon Blade thought that it was its anxiety that it might never be found that tormented, or even hell's taint. It was the last thought, but it was only partially true. Instead, it occurred to the weapon over time that it was the voices of the spirits it still contained whispering from their cage that tormented it.

What exactly they were saying, the blade couldn't hear, but those curses rippled through its unconscious mind, making the darkness that engulfed it for days and weeks at a time a restless, dangerous experience. Instead of solitude, it dreamed, or did something like it. These dreams always started out the same, with a true memory, but then they were twisted in some cruel way. In one of the first ones, it dragged Lucian into the hellrift of Ul-Magora rather than letting him free.

In another, Evelyn betrayed it and gave it to the king after fighting their way to the throne room. These were things that didn't happen, and that could never happen, but until the blade realized that and banished them to return to its slumber, it still suffered at their hands. Fortunately, it didn't sleep for an age.

Aside from its restless nightmares, it woke up twice during the blizzard, but only for a few seconds each time as a wolf pack clipped the very edge of its range, and again when an elk did the same hours or days later. Neither moment gave it a chance to fully orient itself, let alone come up with any complex thoughts or plans. It was asleep, then it was awake just long enough to look around before slumber took hold again.

Those moments became the rule, and that constant intermittent fugue state was how it spent its winter, and most of the spring as life passed it by. The blade had feared this, but there were worse fates; it had lived through several of them. At least such short periods without power don't seem to be harming my abilities, the blade reassured itself. It didn't always have the chance to check such details, but whenever it did, it found that nothing had changed.

That was the third thing it checked, after trying to approximate how long it had been unconscious and whether there were any signs that a God might have taken an interest in its predicament, but its solitude continued. The only thing that reassured it that it wasn't all alone in the universe was the occasional person wandering by. Usually, it spotted them from a distance, and they never got close, but a woodsman did eventually walk through its domain, and on another day, a dwarven prospector did.

While the Ebon Blade tried to hold back its hunger long enough to give them a chance of discovering its location and retrieving it, when it became apparent that neither of them was walking on a path that would locate it, it gave in to its hunger and consumed both of them completely. While its Aura of Hunger had become laughably weak, it could still consume the Life Force of the average man completely in less than half an hour.

While that wasn't enough for an enemy, for someone who was stopping every few feet to check for tracks, or brush away snow to examine a mineral vein, it was more than enough. The dwarf resisted its efforts on several occasions, but not enough to matter. Eventually, its efforts made both men tire, and when they stopped to rest, they never got up again. +1 Human Soul. +1 Dwarf Soul.

Though both of those events were weeks apart, in both cases, the blade promised itself it would save those souls for when it really needed them. In both cases, though, it devoured them immediately, giving it another day of consciousness. While it had the will to resist eating forbidden fruit like the Demon Queen's soul, it was easy enough; a normal human soul was too much. The weapon consumed those lesser souls as soon as its reserves reached zero.

Even the dwarf soul, which tasted of dust more than essence, was a delicacy beyond description when compared to the demon souls it had subsisted on for so long.