Chương 48: Mythical Name

A familiar purple window appeared before Lloyd once more. True Name: Soul Boy. Level: 1 Race: Human Class: Support Skills: [Soul Collector], [Hand of the Forgotten King] Relics: [Fire Bomb] Guide: Mippo The room was steeped in evening half-light — it had grown dark outside long ago, and the only source of light was the desk lamp, dimly illuminating one corner of the desk, along with the bluish glow of the system window itself, hovering in the air right in front of the bed.

The rain outside had almost stopped, leaving behind only rare, isolated drops trickling down the glass in slow, winding trails, and cool, damp air seeping in through the cracked-open window, carrying the smell of wet asphalt and cooling earth. Somewhere on the windowsill the curtain stirred faintly, swaying with a weak draft, while outside, in the darkness, the silhouettes of wet trees were barely visible, swaying under the last remnants of the fading wind, shedding heavy final drops from their leaves.

The silence of the room was broken only by the occasional crackle of the lamp and the distant, muffled hum of the city — a car passing somewhere on the wet road, a door slamming shut somewhere in the building, a dog barking once and then falling silent. All of it seemed to come from somewhere far away, as if muffled by a thick layer of cotton separating Lloyd from the outside world at this late hour.

On the wall opposite the bed, the shadow of a branch outside crept slowly along, stretching and shrinking with each gust of wind, and the room itself now felt especially cramped, as if it had shrunk around the single source of cold, bluish light — the system's purple window. Though Lloyd was glad to see changes in the lines, some of them clearly troubled him.

Lloyd stared anxiously at the line with his True Name, its letters glowing with a cold reddish light, casting faint flickers across his face and the wall behind the bed, while a barely perceptible ripple ran along the edges of the window, as if the very surface of the text were breathing.

"It's glowing red. What could that mean? Well, I hope it works the same way it did with the relic." He focused on the line where his True Name was written, straining his eyes as if trying to burn straight through the letters. For a moment the air around him seemed to thicken, growing denser, heavier, like before a storm, and the silence of the room took on an almost physical weight, pressing against his temples. Even the rain outside seemed to pause for a second, listening along with him.

A couple of seconds later, a new window unfolded before him, flaring slightly brighter than the rest, and a faint reddish glow rippled across the room for a moment, reflecting off the ceiling and off the crack that had long since become almost familiar to him, brushing past the spines of the books on the shelf and tinting them, for an instant, an uneasy shade of crimson.

"It really did work. Well, let's see what this is all about." True Name: Soul Boy. True Name Rank: Mythical Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. Description: When life fades, his path has only just begun. Where death places a period, he opens a new page. One day, even souls will forget their former owners. Lloyd read it with his face twisted in confusion, his eyebrows slowly drawing together.

The reddish glow of the line reflected in his pupils, giving his gaze something strange, almost feverish, and at that moment a light draft from the window brushed the back of his neck, sending a chill down his skin.

"Oh, so it turns out X has a poetic soul. Who would've guessed." A dead silence settled over the room — for exactly one second, broken only by the ticking of the old clock in the kitchen, filtering through the thin wall, and the distant sound of a car driving somewhere down the wet street, splashing through puddles. Then a flood of turbulent thoughts rushed into Lloyd's head, each more unsettling than the last, layering over one another like ripples spreading from a stone thrown into water.

"And how am I supposed to make sense of these riddles?! Damn it, X, did you have to write in hints?" He lowered his head, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his free hand, while his bandaged arm lay limp on his knee, its wrapping glowing faintly white in the half-light, and for a moment he allowed himself to close his eyes, listening to the quiet rustle of the last raindrops outside.

"God, I miss Mippo..." Lloyd slowly raised his head, rereading all the information again — for the second, third time now, as if hoping that on repeated reading the text would somehow become clearer, the cryptic words rearranging themselves into something more understandable, less frightening.

"Mythical rank. Sounds epic. Maybe I actually got something really rare?" He immediately grabbed his phone, lying beside him on the rumpled blanket, and dove into the internet for more information. To his surprise, the results he needed appeared right away on the very first site — lines of headlines lining up one after another, as if they'd been waiting for his search all along.

"That turned out to be a lot easier than I expected." He clicked the link, and a long article unfolded on the screen, dotted with subheadings about True Names and their ranks. The light from the screen picked his tense face out of the gloom, casting cold flickers across the walls, while outside the wind began to pick up again, making the curtain sway gently and cast a trembling shadow on the wall, resembling uneven, crawling fingers stretching from the windowsill toward the ceiling.

Lloyd read carefully, his finger scrolling quickly across the screen, pulling the text further and further down. Paragraph after paragraph, line after line — an ordinary, dry encyclopedia entry, the kind he'd already seen dozens of over the past few days.

Somewhere beyond the wall he could hear Rozi, having finished her phone call, walking back to her room, the floorboards creaking softly under her steps, followed by the muffled click of a light switch — the whole house slowly settling into nighttime silence, leaving Lloyd alone with his discovery. And then, a few seconds later, Lloyd's eyebrows slowly crept upward, his mouth fell slightly open, and his face visibly paled, taking on an unhealthy, faintly bluish tint in the cold light of the screen.

His fingers, which had been gripping the phone tightly until then, suddenly went slack — and the device hit the floor with a dull thud, bouncing off the wooden boards before landing face-up, still glowing dimly in the darkness of the room, casting a cold rectangle of light onto the ceiling, where the familiar crack briefly reflected within it.

At that same moment, a distant, fading rumble of thunder rolled outside — the last echo of the departing storm — and the ceiling light flickered faintly, as if echoing the turmoil inside Lloyd. The wind outside picked up for a moment, swaying a wet branch hard enough that it brushed against the glass with a quiet, scraping sound, and somewhere far down the street a car alarm wailed once, long and lonely, before falling silent again.

He sat motionless for several long seconds, staring at a single point on the wall in front of him, while the meaning of what he'd read slowly, heavily settled into his mind, shattering everything he had believed about himself and his place in this insane new world up until that moment. The room around him seemed to freeze along with him — no creak of floorboards, no rustle of wind, only the quiet, barely audible beat of his own pulse in his ears.

He murmured, and a clear note of shock, mixed with something close to fear, was unmistakable in his voice: — How is that even possible?...