Chương 97: Chapter 30: Resonant Artifacts

That weekend, the routine of Weapon Practice and Handling took a more competitive and brutal turn. After making them run until the burning in their lungs became a familiar companion, and after training individually with their wooden weapons, Selena's short scimitar already felt like a clumsier extension of her arm. The instructor, a veteran with a face marked by scars, raised his voice. —Today you will duel!

The announcement was eloquent, but it was followed only by a heavy silence charged with anticipation that fell over the group. —It will be at random. Remember, a weapon is about much more than just killing, you ignorant brats. It is distance, it is psychology, it is knowing your limit and that of your opponent. He who wins the most difficult match for the weapon he wields… shall receive a gift. The duels were a succession of blunt blows, sweat, and stifled cries.

Selena watched closely, analyzing styles and weaknesses with the mind of the strategist she was learning to be. When her turn came, luck was not on her side. She faced a taller girl with long, energetic arms who wielded a practice spear. The distance was an impossible abyss to cross for the short scimitar. Selena was knocked down time and again, struck in the ribs and shoulders, until, bruised and frustrated, she acknowledged her defeat with a nod of her head. She had lost like the novice she still was.

At the end of all the bouts, the instructor called forward the winner of the prize: a stocky boy who, with a wooden axe, had managed to defeat an opponent armed with a bow—a theoretically disadvantageous matchup. The gift was announced with a sardonic smile by the professor: to train in a duel against him, personally, for the entire upcoming semester. The expression of pure terror on the winner's face was so vivid that even Selena, despite her bruises, stifled a bitter smile.

The prize was, in reality, a sentence to months of pain and masterful humiliation. Aching but with adrenaline still rushing through her veins, Selena headed to the thermal baths for a comforting soak to soothe the blows. Then, with a renewed determination, this time born of the need to understand the power that now seemed to respond to her emotions, she made her way directly to the library. There, in the sacred silence of the eighteenth floor, she found Eliud's book once again.

As always, her fingers trembled slightly upon touching the weathered leather. But after the incident with the fire, after having felt the echo flow from her as a natural extension of her will, fear was now laced with a new urgency. She could no longer afford to be merely a passive reader. She had to act bravely in the face of the mysteries the founder of the kingdom guarded within those enigmatic pages.

She opened the book, and the chronicle of horror continued right where she had left it, plunging her fully into the consequences of the battle against Jing the Ethereal."' Jing the Ethereal' died in terrible convulsions from the venom of a black veil spider," she read, and Eliud's prose became tinged with a vivid, repulsive horror.

"I never looked at that monster the same way again. His flesh melted upon contact with the venom, yet the suffering remained right there, in that agonizing man… perhaps… perhaps that is why the creature of the Echo mentioned that it liked my horrible destiny." The death of the enemy was not a triumph; it was a spectacle of torture that terrified even the man who had ordered it. But out of that horror, a discovery was born.

"Upon the death of Jing the Ethereal, a diadem he always wore detached from his body. Once all the animals had left the field, I approached, sensing something within it. It was a bodily sensation of mental well-being, as if all fog or blurriness of my mind were dissipated." An artifact. An object imbued with the residual power of the dead resonant. The research with the Balyr tribe, the guardians of ancient knowledge, confirmed his suspicions.

"It turns out that after investigating, we discovered it was a resonant artifact. When a resonant dies, regardless of their strength, their essence of the void will remain in whichever of the objects they carry when their decease occurs, and will bequeath their echo… through the one with which they have the most affinity, with the magic they command most." It was a posthumous inheritance, a capsule of power left behind. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The experiment that followed was a chilling lesson on the price of that power.

"When we tested it on one of our men, upon uttering the word 'clamor' and feeling positive regarding its use, he completely cured the anxiety of one of those surrounding us. But he then came to feel the man's anxiety, twofold, for at least thirty minutes. Furthermore, he looked as exhausted as if he had worked a full day hunting." The artifact did not grant free power; it redistributed it, transferring the burden. Its effects were not permanent; the anxiety returned, leaving only the void of the energy expenditure.

But the most terrifying revelation, the one that curdled the blood in Selena's veins, was yet to come. Eliud, feeling his own end drawing near, wrote with the desperation of one who discovers the ultimate curse:"Resonant artifacts… If only I had known before becoming one. If only I had known before learning the spoken and written echo. Perhaps… perhaps not… Perhaps upon dying I would not leave this horrible destiny within reality."

And then, the abyssal truth:"When an imagined resonant dies, as will happen to me shortly, I notice it in every fiber of my being… a dungeon is created. A cursed dungeon, where every sense shatters, where every law is flexible, and where flesh, soul, and mind are nothing more than another part to be molded by that profane place. It is what I term 'the Echo guarding its own power.'

For at the very center of these dungeons lies the artifact left by the death of an imagined resonant, with the power to make the impossible possible, with the power to transfigure… but in exchange for life. The curse of death arrives immediately; others are at random, but always… there is death." Selena snapped the book shut, as if she could trap the horror that had just been unleashed between its covers. It was not just secrets. It was eternal damnation.

A resonant did not merely die young and tormented; their very death contaminated reality, giving birth to a nightmare landscape where their residual essence, trapped within an artifact, became the ultimate prize for other unwary souls. Their curse perpetuated itself beyond the grave, poisoning the world they inhabited. A cold born from the marrow of her bones, deeper than any ordinary chill, ran through her entire body.

With hands that now shook with uncontrollable strength, she hid the book in its hiding place, as if locking it away could contain the monstrous truth it held. But she knew she couldn't. The dungeon as the destiny of an imagined resonant, added to the final fate of every resonant. It wasn't just dying. It was becoming, by force, the architect of an eternal nightmare for others.

The most powerful creating an involuntary dungeon, the common resonants creating a cursed artifact, the void extended its tentacles across the world. Upon leaving the library, the knot in her stomach was a fist of stone, so tight that not even the slightest desire for food could pierce it. Her mind, by contrast, was a troubled river, a torrent of questions without direction or channel, crashing into one another and losing themselves in whirlpools of uncertainty.

The rest of the free time remaining before the formal start of the second semester was spent in a forced stillness within her room at the Cloister of the Forest, trying to mimic the normalcy she so deeply yearned for. She dedicated herself to tidying her meager belongings, watching the slow turning of the leaves from her window, and listening to the distant murmur of the river. She wanted everything to be peaceful, domestic, ordinary.

A normalcy that, since her arrival in Kaelburg, had been an impossible luxury, a hazy memory of another life. Things, with their implacable mundane logic, resumed their habitual flow. The classes of the void, according to the academic calendar, began in the middle of that month, just as the leaves were starting to turn a deep chestnut brown.

Selena watched from her window as the coral trees, which during the summer had displayed an intense red like fresh blood, were adopting a dark brown hue, the color of old, dried blood on a forgotten cloth. It was a mute, yet constant reminder that everything withers, everything is consumed. On the appointed day, Selena dressed with care. She chose a fine emerald-green wool dress, of better quality than her usual practical attire, as a small act of defiance against the imposed austerity.

She did her hair alone in front of the fogged mirror, clumsily but determinedly braiding a thin strand across her forehead, which she then let fall over the hair flowing down her back. The result was simple, but it afforded her an appearance of order, of control over at least one small part of her chaotic existence. Her first stop was the medicine lecture.

A new professor, a man in his forties whose first silver streaks of gray contrasted with his still-youthful face and his impeccable tunic, presented himself before the class. —Basic herbalism and medicinal botany —he announced in a clear, pedagogical voice. The class was an extensive and methodical treatise on herbs, fungi, their properties, and their most elementary uses. Selena took notes with discipline, though her mind frequently wandered to the depths of the library and the confessions of Eliud.

When the class ended, she closed her notebook with a sigh. Earthly knowledge, though useful, paled before the chasms so deep she now knew existed in this world, where the void reigned among the damned.