The violet-black claw dug deeper into Morath's chest, dark lightning sizzling as it devoured the raw necrotic light radiating from his newly awakened core.
Morath coughed violently, a mixture of mortal blood and green ichor spilling past his lips. Yet, the memory of Sarya's dying smile—and the unbearable warmth of her blood on his hands—burned through the paralyzing agony.
"Get... off... me!" Morath roared.
With a desperate, explosive flex of his new divine form, Morath swung the black-iron Death Scythe backward in a vicious, circular decapitation arc.
SWOOOSH!
The blade sliced through empty air.
Lord Ghost Demon dissolved into pure, intangible smoke a millisecond before the edge connected, rematerializing twenty yards away in the air. The primordial demon hovered with supreme elegance, his shadowy robes drifting like ink in water, his crimson eyes gleaming with cold amusement.
"Fierce. Truly fierce," Lord Ghost Demon whispered, his voice sounding like hundreds of whispering phantoms speaking in unison. "A wounded stray trying to bite the hand of a monarch."
Morath didn't listen. His grief had warped into an unquenchable furnace of wrath.
He lunged.
"Pale Harvest: Severing Crescent!"
Morath blurred through the air, leaving trails of green phantom fire. He swung the massive scythe with everything he had—vertical cleaves, sweeping horizontal arcs, diagonal thrusts meant to split reality itself.
Whoosh! Whirrr! Clang!
Every single strike was useless.
Lord Ghost Demon didn't even draw a weapon. With lazy, microscopic tilts of his head and fluid steps through warped spatial folds, the demon effortlessly dodged every fatal strike. It was like Morath was swinging a blade against a passing breeze. No matter how much divine necrotic energy Morath poured into the attacks, the demon slipped through the gaps with insulting ease.
"Too slow. Too heavy with sorrow," Lord Ghost Demon taunted, gliding backward until Morath overextended on a heavy downward smash that pulverized a stone fountain into dust.
Before Morath could recover his footing, Lord Ghost Demon appeared directly before him.
The demon's elongated, shadowy fingers shot out—not to impale, but to tap gently against the center of Morath's forehead.
"Forbidden Nether Art: The Weaver's Illusion — Cognitive Inversion!"
VUMMMM—!
The entire world inverted into a sickening swirl of violet mist. A piercing, high-pitched ringing pierced Morath's skull, paralyzing his limbs instantly. He dropped the Death Scythe as his hands flew to his head, screaming in sheer agony as his memories, perceptions, and neural pathways were forcibly ripped apart and restructured.
"Open your eyes, child of ash," Lord Ghost Demon's hypnotic voice echoed directly within the deepest chambers of Morath's fractured mind. "Look at the truth your pathetic, weak mind refused to see."
The violet mist in Morath's vision shifted, replaying the horror of the festival—but twisted into a sinister, fabricated reality.
In this altered memory, there were no shadow beasts crawling out of the earth.
Instead, Morath saw the greedy, gluttonous faces of the village elders and the strong laborers of Oakhaven. He saw them brandishing torches and iron blades, driven mad by the Seven Deadly Sins festering in the hearts of humanity. He saw their unbridled Greed for the apothecary's rare medicines, their Envy of the frail boy who had won the purest heart in the valley, their drunken Gluttony and violent Wrath as they set their own homes ablaze in a chaotic frenzy of betrayal.
And then came the most agonizing hallucination.
Morath was forced to watch as the brute village laborer—the one who had mocked him his entire childhood—plunged a crude iron dagger through Sarya's chest, ripping away the delicate moon-silk bridal veil in an act of pure, sadistic Lust and Pride.
"No... no, no, no!" Morath screamed, tears of blood streaming down his face as the false memory seared itself into his soul. "They... the village did this...?! The humans killed her?!"
"Humanity is a disease of unyielding sin," Lord Ghost Demon whispered into Morath's ear, wrapping his dark, shadowy arms around the trembling, broken boy like a venomous serpent. "They despised your weakness. They envied your peace. They slaughtered your beloved because mortal hearts are governed only by corruption."
The pure, sorrowful love that Morath had carried for Sarya shattered into a million jagged shards of absolute, irredeemable misanthropy. The divine green light of the Death God within him darkened, rotting into a pitch-black, venomous miasma.
The manipulation was complete. The kind-hearted apothecary named Morath was dead.
Lord Ghost Demon stepped back, his fangs bared in a grand, malicious smile as he pointed toward the surviving, terrified villagers cowering in the ruins.
"They took your light, boy," Lord Ghost Demon hissed, his crimson eyes blazing with cruel delight.
"...Now go. Slaughter every last one of them."