He entered the main hall with the pool and saw all three victims being brought in.
They stood, held by undead in armor, before the morbid creature, and it touched them, spreading the deadly disease. Transformed into undead, they were no longer themselves.
On both sides of the pool, dark passages opened like black maws into the womb of a monster. The morbid creature floated in ecstasy in the pool. The Cursed descended the ancient stairs to the very bottom of the dungeon. Black, ancient walls. He felt like the only human to have descended here in many hundreds of years. The black walls spoke to him of the fact that for a long time this place had been the refuge of an ancient terrible demon, whose cult had long perished, and now only its pitiful remnants had revived.
The Cursed entered a vast hall where, in the center, upon a black stone altar, lay a large white monster with numerous tentacles. Vampire sight allowed the Cursed to see in the darkness. It was the very same creature from the visions he had seen when he killed the morbid nobleman with a dagger to the heart. The floor of the hall was covered with a gray liquid up to the tops of his boots.
Suddenly, the Cursed felt that he and the monster were not alone here. In the black ancient walls of the hall, to the left and to the right, were large, numerous openings or burrows, from which massive creatures stared at him with wild eyes burning like flames.
An alien, utterly incomprehensible mind burst into his thoughts and began to read events from a decade ago that were of particular interest to it.
He saw the Cursed walking through an ancient labyrinth, then along a straight corridor that led him into a silent hall. Seven large, terrifying figures enclosed in high-tech capsules designed for prolonged enchanted sleep. The capsules were positioned vertically around the entire hall. The Cursed entered and stood in the center of the chamber. Their eyes opened simultaneously. A fire burned within them.
The Cursed made a pact. From that moment on, the Curse of the Sleeping Demons fell upon him. He gained supernatural physical strength. To kill enemies and use their power at will and by choice. But in return, he bore the Curse, which caused a Messenger of the Sleeping Demons to come for him every night, to destroy him and return the power of the Sleeping Demons to their masters. This would continue as long as the Cursed remained alive.
And one more price for the gift: ten years of his life, during which all events that would happen to him and his loved ones, everything that would happen in the Kingdom, would be erased. For a full ten years, he would be cut out of the life of the Kingdom. One more question remained: did he fully understand the terms of the pact? Did he accept them?
The answer was the hero's grim look.
"Yes," he said.
And a whirlwind of new changes carried him into the darkness of the dungeons of the Sleeping Demons. Back, from their lair located on the border of the Kingdom, emerged a different man. Grim, determined, uncompromising. Too much had been at stake for his journey.
The memory of this came to the Cursed and unleashed the black will of the demon.