The past few days in the hospital did not bring Raku much relaxation. That frail body lay on the soft hospital bed, yet his sleep was far from restful.
A faint yet impossible-to-ignore sense of foreboding lingered like a thorn lodged in his nerves.
It was today.
Raku leaned against the pillow, looking at the bedside table. The parchment that had originally lain there suddenly began to curl at the edges without warning.
A wisp of dark golden flame ignited from the bottom of the paper–without heat, without smoke–silently devouring the aged ink upon it.
Raku watched the steadily expanding flame, his eyelids lowering slightly.
"Something happened to Eldlich…?"
There was little shock in his tone; it sounded more like the confirmation of an ending he had long anticipated yet could do nothing to change.
After all… that guy's whole theory about refining the Philosopher's Stone for the sake of some so-called greater good had reeked from the very beginning of raising countless death flags.
"Looks like fate hasn't changed."
Aleister's figure appeared in the corner of the hospital room. He held that massive staff in his hand, and beneath the hood, his emerald eyes carried a trace of amusement.
"Do you need me to take you to claim his inheritance?" Aleister asked with a smile.
Raku looked at the parchment that was still slowly burning.
"The parchment hasn't fully burned yet." Raku reached out and picked up the sheet, still carrying embers. "Take me there."
"You still have lingering attachments?" Aleister did not act immediately.
Instead, he leaned against the wall and looked at him. "You've already seen the card art of [Eldlixir of Scarlet Sanguine].
The form that the alchemist named Eldlich will become–a skeleton, an undead."
That gentle and courteous young man was already dead.
What remained in that great hall now was merely a monster twisted by gold and an immortal curse.
Raku said nothing about hope. He knew the card art; Of course, he knew the ending.
"Let's go take a look first." Raku shifted his gaze away from the parchment. "I said it before-I'll see it through."
Raku looked at Aleister.
"That's a promise, right?"
If you've promised something to someone, as long as you're not dead, you should go see how it ends. This was one of the few principles he was still willing to uphold in his laid-back life.
"Keeping promises, huh?" Aleister nodded, the amusement on his face fading somewhat.
He stepped forward and gently tapped Raku's head with the bottom of his massive staff.
Raku closed his eyes. He felt that heavy body being instantly stripped away. As he fell into unconsciousness, his soul began a highly familiar drift.
When he opened his eyes again, the scent of disinfectant had vanished.
In its place was a thick stench of scorched earth mixed with decay.
Aleister had brought him to this wasteland.
This place had already become a complete land of death. The sky was shrouded in a layer of dark red haze, and the ground beneath his feet was a sickly gray-white, with no trace of any vegetation surviving.
At the very edge of vision stood a massive semi-open circular hall. Dark red light, intertwined with blinding golden radiance, shot straight up into the sky from the hollow where the roof should have been.
The two began walking toward the distant hall.
Not long after they set out, the gray-white earth ahead suddenly loosened.
A teeth-grating sound of bones scraping against each other rang out. Several skeleton soldiers, caked in dirt and with red light flickering in their eye sockets, clawed their way out from underground.
Rusted iron swords were gripped in their hands as they mechanically fixed their hollow gazes on Raku's living soul.
Without any warning, they raised their swords and charged.
Raku did not even slow his pace.
A mass of blue-white flames ignited out of thin air beside him. Aleister merely waved his staff lightly, and those flames wrapped themselves around the skeleton soldiers with extreme precision.
Extreme cold and extreme heat erupted at the same instant.
The skeletons did not even have time to produce the sound of bones shattering before they were reduced directly into a mixture of icy water and ashes within the flames.
"The Spellbook of Knowledge, nicely done." Raku recognized the power Aleister had just used.
Aleister smiled slightly and did not deny it.
"So you knew after all." Aleister tapped the staff against the ground. "Let's move quickly."
The wind across the wasteland carried a biting chill, sweeping up the ashes on the ground. The distant hall, radiating red light, appeared eerily silent beneath the haze.
After some distance.
Raku and Aleister stepped over the crumbling stone threshold.
The air inside the hall felt as if it had been drained away by something. What rushed toward them was an utterly nauseating, pure sense of deathly stillness.
There was no wind, and no sound. Light poured down from the semi-open hollow in the dome, barely illuminating the neatly arranged rectangular floor tiles around the altar. Upon those tiles lay piles of unrecognizable ashes and several tattered robes.
"Eldlich!"
Raku called out several times.
His voice echoed within the vast circular hall, sounding particularly harsh.
A few seconds later…
A faint sound of friction came from the edge of the altar.
Raku followed the sound and looked over. At the edge of the hemispherical pit, in the very center of the hall, lay a skeleton.
Tattered strips of cloth, soaked with sweat and some unknown fluid, still clung to that skeletal body. Its right hand struggled to support itself against the ground, while in its left hand–nothing but finger bones remained–it clutched a crimson gem riddled with cracks, radiating a blinding red-gold light.
"That should be the Philosopher's Stone, I suppose."
Aleister stood beside Raku, looking at the stone, his tone carrying a hint of casual judgment.
"In that case…" Raku looked at the skeleton, which had not a trace of flesh left, "That's Eldlich?"
Raku slowly walked over and crouched down half a step away from the skeleton.
He truly hadn't expected that even in this state, Eldlich would still retain consciousness. It seemed that the so-called Philosopher's Stone–or rather, the core of that curse–was indeed barely sustaining the alchemist's final "life."
The skeleton's skull shifted slightly, its hollow eye sockets turning toward Raku.
"…Did I succeed?"
Eldlich's jaw opened and closed, producing a hoarse and faint sound, like sandpaper scraping.
He could no longer see clearly what the person before him looked like; his vision had long vanished along with that body of flesh.
Raku glanced around at the scene that resembled hell itself. Ashes covered the ground, his fallen companions lay dead, and before him stood this young man turned monster.
This was absolutely not what success looked like.
But…
Raku still nodded.
"Yeah." Raku looked into those hollow eye sockets. "Isn't it in your hand?"
The skeleton fell silent for a moment.
"You're lying…"
Eldlich's voice was very soft, carrying a fatigue that bordered on relief. "It… failed."
The arm that was nothing but bone emitted a harsh cracking sound. Using the last of his strength, he raised the cracked Philosopher's Stone high toward Raku.
"This… for you, Mr. Raku…"
His voice grew increasingly indistinct.
"The gold… you gave me back then… wasn't wasted…"
"Please…"
The skeleton's cervical spine let out one final brittle crack under unbearable strain.
"Inherit Eldlich's legacy."
Raku's originally solemn mood, brought on by witnessing such a tragic state, trembled the moment he heard those words.
Raku stared at the skeletal hand extended toward him, and the fragmented memories in his mind–blurred by time–instantly pieced themselves together.
He remembered.
The full outline of the Golden Land card lore.
A group of fanatical alchemists attempted to refine the Philosopher's Stone. The attempt failed, turning the entire hall and the surrounding plains into a land where the living were buried. Then, as time passed, countless adventurers came seeking the legendary wealth.
Among them, there was one warrior who discovered this flawed Philosopher's Stone.
That warrior took on the heavy curse, inherited the alchemist's legacy, and ultimately became the lich who ruled that wasteland–the Golden Lord.
And now…
This situation.
Raku looked at the stone before him, radiating an ominous red glow.
In other words, that so-called warrior was him… Raku? Would he inherit the name of Eldlich and become that monster destined to sit upon the throne?
And the root cause of this change, of what should have been a story carried out by some unlucky adventurer, was simply because he had casually given Eldlich that pouch of gold to start with.
Fate. This absurd closed loop.
"Not going to take it?"
Aleister's voice came from behind him. That guy seemed quite unaffected by the bleak atmosphere.
"Partner, even if it's only a flawed Philosopher's Stone," Aleister spoke slowly in an extremely tempting tone, "the amount of energy contained within it is immense."
He lightly tapped the staff against the ground.
"It's more than enough to repair your damaged soul."
Raku looked at the skeletal hand held aloft in midair and the crimson gem within reach.
He fell into a long silence.
From the dome above, that beam of cold moonlight shifted its angle, slanting across the cracked, flawed stone. It refracted an eerie red-gold shimmer that fell upon Raku's expressionless face.
Aleister leaned against a broken marble pillar, arms crossed, just waiting in quiet.
...
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