His gaze swept over the two burning flames, his voice full of contempt: "Phillip, she never truly felt she was wrong."
"The subsequent pleas for mercy were nothing more than an illusion born from realizing death was approaching, a forced act to survive."
"In her heart, there is only herself and her desires."
Inside the wooden house, the flames crackled, consuming the bodies of Anna and the unnamed adulterer.
Phillip sat on the floor, his eyes vacant, unresponsive to Karl's words.
Karl stood nearby, his face cold, about to say something.
Suddenly, his gaze froze. Directly above the leaping flames, above the two burning corpses, he saw something.
Each was rising very thin, almost transparent, but with the same outline as before.
They swayed like faint smoke, escaping the burning shells and hovering vacantly in the air.
"Souls?" Karl immediately understood in his mind.
In this world where magic and monsters exist, the existence of souls is not an ethereal legend.
He watched the two apparitions go from initial numbness to quickly becoming clear, showing obvious emotions.
Anna's soul face remained as vicious and resentful as before, while the adulterer's soul looked panicked.
Karl's mind moved, and his invisible bio-field spread out, trying to touch, pull, and even grasp the two souls.
However, the result surprised him a bit: his bio-field had no effect on these two illusory souls, as if they were passing through air.
No matter how hard he tried, the bio-field could not exert any substantial influence on the souls.
They seemed to exist in another dimension, and the forces of the physical plane had difficulty interfering.
At that moment, the two souls seemed to "see" Karl and the paralyzed Phillip.
The expression on Anna's soul face instantly erupted with even stronger resentment than before her death.
She let out a piercing scream, but only Karl could hear it, and she lunged at Karl and Phillip with bared teeth and claws.
"You two inhuman scoundrels! Murderers! Go to hell!!"
And the adulterer's soul panicked, trying to pick up the bloodied steel sword Phillip had dropped on the ground, wanting to resist.
But his hand passed straight through the hilt; he couldn't touch anything in the physical world.
Just as these two souls tried to approach with resentment but could do nothing to reality,
an inexplicable force from nowhere, like a giant magnet, suddenly acted upon them.
The two souls suddenly trembled and began to float towards the roof, as if about to be sucked into an invisible passage.
"The call of the underworld?" Karl sharply raised his brows, a cold light flashing in his eyes.
"If you do this, will your soul still rest in the so-called underworld? Or become a ghost and continue to exist? How can it be so cheap!"
He remembered the meager faith power he had just acquired.
Could such power, originating from the mind and spirit, act on souls, which also belong to the spiritual level?
Just try it. Karl focused on mobilizing the small amount of pure golden faith power.
He quickly compressed and condensed it, forming two tiny energy balls the size of soybeans at his fingertips, emitting a soft, pure golden light.
He flicked his fingers, and the two golden balls ignored the obstruction of objects and instantly crossed the distance.
"Whoosh! Whoosh!" They struck the souls of Anna and the adulterer being lifted by the invisible force.
"Ah——!!"
"Ugh——!!!"
Two cries, indescribably mournful, like screams from deep within the soul, suddenly exploded in the depths of Karl's consciousness.
The voices were full of extreme pain and the fear of annihilation.
Phillip also seemed to vaguely sense something and looked up vacantly, but saw nothing.
Immediately after, under Karl's gaze, the two faint soul phantoms seemed like bubbles pierced by a needle.
They spun and trembled violently, then suddenly burst with a "poof."
There was no earth-shaking sound, only a strange silence where existence was erased. After the souls exploded, the space was no longer empty.
Instead, two small clumps of strange substances, the size of eggs, colorless and transparent, remained, slowly flowing like gas.
They radiated an indescribable, most original spiritual aura.
A flicker of surprise passed through Karl's eyes, and he raised his hand into the void.
The two invisible substances easily flew over his palm and hovered there.
"This is... the purest origin left after a soul is completely destroyed by faith power?"
"Whatever it is, it's definitely excellent stuff!"
Karl acutely felt that these two masses of matter gave him a feeling of incomparable purity, yet containing faint life information.
Although he didn't yet know what it was for, intuition told him that this thing had immense value.
With a movement of his mind, he stored the origin of these two small soul clusters along with the meager faith power within his body, leaving them for future research.
After all this, Karl pulled Phillip, who was still in a state of despair, up from the ground.
At the same time, his mind split in two, controlling the flame spell and increasing the intensity of the corpse burning to leave no trace.
He patted Phillip on the shoulder, his voice loud and encouraging: "What are you so stunned about, Phillip!"
"Grieving and blaming yourself for a bitch dumber than a wild boar in the forest who never knows what contentment is?"
"This is not the Phillip I know, who sweats and swears to be my right-hand man on the training ground!"
"Think about who you are now! You are the squire of the Grand Duke of Terra, a knight destined for honor and status in the future!"
"Think about the brothers who fight alongside you and can trust you with their backs!"
"There are plenty of women, with your current status and prospects, who are a thousand times better than Anna and know how to value you, here on Terra and even throughout Temeria!"
Finally, he looked into Phillip's eyes and spoke word by word: "And I need you very much, Phillip. Don't forget your oath. You are my servant!"
These words, mixed with Karl's will, were like a warm current flowing into Phillip's cold heart.
The daze and emptiness in his eyes gradually faded, replaced by a renewed fighting spirit and slight shame.
He stood firm, took a deep breath of the scorched air, his chest heaving, and slowly but firmly answered: "You are right, Lord Karl!"
"It was me... I was confused for a while, almost crushed by this filthy thing. I have failed your trust and care! Phillip... understands!"
╔══════════════════════╗
📘 Want more?
Join me on Patreon for bonus chapters
and early access!
🔗 https://www.patreon.com/cw/OverlordD
╚══════════════════════╝