Let's hear some comments give power stones and whatever else you've got!
*****
{Chapter: 90: The Death Flower}
If he had not signed a binding contract with the Academy that required him to remain for a full hundred years and he lived through 20% of that time, perhaps Dex's temperament would still have been the same as it was in the Abyss: bloodthirsty, indifferent, and utterly devoid of patience.
Time had changed him—not softened him, no—but polished him, the way a blade is sharpened with restraint. His old instincts hadn't disappeared, they merely slumbered beneath the surface. The violent urges, once dominant and insatiable, had subsided to a quiet simmer. Where once he would have torn a soul from a trembling mortal for daring to speak out of turn, now he found himself merely glaring and moving on.
'How far I've fallen… or perhaps, risen,' he mused.
In the endless Abyss, where cruelty was law and only power could determine value, no demon would entertain the thought of fair exchange with the weak. The strong took what they desired. Bargains were only forged between equals—or between predators who saw temporary value in cooperating before turning on each other.
Demons, by nature, were not negotiators. They were conquerors, manipulators, and devourers. In his natural state, Dex would never have even spoken to a human unless it was to mock them before ripping out their spine. Yet now, bound by terms of magical contract, he was forced to temper his instincts. Forced to listen. Forced to communicate.
And he did. With cold dignity, he extended courtesies that would have seemed laughable a decade ago. If mortals were too foolish to see the enormous grace he was offering them, then that was their failure. Dex would not lower himself further. He would simply correct them—in the most efficient and excruciating manner possible.
As he walked away from the courtyard where he had just concluded a tense negotiation, leaving behind a bruised and humbled Wizard with a face like a bruised melon, Dex didn't even spare him a second glance.
His attention was already drifting elsewhere.
The crowded streets of the Academy's outer district were buzzing with activity. Students—humans, and with books and scrolls clutched to their chests and mana-fueled devices humming in their hands. A group of initiates floated lazily past on enchanted platforms, arguing about transmutation theory. Dex ignored them all. Their chatter, their breathless excitement, their ignorance—it was all white noise.
His mind had become preoccupied with something more interesting: witchcraft.
Earlier, he had obtained a transcription of a new spell devised by one of the younger faculty members—barely a fourth-circle wizard, though the man thought himself a genius. Dex had read through the papers of the spell without expectation, more out of boredom than anything else. But upon examining it, he found a peculiar kernel of potential buried in the otherwise crude design.
The spell itself was laughably amateur. The magical structure was inefficient, cluttered with redundancies and loops that should have been pruned at the conceptual stage. Its intent was to 'revitalize' non-living matter—imbue it temporarily with a semblance of life. A parlour trick, in the eyes of most serious mages.
But Dex wasn't looking for perfection. He was looking for seeds. A seed of originality. A glimmer of potential that he could cultivate with his own insights. That was how he worked: by consuming and transforming. By turning mortal folly into infernal brilliance.
With a flick of his wrist, he cast a modified version of the revitalizing spell toward a tree standing alone in the corner of a stone courtyard. The tree had grown old and gnarled, with bark like cracked leather and drooping branches thick with shadows.
Dex narrowed his glowing eyes.
A whisper of power shimmered from his hand.
Instantly, the air around the tree vibrated. The trunk convulsed as if choking, and then—
Snap. Snap. Snap.
Every insect and small bird perched within its branches erupted in tiny explosions, their remains transfiguring mid-air into swirling clusters of withered petals. The flowers descended in slow motion, trailing faint violet mist as they fell like death-kissed snow.
Dex reached out and caught one between two fingers.
It pulsed faintly, as if alive. Not truly living, but animated by his will.
He brought it to his nose and inhaled softly.
"Beautiful," he whispered, lips curving into a rare, genuine smile. "But flawed. It decays too fast."
This was a start. A stepping stone. The raw material was promising.
The essence of the revitalizing spell—its intent—was to breathe energy into the inert, to create movement from stillness, life from death. But life is not enough. Dex had no use for clumsy, uncontrolled bursts of vitality. What he desired was control. Precision. Power. Subjugation.
True necrotic magic, at its height, did not simply animate. It commanded.
He remembered, not long ago, the limits of his own powers. Even with his plague and soulburn skills, he could only transmute living beings. His magic relied on biology—a body to infect, nerves to corrupt, a soul to seize. Rocks, wood, statues—those had been beyond his reach. Until now.
This spell, in its primitive form, offered a new path.
With careful modification, he could anchor his will into inanimate objects. Turn dead wood into servants. Make a cathedral bow to him. Make a mountain bleed.
Yes, he thought, the corners of his mouth twitching into something too wide and toothy to be human. This is what I was missing.
A passing student screamed when a nearby bench suddenly sprouted thorns and skittered away on spider legs. Dex did not notice. He was busy adjusting variables in his mind.
"There's promise in their ignorance," he said to himself. "They fumble in the dark, and in doing so, light torches they don't understand. And I… I collect the embers."
His mind flicked back to the young man who had authored the spell.
'Fourth circle… barely,' he scoffed.
In the hierarchy of wizards, circle levels defined one's tier of power. A first-circle mage might conjure illusions or light flames. A fourth-circle wizard, by contrast, could bend space, summon minor elementals, or stitch flesh. But even at the fourth circle, mortals were fragile.
In Dex's eyes, a fourth-circle mage was a candle against a storm. A spark to be extinguished with a breath. He had met archfiends whose gaze could annihilate ten such mages with no more effort than blinking.
And yet, from such weaklings came inspiration.
It was ironic. Tragic, even. But Dex had long since made peace with the hypocrisy of it.
Their bodies were pitiful. But their ideas…? Occasionally worthy of theft.
As he continued down the street, the faint trail of death-flowers in his wake turned heads and spread whispers.
*****
You can support me by joining my Patreon and get upto 60 chapters in advance.
patreon.com/Eden_Translation