Chapter 393: The ballad of Alice Dunkelkrieg
Immediately after getting smacked in the head by a magic glowing purple ball of light, a weird new type of energy began to flow into Zhen Liu’s head.
While it was hard to describe what this energy was exactly, Zhen Liu could immediately sense that it wasn’t aether or [Chaos].
‘This is…new.’
Zhen Liu was used to information being forcibly downloaded into his brain, came with the territory of almost omniscient twin spirits of knowledge attached to it.
Zhen Liu was used to seeing the world through the perspectives of his kaijin, they saw the world differently and he found it fascinating.
However, he had never lived through someone’s life and “death” before, until right now.
‘So your name is…was…Alice? Huh…’
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Morality is never as simple as dark and light, it’s usually mired in twilight.
This is a saying that is normally said in one particular region of the world that is found in between the territories of the Radiant Feather continent and the Umbral Spider Continent.
The two continents of light and dark have always been in a state constant conflict with one another, an irony that hasn’t been loss to anyone who’s been to either continent, with their territories expanding and contracting with the ebb and flow of the tides of history and war.
However, there is one area, one region, that has always remained neutral and had never once been in the grasp of either continent’s super powers ever since it’s founding, the Twilight Territories.
To clarify, the Twilight Territories wasn’t a single nation or super power, rather it was a collection of several dozen kingdoms, republics, theocracies and everything in-between, that have vowed to remain neutral in the conflicts between the continents of light and dark after declaring independence from both…mostly.
A few of these nations actively supply mercenaries and weapons to both side of the conflict, leading to some minor internal conflicts between the territories, but in terms of land and full blown allegiances to either side, they have all remained neutral.
It is among these neutral territories that we must now tell the tale of a star whose fate was sealed, but then…stolen.
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Time: Fifty years ago from this day.
In the manor of the baron of a land known as the Wailing Eclipse barony, one could find the aforementioned baron currently pacing nervously outside of a bedroom door.
“Come on, come on, please be okay…,” the baron kept muttering to himself.
This muttering was due to the fact that the baroness had just gone into labor for their second child, and frankly speaking, he was very nervous about the whole affair.
“Wah! Wah!”
It wasn’t until he finally heard the crying of a new baby that he finally relaxed and stopped his mutterings.
“Congratulations, Baron Dunkelkrieg. It’s a girl.”
“And she has her mother’s grey eyes as well!”
“Brilliant, simply, brilliant.”
Alice was born as the eldest daughter of the Dunkelkrieg household, the family that had maintained the Wailing Eclipse Barony for over three generations.
This prestigious honor was earned in the Third Conflict of Shadows war by it’s founder, Karstein Dunkelkrieg, who claimed the territory, after defeating the occupying warriors from Radiant Feather.
Ever since then, the Dunkelkriegs have been ruling with the Barony with a golden fist, i.e., mostly for the benefit of the people, but if they stepped out of line, there would be severe punishments involved.
It was in this environment of reward and punishment, that Alice Dunkelkrieg grew to be a young lady of fine refinement and good breeding, as well as becoming a terrifying monster of a warrior with talent that made even the most powerful sects in the world jealous.
Born with pure Caligos aether, Alice managed to stumble upon a rare minor World class aether formula known as the [Nightmare Scripture], and learned that it had 110% compatability with her own aether.
Many aether formulas had a set limit to how powerful someone could become after being inscribed with it.
In practice, this meant that anyone with a minor Corporeal formula could only ever reach the Acolyte level at most, while those with a major Ethereal formula could feasibly breakthrough to Aether Lord within a couple of decades.
This assumption is based on wether or not someone is compatible with their chosen formula in the first place.
If someone had complete compatibility with their formula, they can exercise it to its absolute limit and reach peak power in no time, while on the opposite end of “no compatability”, the practioner would be lucky to reach even Acolyte rank of the first ring.
However, there are rare cases where one’s aether and one formula are compatible, that the breaks this rule and enables the practitioner to go above and beyond their formula’s limits.
Legend has it that a young boy who practiced a minor Corporeal formula ended up becoming an Aether Saint due to having a compatibility rating of over 600%.
With all of these factors combined, Alice Dunkelkrieg grew to become an almost almighty figure of power and renown, breaking through to the Aether Lord rank at the tender age of eighteen.
“So she’s powerful, she’s rich and she’s gorgeous…damn no wonder she gets so many marriage proposals on the daily.”
“Is that including or excluding the courtship letters from the international ring?”
“Yes.”
By all means, Alice was set to become a shining star, a prodigious talented warrior who’s very name would be forever etched into the history books…but alas, that wasn’t to be the case.
“Lady Alice Dunkelkrieg has been murdered, I repeat, Alice Dunkelkrieg has been murdered.”
The circumstances leading up to her death were hazy to say the least, namely due to many of her once enemies were buried in shallow graves, but the manner in which she was found dead was throughly well-known.
Her face was missing.
Not crudely peeled off by hand or skinned with a wicked sharp knife, instead, it was like her face was erased and replaced with a blank slate of flesh.
After many days of mourning and a public funeral, the Dunkelkrieg family buried Miss Alice in the family mausoleum, where she had the (un)fortunate honor of being it’s youngest entry…or so the Dunkelkriegs told the public.
In truth, when they found Alice’s body in the state that it was in, they found that despite having no face, it was alive.
When the family’s healers tried to figure out what was wrong with the young Mistress, they soon discovered that not only had her face been stolen, but so had her cultivation.
Whomever did this to the baron’s precious daughter needed her alive, and as a cruel as it sounded, it was the faintest hope that they had.
The Dunkelkriegs would spend years trying to figure out who had the ability to steal someone’s face and cultivation at the same time, but could never find any conclusive evidence as to who did it.
The only ones who knew was the girl who’s face was throughly stolen, and a certain traveling performer who only had stayed in the barony for a one night performance.
“Such a pretty face, such a marvelous fate! It’d be a shame to let such beauty fade to the ravages of time. Come! I shall make you immortal! Well…in a sense.”
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“Oh damn! I knew you were creepy bitch, but I didn’t expect you to be into body horror!”
Razorstella watched as Fia Venus’s body began to contort and distort itself from a muscular build into one more elongated and delicate as soon as she donned that strange purple mask, confused and mildly repulsed at the undulating flesh.
So enraptured by this strange transformation, that she failed to notice an earthy colored ball of light suddenly eject itself from Venus’s body and go flying off in the same direction the purple ball of light had come from.
But as soon as that ball of light had left, an even more drastic change took place before Razorstella’s eyes.
‘The armor is changing too? No…her entire formula is changing too?! What the fuck?!’
When Razorstella first clashed with Fia Venus, the latter was clad in golden aether armor with a decidedly oxen and earthy motif, contrasted by bone and glass-pieces here and there.
Now, before her very eyes, the golden armor began to twist, contort and mutate as the sheen it once had dulled away into blackened steel and the ox horns upon her head began to curve downward into a crown-like formation found only in the paintings of demons.
The skull-axe in her hand began to distort as well, elongating both in handle and blade until
It became a wicked looking scythe.
The change took a few seconds, but after it was done, Venus let out a long breath, a definitively different affinity of aether tinging it ever so slightly.
“I see that Fia’s brute strength wasn’t enough to break you,” Venus stated in a very different voice, one that was light, elegant and sounded much younger than the one she previously used, “So why don’t we see if Miss Alice here can snuff out your little candle light?”
[Shadow Step!]
