Chapter 70- Soul Refining and The Devil’s energy.
Leo raised his palm. The blood-chanter’s soul answered.
A sphere of dark crimson smoke condensed above his hand, denser and heavier than the Warg’s had been.
Faint shapes drifted inside the smoke like half-formed faces or claws testing the boundary. A bloody aura uncoiled from it and rolled outward through the forge, thick enough to fill the surrounding with— smell of blood, rot, and something older.
Hugh stood only a few paces away.
He had been openly admiring the earlier work, still carrying the residual pride of a master watching a student succeed.
The moment the crimson soul appeared, that pride locked him in place. He did not step back. His legs trembled and sweat beaded across his forehead and upper lip, but he stayed where he was, closer than he had stood for the previous soul forging.
Leo glanced at him. The old man’s face had gone pale, yet the set of his jaw said he would rather collapse than retreat.
Leo let out a short, dry chuckle.
"Old man, don’t faint on me now."
"Who is going to faint? I am perfectly fine." The reply snapped out, but Hugh’s voice cracked halfway through.
He coughed once, then again, clearing his throat with visible effort. "Ahm. Ahm. Brat, out of all the forging branches, you had to go and pick such a ghostly work. You could have gone and taken up baking or something. People would actually like you. But instead you had to go and play with the ghosts."
"Hahaha. Old man, no need to be scared so much."
"Tsk. Who is scared?" Hugh turned his body sideways so the sphere sat at the edge of his vision rather than in the center of it.
Leo smiled and returned his attention to the soul.
The crimson sphere drifted above his palm, still shedding its reddish aura. Faint bloody intent settled into the air around the workbench and clung there like humidity before a storm.
This was the soul of the goblin shaman—the one who had bargained with the blood devil.
"Old man, watch carefully. You might get a sudden enlightenment and break through, who knows. So stop being a scaredy cat."
Leo summoned the silver-colored soul flame. It bloomed around the sphere like a second skin. The reddish aura vanished into it at once; the fiendish, bloodthirsty pressure that had filled the forge simply ceased to exist.
The soul body began to burn.
Memories came first, as they always did.
Leo saw the forest through the shaman’s eyes—low tunnels packed with dead bodies, the earth underfoot reeking of blood and decay. He felt the constant, gnawing hunger of the tribe that never fully went away.
He felt the shaman’s contempt for the weak and the sharper, more inner fear of becoming one of them, one of the weaker being.
Images surged and vanished in rapid succession. Each lasted only a heartbeat before the flame consumed it.
Then the emotions arrived.
Rage first—hot, indiscriminate, aimed at everything that lived more easily than the tribe.
After that came fear, cold and precise, buried so deep it had almost become part of the shaman’s bones.
Last of all came the fear of the moment of death itself: the heavy, sinking certainty that the body was finished and nothing would follow except whatever waited on the other side.
Leo kept the soul flame steady. This time the soul did not resist the way the warg’s had.
Well Not yet, At least....
The outer shell burned away until only a thin membrane remained. Underneath it the pattern should have revealed itself, but what appeared was wrong.
Leo did not recognize it.
Something else had coiled around the soul pattern like a root that had grown through and around living wood, binding it from the inside.
The soul finally began to fight back.
It pushed against the flame. The burned outer layer recovered, contracting and thickening at the same time. The resistance carried a stubborn, almost spiteful weight that made Leo frown.
A vision struck him again without warning.
He stood inside a cave. Dark water pooled at the center of the stone floor. In front of the pool sat a group of goblins—young ones, thin ones, old ones—hands bound, bodies shaking with fear. Behind them stood another group who simply watched, faces blank.
The surface of the dark water vibrated.
Then it stirred....
A voice rose from the depths of the pool, a low growl that seemed to scrape the skull.
Black water lifted from the pool like snakes. The water wrapped the bound goblins near the edge and dragged them under. Their screams cut off one by one as they disappeared.
"Not enough..."
The voice was not satisfied. The blood of the goblins had not been enough.
"I paid you with the blood sacrifice. Now please grant me the power."
The words belonged to the goblin shaman.
As the pool drank, the shaman’s eyes changed from red to a depthless black. In that moment a devil-worshipper was born.
Leo watched the entire sequence from inside the shaman’s own perspective. He saw the learning of the rituals, the endless chants, the bargain struck in that cave, and the power that followed. Every piece of it passed through him and then burned away.
For a brief instant Leo’s focus slipped. The soul flame wavered. An instinctive urge rose hard in his chest—the desire to simply annihilate every last scrap of resistance along with the soul itself. The force of that urge nearly reduced the pattern to useless ash.
He forced himself to cool.
"Breathe."
He drew a full mouthful of air into his lungs and let it out slowly. The flame does the burning, not me.
He repeated the thought until the murderous impulse settled.
Slowly the core of the soul began to unfold again.
Earlier he had only glimpsed the strange pattern.
Now he saw it clearly.
Smoke-like energy engulfed the soul threads. Underneath that energy the shaman’s own shape remained: a hunched goblin body.
But the shape was wrapped in something black. Greasy strands coiled around it like a net pulled too tight, pulsing with a slow, steady rhythm.
Devil’s energy....
The power the shaman had received had never been a gift. It was a chain the devil had driven into the soul, a living tether that siphoned strength and kept the shaman bound as a slave long after the bargain was struck.
Leo understood why this refinement had been harder than the last.
The soul was still a prisoner.
He increased the intensity of the soul flame. Each black strand resisted the heat as if it were a wet rope that refused to catch the fire. He wrapped the strands completely, yet they would not come free.
He had no clear idea what to do next.
"Try using the eternal flame along with the soul flame. It should be able to annihilate the energy."
Surtr’s voice cut through his consciousness. The ancient presence had been watching the entire process in silence until now.
Leo’s eyes sharpened.
He summoned the gold-black-and-white eternal flame and let it mix with the soul fire. The two flames tangled, becoming a single silver-golden blaze that occasionally spat pure white and pure black flickers.
A system notification appeared.
[Ding~]
[Synergy detected]
[Eternal flame and soul flame are highly compatible with each other]
[All effects of both flames are increased by 50% in the synergy state]
The combined flame touched the dark energy.
A hissing sound rose, sharp and continuous.
The devil energy did not simply burn; the eternal flame annihilated it while the soul flame consumed any soul energy that had mixed into the taint.
Strand by strand the black net came apart.
After a short time the pattern stood fully cleared.
Another notification surfaced.
[Ding!]
[You have been tainted by the devil energy.]
[Your relationship with the devils have dropped -50]
[You have hostile relation with them now.]
Leo stared at the message for a moment, then dismissed it with a mental shrug.
Hostile, you say? Not that I care. They are probably hostile to everyone.
The soul pattern was now fully visible: the same hunched-back goblin shaman gripping a staff.
Leo reached for the armor set and placed the folded pieces on the workbench. The metal had cooled completely. He warmed it gently with the eternal flame, applying only enough heat to widen the microscopic gaps in the lattice so the soul weaving could enter.
Then he manifested the soul-flame hammer.
He guided the soul pattern into position directly above the chest plate and began to hammer it downward. The first blow pressed the pattern against the flat strips of the chest plate and the metal surface beneath.
Clear resistance met him—exactly the amount he expected from a vivid-rank soul pattern.
As he continued to drive the soul threads into the armor, the blood steel suddenly awoke.
Killing intent surged out of the metal like a hound catching the scent of fresh blood.
The steel wanted the soul for itself.
Drawn by the familiar bloody aura that still clung to the pattern, the metal began to suck at the soul threads, trying to devour them whole.
The threads stretched thin under the pull. They were about to tear. The soul pattern shuddered at the edge of breaking.
Then a single black strand of devil energy appeared.
Leo was certain he had already burned every trace of that energy away. Yet the strand manifested without warning.
It seized the soul threads the blood steel was about to consume and yanked them back with possessive force.
Leo watched the strand act.
Goosebumps rose across his entire body.
What the fuck?.....
.....