The Runic Alchemist

Land-breaker started from the time he went looking for his Highswords. They were not in the Old Empire’s lands—which was pretty obvious. Otherwise, the Emperor and other third-rankers fighting the demons for years in the alliance army might have sensed them.

The Land-breaker began searching along the sea route many ships had taken when he was at the edge of the Old Empire. After following a ship for a few days, he found an island hundreds of kilometers away from the mainland. It was mostly just a rocky island with patches of sand here and there, but behind it was a cave entrance where ships could enter.

A lot of demons and humans had been captured there and were being starved to death, forced to power some ancient relic that consumed an immense amount of mana. It was the cult again. Voidshaper had been kept unconscious for years, bound by some weird otherworldly cursed items. Land-breaker guessed they had to be from some dungeon the cult had discovered—one that had remnants of a demonic civilization.

Before he could question the cult members, they took their own lives by eating some ugly, glowing purple roots.

Voidshaper had been attacked by the transcendent demons after many of the third-rankers among the Highswords betrayed him and the others. After a brutal, desperate battle, Voidshaper managed to save most of the academy kids, but he himself had been captured. One by one, the third-rankers not aligned with the cult were consumed in the same way—used to harvest mana from their bodies to feed this giant relic.

Voidshaper and the surviving knights had no idea what had happened to the other third-ranker Highswords. Only five hundred of them had survived, out of the thousands captured alive or injured. All of them mentioned the same thing: the cult didn’t want to kill them. They wanted to use their bodies like living mana batteries to power their enormous relic.

"So, where is it?" Damian asked.

"It was there, in the hidden cave," the Land-breaker replied. "That’s the thing—it constantly oozes this dark, chaos-element liquid. I thought about breaking the whole island, but I abandoned the idea. I didn’t want to bring such an abomination onto the land. It’s poisoning the ocean though, and we’ll have to stop that soon."

"Mindseer said you can copy spells," Voidshaper said. "Can you do that with this relic? Not to activate it, but just to get an idea of what it could potentially do. We’ll have to find this abomination of a dungeon soon—assuming that’s where it all came from."

"It has to be. Humans and even demons aren’t capable of using the chaos element in such a way," Land-breaker said.