Malevolent Warlock: Sin Of Eternity

Seated cross legged on the wet cave floor, Leon's figure was outlined by blood.

It seeped from him slowly, not rushing, just leaking from the cuts and gashes that decorated nearly every visible patch of his skin.

His robes were ruined.

His breathing was measured.

[Slain guards 20/20. Proceed to the next stage?]

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Within a period of five hours, Leon had fought through five full waves of serpentine guards, every single one of them seated at the transcendent stage.

They had been mechanical, yes. Lacking in the kind of lived experience that made a fighter truly dangerous. But each of them had carried the force of a mountain behind every movement. A blocked strike felt like stopping a falling boulder with bare hands. A graze from one of their spears left bone-deep marks.

Five waves of that.

And Leon had walked through all of it.

What kind of situation had he never been in before?

His mind was calm.

Not the calm of someone who didn't understand the danger, but the calm of someone who had sat inside far worse and come out the other side carrying something heavier than a shield.

He focused on the goal in front.

That was enough.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Beside him to the left, his beast Actualization worked at its own test.

Gouts of flaming hot fire poured from its maw in long, sustained bursts, bathing the massive ice wall in heat, weakening the surface layer by layer before it drew back and threw its full weight into the structure.

—boom!!

The wall cracked but held.

It cracked a little more.

Leon kept part of his focus there, directing it with quiet mental pressure, adjusting the angle of attack, pulling its attention toward the fractures rather than the solid face.

He was managing it while bleeding on the floor.

Meanwhile, where Levi was meant to be seated was completely vacant.

The space to the right was empty.

The pool of eroding blood was still. Levi was gone.

Leon stared at the empty space for a moment.

'Sometimes I wonder if that little shit head might be more talented than me.'

He let the thought sit there without chasing it.

It was already the equivalent of a level four warlock nearing the peak of its power.

And how had it gotten there?

Sleeping.

All day.

Eating when it felt like it. Lounging across whatever surface was most comfortable. Looking deeply unbothered by the state of the world at all times.

Leon almost felt something close to amusement.

Almost.

He closed his eyes, shook off the thought, and continued pushing his focus back into the Actualization's test.

Some time later, the ice wall shattered.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

He stepped into the next part of the test.

...…

The tunnel ahead was different from the first.

The stone walls gave way to something almost organic, surfaces completely overtaken by a thick coating of green moss that stretched down a straight corridor as far as the eye could follow.

Twenty kilometers.

A straight line of it.

[At a pace of between 80 and 100 meters per minute, walk through this path and reach the end.]

Leon read it once.

Then frowned.

It looked too easy.

His eyes narrowed and he leaned forward slightly, zooming his perception into the surface of the moss wall.

There.

Tiny serpent heads, barely larger than a fingernail, embedded in the green growth at irregular intervals. Invisible to any ordinary eye. Their mouths were open in perpetual silence, each one carrying something that his instincts flagged immediately.

Highly poisonous.

"That's…."

For the first time since entering this inheritance ground, Leon felt something close to hesitation.

He had a high poison resistance. That wasn't in question. His serpent bloodline had seen to that, baking a degree of tolerance into him at a level most cultivators would spend decades trying to artificially achieve.

But high resistance was not immunity.

There was a difference.

He touched the grimoire at his side and drew out a sliver of dark energy, sending it threading toward the moss along the ground ahead.

It worked.

A section blackened and corroded, the tiny serpent heads within it going still.

Then the moss grew back.

Slower than a breath. Faster than he'd hoped.

He watched it fill back in and pulled the energy away.

'Life. I'm sure Altor could probably drain this entire place if he wanted to.'

He thought of the grimoire on the old bastard's side. The one that breathed differently from his own. Something about it always suggested a depth he hadn't fully mapped yet.

He filed the thought away.

"Hmm."

Something else surfaced instead.

An older memory. Quieter. From a time before much of what he carried now.

"Reminds me of something."

He began circulating a spell he hadn't touched in a long time, drawing it up from the deep archive of techniques he'd integrated over the years. It had come from the first elder of the blood serpent clan, passed over with little ceremony, explained even less.

He had never questioned its origins.

He knew its function.

That was enough.

"Life devourer."

—pulse.

The energy erupted from his body the moment his foot touched the moss-covered ground, spreading outward in a slow, steady wave that didn't burn or corrode.

It consumed.

The moss directly beneath him went dark and withered instantly, the tiny serpent heads collapsing inward as the life energy ripped free from the growth and flooded back into Leon's body in a warm, steady current.

He walked.

Unhurried. Exactly within the required pace.

With every step the moss died around him and fed him. Poison included. The devouring energy didn't distinguish, it took the life and the venom both, blending them together and processing them through his constitution like fuel.

By the halfway point he could feel it.

Something in his body was shifting.

Settling into a new configuration quietly, without fanfare. His resistance to poison deepening, the potency of what he carried within his own blood sharpening slightly at the edges.

Before Leon reached the end, his constitution had strengthened.

Leaning further toward poison resistance.

Leaning further toward poison potency.

He stepped out the other side and said nothing about it.

...…

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

"Leon, is that you?"

The voice appeared in his head the moment he reached the threshold of the third stage.

Levi.

"Yes." Leon responded without ceremony.

A pause.

Then —

"Pheww!! I thought you were dead. I've been here for 12 days."

Leon's brow dropped.

He stopped walking.

"Days?"

They had entered this test roughly eight hours ago. He was certain of that. His internal sense of time was not something that drifted easily.

"Yes." Levi's voice came back, slightly flat with exhaustion underneath the usual sharpness. "The time here is messed up. My biological clock says 12 days since I got here."

Leon said nothing for a moment.

He extended his perception outward, feeling into the space around him carefully.

And there it was.

Time was moving at a fundamentally different rate inside this place. What felt like hours from the outside was stretching into days within the inheritance ground, compressing the experience of duration without mercy.

He had felt something like this before.

Not exactly this. But close enough to recognize it.

[To seek immortality, one must first endure stillness and patience. The will to endure as everything dies. Stay in this cave for three years in absolute stillness to pass this stage.]

Silence.

Complete silence.

Then —

"What the actual hell??!!"

Levi's voice detonated in Leon's mind.

"I'm not even six years old yet and you want me to sit still for THREE YEARS?! My fucking ass!!"

The rage was immediate and total. No buildup. No processing period. Just pure, incandescent fury aimed directly at the announcement that had just delivered its verdict.

Leon didn't respond right away.

He understood it.

Levi had been alive for six years at most. Three years of enforced stillness inside a time-distorted inheritance cave wasn't a test of patience.

It was asking the creature to endure half its entire existence in silence.

And Levi was nothing like Leon.

Leon had sat in the void for a thousand years.

He knew what stillness cost.

He knew what it felt like when time stopped meaning anything and the only thing left was the weight of your own mind pressing down on itself.

Levi did not know that yet.

"Calm down." Leon said quietly.

A beat passed.

"…Don't tell me to calm down." Levi muttered under his breath annoyed . He couldn't even wrap his head around it.

But Leon could, a flash of determination in his eyes, all he ever wanted to this immortality. And this was what an immortals life looked like.