Chapter 711: An Impossible Goal
"One million." Two words broke the suffocating tension.
Spoken not by Alex, but by Guardian Elmara, they lingered in the air like an undeniable verdict. She remained silent for nearly ten seconds, letting their weight settle over the room before continuing.
"See this beautiful little marvel on my finger." Lady Elmara raised her right hand, displaying an intricately wrought black ring set with a deep blood-red gemstone that seemed to glow from within. "This artifact stands above the Ancient class."
The scowl that had lived on her face since she had taken her position was gone, entirely, immediately, replaced by something that belonged to a completely different person.
Her eyes were glittering. The expression was the specific, unguarded excitement of a child who had acquired something extraordinary and had been waiting, with great difficulty, for the right moment to show it off.
She was clearly relishing every second of this, caring less for the suffocating tension that gripped the throne room.
"This artifact can heal one million mortals of the Devourer’s Curse in a single month." She let the words settle before continuing. "Two hundred and fifty thousand Elementalists in the same period... and one thousand Elemental Rulers."
A broad, radiant grin spread across her face, not that each number meant a saved life, but because to her each person was another glimpse of the fantastical knowledge she lived for.
"Oh." She exhaled after a brief, savored silence, her beady eyes narrowing with theatrical consideration. "I hear you asking what the cost is. In simple terms, resources of any kind."
"But if I must elaborate..." she seemed quite willing to elaborate, "Corpses of those nasty, ugly demons. Corpses of the Eldravian soldiers. Their giant iron tin cans, and the endless corpses of that kin-slaying bastard’s abominable horde."
"Oh." Another exclamation, her eyes sweeping across the gathering, half of whom sat on the edge of their seat, their eyes brightening from the implication.
"I also hear you asking whether it can help you miserable bunch recover." She tilted her head. "The answer is yes. It can heal any damage done by the Devourer’s Curse or any damage, for that matter."
The room was struggling to contain itself.
"It is called the Primordial Nexus." Varon’s voice arrived quietly, pulling the room’s attention toward him without demanding it. "It is the same artifact the Domain Ruler acquired independently and used previously to heal selective thousands. It will now heal millions."
"The question you all came here to receive an answer to, the one this Domain has waited seven decades to hear," A brief pause, for the simple courtesy of giving truth the space it deserved, "I will leave in the hands of the Domain Ruler."
The revelation sent a ripple of shock through the room, widening eyes and stealing breaths. It was quickly replaced by eager anticipation as every gaze settled on Alex, all silently waiting for his answer.
Every eye settled on Alex, and what lived in those eyes was a mixture that had no clean name. Hope and fear braided together so tightly they had become a single thing, the particular combination that only existed in people who needed something so badly that the prospect of receiving it was almost as frightening as the prospect of being denied it.
They knew what the Devourer’s Curse was at its core. They understood in their bones that it existed beyond the reach of any means available to them, and that no cure developed by them had ever come close, that every attempt had failed, that the degradation had continued regardless of what was tried.
Their only thread of hope had always been the Domain Ruler, someone connected to powers beyond the Ancient World, capable of acquiring things whose nature exceeded anything they could reach on their own.
But hope was a fragile thing in and of itself, and being eluded by it for seven decades, they held onto it with the full awareness that they might be about to watch it fall apart completely.
Alex looked at them.
"The Ruler Shop does not contain a magical potion that can be conjured from thin air," he said. His voice was deliberate and unhurried, the bluntness of it intentional, not unkind, but unwilling to let false hope build any further than it already had. "Nor a magic spell capable of cleansing the Domain of the curse in one sweep."
The silence that followed had weight to it. He watched it happen, the false hope dying quietly in the gathered eyes, one face at a time, reality settling back into place with the particular heaviness of something that had always been true and had simply been briefly, desperately ignored.
He gave them a moment to feel it, and then he continued.
"However, that doesn’t mean there is no cure," Alex spoke to the question every soul in the room had already silently arrived at, meeting it before it could be asked aloud.
"There are a plethora of them. True cures, like the Nirvana Elixir among them, and others still more potent, capable of rebuilding an Elemental Ruler from nothing, even a Monarch." He let that sit for a breath. "But I could work for a century acquiring those, and it would not amount to curing one hundredth of this Domain’s people."
He watched the weight of that land before continuing.
"The cure I have managed to acquire will heal three million afflicted souls each year, who could stand their ground in a war. In five years, fifteen million." A pause, heavy with the arithmetic behind it. "A little less than three percent of the Domain’s population."
The heaviness in his voice didn’t lift.
"It will take more than a century to heal this entire Domain at that rate, and that is assuming the curse stops spreading, and that no new souls fall to its corruption in that time." He looked across the room. "Which it will not, unless something else changes first."
Silence.
"There is only one true cure to the disease that has plagued our people for the better part of a century." He let the words settle before he gave them the rest. "Ahrimon has to die."
The room absorbed it in the particular stillness of people hearing a truth they had already known but also knew he imencity of it.
"I acquired this knowledge from the Domain Shop," Alex continued, his voice clear and unhurried. "The only way to remove the curse entirely is to kill the one who wields the Devourer’s Curse. With him dead, the soul brand placed on each victim will fade on its own, gradually. Only those who have already entered the second stage of corruption and beyond will require external intervention to fully recover."
He had gone through the Rulers’ Shop shortly before this gathering, and had confirmed many new details; for one, his Ruler’s authority had risen naturally to Third Rank, and accepting it fully would advance it to Sixth Rank instantly.
After all, beyond the simple Domain quests required of him to judge his character, which was being fulfilled by his participation in the brewing world war, the other core requirement had always been strength, which now also stood at the pinnacle of the world.
He had not accepted the advancement yet. Doing so required signing a soul contract, binding him to serve as Domain Ruler now and into the future, earning benefits he knew little about by fully accepting his role, but he couldn’t at the moment, even if he so desired, because at present his unique soul condition prevented him from accepting it.
That was a problem for another day.
What mattered here was simpler. The truth about the Devourer’s Curse and its cure, learned from the Shop, had brought a mixture of disappointment and relief in equal measure, disappointment that the cure was not the clean, complete solution the clan leaders had spent decades hoping for, relief that a genuine path existed at all.
But in the end, it changed very little for him personally.
Before learning any of this, his plan had already been to kill Ahrimon after five years, and to help the Domain recover to whatever extent his resources allowed in that time.
Now the plan remained essentially unchanged. Ahrimon had to die for the future to be secured, because if Ahrimon survived, the only way that could happen was if Alex himself died first, and his death would mean the Domain’s death by simple consequence.
So nothing had truly shifted. Not for him, at least.
"I plan to acquire a soul array," Alex said, "one capable of weakening the Devourer’s Curse, slowing its spread, suppressing its growth." He paused, watching the clan leaders wrestle visibly with the new shape of their reality.
"As you must have heard about the agreement I made with Ahrimon, for the next five years, no new souls would be infected by the curse. And when that window closes..." He let the sentence hang for exactly as long as it needed to. "I plan to kill Ahrimon."
A beat.
"At least, that is the plan." The smile that followed was small, and carried the particular quality of someone who understood exactly how much weight that sentence carried, the impossibility of it, and still he had chosen to say it plainly anyway.
The words struck the room like a thunderbolt.
Every expression froze. The confusion spared no one, not even his own Guardians. Elmara’s earlier excitement vanished, replaced by a searching gaze, while even Varon’s impassive expression sharpened, waiting for an explanation.
"I know all of you have questions," Alex said, looking across the gathered faces, his finger drumming against the throne’s armrest. "About my condition. About my reasoning." He spread his hands slightly, an invitation.
"So go ahead."
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