Chapter 100: Mass conversion
Kenji walked down the long, metallic corridor of the Solgrace central human fortress. He had a perfect, deeply anxious expression on his face.
His breathing was rapid, and his hands were trembling slightly as he clutched the leather wrapping of his standard iron sword hilt.
To any guard watching him, he looked exactly like a terrified Crusader who had just witnessed the absolute destruction of a Spire Event and was rushing to find a powerful authority figure for protection.
Inwardly, Kenji’s mind was entirely calm. His clinical focus was sharper than it had ever been.
He was deliberately retracing the steps of the previous timeline, moving directly toward the high security briefing room to confront the Marshal.
But this time, he was not walking into a blind trap. He was actively studying the environment, preparing his thoughts to analyze the deep details he had completely missed during the confusion of the last loop.
When he reached the grand blast doors, they hissed open automatically. The red alarm lights were spinning along the ceiling, and the tactical monitors were flashing with spatial distortion warnings.
The Marshal of the humans was standing right before the giant holographic map, his tall, imposing frame completely motionless.
He looked up as Kenji burst into the room. His face was cold, dark, and indifferent.
Kenji stopped in his tracks. He began to shout the exact same panicked words he had used before, warning the old man about the Enders, the Soul Crystal, and the massive iron gate manifesting outside the void bridge.
But while his mouth was moving frantically, his hazel eyes were locked onto the Marshal’s physical frame, scanning every millimeter of his posture.
The deep details he had missed in the last loop began to reveal themselves one after another.
Kenji had learned about Ghouls.
Technically, Ghouls were parasitic soul entities. They could only take over the physical body of a human when that human had already died.
Even then, the possession was highly temporary.
A Ghoul could only manipulate the flesh until the residual death energy inside the dead body completely ran out, after which the muscles would rot and fall apart.
However, there was another, highly forbidden method for them to control a human body for as long as they wanted.
It required the original owner of the human body to willingly form a symbiotic contract with the Ghoul.
Doing that was incredibly detrimental to the human owner.
The moment the contract was signed, the human soul would be forcefully joined and fused with the soul of the Ghoul. They would be forever stuck together, sharing the exact same soul container.
If the core characteristics, personality traits, and moral structures of the human and the Ghoul were different, the two consciousnesses would eventually fight for dominance inside the brain.
This constant internal war almost always ended in disaster. It had a massive chance of birthing a Void being, a horrifying creature without a true soul that could only follow the base traits of absolute continuity and mindless consumption.
Kenji studied the Marshal’s movements. The old man did not look like he had died. His skin was firm, his posture was steady, and he looked incredibly strong, radiating the dense aura of a Diamond ranked powerhouse.
There were no signs of rotting flesh or internal decay.
Suddenly, a tiny, soft vibration echoed right inside Kenji’s left ear canal.
"Oh..." Ayla’s multi-layered voice sounded inside his ear.
Thinking about the ridiculous form she had taken to execute this part of the infiltration strategy, Kenji lowered his head slightly to hide his face from the Marshal.
A very subtle grin broke through his anxious mask.
Ayla had transformed herself into a tiny, translucent blue bee, completely shrinking her massive presence down to the size of a pebble.
She was currently hiding deep inside his left ear canal, her tiny legs gripping his skin while her translucent wings rested right against his ear drum.
"No wonder I can’t hear his thoughts," Ayla’s voice continued buzzing directly into his ears. "He doesn’t have a single thought at all! His head is completely empty, Kenji. The human soul and the Ghoul soul inside him must have destroyed each other during the fusion process. He is just a hollow shell. Creepy."
Though she wanted sound like she had goosebumps, her words felt like she was excited instead.
She shifted her tiny insect legs slightly, causing a faint tickling sensation. "Also, Kenji, you should clean your ears. It is so smelly here."
Kenji’s subtle grin instantly froze. The little blue bee flipped her translucent wings irritatedly against his sensitive ear drums, making a tiny clicking sound that made him want to scratch his head.
He forced his body to remain perfectly still, refocusing his clinical mind on the Marshal.
"Lock him up," the Marshal commanded, his voice completely flat and devoid of any human resonance.
He raised his right hand and pointed his index finger directly at Kenji’s chest, executing the exact same mechanical command from the previous timeline.
The blast doors behind Kenji violently flew open. A dozen elite military enforcers dressed in heavy crimson armor bearing the symbol of the broken crown rushed into the briefing room.
They moved with high tier speed, their raw statistics completely outmatching Kenji.
Three crimson enforcers lunged from Kenji’s blind spots. They brutally slammed him onto the cold metallic floor, pinning his limbs with mechanical precision.
A heavy, dark iron manacle was forcefully clamped around his wrists and his neck with a definitive, chilling click.
The moment the suppression lock engaged, a loud, sickening hiss echoed through his pathways. Kenji felt the vital connection between his core and the surrounding mana completely disappear.
His internal pathways went entirely dead. He allowed the soldiers to lift him up like a sack of meat, dragging his heavy body roughly across the steel floorboards and down the long, winding stone staircase toward the subterranean barracks.
The enforcers pushed him through a massive iron gate and threw him brutally onto the cold, filthy ground of the large underground cell. The heavy bars slammed shut behind him with a definitive clank.
Kenji pushed himself up from the damp straw, his body feeling incredibly heavy and sluggish without his internal mana flow.
He wiped a smear of dirt from his jaw and looked through the darkness of the dungeon.
Just like the previous loop, dozens of pale, hollow faces looked back at him from the shadows. They were the decorated soldiers and elite vanguard officers of his grandfather’s private division.
And sitting near the corner, her uniform torn and her expression filled with a dark, heavy exhaustion, was Lieutenant Maren.
Kenji crawled calmly toward the iron bars that separated his section from theirs. He looked directly at Maren’s bloodshot eyes.
"Lieutenant Maren," Kenji whispered urgently, keeping his voice level. "Tell me exactly how Grandpa was taken away. I need every single detail of the ambush."
Maren looked up, her hands trembling as she gripped the cold iron bars separating their cages. She drew a ragged breath, her jaw clenching tightly as the painful memory rushed back into her mind.
"We were walking through the outer perimeter of the barracks to log our campaign report," Maren whispered, her voice shaking with absolute anger and sadness. "The General was leading the line. Suddenly, a massive structural trap triggered above our heads. A dense, blue smoke rained down from the ceiling grates like a heavy storm."
She shivered, her eyes widening in residual terror.
"The moment that blue smoke touched our skin, we didn’t even have the strength to circulate our internal energy. Everyone who smelled it lost consciousness within a single second.
I was falling backward, my vision blurring fast, but I forced my eyes to stay open for one final moment. Through the fog, I watched the hidden enforcers rush the field.
I watched the General being taken away by those monsters while he was completely paralyzed. And when I finally opened my eyes again, I was locked down here with these trait suppressors."
Kenji listened to her explanation, his hazel eyes narrowing into a sharp, calculating glare. "No wonder," he murmured silently under his breath.
A high tier Diamond ranked Crusader like General Roric Vale could never be defeated in a standard physical confrontation within twenty four hours.
But a specialized, biological agent like that blue smoke changed the entire scenario.
It was an asset designed to target the respiratory and spiritual pathways simultaneously, bypassing standard physical armor.
Inside his left ear canal, the tiny blue bee shifted her position, her wings buzzing softly against his skin.
"Kenji, that blue smoke sounds very dangerous," Ayla’s mind voice vibrated inside his head. "I want to eat it.."
"Be patient," Kenji replied mentally, his fingers lightly tracing the cold stone floor of the cell.
His mind was already analyzing a massive logical contradiction in the enemy’s strategy. Why were the Ghouls keeping them alive?
If the Marshal and the Enders wanted to completely clear the background assets of the Solgrace sector to secure the control over humanity, the most efficient and logical move would be to execute every single loyalist soldier immediately.
Leaving hundreds of elite vanguard captains locked up in a subterranean dungeon created an unnecessary variable that could jeopardize their entire operation.
He was deeply thoughtful, trying to find the hidden reasons behind this specific containment protocol, when Ayla’s tiny voice buzzed inside his head again, dropping a casual but terrifying deduction.
"Maybe the Ghouls don’t want to kill them yet because they need their physical bodies intact. Maybe they want your grandpa to be just like the Marshal. If they can force the General to sign a symbiotic contract while he is paralyzed by the blue smoke, they will gain a Diamond ranked Ghoul King to control the entire Eastern Front."
Kenji’s breath completely caught in his throat. The piece of data clicked into place with absolute, devastating clarity.
The Ghouls weren’t running a standard military execution. They were preparing a mass conversion ritual!
