"Who are you?... Where is Lily?" Arvell nervously inquired. However, he noticed his voice was deeper than before, more akin to that of someone in their early teens. While this did confuse him, his worry for Lily and the identity of the mysterious man took precedence over that.
The young man had silver hair with beautiful purple eyes, and Arvell could without a doubt say that the man was the most handsome man he'd ever seen in his life. The man's beauty was simply otherworldly.
Suddenly a flood of memories entered Arvell's mind, including the memories of being impaled by a sword.
Arvell looked at his chest, but instead of finding a gaping wound, he found an extremely lean and muscular physique, something he didn't possess before.
Arvell looked up at the mysterious man in confusion as if the man could answer his questions about his current state.
The man smiled at Arvell, before slowly rising to his feet.
"Follow me"
He began to walk forward and beckoned for Arvell to follow him.
Arvell got up and decided to follow the man in hopes of answering his questions.
"Can you please tell me what happened? Is this the afterlife?" Arvell asked.
The man kept walking forward without pausing.
"Just wait until we reach our destination before I explain everything to you."
'Maybe this person is my guide to the afterlife?' Arvell mused to himself. He heard stories about how there would be a guide from hell to take recently deceased people to the afterlife.
The two of them kept walking until they reached a full-length mirror.
"Take a look at yourself first," he told Arvell before stepping aside to allow Arvell to look at the mirror.
Despite being confused by the man's words decided to look at himself in the mirror, after all, he might be able to get his answers from the man after doing this.
However, to Arvell's surprise, he found an exquisitely handsome silver-haired man looking back at him. If before he was considered handsome, now he was probably the most handsome guy he ever saw, except for the young man beside him. Even his eye colour changed from brown to light purple pupils that looked like beautiful gemstones. His entire appearance looked quite similar to the man beside him, almost eerily so…
"Careful you don't fall in love with yourself, It never ends well. I can speak from experience."
The man's words disrupted Arvell's thoughts and he turned his head away from the mirror to face the man.
"What happened? I look different" Arvell asked.
However, unlike before, the man decided to finally answer Arvell's burning questions.
"You were finally able to help me properly materialize."
"Materialize?" Arvell asked
"My soul was sealed within the amulet you wore around your neck, and the only way I could properly materialize my soul was to absorb enough life essence, which you managed to provide to me through your blood."
"Who are you?" Arvell asked for the third time.
"You can simply call me Lykos. The information of what I am has been lost to the passage of time eons ago, but you can think of me as a spirit that inhibits your amulet."
"So you aren't an agent of hell?"
"Agent of hell? Where did you get that delusion from? Hmm… I guess you are thirteen so having 8th-grade syndrome makes sense..." The spirit gave Arvell an amused look.
Veins started bulging in Arvell's forehead, "I'm not a chunni! Anyone would think that after dying! Probably!"
Hearing Arvell acting like a pouty young child, Lykos started laughing out loud while holding onto his chest. Tears even threatened to spill from his eyes.
However Lykos's actions only served to piss off Arvell even more, but knowing that the man before was only trying to tease him for fun, Arvell began to calm himself down. He wouldn't give this man any more reason to laugh at him.
Seeing Arvell calm down, Lykos knew he wouldn't be getting any more laughs out of Arvell, so he also stopped laughing.
Wiping a tear from his eye Lykos decided to get back to the main topic of their conversation.
"Arvell you desire power right?" He asked with an air of seriousness, "What would you do for it?"
Arvell's entire body began to heat up after hearing the word 'power'. He looked at Lykos with eyes burning with determination.
"If I had Strength, I would have never been forced into such a pathetic state, I wouldn't have been abandoned, I wouldn't have been embarrassed, I wouldn't have been betrayed, and I wouldn't have been killed! If I was given the chance, I would do anything to get it!"
Arvell clenched his fists tightly and caused them to make a loud popping noise.
"Even if I have to endure hellish pain, or undergo gruelling training, I would do it. I want to… No I need to get stronger! Only then can I dictate my life, and get back at those bastards who threw me away!"
Pausing for a moment, Arvell looked resolutely at Lykos.
"However I will not cross my bottom line. I don't want to lose myself in pursuit of power." fr(e)ewebn(o)vel
Lykos nodded as if expecting this exact answer.
"Good answer Arvell. Without that level of dedication, you would not go far on the path to supremacy no matter how much help you receive. You can take a horse to a lake, but you can't make it drink."
"But Lykos, why are you even asking me this? I am already dead. It's too late…" Arvell dejectedly asked.
Lykos looked at Arvell with a knowing look.
"What if I told you that you aren't dead… at least not anymore".
"What do you mean? I got stabbed through the chest and bled out!"
Arvell gripped his chest area tightly with a shaking hand.
"I still vividly remember the sensation of the cold metal in my chest. I didn't feel much pain from it, but I felt it in my chest. Like my body knew something was there that shouldn't be."
He touched his hand to the location of where the sword wound was. fre ewebnovel.com
"Only a skilled healer would have been able to heal someone from that level of damage. Unless Jessica and Calen or some passerby managed to save me, I should have bled out and died."
"Oh… well you kinda did die, if you consider it that," Lykos replied. "But I was the one who 'killed' you. I made your heart stop… for a bit."
Arvell looked at Lykos with visible confusion, before a thought went through his head.
"Was it to fake my death so that the people aiming for my life would think I'm dead?"
"Yes," Lykos calmly replied.
"But… how did you do that? Did you somehow even fake the aura of death around me as well? People of that level wouldn't leave until they made sure that they were dead!"
When someone dies, they release an aura of death around their corpse. Sometimes the leftover mana in a corpse would fuse with the aura of death and the soul of the deceased causing the corpse to reanimate into an undead. Depending on the amount of leftover mana the undead could even retain their consciousness of when they were alive, but this was only for exceptionally powerful mages.
Assassins who dealt with murder were typically incredibly sensitive to the aura of death, so there was no way they would have just left without making sure he was properly killed.
"Naturally I faked that too."
"How? That shouldn't be possible!" Arvell asked in confusion.
Lykos's words just broke Arvell's definition of 'common sense', after all, how could someone be dead while also alive? That shouldn't be possible!
"Through a little manipulation of nether."
Arvell raised his brows after hearing this new and unfamiliar word.
"What's that?"
"Nether along with Aether are two of the strongest powers in existence, and the thing you know as 'mana' is just some cheap knockoff of these two powers."
'Mana was just some knockoff? If the mages across the world were to hear this they would be spitting blood.' Arvell mused.
Strangely enough, he seemed to believe the man's words now, no matter how outlandish they seemed.
"Nether specifically is a power that can control life and death. Faking your 'death' while preserving your 'life' isn't that hard."
'Or it at least shouldn't be if I was at my full strength,' Lykos thought to himself.
The information that he might not be dead invigorated Arvell, he felt a sudden desire to leave this place and see for himself.
"So how can I get back? I don't know how to leave this place," Arvell asked while looking at the man with expectant eyes.
"I guess your body transformation should be about complete now so I guess it's okay for you to wake up now."
Lykos snapped his fingers and Arvell's vision went black.
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