Advent of the Archmage

Argh!!! A blood-curdling shriek sounded.

It came from an odd-looking blue-white tower. The two demons standing at the tower’s entrance sniggered at each other. One of them even licked their lips.

“Master Eilot’s having his fun again. Sounds like his toy is enjoying themselves too.”

This had been going on for more than three months. Every day, the Dark Tutor, Eilot would bring in an Omirian to torture for ten hours.

The Omirian prisoners had entered the tower physically whole. They had no scars on them. Some were even plump and white. However, after those ten hours of torture, the Omirians were all reduced to piles of minced meat.

The tower was now filled with said piles of Omirian minced meat. The demons seemed to love it for some reason.

Argh!!! Another shriek echoed from behind the tower walls. Following the shriek was a feeble voice, which pleaded, “I’ll talk, I’ll talk, Eilot, just stop. I’ll tell you everything!”

The tower’s first floor was a circular hall where the screams had been coming from. An Omirian with dark blue skin gave a brisk wave of his hand, and the demon executioners who had been abusing their victims in front of him immediately left the hall.

The Omirian was Eilot. Three months ago, he was a Soul Tutor respected by all Omirians. Now, he was Nozama’s Dark Tutor.

He was now sitting on a black throne. In a corner of the circular hall was a torture rack where a young female Omirian was left to bleed. Blood flowed profusely from her wounds before hitting the floor. The dripping sound it made was enough to make anyone’s hair stand on end.

There was a cage on the other side of the room. Ten Omirians in commoner attire were imprisoned in it. There was a young man kneeling in it, staring at the young Omirian girl on the rack. He pleaded, his eyes bloodshot with tears, “Let her go, Eilot, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know!”

Eilot’s face remained expressionless. “You’re in no position to negotiate.”

Saying this, he gripped at the void. A dark blue whip appeared in his hand in an instant. With a violent motion, he whipped at the girl who was hanging from the rack ten feet away from Eilot. Upon being struck, the barely conscious girl let out another blood-curdling shriek.

Whoop! The whip returned to Eilot. Fine steel teeth lined the whip’s length. With every stroke, its teeth would fasten themselves to its victim’s skin. It would then pull out chunks of flesh and skin from him or her every time it returned to its handler’s hand.

The girl on the rack screamed again, but this time, her voice was frail and lifeless. The prisoners in the cage shuddered. Tears streamed down the young man’s face even more as he looked on helplessly at the horrific scene.

Seeing how severe her wounds were and how much blood she had lost, the young man knew that she was beyond saving.

“No! No! Eilot, no!” shouted the young man in the cage, his eyes widened with growing hatred.

Eilot looked at him and then said, “Delin, I’m about to kill your sister. The next one to be hung on the rack will be your father. I’ll save your mother for last. Piasce was your tutor, but he is now a wanted man. Now he’s escaped, and still, you would give your life up to protect him?”

Delin had undergone rigorous training in Soul Magic. Forcibly extracting any information from his soul would have decimated his mind, and Eilot would not be able to gain anything from him. He would not have gone through this much trouble if there had been an easier way to make Delin speak.

Delin was now kneeling on the ground, emotionally exhausted. He said in a low voice, “I’ll tell you everything. I only ask that you give us a painless death. Please don’t torture us any more.”

“I can live with that,” said Eilot, nodding. He had always found the routine of torture tedious anyway.

An hour later, ten Omirian corpses were lifted out of the blue-white tower and thrown out onto the pathway leading to the tower’s entrance. A couple of demons rushed over and tore into the corpses, ripping their flesh clean off their bones.

In the tower, Eilot remained seated on his throne without moving a muscle. His eyes were closed. However, he was not asleep. Rather, he had slipped into a meditative state commonly practiced by the Omirians.

Physically, he was still within the realm. However, his soul had entered the Sea of Void.

The Sea of Void was filled with eddies of energy. A naked soul entering the Sea of Void was a risky affair. One would need to possess extraordinary skill in order to traverse the Sea of Void safely. There were only three… no, two people in the Omir realm capable of such a feat.

Eilot’s path was thick with white Mana mist, energy vortexes, and negative energy pitfalls. Wily Void creatures lurked in the shadows as well, but Eilot managed to avoid them all. Half an hour later, a red globe appeared before him.

From afar, the object looked like a tiny bubble in the depths of an ocean. However, as he got closer, the red globe grew bigger. After swimming towards it for half an hour, the tiny bubble had expanded into a huge globe, occupying Eilot’s line of sight completely.

Eilot made his way expertly through the bubble for half an hour. Soon, a whirlpool appeared up ahead. Without hesitation, he plunged into the eye of the vortex.

Beyond the eye of the vortex was a long tunnel. Dim, red light emanated from its walls, swimming around Eilot as he pressed on. The light wove all kinds of imagery across the walls. At times, it was a laughing skull; at others, it was a roaring beast. There was even one which depicted a giant pulling apart a dwarf limb by limb. All of it seemed surreal to Eilot.

Twenty minutes passed, and Eilot finally reached the end of the tunnel. There was a ball of dark red light up ahead. Eilot began to accelerate and soon burst through the light.

The scene before him shifted. In the next few seconds, the surreal imagery vanished, giving way to an empty hall.

The hall was built on a seemingly endless plain. There were no walls in it. Only four circular pillars were holding it together. Bits of sand were swept up by a bitter wind. The sky was a shade of red, and a lone sun hung from it, casting a weak, red glow over the plain. One could see silhouettes of towering demons lumbering aimlessly in the horizon. The bitter wind also carried with it inhuman screams across the wasteland.

In this dark, empty word, a soft, mellow voice spoke out, “Eilot, I take it that you’ve come here to bring me some good news?”

Eilot’s eyes searched for the source of the voice. They were drawn to a pile of bones shaped like a throne at the end of the empty hall. The bones were pitch-black, and they were mostly skulls. Each of their sockets was glowing with an eerie red light.

Sitting atop the throne was a middle-aged man. His hair was greying, and there were white strands of hair hanging over his forehead. Even from an Omirian standpoint, the man’s appearance was flawless. His eyes were black like the night. However, they gleamed with a raging bloodlust that would have given anyone the impression that they were looking at the streams of boiling lava in the Abyss.

The man was wearing an elegant robe with golden embroidery. He was looking at Eilot, his hand propping up one side of his face, a faint smile playing around his lips.

It was the Lord of the Deep, Nozama!

He looked completely out of place here in the middle of the barren wasteland. On the surface, he looked like a human master who had been cast out into the depths of the Abyss but had yet to reach rock bottom.

At first sight, no one would have taken him for the notorious Lord of the Deep.

However, Eilot knew who he was dealing with. He immediately bowed deeply before the middle-aged man and then said, “Master, I’ve interrogated all of Piasce’s disciples. Through the bits of information I had gathered from them, I was able to determine the location of that presence you seek. These are their statements. Please take a look.”

He then handed over a black orb of light to Nozama.

Nozama took it. After feeling it for a few minutes, his perfect face broke into a smile. “Well done, Eilot.”

He then opened his hand, from which emerged a thick haze of light. The haze solidified into strands of darkness and then flew out of the hall and towards the far corners of the wasteland.

A few minutes later, dust rose up in the horizon. Demons of all shapes and sizes were converging towards the hall from every direction at top speed.

The demons’ number grew by the minute. Half an hour later, approximately 3000 demons had reached the hall. Eilot could clearly feel just how powerful these demons were. Every one of them had at least Legendary-level power, the strongest among them being Level-15.

Seeing 3000 Legendary demon masters in one place would have made anyone feel despair. Eilot could even feel his spirit form quaking at the sight of them.

After making sure that everyone had answered his call, Nozama spoke with that soft, mellow voice of his.

“Eilot, return to Omir and have Mysin prepare a Void Ferry. My army of demons will seek out this presence.”

“Yes, Master,” Eilot humbly replied. Mysin was one of the three Soul Magic masters in Omir. His skill in making Void Ferries was second only to Piasce.

Nozama’s mind was set on obtaining his prize. His demons moved quickly. Soon, all 3000 demons were all aboard a vast disc-shaped Void Ferry.

Mana surged through the Void Ferry’s circuits, and the entire vessel roared into life.

“Let’s go!” ordered Nozama.

The Void Ferry plunged into the Sea of Void like a huge whale diving back into the depths of the ocean.

At that moment in the Firuman realm, Link had taken on his black dragon form. His dragon’s body was vast, its wingspan close to a hundred feet. Silver-black dragon scales glittered under the sun across the length of his body.

He almost blocked out the sun in the sky when he spread out his wings.

All the Red Dragons in Ferde were looking at their Black Dragon King in awe. In dragon society, size equaled power. It had been 30,000 years since a dragon as powerful as Link had appeared in their midst.

After making the necessary adjustments to his dragon body, he was able to propel himself 5000 feet into the sky with one powerful stroke of his wings. His body began to fade in the air until he finally vanished from sight.

He had also entered the Sea of Void.