Chapter 2998: Divinity / Devil Core
Chapter 2998: Divinity / Devil Core
Date: Unspecified
Time: Unspecified
Location: Myriad Realms, Dark Realm, Gelid Alps, Snow Elven Region, High Snow District, Boundary Ward
"You are not a Frosling. Who are you? Froslings can’t swap reality—"
The Snow Elven Prince’s booming, tectonic voice suddenly faltered, leaving me staring at him wide-eyed. He shouldn’t have sensed the swap in reality. Yet, he not only caught the reality shift perfectly, but he had immediately doubted my Frosling disguise.
Before I could even formulate a mocking response, the massive, imposing Glacier Goliath form began to violently destabilize.
The hyper-compressed glacier and the intricate matrix of fused Ruler-class armor pieces began to melt away rapidly, dripping into my sub-reality like a cheap popsicle on a scorching summer afternoon. As the majestic exoskeleton dissolved into stagnant puddles of slush, it revealed the truth hidden within: a withered, completely lifeless Snow Elven corpse.
The Prince was dead. He hadn’t fallen to my strike—his life force had simply ceased to exist, turning from a sentient ice entity to a frozen corpse in an instant.
Stunned by the abrupt conclusion, I hurried over to the rapidly thawing devil corpse. I activated my Soul Pupils to their absolute limit, plunging my awareness directly into the remaining, fractured husks of its divinity to diagnose what had just happened. The moment my energy touched his core, a wave of profound realization washed over me, solving the great evolutionary mystery of the Frosell Realm.
I finally understood why, after so many millennia of the Frosell Realm being destroyed and its will fragments being sold as commodity through the Devil Merchant Code, this man had still been so far from completely digesting his will fragment of the Frosell Realm. That was because he had only recently ingested the realm will fragment.
But that made no sense.
Wasn’t he supposed to be the first to discover the potential of combining the Snow Elven bloodline with Forsell’s blessing upon the Froslings?
How could he have only recently ingested the realm will fragment and learned its benefits to elven bloodline only now, when the bloodline breeding experiments had been ongoing for several millennia?
It turned out that until this very moment, I hadn’t been facing the actual, flesh-and-blood Snow Elven Crown Prince at all. This entire time, I had been fighting a perfect clone of his — one so flawlessly made that it genuinely, implicitly believed itself to be the true Prince, with the title demon core, and the divinity all reinforcing that belief.
The clone possessed a perfectly synchronized copy of the real Prince’s memories, spanning countless millennia of hidden history, royal history, and horrific vault experiments. Yet the physical flesh of this corpse was barely a few centuries old — a discrepancy I’d only missed because I’d aggressively aged him with my Fleeting Youth curse before I’d bothered to check his real lifespan.
I hadn’t felt the need to double-check his origin data beforehand, because his insane, space-tearing velocity while under my Fleeting Youth curse had made it seem completely unnecessary. I’d thought he would die before we even clashed.
Only I’d underestimated the means at his disposal. He was a crown prince of the Elven Race; of course he’d have one or two defenses against every possible scenario. Leading to the current scenario. Otherwise, I would have believed I had killed him, only to uncover the truth too late.
I had no idea where the real Crown Prince was. Maybe he was safely nestled in the deepest bunker of the capital, letting his proxies carry out his will.
I looked down at the melting, fraudulent royal corpse, a cold smile slowly spreading across my face as the pieces of the puzzle realigned. Right up until the moment it was dragged into my sub-reality and abruptly died from being severed from its source, the illusion had been absolute — for both of us.
I was genuinely relieved the proxy had died instantly upon being separated from its source. Otherwise, I would have carelessly burned my Calamity Daughter Gem on a mere clone that — ironically — would have died none the wiser.
Without dwelling on the deception any further, I swiftly stored the melting elven corpse into my storage space, deactivated the Reality Isolation Seal, and snapped back into the primary space of the Dark Realm.
The moment the sub-reality dissolved, I instantly heightened my senses to their absolute limits, bleeding my perception into the local space. I needed to find the immediate replacement or the automated contingency network the original had undoubtedly deployed to contain the fallout of his clone’s sudden expiration.
If he could think of deploying perfect clones — clones that completely believed themselves to be the original — as proxies in the Elven Capital, even to the point of orchestrating a peaceful coup that unfortunately turned into patricide because of my intervention, then I knew without a doubt his external contingencies would be just as airtight.
I didn’t dare underestimate the sheer financial and material means of a ridiculously wealthy, Ruler-class devil. Unlike the desperate, resource-starved devils I was used to fighting in the past, the Snow Elven Crown Prince was operating on an entirely different economic plane. He wasn’t just monstrously strong; he had an absurd volume of high-tier artifacts, ancestral items, and miracle elixirs at his disposal, each one seemingly rarer and more broken than the last. He quite literally had more tricks up his sleeve than any single opponent I’d faced in my entire life.
My Soul Pupils scanned the perimeter, slicing through the ambient frost and the lingering static of our clash.
Just then, the exact nightmare scenario I feared came to fruition. The replacement for the Prince’s clone hadn’t deployed from the capital to the borders to investigate — it had already arrived. The bastard, instead of rushing over from the capital like the last one, had read the data pulled from his dead clone and realizing my presence he had immediately dropped the cash to blink a fresh, fully loaded proxy straight into Frosnow City via the Devil Merchant Code.
...
AN: Divinity / Devil Core Clarification
Card Apprentices (Humans):
Grimoire → Ego Gem → Divinity
Demons / Devils:
Demon Core → Title Demon Core → Divinity (Devil Core)