No! I don't want to be a Super Necromancer!

Chains of thought and dominance formed mid-air, lashing down through the mist like iron-scripted verdicts. The spiritual fragments of the fallen resisted, of course they did, but their wills had already cracked under the Second Circle's weight, and their pride had been desecrated by the shame of their death.

Jin Tu snarled once before falling silent.

Lu Shenyi twitched, his runes flickering erratically, then folded like burned parchment.

Yan Qinglan opened her mouth, silver tears dripping from her lashes, and knelt without protest.

And Wu Jinhai… looked up, one last ember of divine hatred flickering in his reconstructed eyes.

Damien's voice cut it down.

"You follow the beast now."

The hatred vanished.

All four bowed low.

Their flesh knitted into new forms, reconstructed not from memory, but from death-molded potential. Not Elite-Rank anymore. These were Knights of the First Hell, higher than mere elites, Wraithbound Knight-Rank, loyal to Vel'kharn, soul-marked by the Ninefold Seal.

Their armor grew from their bones. Their weapons fused to their limbs. Their eyes were cold but clear. Not mindless. Not puppets. Just… submissive.

Vel'kharn growled softly, a thunderous purr of satisfaction.

And Damien, for the first time since invoking the Second Circle, breathed.

It wasn't clean. It wasn't painless. But it was breath.

He forced himself upright, spine creaking, limbs shaking, and wiped the blood from his chin with the back of his sleeve. His gaze drifted toward the plundered realm around him, now eerily quiet, filled with drifting debris and the scorched remains of sect arrogance.

The voices in his head didn't stop.

But they did soften.

Because Damien, clever, fractured, too stubborn to fall, had found a way to balance the madness.

He had taken the loudest echoes, the four souls that screamed most violently within him, and turned them into servants. Their grief was now directed. Their regrets weaponized. Their screaming channeled into Vel'kharn's leash.

The pressure that had almost shattered his mind now had a valve.

And above, far above, beyond the dying sky of the inheritance realm, through shrouds of layered dimensional fog and tiers of temporal distortion, a second celestial eye opened.

Not a metaphor.

Not symbolism.

A literal construct, forged from spiritual essence and divine authority, unfurled high within the highest sanctum of light, a vault not of heaven, but of ancient purpose.

It pulsed.

Not with wrath. Not yet.

But with curiosity. With recognition.

Because this was no mere tool of heaven. This eye did not belong to the Celestial Blaze Sect. Nor to the fragmented conscience of divine law. It was not born of prophecy, nor guided by fate.

This eye belonged to JerAxle's Kin.

In the era before the Sovereigns fell silent, before the Realm Wars shattered the Ancestor Planes, JerAxle had built his inheritance not as a benevolent legacy to be passed on, but as a selection crucible, a forge to identify the rarest, strongest, and most twisted souls who might one day serve or challenge his clan's future.

The Celestial Eye was not a watcher for the heavens.

It was a mirror for the abyss, reporting back not to gods… but to kin.

And in that far sanctum, veiled in obsidian glass and floating amidst scrolls of condemned scripture, she watched.

A figure moved from her throne of bone-laced silk, her form tall and sinuous, clad in robes stitched from flayed shadows and frost. Her hair was midnight incarnate, flowing down her back like a stream of ink dragged through snow. Her eyes were violet, ancient, and crystalline, as though seeing through veils stacked a thousand deep.

A Drow of the First House.

Nyxara's bloodline.

But where Nyxara bore control, this woman bore command.

Her name was Xaelith Umbra, Daughter of the Thirteenth Vow, Speaker of the Night Script, and direct heiress to the Umbra Lineage, which had ruled the Drow High House for ten generations. Her presence did not shout. It did not pulse. It simply existed, the kind of existence that required other things to make space.

Standing beside her was a man shrouded in a deathcloak of layered soul veils, his fingers covered in rings made from jawbones, his eyes pale and humming with necrotic runes.

A necromancer.

Not a rogue. Not a cultist.

But a sanctioned soul-lord of the Umbra family, one of the few trusted to advise Xaelith directly.

The two observed the projection from the celestial eye as it hovered before them like a hollow moon, showing Damien in full detail, blood-soaked, trembling, eyes red and mad and calculating all at once, standing beside a beast carved from sorrow and silence, and four reborn elites kneeling at his flank like knights drawn from forgotten war epics.

"So that's him," Xaelith said, her voice like silk laced with frostbite. "The one who dared slaughter the blaze-born heir, the storm-carved beastlord, the runeblooded prodigy, and the lotus death-maiden."

The necromancer nodded slowly. "And raised them to serve his beast. Not himself."

Xaelith's lips curled faintly. "Interesting choice."

"A strategic one," her necromancer added. "He recognizes the limitations of control. He placed them under the command of the stronger will, the one bound to him by pact. The beast is the leash. Not him. I wonder why he did that… Maybe it has something to do with the extreme pain that he is in… A way to reduce the cost to the strange power the beast wields perhaps."

"Then he has instincts beyond mere bloodlust." Xaelith said softly, fingers tapping the rim of her throne. "That makes him more dangerous than the fools he killed."

The necromancer's expression remained unreadable. "I would like to study him. His death core seems like it has taken on… mutations. It does not function on a singular frequency. It breathes like a soul. It… feels like it is weeping."

Xaelith said nothing for a moment, studying Damien's image more closely.

"That strange power causes him to be in mental or emotional pain, but it is too much." she said finally. "That much sorrow cannot be stored forever. Even sorrow devours its host eventually."

"And yet," the necromancer murmured, "he survives."

Xaelith leaned forward slightly.

"That beast," she said. "Vel'kharn. It is more than undead. More than demonbound. It has… evolved."

The necromancer's pale lips twitched. "Perhaps it mirrors its master."

Xaelith's gaze turned cold again. "He wears no crest. No sect. No house. And yet he has claimed the center of the inheritance through nothing but will and blasphemy. He has killed four prodigies of four of the strongest bloodlines in the realm. He will not leave this world unscathed."

"And yet he will leave it."

Xaelith tilted her head slightly. "Yes. He must. I want to see what such madness becomes once it is no longer confined."

The necromancer said nothing, but the smile he wore was faintly unhinged.

Xaelith waved her hand, and the projection from the eye shimmered, fractaling outward into dozens of mirrored perspectives, one from above, one from below, one seen through the eyes of something near to Vel'kharn himself. Each projection pulsed with layered runic seals and observation marks.

"Prepare a report." she said. "Flag him as a threat. But also a possibility."

"And what of the bloodlines whose heirs he destroyed?" the necromancer asked.

Xaelith stood slowly, her violet robes flowing like smoke. "They will come. The Celestial Blaze Sect will send an executioner. The Beast King Pavilion will send champions. The Silver Lotus Court may send assassins… or a plague."

"And the Heavenly Rune Empire?"

Xaelith's voice was amused. "They'll send a poet."

"And us?" the necromancer asked, finally.

"We will watch," she said. "And when the storm settles, we will offer him a choice."

Back in the broken realm, Damien stood beneath the shadow of his beast, unaware of the attention gathering beyond the veil.

But he could feel something.

Not pain. Not grief.

A weight, far more patient. Far more calculating.

And somewhere, not far, Nyxara felt it too.

She turned her head slightly, the mark on her palm glowing faintly with ancestral resonance.

Her house had noticed.

And they were coming.