Pandora Unchained - a Cultivation Progression Fantasy

It took some time for Sorin to go over all the key events, starting with his corruption and his awakening as God Seed and how the Temple of Hope had hidden his status. He then went on to explain Asclepius’s appearance and the deadly quest he’d been sent on. Events snowballed with Sorin willingly corrupting himself with Madness, Azrakul’s attempted possession in the Catacombs of Delphi, and Asclepius’s sacrifice to imprison the deadly Herald.

It took an hour to fully answer their questions, and by the end, Sorin felt like a great weight had been lifted off his chest.

It was good, to be honest.

It was good to be human.

“So, what you’re saying is that you’re an overpowered ticking time bomb that has serious mood swings,” Stephan concluded after Sorin finished his story. “Got it. We’ll keep an eye out for that herald acting up or any unanticipated corruption build-ups.”

“I can see why you didn’t want to share this with everyone,” added Daphne. “The bounty for agents is quite high, and the punishment for colluding with them is very steep.”

“To clarify, you’re obviously not an agent,” said Gareth. “Agents are loyal to the Seven Evils and extremely obedient. You are more of an advanced case of corruption. Your personality is slowly being twisted and manipulated due to the corruption, but obviously not to the point where you’re actively working against humanity.”

“By the way, do you think your recent combination of five forms of corruption will be able to help Lorimer?”

Sorin nodded. “I believe that should be the case, especially with my blood as a catalyst. He hasn’t recovered even with the collar keeping his corruption suppressed. I’ll need to somehow source a core of hatred to balance things out.”

“Restricted but doable,” said Daphne. “Though I’d prefer if it was sourced through the black market instead of through me. My family is pretty cutthroat and might discover something amiss if I go digging into such items.”

Sorin gave Astley a look. “You seem pretty calm about all this.”

Astley shrugged. “I’ve been taking risks all my life for knowledge. Who am I to begrudge you for doing the same for power. More to the point… your condition seems to have regressed. You no longer seem as cold and erratic as you’d become.”

Sorin agreed with that assessment. His heightened emotions were finally strong enough to overpower Strife's cold indifference. Hatred, Jealousy, Madness, and Violence were all very human emotions in regulated quantities.

“We’ll need to work something out about Azrakul,” said Sorin. “A kind of check to confirm that he hasn’t manipulated me into forgetting him again. That said, I’m sure he’s anticipated this and won’t use the same trick a second time.”

“We’ll make sure to check up on you regularly,” said Gareth. “But for now, I think we should get back to business.” He nodded over to the ominous spike that had pierced into the ground after the two agents were defeated, creating a small fissure in the impossibly hard soil that marked the region separating the living and dead forests.

The fissure was dark and teeming with both life and death energies. The two forces were normally incompatible, as evidenced by their immediate separation once they left the fissure.

The inside of the fissure was completely different. There, the forces were pressed together in a strange, cyclical harmony that threatened to tear apart even the sanctified flesh in their bodies.

Entering the rift took significant effort. Flying was impossible, and they were forced to scale the steep cliffs leading into it the old-fashioned way. Fortunately, the spike had not pierced the earth too deeply. They found a secondary impact point thirty feet down where the spike had lodged itself three feet into the ground before halting in place.

“The spike’s completely drained,” observed Sorin as he inspected the object. “The miasma of resentment and conflict is gone. That said, the spike is surprisingly solid. I sense demigod-tier components in its construction. Whatever these spikes are for, it’s obvious that the flamekin spared no expense.

“This place is strange,” commented Gareth. “The ground is smooth.”

“You call this smooth,” said Lawrence, rubbing the rough ground with a booted foot. “No wonder you have trouble picking up ladies.”

“I’m pretty sure he meant the ground was too flat and that there are no uneven spots,” interrupted Stephan. “But you make a good point, Lawrence. Gareth, did you know that they teach lessons about proper hygiene and offer kits to—”

“Are you three seriously talking about manscaping in such a situation,” interrupted Daphne. “Quiet, children. The grownups need to speak. Astley, do you sense anything in this spike. It seems not completely spell-based.”

“Just the stench of a sinister ritual,” said Astley. “The glyphs on that spike reek of blood and faith. Also, standard spells don’t typically require mass sacrifices and sinful imbuement.”

Daphne nodded. “Maybe they’re trying to take over the dungeon in an underhanded manner? I can see no other reason to imbue the earth with ritualistic power.”

“That seems like the kind of thing they’d do,” agreed Stephan. “Or they could just be destroying the place so we can’t claim it.”

Sorin wasn’t so certain. He looked over the rocky ground and concluded that Gareth was right. They’d previously seen similarly smooth patches in other locations. These patches had been located under the small mounds of rock and typically contained large quantities of life and death scales.”

“This place is the motherload,” said Lawrence as he picked up a handful of scales. “These things are just piled up everywhere here. I wonder where they come from.”

Something clicked as Sorin finally put the pieces together: the coiling serpent on the ancient armor of refined corpses and the reverent placement of the scales they’d found in the ruins. There was also the tomb-stone-shaped mausoleum that hinted at the interment of a massive entity.

Sorin placed his hand on the ground and sent poison into the depths. They drilled holes through the rocky top layer until they reached a more familiar medium. “I’m afraid this matter is a bit more complicated,” he said as his energies encountered another familiar substance: divinity. A huge amount. “They aren’t trying to claim the dungeon; they’re trying to claim the corpse that was buried here.”

“A corpse?” laughed Lawrence. “What kind of corpse would be this massive?”

“The corpse of a minor deity,” Sorin replied. “The corpse of the Tail Biter, Ouroboros.”

Sorin’s words landed like a bombshell. For a while, no one said anything. “The corpse of a deity?” Daphne finally said. “Are you sure? Last I checked, they didn’t send an Agent of Death, but an Agent of Strife and Hatred.”

Thinking about it, Sorin agreed. “You’re right, it doesn’t make sense. These spikes clearly have nothing to do with necromancy. That said, we’re currently standing on a portion of a giant body filled with divinity. It contains a huge amount of death mana—what else could it be but dead?”

“I agree with Daphne,” said Gareth. “Something seems fishy. Also, weren’t you worried about what Ratten Hyde was up to? He’s obviously trying to claim this divine corpse, for better or for worse.”

Sorin felt an intense sense of crisis upon hearing those words. Both his corruption-enhanced instincts and Nemesis told him such a development could only end badly for him. “Let me spend a bit more time inspecting the corpse,” said Sorin. “It’s quite large and cumbersome to make out the details. I’ll need a few minutes.”

Sorin once again infused his divine poisons into the massive body. By his estimate, the section they were standing on was over a hundred feet in diameter, and the body as a whole had to be tens of kilometers in length.

“A lot of death mana,” Sorin confirmed. “The sheer quantity of it is monstrous, to the point that even a three-star corpse would have already converted to the living dead. That said, I find it interesting that the corpse’s divinity isn’t scattered. It’s not powerful, by any means, but it is restrained in the same way those crystals we’ve been finding are restrained.

He continued scanning the body horizontally and noted that the spike had been inserted into one of many wounds. There were gashes on the serpent’s body, and most of them contained small pockets of that strange alien energy. A spike was inserted into 60 percent of these points, and the largest of the spikes was located near the largest wound, not a hundred feet from their current location.

Another strange matter was that the corpse was relatively intact. It hadn’t putrefied how one might expect a corpse would after centuries of decay. That said, the corpse was the corpse of a deity. Would a divine corpse really decompose the way a normal corpse would?

The more Sorin inspected the corpse, the more anomalies he found. The divinity wasn’t just concentrated. It was flowing slightly along pathways Sorin could only assume were meridians.

The divinity was attuned mostly to death but somewhat to life. In fact, the affinity to death seemed to be increasing, as was the large amounts of non-divine death mana currently flooding the body.

It’s almost as if the mana is external, thought Sorin. It’s encroaching on the divinity and increasing with each passing minute. The death mana is overbearing, but it’s still three-star mana.

Going back to the pockets of tainted energy, small runes had been engraved inside the serpent’s flesh. One portion of the runes radiated karmic energy, but another portion contained targeted corruption that was attacking the serpent’s divinity. No, it’s not attacking its divinity but targeting it. It’s actually bolstering the divinity to counterattack the tainted energy, locking it down.

“I think… I think we might have stumbled onto something big,” muttered Sorin. “This deity isn’t dead —just almost dead. The flamekin inserted those spikes to stir up the serpent’s divinity. As for Ratten Hyde… he’s obviously trying to kill it so he can animate it.