Chapter 617 - Eternal Grudge (Patreon)

“Urgh… That thing suddenly became a lot stronger.”

At the far wall, Leyvi pushed himself free from the crater where he had been embedded. Stone fragments crumbled around him as he landed on his feet.

The moment he looked up, he saw the woman’s apparition raging inside the layered barriers. She was not trying to escape. She was trying to kill anyone she could reach, slamming herself against the barriers again and again while screaming hysterically.

“Is that a spiritual entity?” he wondered aloud.

It was supposed to be a foreign memory. How had it turned into a full apparition after leaving the sea of consciousness?

He could not determine its true nature.

“Leyvi, I’m surprised you’re not hurt by that blast. You were completely defenseless. Your body is much tougher than I expected.” Jade’s voice came from right beside him.

The moment he had been thrown into the wall, she had rushed over to treat him, only to find he was completely unharmed. A blast of that strength could have heavily injured even a Nascent Soul Realm cultivator who lacked proper protection.

“Sister Jade, that’s the woman from the memory,” Leyvi told her.

“Is she speaking the ancient language? What is she saying?” Jade asked as she turned her gaze toward the apparition.

“Yes. It’s the ancient language. She’s screaming about killing every human,” Leyvi replied.

“Woman! Who are you?” Tiger roared at the apparition while keeping his barrier firmly in place.

Their goal was to gather information, which was why they had trapped it instead of destroying it immediately.

The apparition gave no response to the question. It only continued yelling and thrashing violently inside the barriers.

The Protectors tried several more times to communicate with the woman’s apparition, but nothing worked.

Thinking the problem was most likely the language barrier, they asked Leyvi to speak to it in hopes that his ability might succeed where theirs had failed.

Leyvi agreed without hesitation and began talking to the apparition using his Universal Language benefit.

He asked several questions. Who are you? Can you understand me? Can you remember anything?

Just like the Protectors’ earlier attempts, every question was completely ignored.

At this point it seemed more accurate to say that the thing simply could not be communicated with at all. It was nothing more than a mindless, vengeful apparition.

“Why do you hate humans?”

Leyvi asked one final question before concluding that interaction was impossible.

He was not the only one who had reached that conclusion. Everyone else in the hall had arrived at the same thought.

Then the woman apparition’s next action completely shattered the conclusion they had just formed.

All of a sudden, the hall fell silent. The grudge-filled screams cut off mid-word, vanishing so abruptly that the quiet itself felt heavy. The thrashing figure froze in place. Slowly, deliberately, it turned toward Leyvi.

Her bloodshot eyes locked onto his with an intensity that made the air between them feel thicker. The gaze was no longer empty. Something aware and ancient stared out from those eyes, pinning him in place.

Every Protector reacted at once. Spiritual senses flared outward like a net. Multiple barriers thickened and layered over one another. Weapons of condensed Qi and elemental power formed in several hands, ready to strike the instant the apparition made a hostile move. The entire hall thrummed with restrained force, every expert coiled and waiting.

Leyvi’s eyes widened. A cold prickle ran down his spine.

Now that they were staring directly at each other, he could clearly sense that the woman apparition now possessed a mind of her own. The screaming version from earlier had truly been mindless.

What just happened? Did my last question somehow wake her?

Then the woman apparition opened her mouth.

“For as long as I exist… humans must pay for the betrayal… humans must pay for every torment they forced upon me… humans must pay for stealing what was mine… for as long as I draw existence, I will erase every last one of you no matter how many times you crawl back onto this land… again and again… I will endure eternity itself if it means watching your kind vanish completely… this is the only justice you deserve for what you did to me…”

The words dripped with pure, unending hatred, each syllable heavy enough to make the air feel colder.

Before Leyvi could ask anything, the moment she finished speaking she snapped back into her violent state. Hysterical screams once again tore through the hall, raw and unrestrained.

The outburst did not last long. The apparition’s form began to flicker, then slowly thinned until it dissolved completely and vanished from sight.

“Hmm… I can’t sense her presence anymore. She’s gone,” Gandolf said as he dispelled the barrier he had created.

The others also released their barriers, yet none of them fully relaxed. Spiritual senses continued sweeping the hall in overlapping layers. The atmosphere remained tight and watchful for several long moments.

“What is her true nature anyway?” Jade asked.

“We can’t know for certain, but at least we now know it was never just a memory. I don’t believe a simple memory could transform into something like that,” Sherlock replied.

“Leyvi, what did the woman tell you just now? You could understand her, right?” Alexandra turned toward him and asked.

“Senior Alexandra, please let me rest a little. I can’t think straight right now.” Leyvi lay down on the floor and swallowed a recovery pill.

Now that the immediate danger had passed, the full weight of mental exhaustion crashed over him.

Maintaining the Zenith State for so long, repeatedly forcing his way through the repelling force, forming and reforming the mind avatar, and finally sealing and extracting the foreign memory had drained his mental energy far more than he realized in the heat of the moment.

The sudden explosion and confrontation afterward had given him no chance to recover. His thoughts felt slow and heavy, as if a thick fog had settled over his mind.

“Let the kid rest first. I have something to say.” Sugaro’s words drew everyone’s attention.

“Have you noticed something, Geezer Sugaro?” Alexandra asked.

Sugaro nodded and dropped an object in front of him. “Look at this.”

It was the dried-up corpse of a demonic beast, the same one from which the foreign memory had been extracted.

“How did it end up dead like this? I’m certain we didn’t cause its sea of consciousness to collapse this time. It should still be alive,” Sherlock said, frowning at the corpse.

“It was under my restraining technique from beginning to end, so I know exactly what happened to it,” Sugaro replied.

Leyvi remained lying on the floor, but he kept his ears open and listened carefully to the explanation.

“From the moment young Leyvi brought that thing out, I sensed the demonic beast’s bloodline power suddenly weaken, as if something had begun draining it. Then the explosion occurred. I managed to keep it alive for a while longer, but while the apparition was thrashing inside your barriers, the beast’s bloodline continued to fade at a steady rate."

"The moment the apparition started speaking to young Leyvi, the draining accelerated sharply. Its body shriveled at a visible speed, the flesh drying and collapsing inward. After it finally died, the woman disappeared,” Sugaro explained in detail, recounting everything he had observed amid the chaos.

“Hoo… so that thing feeds directly on bloodline power.” Gandolf stroked his beard, his expression growing more serious.

“That would explain why only demonic beasts can be infected. No other explanation fits the connection this cleanly. The apparition was sustained by the beast’s bloodline power, and once that source was exhausted, it could no longer remain.”

“Are you done resting? Tell us what the woman said. We need more information,” Alexandra urged Leyvi once more.

Her veiled face appeared directly above him as he lay on the floor, the fabric of her veil almost brushing his vision.

Leyvi’s mouth twitched. Only a few minutes had passed. Could she not give him even a short while longer? It was not as if the woman’s words were going to suddenly hand them a complete set of answers. 

Although he was still complaining inwardly, Leyvi stood up and repeated everything the apparition had said to him. He wanted to finish this as quickly as possible.

“Haa… I wonder what happened to that woman to make her hate humans so deeply,” Newton sighed after listening.

“Hmph! We all know how evil humans can be. It’s not that surprising. It’s the reason we gathered here in the first place. The evil committed by humans is what forced us to band together like this, not any other reason,” Tiger said. It was clear how deeply he despised evildoers.

The hall fell into a heavier silence.

No one spoke for several moments. The truth in Tiger’s words settled over them like a familiar weight. They had all seen too much over the long years to deny it. As long as humanity existed, some measure of evil would always appear.

The best they could do was shape a society that made such people rarer and limited the harm they could cause. The quiet that followed was not empty. It carried the shared understanding of a burden they had carried for a very long time.

Afterward, Gandolf told Leyvi to stay anywhere in the city and rest for the time being.

For now, the Protectors would carefully analyze every piece of data gathered during the encounter. They planned to study the energy composition the apparition had released, compare it against known spiritual and bloodline signatures, examine the residual traces left in the barriers, and search for any pattern that might reveal its origin or true nature. Only after that work was done would they decide the next step.

Until they needed his help again, Leyvi was free to do as he pleased.

A day later.

“Come! Daddy will take you to play in the city today! Tell me where you want to go!” Leyvi announced to his children with a bright smile.