Chapter 568: The Wyvern Heals, Someone Doesn’t

[Yin and Yang has harmonized]

[Your Spirit Essence Limit has increased]

[Your Spirit Essence Limit has increased]

[Your Spirit Essence Limit has increased]

[Your Spirit Essence Limit has increased]

[Your Spirit Essence Limit has increased]

[Your Spirit Essence Limit has increased]

[The proficiency of your Main Attribute, Infinite Vitality has increased]

[The proficiency of your Main Attribute, Sculptor’s Gift has increased]

[The proficiency of your Main Attribute, Sculptor’s Gift has increased]

[The proficiency of your Main Attribute, Sculptor’s Gift has increased]

[Summoner Status]

Name: Cade Marlowe

Rank: E

Spirit Essence: 5,000/5,000

Active Spirit: 5/7

[Main Attributes]

Summoner’s Touch (Advanced) Lv. 3 Infinite Vitality (Advanced) Lv. 2 Sculptor’s Gift (Advanced) Lv. 20

[Extra Attributes]

Emperor’s Dominion (Advanced) Lv. 7

Tactical Omniscience (Advanced) Lv. 10

Unshakeable Spirit (Advanced) Lv. 4

Voice of Authority (Advanced) Lv. 3

Heretical Pursuit (Advanced) Lv. 8

Chains of Agony (Advanced) Lv. 4

Condemnation (Advanced) Lv. 3

Bear Their Burden (Advanced) Lv. 2

Feather Step (Advanced) Lv. 11

Ethereal Grace (Advanced) Lv. 2

Fallen Divinity (Basic) Lv. 1

Purifying Flame (Basic) Lv. 4

Death Sense (Basic) Lv. 9

Necrotic Touch (Basic) Lv. 3

Frost Manipulation (Basic) Lv. 1

Frost Resistance (Basic) Lv. 1

Call of Ice (Basic) Lv. 1

My eyes ran down the panels one at a time, and near the bottom something made me stop for a moment.

’What is that?’

My Spirit Essence limit had clearly gone up to five thousand. But this time, it had done it without handing me a new summon to call on.

’Ah, I see... so that’s how it is.’

I’d suspected as much. What actually opened the door to a new summon wasn’t just sex, but sex with a summon, so it seemed.

The other times I’d slept with people who weren’t my summons, I’d never really seen a chance of it. Lilai’s case had been slightly different. And then there was Brunhilde.

Thanks to Brunhilde, I knew I could now steal summons by simply fucking them. What an Heir to be.

I shoved the question of the Heir to the back of my head and turned to the attributes instead, the new frost ones I’d received from Brunhilde included.

With my essence back to normal, my mind seemed to be working fine again. Even so, I felt like I still couldn’t trust my own judgement. Not yet.

Everything I tried to look at directly just slipped away from my hands. If this was a hex, like Wren had said, then it was one that made very little of my mental fortitude. Unshakeable Spirit was sitting right there on the panel at level four, and apparently that counted for nothing. Nothing I’d run into so far came close.

Thinking about it, it made a lot of sense, because Devant had told us how he’d been burned from the inside simply by being looked at.

’That means the source is down there...’

I cast my gaze toward the mouth of the cave.

It was getting unbearably hot. The rock under my knees gave off heat like a stovetop, sweat was running off me in lines, and Ilse was still lying on the ground, naked and peacefully passed out, her horns still up.

My body felt as good as new. All the pain that had been grinding through it was gone, almost as if it had never existed in the first place. The ruined knee I’d been dragging for days bent without a sound, and the blisters along my forearms had closed over into smooth, pink skin.

I called on Ethereal Grace, and white linen wove itself around me thread by thread, settling into a light, thin white robe.

Then I helped Ilse up.

She groaned and woke up grumbling as I pulled, and even pulled back against me, wanting to stay down a while longer. One of her horns knocked against my jaw.

"We can’t keep wasting time here. Get up, please."

Trying to wake her was wearing my patience thin, but I still spoke to her kindly, the way you’d speak to someone you’d just fucked that well.

’I’m not going to disrespect someone I just fucked.’

I got her arm around my neck, draped her clothes over the parts of her that needed covering, and walked her out of the cavern.

As we neared the entrance, I began to feel soft tremors under my feet. The small stones on the cave floor were dancing, one little hop at a time. I didn’t like it one bit, but it stopped after the second hop, so I kept going.

Bren, Light and the others were waiting outside, keeping watch. As I stepped out, Light turned to look at me, and the rag he’d been wiping his hands with stopped moving.

Bren had the same look, only she did a much worse job of hiding it.

"You seem... different?"

I straightened, holding Ilse by the waist.

"I’ve recovered, fairly well. I think the road from here will be a lot easier."

The big man kept looking at me and said nothing.

"The first thing I want to do..." I turned my head toward Light’s wyvern.

Light followed my gaze and watched me walk over to it, Ilse coming more awake as I towed her along with me.

I laid a hand on the wyvern and used Fallen Divinity.

A faint, dark-purple light poured out of my palm and surged through the creature. It let out a small screech, and Light was already a step forward before he saw what was happening and stopped.

It started with the eye. Tissue crept out from the walls of the hollow socket, filled it, and rounded into something wet that blinked. Then the leg grew back out of the closed stump. The scars and half-healed gashes all over its body smoothed away like they had never been there.

The biggest change was the wings. Both of them straightened with a run of wet cracks, the broken bones knitting back together, and spread out wide over our heads.

Light watched all of it with his mouth hanging open.

"How... in Sol..."

He was too shaken to finish. Bren and the others weren’t doing any better.

The big man turned to me.

"Have you been hiding your powers... pretending to suffer with us?"

I chuckled lightly.

"I’m not so much a fan of suffering that I’d pretend just to go through it with you."

Ilse held her head, standing on her own now. I threw her a brief glance, then turned to everyone.

"Now’s the best time to cover as much distance as we can."

Bren glanced back into the darkness, and it took her a second to get the words out of her ruined throat.

"What about him?"

I was quiet for a couple of seconds.

"He knows what he’s doing better than any of us. It makes no sense to worry about him."

I turned toward the slope running down the plain.

"Right now, we worry about ourselves."

Just as I said it, the wyvern let out a low, wary growl. I turned to look at it, and in that same instant, something came out of the darkness.

A claw was sticking out through the big man’s belly.

And it seemed I was the only one who had seen it.

For that moment, everyone else went on exactly as they were, blind to whatever had just come out of the dark.