Chapter 251: A Ghost?! (Kofi Donation Bonus)

"Bro..." Pascal breathed, shaking his head in reluctant, awe-struck admiration. "You look like a high-tier mafia lord who came to a wedding just to assassinate the groom."

"I’ll take that as a compliment."

Creed tapped his dimensional bracelet against Vane’s register, transferring fifty thousand credits without a single flinch—the perks of having millions tucked away from his entrance exam hustles.

"A pleasure doing business with you, Master Vane."

"The pleasure is entirely mine, Class Captain," Vane said, bowing deeply with a respectful, professional smile that had completely replaced his earlier disdain. "Do try not to get blood on the silver lining. It is notoriously difficult to clean."

Creed chuckled, turning toward the boutique’s grand glass exit.

Outside, the late afternoon sun was beginning to dip beneath the rim of the floating academy.

The sky was turning into a rich, bruised violet, streaks of glowing starlight banners flickering to life along the promenade archways as evening approached. The festival was only a few hours away.

Creed stepped out onto the marble terrace, taking a deep, satisfying breath of the cool mountain air.

And then—

The world stopped.

It was not a figurative pause. It was not a lapse in focus.

The cheerful chatter of passing students instantly went dead. The hum of the floating delivery drones froze mid-air.

The vibrant purple and orange colors of the sunset bleeding across the sky suddenly desaturated, draining into a cold, sickly, monochromatic grey.

Creed’s boots seized up, locking to the stone floor as if his nervous system had been severed from his brain.

THUMP.

Deep behind his forehead, beneath the black fabric of his headband, the geometric slave brand detonated with sub-zero, agonizing heat.

"Ngh...!" Creed gasped, his breath catching in his throat like a swallowed razor blade.

A sharp, electric spike pierced through his frontal lobe, driving straight into his brainstem. His vision doubled, then shattered into fractured, kaleidoscope shards of black and crimson.

’Move,’ Creed commanded his limbs, his Silver-stage Natal Force screaming inside his core.

’Move!’

Nothing happened.

His body was not his own. An alien, crushing weight had descended upon his spinal cord, pinning his consciousness into a dark, suffocating corner of his own skull.

His fingers—clad in the sleek cuffs of his new suit—twitched involuntarily, curling into unnatural, claw-like angles that he did not order.

And then, a voice spoke.

It did not echo through his ears. It did not vibrate through the air.

It resonated from the marrow of his own skeleton—raspy, dry, infinitely ancient, and dripping with an irritating, patronizing, senile malice that sounded like dry leaves scraping across a gravestone.

"Heheheh... such a fragile vessel. Such a noisy, arrogant little worm..."

The voice echoed inside Creed’s consciousness like a swarm of cicadas, buzzing with sickening familiarity.

"A three-hundred-thousand-year seal... and the Accord chose to tether the fourth anchor to an unweaned whelp who wastes his daylight playing dress-up for a mortal wench? Pathetic. Truly, the architects of this cage have grown decrepit..."

Creed’s teeth ground together with such violent pressure that blood seeped between his molars.

’Who the hell are you?!’

Creed snarled in the darkness of his mind, throwing the full, unyielding weight of his Peak Realm Path of Killing against the invading presence.

’Get the fuck out of my head!’

The ancient voice let out a rattling, wheezing cackle that sent needles of pure agony shooting down Creed’s optic nerves.

"Hahahahaha! Look at it snap! Look at the flea bare its tiny teeth! You carry the scent of the Severer on your knuckles, boy... but your soul is hollow. A hollow key waiting for a master’s turn."

CRACK.

Creed felt his neck forcefully jerk to the right. He wasn’t moving it. The slave brand was physically overriding his motor cortex, burning cold, black runic lines beneath his skin that traveled down his neck, past his collarbone, and into his right arm.

His right hand moved.

Slowly, mechanically, his fingers reached behind his shoulder, wrapping around the cold shaft of the Pale Horizon.

’STOP!’ Creed screamed internally, panic and fury exploding in his chest like a detonated sun.

Beside him on the terrace, Pascal was still standing mid-sentence, his mouth open, frozen in temporal suspension. Twenty feet away, a group of basic-class freshmen were laughing beneath an archway.

The entity inside his mark wasn’t just observing. It was attempting to draw the spear. It was preparing to unleash an apocalyptic, indiscriminate slaughter directly into the crowded student plaza!

"Let us see what this era bleeds," the rasping voice purred, Creed’s own knuckles whitening as the Pale Horizon was pulled an inch out of its magnetic latch. "Let us break the seal early... let the feast begin..."

’I SAID...’

Creed did not rely on his dormant system. He did not beg for his sleeping summons.

He remembered the lesson of the Old Monk. He remembered the fundamental truth of the Path of the Mountain and the Path of Freedom.

You don’t fight the flood by building a dam. You give the flood a mouth.

Creed didn’t push outward.

He collapsed his consciousness inward, drawing upon his newly comprehended Death Gaze art.

He turned the entire, terrifying, soul-crushing density of his Peak Realm Path of Killing—not toward an external enemy, but directly into his own prefrontal cortex, locking eyes with the parasite within!

’GET. OUT.’

BOOM!

In the dark expanse of his spiritual realm, Creed manifested the mirage of an infinite, towering mountain of black stone, dropping the conceptual weight of ten continental plates directly onto the invasive ancient consciousness!

A sharp, shocked hiss tore through his skull.

"What...?! A Soul Art...?! How does an ant comprehend the unyielding—AGH!"

SNAP.

The cold, dead grey drained from the world in an instant.

Color rushed back into the sky—the brilliant violet and burning gold of the setting sun exploding across the clouds. The ambient chatter of the students returned like a wall of sound.

The floating delivery drones resumed their flight with gentle, mechanical hums.

Creed stumbled forward, his left hand slamming against the marble balustrade to keep himself from collapsing.

His chest heaved violently, dragging desperate, ragged lungfuls of air into his burning lungs.

Cold sweat soaked through the interior silk of his new jacket, and beneath his navy headband, the slave brand went utterly, completely silent, retreating back into the bone like a wounded serpent.

His right hand fell limp from the spear shaft, trembling with lingering neurological shock.

"—and that’s why I told her that the dragon flies alone!" Pascal’s voice piped up beside him, completely unaware that reality had just paused for ten seconds.

Pascal paused, turning around, blinking at Creed’s pale face and heavy breathing.

"Whoa, Elder Brother," Pascal asked, cocking his round head with genuine concern. "You okay? You look like you just saw an ancient ghost. Did the price of the suit finally give you a heart attack?"

Creed stood there for three long seconds, his fingers digging into the cold marble until his knuckles turned white.

He slowly straightened his posture. He reached up with a steady, calculated movement, adjusting the cuffs of his midnight-navy jacket, then smoothed down the fabric of his navy headband.

A ghost?

No. Not a ghost.

Something ancient was locked inside the brand.

An echo of whatever cosmic entity had manipulated his birth, tethered to the ancient Accord Anchor resting in the dark depths beneath this very academy.

And it was trying to wake up.

The situation was getting worse. And fast.

Creed’s lips slowly curled into a cold, dangerous, utterly razor-thin smile. His dark blue eyes burned with the lethal, unyielding light of a predator that had just realized the prey was hiding in his own shadow.

"I’m fine, Pascal," Creed said softly, his voice smooth, steady, and dropping into that quiet, terrifying cadence that made the hairs on the back of the neck stand up.

He turned his gaze toward the grand, starlit spires rising into the evening clouds.

"Let’s go back to the villa," Creed murmured.

"We have a banquet to attend. And tonight... things are going to get very, very interesting."