Chapter 575 - 508: [Demon Contract: Soul Shepherd]

Chapter 575: Chapter 508: [Demon Contract: Soul Shepherd]

After her unexpected capture, Celeste was filled with nothing but towering rage and unyielding arrogance.

As a Succubus born from an Abyssal Rift, her veins coursing with the blood of temptation and Chaos, Celeste had always believed her very existence was a mockery of Order and reason.

She reveled in toying with mortal emotions and fed on their fervent desires. Within the web she wove of whispers and Illusions, she had always been the composed and patient hunter.

’Captured?’

’Imprisoned?’

’This has to be the biggest joke in the Abyss!’

’That damned human must have used some despicable trick!’

’Once I break free from these damned restraints, I’ll make him taste what it’s like to have his soul torn apart, inch by inch, to sink for eternity in an abyss of ultimate pleasure and pain!’

Anger sustained her through the initial "time."

Countless times, she assailed the formless yet indestructible barrier. She exhausted the beguiling whispers of her Succubus nature, tried to corrode it with Abyssal filth, and even resorted to Burning her own essence to cast Curses... but it was all for naught, like casting a stone into the ocean.

The space severed all connection. There was no echo, no feedback—only her own Power dissipating uselessly into absolute silence and the Void.

Gradually, the anger burned itself out, leaving behind a cold Fear. And with it came something even more maddening...

The Void.

No light.

Not Darkness, but an absolute "un-light," a place where the very concept of Darkness did not exist.

No sound.

She couldn’t even perceive the sound of her own breath.

There was no temperature, no scent, no sense of direction, not even the tangible feeling of "time" passing.

It was as if she had been thrown into a cage of pure, conceptual "nothingness."

For a Succubus who fed on sensation and emotion, whose very nature was to chase stimulation and interaction, this environment was the cruelest form of torture imaginable.

She began to "remember," frantically dredging up every detail from her memory.

The trembling pupils of her prey at a feast, the smell of sulfur on the scorching winds of the Abyss, the reflection of her own bewitching figure in a pool of blood beneath the moonlight...

But memories, chewed over and over in the absolute Void, gradually faded, distorted, becoming illusory and unreliable.

She even began to wonder if those vivid memories were nothing more than mad fantasies, conjured up in her eternal solitude.

Loneliness, like the thickest Abyssal ooze, enveloped her, seeped into her, and corroded every inch of her being.

There was no one to talk to, no hateful enemy to rage against, not even the bars of a cage to vent her fury upon.

There was only her, and her consciousness, which grew ever fainter, ever more chaotic.

Her pride was ground to dust, her nature forcibly twisted. She no longer craved to tempt anyone, no longer plotted revenge. She couldn’t even "feel" hatred itself anymore.

The games of desire that had once given her life meaning seemed so pale and laughable before this eternal "nothingness."

Like graffiti on a beach, easily erased by the waves of the Void.

Her collapse wasn’t sudden. It was a silent, slow slide of her consciousness toward the edge of dissolution.

She felt herself fading away. It wasn’t death, but something far more terrifying: the utter Annihilation of her reason for being.

She began to "crave." To crave any form of "proof that she existed."

Even a prick of pain, a glimmer of light, a single noise... even the voice of the human who had imprisoned her.

’His gaze! Any sign of his ’existence’!’

’As long as it can stop this damned, all-consuming ’Void’! As long as I can ’feel’ something again...’

’Even if it’s pain, or hatred, or total enslavement!’

So when the familiar, faint ripple of space being opened reached her, when an infinitesimal yet undeniably real trace of the "outside world" appeared like a lifeline...

Celeste, already on the verge of complete disintegration, used the last shred of consciousness she could gather to desperately utter a hoarse plea.

Torture?

Yes, the eternal Void was the most profound torture.

And now, as long as she could escape it, see the "light of day," and "breathe" the open air once more...

She was willing to pay any price.

Dignity?

That was a luxury long since crushed to dust in the Void.

Freedom?

If freedom meant returning to this eternal silence, she would rather choose to be shackled to "existence."

A contract?

Enslavement?

A Servant Demon?

Any form!

Any condition!

As long as...

...she could leave this "nothingness."

"Stop... stop, I beg you... great master, captor, whoever you are..."

The voice was halting, no longer the venomous whisper from before, but a hoarse and trembling plea that sounded as if her very soul was scraping against its own frayed edges.

Each word seemed to take all her strength, desperately clawed up from the depths of her consciousness.

Roland’s gaze followed the sound, landing on a corner of the space.

A head was floating there.

The head of the Succubus, Celeste.

Compared to when he had first captured her in Golden Ears City, her face hadn’t gathered a speck of dust during her static imprisonment. Instead, due to a strange sort of temporal stasis, it looked even more unearthly.

Her skin was a bloodless, cold white, like the finest bone china, which made the waterfall of her long hair seem all the darker.

Her features were so exquisite as to be unreal. The corners of her eyes and the arch of her brows were naturally seductive, and her full lips, though colorless, possessed a soft contour that sparked the imagination.

Even motionless, the face itself exuded a bewitching charm that could stir the hearts of mortals.

It was an instinctual pull on all living things, one deeply rooted in the bloodline of a Succubus.

Yet in cruel contrast to this breathtaking beauty was her current mental state.