Chapter 423: Saintess Of The Argent Flame [I]

Silas stared down at the glowing silver border of the ticket.

’Ah... Damn it became more cost.’

In the modern world, the value of a Hero Summoning Ticket had skyrocketed to an astronomical suffocating sum... easily fetching over two million Spirit Credits apiece.

’I can still remember when it was 500k.’

With his current financial reserves and territory dividends, Silas possessed the raw wealth to purchase dozens of these tickets and simply spam the summoning until he flooded the basin with divine combatants.

Yet, Silas had deliberately chosen not to rush the process.

’Every single high-ranking Hero I pull through this rift comes with their own heavy baggage...’ Silas thought solemnly, his thumb tracing the smooth magical edge of the card. ’Eluned according to what she told me was locked in a dying world-core for centuries, watching her domain rot. I don’t know much about Morwenna but I knew she lost everything precious to her...’

He refused to treat these souls like disposable gacha pulls.

If he was going to summon a living, breathing warrior into his Blessed Land, he needed to ensure his territory possessed the emotional, physical, and logistical capacity to actually heal them, support them, and give them a home where they would never be exploited again.

’Take it step by step,’ Silas resolved firmly. ’Build the foundation first.’

Silas extended his arm and placed the glowing golden ticket flat against the central indentation of the starlight quartz pedestal.

The moment the ticket touched the stone, the runic circuits carved across the dais flared with blinding incandescent golden light.

HUMMMMMMM.

A low tectonic vibration reverberated through the bedrock of the entire territory, sending a gentle shockwave through the soles of their boots as a semi-transparent crystalline system interface materialized directly before his vision.

[Would you like to Summon A Hero?]

[Y / N]

Silas took a deep breath, extended his index finger, and firmly pressed the glowing golden [ Y ].

BOOM!

The summoning ticket instantly disintegrated into a tempest of radiant golden light particles.

WHOOSH!

A colossal pillar of concentrated starlight exploded upward from the quartz pedestal, surging vertically into the heavens with enough raw force to violently whip Silas’s dark combat robes and hair backward.

The golden beam tore through the low twilight clouds, scattering the falling snowflakes into sparkling vapor and illuminating the entire Umbral Basin around the territory in a warm breathtaking dawn.

The twin white pillars of the Archway began to rotate slowly, the spatial vortex between them spinning with terrifying cosmic acceleration.

Silas looked up into the swirling golden void, his blue eyes burning with quiet conviction.

’Whoever you are... wherever you are trapped in the endless dark... come to us.’

...

"A savior, huh...?"

The words drifted into the empty expanse, it was dry and hollow, carrying the fragile tone of a ghost that had long forgotten the melody of human speech.

In the boundless, suffocating expanse of the Great Void, a lone woman sat curled upon a floating slab of shattered white marble.

Around her, there was no sky, no horizon, and no ground.

There was only the infinite pitch-black sea of raw unrefined ether, punctuated by jagged fragments of floating stone, shattered temple ruins, and ancient drifting debris from forgotten worlds.

But this ether was not the gentle spiritual mana of the mortal realms... It was toxic.

CRACK!

A few hundred yards away, a floating island the size of a mountain was suddenly engulfed by colossal, writhing tentacles formed of raw void-corruption.

The abyssal fiend squeezed with casual uncaring brutality, crushing the ancient stone pillars into dust.

The sound of stone fracturing echoed like thunder through the silence, but the monstrosity simply drifted away, searching for more soul-essence to devour.

Aurelia El Mimonte did not even turn her head.

Her hair was magnificent, falling past her slender waist in thick tangled waves of pure platinum-blonde that caught the sickly luminescence of the surrounding ether.

Her facial features were sculpted with breathtaking beauty... high cheekbones, a soft delicate jawline, and pale porcelain skin yet her expression was completely dead.

She slowly raised her slender, trembling hand, bringing her fingers to the corners of her eyes.

She wiped away a bead of moisture, half-expecting it to be a tear.

But when she rubbed her fingertips together, she felt only the cold, sticky film of dry sweat.

She had tried to weep so many times over the centuries, yet her tear ducts had long since withered into arid scarred silence.

Aurelia had lost all concept of linear time.

Was it a thousand years? Ten thousand? Five centuries? In this sunless, bottomless dimensional graveyard where abandoned souls and dangerous entities were cast out by the higher pantheons to rot, time held zero meaning.

This place was a prison... a cosmic dumping ground designed to hold beings whose powers were deemed too terrifying or too unstable to allow them to live, yet too resilient to easily kill.

She lowered her hand, her knuckles brushing against the cold jagged surface of the stone mound beside her.

It was a grave.

When Aurelia had first been cast into this dimensional purgatory, she hadn’t been alone.

Resting upon this floating slab of rock was an ancient frail woman... the previous High Saintess of the Argent Sanctum, who had been locked away five hundred years before Aurelia’s own era.

The old woman had spent her final dying decades holding Aurelia’s trembling hands, whispering ancient prophecies of a legendary someone... a true Savior who would one day shatter the cosmic chains, cross the boundary of the void, and pull them back into the light.

Aurelia had buried the old woman with her own bare hands three centuries ago.

’A savior...’ Aurelia thought, a bitter hollow smile touching her chapped lips. ’What a cruel, pathetic lie.’

She had lived long enough to understand the depravity of mortals, heroes, and gods alike.

She had believed in a savior once... She had loved a savior once... She had given her entire flesh, her soul, and her sanity to keep her savior alive...

...And that savior had butchered her.

Aurelia turned her head toward the empty abyss.

Her once-radiant golden-amber eyes were completely milky-white, their retinas permanently burned away and scarred by centuries of processing foreign spiritual corruption.

Aurelia was blind.

Truly, completely blind. She could perceive the void only through the agonizing vibrations of mana radiating through the cold ether.

’If there truly is a savior out there in the infinite void...’ she thought, her fingers tracing the cold dirt of the grave, ’I would fall to my knees and praise whoever it is for the rest of eternity.’

She swallowed but even that was dry.

’...But I know the truth. There are no saviors in this universe. Only executioners.’

Because the last time she had believed in a hero, the rain had been falling over a field of rotting corpses.

...

CLATTER! CRASH!

The freezing rain poured down from the bruised, purple-black sky, pounding relentlessly against the mud, shattered iron, and severed limbs that covered the ruined plains of the Meolion Kingdom.

The air was thick with the suffocating stench of demonic miasma.

Humanity’s grand expeditionary vanguard was completely annihilated.

Thousands of elite paladins, royal knights, and high mages lay dead in the muddy trenches, their flesh actively decomposing into black bubbling sludge beneath the horrific, incurable contagion known as the Demon Rot.

Standing amidst the slaughter, barely holding her balance against the churning mud, was the young High Saintess, Aurelia.

Her golden ceremonial robes were soaked in mud and crimson blood, her hands trembling violently as she dropped to her knees beside a fallen warrior.

Lying in the mud before her was Cassian.

The Otherworldly Hero... the handsome silver-haired champion summoned from a distant planet to save their world was coughing violently, hacking up thick globs of black, coagulated blood.

A horrific jagged gash tore across the entire expanse of his chest plate, exposing shattered ribs and black pulsing veins of abyssal demon rot that were rapidly creeping toward his heart.

"Cassian! No! Don’t close your eyes!" Aurelia screamed, her golden-amber eyes overflowing with terrified tears as she pressed her bare hands against his shattered chest. "Stay with me! You cannot die here! Please, look at me!"

Cassian looked up at her through half-lidded fading eyes.

A weak bloody smile touched his lips as he reached up with a trembling hand, weakly brushing his fingers against her wet cheek.

"Aurelia..." Cassian rasped, his breath rattling in his throat like broken glass. "I... I don’t want to die... I made a promise to you beneath the stars... I want to stay by your side... I want to take you away from this kingdom when the war is over..."

Aurelia’s heart shattered into a million pieces.

’He is the summoned Hero...’ Aurelia’s mind raced with agonizing panic. ’If Cassian dies here, the Meolion Kingdom will fall. The demons will slaughter every innocent soul across the continent. But more than that... I love him. I cannot let the man I love die in the mud!’

Aurelia gritted her teeth so hard blood seeped from her gums.

She reached down into the deepest wellspring within her soul.

VUUUUUUM!

A blinding radiant corona of golden divine fire ignited around her hand but as she focused her intent on saving his life at any cost, the golden flames violently shifted... transmuting into a searing incandescent Argent Flame.

The silver fire roared to life, latching onto Cassian’s chest.

"AARRRRGGGGHHH!"

Aurelia threw her head back, letting out a blood-curdling shriek of unimaginable soul-tearing agony.

The Argent Flame did not simply burn away the affliction. Under the cruel immutable law of its secondary conceptual activation, it acted as a living bridge of transmutation.

The black necrotic demon rot was forcefully pulled out of Cassian’s circulatory system, surging up through the silver fire and slamming directly into Aurelia’s own spiritual core.

In that exact same second, the physical reality of the wound mirrored itself with violence.

SPLURT!

A massive identical jagged gash violently tore open across Aurelia’s own chest, ripping through her flesh, shattering her ribs, and splattering a fountain of her own bright crimson blood into the muddy rain.

"GAAAH—!"

Aurelia staggered backward, crashing into the mud, her vision swimming with blinding white agony as the protective silver barrier she had cast around them shattered like brittle glass.

Cassian gasped.

He bolted upright, his eyes wide in utter bewilderment. He looked down at his chest... the shattered ribs were fully knitted, the black demon rot was completely purged, and his skin was smooth and pristine.

His strength, his vitality, and his mana had been restored to their peak in an instant.

"Aurelia?!" Cassian shouted, scrambling through the mud toward her trembling bleeding form.

"D-Don’t stop..." Aurelia choked out, clutching her shredded chest with blood-soaked fingers, her pale face completely drained of color as she fought desperately to maintain consciousness. "The... the abyssal fiends are closing in... I am fine... I can slowly purge the rot... Go! Defeat them, Cassian!"

Cassian looked at her bleeding body, a dark, complex flicker passing through his eyes before he firmly nodded.

"I will protect you, Aurelia!" Cassian roared, drawing his holy broadsword with renewed invincible fury as he charged into the encroaching swarm of demon lords, cutting them down in a storm of brilliant steel.

That was the fateful day the Kingdom discovered the true nature of the Saintess’s awakening.

The legend of the Argent Flame of Transmutation had become reality.

The Saintess of Meolion possessed a divine miracle capable of curing the incurable Demon Rot... provided she absorbed the corruption entirely into her own flesh, mirroring the fatal wounds upon her own body to grant the recipient absolute, immaculate restoration.

Because of the vast purifying reservoir of the silver flame, she would not immediately perish from the rot; she would simply endure the agonizing process of burning it away within her own core.

It was meant to be a day of miraculous triumph for the realm.

Yet...

BANG!

The heavy iron-reinforced door of the subterranean dungeon slammed shut with bone-jarring violence, barely an inch from Aurelia’s face.

"Ahn—!"

Aurelia recoiled with a sharp terrified gasp, tumbling backward onto the cold, damp stone floor of the prison cell.

The concussive force of the door slamming had nearly shattered her nose.

Outside the narrow iron bars, an armored royal inquisitor sneered down at her with cold, uncaring eyes.

"You performed adequately today, Saintess," the guard stated in a monotonous dismissive voice. "The Third Battalion suffered twenty-four cases of advanced demon rot during the northern skirmish. You will begin processing their wounds at dawn. Do not slack in your duties."

The guard turned on his heel, his heavy iron boots echoing down the dark stone corridor before vanishing into the upper fortress.

Aurelia sat curled in the dark, damp corner of the subterranean cell, pulling her trembling knees tightly against her chest.

It had been a month.

Exactly four weeks since she had awakened the Argent Flame and saved the Otherworldly Hero from certain death.

And instead of being revered as a living deity, instead of being protected as the kingdom’s sacred treasure... she had been locked in high-grade mana-suppression chains beneath the royal dungeons, treated like a consumable biological filter.

She looked down at her own exposed trembling limbs.

Her pale, once-pristine porcelain skin was completely ruined.

Crisscrossing her arms, her thighs, her collarbones, and her torso were dozens of brutal jagged scars... burn marks from abyssal fire, torn flesh from demonic claws, and black necrotic veins of demon rot pulsing beneath her skin.

Every single wound represented a royal knight she had saved from death, reflected onto her own flesh by the cruel laws of the Argent Flame.

’What did I do wrong...?’ Aurelia wept silently, pressing her forehead against the freezing stone. ’I only wanted to save everyone... I only wanted to protect our people... What did I do to deserve this hell?’