Chapter 1343  A Golden Portal

Back in Kera and its skies, Kar remained frozen, boiling with anger. Spade witnessed his features twist from their calm appearance into unsightliness. He saw the vampire shaking with fury until his fists bled into the platform. "Is this how you want it to be?" Kar muttered to himself through gritted teeth. "How dare you do this to my beloved followers? Who the f.u.c.k do you think you are?" "Master Kar, what"s the problem?" asked Spade, confused. Kar was still seething before his rage vanished. His expression returned to normal before he turned to Spade. "They"ve disconnected the portals of my palace. My vampires have been wiped out of existence," the vampire commanded, his long black hair seeming to rise as he unleashed a suffocating aura. "Arthur Netherborne has appeared." The four words rang like thunderclaps in Spade"s mind. He felt as though their death sentence had been delivered, along with their plan. "He"s already here? But we aren"t ready… the sacrifice is… No. We would lose if he interfered now." "I know!" Kar shouted, flinging his arm. The clouds parted as his aura exploded. He began chewing on his nail, even reaching the nailbed. Spade closed his mouth, fearing for his life. "We can expedite things. The promise we made to that man can still be delivered." "How would we sacrifice a hundred thousand souls without the vampires?" asked Spade, his bald head growing sweaty. "And the ritual is… complicated. We need the vampires, Master Kar." "Deluge will use his hypnosis to control the citizens. The ritual can be done through that, right?" Kar muttered while still biting his nail. "It can be done…" "A strong command like that will dispel the hypnosis," explained Spade. "A large-scale operation like this weakens my master"s power over his l.u.s.t-driven puppets. And even now, we have yet to gather the full hundred thousand." "d.a.m.n Netherborne… I thought he was still in Sourna? What brought him all the way back to Kera? Could it be…" Kar began talking to himself before his eerie red eyes turned toward Spade. "Could it be that there is a traitor?" "If not for your help, he would have ripped us apart," Spade defended both himself and his master. "We came to your palace with the sole hope of killing him. Why would we leak the plan?" "…I know, dammit," Kar said, remembering the epiphany he received when the timelines merged. The feeling of being obliterated by a single rune still left an impact on his mind—a lifelong trauma from a single man. "But I cannot create more vampires in such a short span of time. The power I have right now…" "…is lacking?" asked Spade as a lightbulb lit up in his mind. "We can continue our search." "…Search? For that d.a.m.ned artifact?" "The best bet we have at the moment," explained Spade. "I can create a portal that will lead us back to Sourna. Valeria Storm is still in custody at the palace, right? We can interrogate her to reveal the location of the amplifier. You can use it to finish the ritual. After that… Devaheim." Kar calmed down as the word Devaheim was mentioned. If there was one thing the sins had in common, it was their desire to enter the kingdom of G.o.ds. It was beneath them to remain in this world, they believed. Kar, the Sin of Gluttony, was, alongside Amelio, the one most desperate to enter Devaheim. "It seems we don"t have another choice, huh?" muttered Kar with a smirk. "How long do we have before your master finishes his job?" "In order to control a hundred thousand citizens, Master Eros needs at least a few more hours. We have until then to find the artifacts, but…" "Arthur Netherborne already knows about us," Kar finished the thought he knew too well. He will not stand idle and let us finish our plan. If that"s the case, we need… a distraction." "If he"s already in Kera, then that means he still cares about this city," reasoned Spade again. "But if we create a disturbance here, it would be harder for my lord to affect the people." "Arthur still has a base here, right? One close to the Divine Selection," muttered Kar with a grin. "If we just have one person infiltrating the base and causing havoc, it would be a good distraction. I still have a few vampires left." *** Arthur watched the desolate ground where a palace once stood. His rune had turned everything into cinders, melting down steel and turning everything else to ashes. It was his weakest rune indeed, but there was something else about it: Spiritual Energy. Spiritual energy was a mystic force that not even the strongest guardians fully understood. Arthur was just beginning to scratch the surface of its power, but he could not deny its strength compared to mana. Mana exists in the physical realm, but spiritual energy ran parallel to it. A person with little spiritual energy could not wield large amounts of mana. The strength a person had correlated with how much their soul could control. Therefore, Arthur thought about using his spiritual energy as he did in the alternate timeline. It was difficult without a spiritual arm. Spiritual energy would scatter the moment it left his soul, and all he could do was pour that energy into his rune. There were a couple of changes he had noticed. Spiritual energy could not launch the rune. Instead, it seemed to evolve its effects and scale. A [Spark] rune would usually ignite a spark. But after being infused with his spiritual energy, it turned into a golden light, and its effects changed. Then, mana could launch the rune with its new effects. What surprised Arthur most was the amount of mana needed. It was the same as before the infusion of spiritual energy. He had achieved a great effect using the same amount of mana as before. Arthur wanted to teleport back to Kera while thinking about these things, but a portal appeared before him. Its golden hues told him who had created it. It was Gaia, summoning him because Arthur refused to have his sight sealed again. After a moment of consideration, Arthur walked into the portal.