Chapter 39
Chapter 39
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: penny
Chapter: 39
Chapter Title: Soul-Capturing Delusion
-----------------------------------------------------------------
“You?”
I shot him a look that said he was talking nonsense, and the sky rumbled threateningly.
He must have been thrilled to the point of madness.
『Let’s see how much longer you can flap that mouth of yours trapped in a place like this!』
Of course, even as I kept up a calm facade, I wasn’t taking this situation lightly.
I knew full well that all of this was an illusion.
But my senses were screaming otherwise.
That every bit of it was real.
An illusion this close to reality was no different from reality itself.
No matter how loudly reason protested, perception is rooted in the subconscious, and without uprooting that entirely, it wouldn’t budge.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet conquered the realm of the subconscious.
As far as I knew, only my master had reached such heights.
It was a state reserved for those on the verge of ascension or nirvana.
So, I had no choice but to accept this place as reality and devise countermeasures accordingly.
If I drowned here, I would truly drown.
If I starved here, I would truly starve.
Afterward, my body would become an empty husk, a soulless shell.
That’s what the White Bone Sorcerer seemed to intend—claiming my body for itself.
A true gamble with my life on the line.
Of course, something like reincarnation required such immense luck and skill that only an ignorant fool would attempt it, making it nothing but a fool’s errand.
But for him, with no other options and facing enslavement by me, it was a desperate choice.
I sharpened my senses more keenly than ever.
As the White Bone Sorcerer had said, this place was a prison.
More precisely, it was another ghostly formation woven from spirit arts.
Like any formation, the ghostly formation consisted of eight gates.
To escape, one had to find the Life Gate without fail.
So, where was the Life Gate?
I looked up.
A blue sky stretched overhead.
Was it there?
Kwaaaa!
『Bury him, Little Heavenly Demon! Bury you so deep you never crawl out again!』
At that moment, the waves surged right up to me.
The waves had grown into a tsunami.
At least ten or twenty feet high.
No way to slip out with mere evasion arts.
I hadn’t planned to flee backward anyway.
There was no land anywhere nearby—just endless ocean, no matter where I went.
I’d only end up trapped at sea.
Worse, if I hit uneven terrain or an underwater whirlpool, it was over.
Fleeing would just lead me straight into the Injury Gate or Death Gate.
So what were these tsunamis?
The answer came instantly.
The Blockade Gate.
A dead end.
Kwaaaang!
In the end, the tsunami crashed over my head.
Gurgle—
I was swept up in the waves. The currents tossed me about.
I forced my eyes open.
Before I knew it, I was submerged deep in the churning sea.
I didn’t resist with my body. I let the currents carry me.
No breathing possible here. I had to conserve air as much as possible.
But my mind raced faster than ever.
My purple inner eye blazed, relentlessly probing the currents.
「Young Division Leader—」
「This place is—」
The spirits chattered with their so-called advice, but I ignored them all.
Here, no one knew the spirit world better than me.
I trusted myself.
‘Passage. I need to find the passage.’
The reason I threw myself into the Blockade Gate was simple.
A closed gate meant a wall.
My plan was to trace the wall slowly and move along it.
The easiest way to escape a maze without getting lost: stick to one wall and keep going in one direction.
That was the passage.
If the tsunami was the Blockade Gate, then the currents were the wall.
The Surprise Gate.
The passage allies freely traversed to move between the eight gates at will.
I checked my bearings constantly—up, down, left, right—to stay oriented, riding the currents deeper.
Deeper into the seafloor, ever deeper.
The White Bone Sorcerer’s echoing voice faded away.
Then, when the currents finally calmed, the light failed to reach, and thick darkness descended.
The deep sea’s pressure was immense; one slip in breath control, and my body would crumple.
But I realized this was the Rest Gate.
True to its name, a place to rest.
Not an escape route, but a chance to gather my thoughts.
And to survey the entire eight gates.
I’d been analyzing the world’s underlying principles from the moment I was swept in, so I already had a rough idea of the Life Gate’s location.
In this world, drowning meant the Death Gate.
Death at his hands.
So, the opposite—the Life Gate?
‘Self-determination.’
Killing myself.
My breath wouldn’t last much longer anyway.
No other way.
I tensed my hand into a blade, channeling Shrinking Gale Seal, and stabbed my chest.
Puhwaak!
「Gasp!」
「Young Division Leader!!」
「That’s dangerous!」
Ignoring the spirits’ panic, my left chest split open, blood spreading.
Black blood, like the deep sea itself.
『You vicious bastard!!』
And in my left chest, where a red heart should be, sat a black one instead.
Precisely, a lump of malevolent intent formed from the White Bone Sorcerer’s spirit energy.
‘To take my body, my soul couldn’t just fade away uselessly, right? You needed me to drown, mind shattered, so you could naturally erode this spirit body. Am I wrong?’
I grinned coldly and reached for the black heart.
『Even if you saw that far, how can you throw away your life so casually…!!』
The black heart quivered and throbbed wildly.
Flash!
The world around me shifted once more.
This time, a jungle.
A swampy mire that sucked at my feet, trees so dense they blocked the sun.
『This place crawls with all sorts of venomous insects. Drowning failed, so now poison—』
“You clueless idiot really don’t learn.”
Before the White Bone Sorcerer could finish warning me, I smashed a nearby giant tree with full force.
Crack, kuku ku—
The tree snapped instantly and toppled sideways.
Something leaped into the sky; I vaulted up and snatched it midair.
A lizard wriggled at my fingertips.
The reptile’s face showed clear panic.
“Planning to eat my brain once poison killed me?”
『Damn it all!!』
I started to crush it.
But the world shifted again first.
Flash!
Now, high in the sky.
The world looked tiny below.
『This way, you’ll plummet to your—』
His words didn’t last long this time either.
I was blasting Shrinking Gale Seal at the clouds.
『Fuck!!』
Flash!
Another shift.
Hot, arid desert.
『I’ll starve you to—』
Of course, the White Bone Sorcerer fell into my grasp just as easily.
Flash!
An icy glacial sea.
Flash!
A high mountain with barely any air.
Flash!
Flash!
.
.
The world shifted countless times.
Flash!
『Damn it all!!』
But each time, I caught the White Bone Sorcerer.
I no longer needed to seek the Life Gate.
I could see exactly where he moved, where he hid, what form he took. All of it.
Finally, we returned to the original first place.
The calm sea.
The White Bone Sorcerer, in snake form, thrashed in my grip.
His tail battered my forearm, begging release, but I held firm.
『How… how the hell…?!』
He looked utterly bewildered.
No matter how he changed the world, I found him every time.
And faster each round—by the end, I just had to reach out.
I smirked.
“Soul-Capturing Delusion.”
It seized the soul and dragged it into a world of delusion.
A very fitting name.
『H-how do you know that name!?』
No wonder he was shocked.
I’d just named this spirit art perfectly—something I’d never uttered aloud.
“The incantation wasn’t that hard.”
『!!!』
As a fellow spirit sorcerer—and a zombie at that—the White Bone Sorcerer grasped exactly what I meant.
In the world of sorcerers, a ‘name’ carried immense weight.
It defined a being’s essence and value.
Damage a name with curses or spells, and the existence itself could be harmed.
That’s why sorcerers used aliases, hiding their true names.
They rarely spoke of their dark arts or spirit knowledge either.
Not even between parent and child, master and disciple.
A spell’s name was still a name.
No—because it was a spell, the meaning packed into it was dangerously profound.
Yet I’d named this soul-capturing art precisely?
It meant everything was exposed to me.
Its principles, structure, key formulas—all of it.
Like having every stance and incantation of a martial art stripped bare.
「Ah, so that’s why you kept releasing him after finding the Life Gate—」
「A chance to dissect an enemy’s dark art piece by piece! Such wisdom—」
「Not easy to see through, but as expected of the Young Division Leader! Your insight pierces the heavens!!」
The White Bone Sorcerer’s eyes now churned violently.
“A soul-capturing art strong enough to drag even a sorcerer with powerful mental barriers into illusion? Thanks for the lesson. Never thought I’d owe the Black Bone Ghost Valley one. Short as my time there was, a master’s a master. Right? Mas-ter?”
『!!!』
“So now, die quietly in your old disciple’s hands.”
『W-wait—』
Indignant at being used, yet desperate to survive, the White Bone Sorcerer cried out.
But I’d already clenched my fist tight.
Kwachik!
The snake’s head exploded.
Crash!
The world around us shattered completely.
The scorched, fire-swept wasteland reappeared, all charred remnants.
「N-no! I can’t die so pointlessly—」
Reduced to a mere spirit, the White Bone Sorcerer refused reality, clawing his hair and glancing around wildly.
「Looks like the newbie hasn’t come to his senses yet?」
「Heh heh heh. Time for a good whipping, then.」
「Boys, welcome the newbie!」
「Get lost, you wretch! Do you know who I am? As for me—」
「Hah! Like you’re the only one with a past here? As for me, I was an elder of the Great Heavenly Demon God Cult—」
「Blabbering nonstop. Gonna make me run. I’ll beat him first!」
「Me too!」
「Me too!!」
「Ehehe! Nothing vents frustration like this!」
「Hey!! Save some for me!」
Thwack! Pow pow thwack!
「Aaaagh! Aaaaaagh!」
Under the spirits’ barrage, the White Bone Sorcerer showed no signs of snapping out of it.
He’d only ever handled the dead; now fallen to their ranks, reality hadn’t sunk in.
A few more rounds of this ‘education’ would fix that.
「From now on, your name isn’t White Bone Sorcerer or whatever! Number Sixteen! Number Sixteen! Repeat after me: Number Sixteen!!」
Especially Number Fifteen’s eyes gleamed with madness.
Seemed he’d built up plenty of grudges as a living disciple.
Watching the White Bone Sorcerer get pummeled to rags, I reviewed the Soul-Capturing Delusion incantation I’d just mastered.
I’d said it wasn’t hard, but dissecting its principles piece by piece revealed nothing simple about it.
Only as the Ghost King could I see it; any ordinary martial artist would’ve been helpless.
In some ways, it might even surpass the Ghost King Arts…
The issue was, I’d given it away so casually to the White Bone Sorcerer, so it probably held little value to the Society.
Just what was the Society?
I needed to delve deeper into the Soul-Capturing Delusion incantation.
“…….”
I sank into thought.