The Pioneer
Where Soul Net was concerned, a culture of trash talk came with the territory.
When people got angry or annoyed, insults flew, and there were certainly users who did nothing but pick fights.
But did that mean the overall atmosphere was nothing but ugliness? Not even close.
On the whole, gallery culture leaned toward the refined and gentle — a quiet, courteous register best embodied by the humble speech style and the running joke of "kya-ha-ha."
Ah. Of course, with exceptions.
Each gallery had its own particular flavor, granted. But even the Adventurer Gallery — famous for being the rowdiest of them all — never descended into a culture where people were routinely looked down upon and profanity was simply the default.
And then, into that atmosphere, something waded in and began to foul the waters on a scale no one had seen before. Its name was the Curse Emperor.
This user appeared out of nowhere, toured every gallery in existence, picked endless fights, and spewed a torrent of abuse so vile it was hard to even repeat out loud — and in the worst possible sense of the word, they started drawing attention.
When the Curse Emperor first appeared and began making a name for himself, it was in the Novel Gallery. Carrying on as though he were some literary titan, he posted scathing critiques of Net Novel's famous serials and the classics alike, inflating his own ego with every review.
If he had stopped there, he would have simply looked like an ordinary case of pathological grandiosity........
The problem was that he didn't stop at empty boasting. Anyone who dared talk back or challenge him was buried under abuse so crude and filthy that decent people couldn't bring themselves to even repeat it.
Overnight, the Curse Emperor became very, very famous in the Novel Gallery. And fame's price came due.
So the Curse Emperor took his ban in the Novel Gallery. But the ban wasn't the end.
It was only the beginning.
. . .
The Novel Gallery exploded. Hundreds of identical posts uploaded simultaneously rendered normal content completely unreadable. The moderators deleted the spam posts one by one until, at long last, they simply gave up — and just like that, the Novel Gallery was paralyzed for the foreseeable future.
And then.
Having made an example of the Novel Gallery, the Curse Emperor moved on. And from then on, he began rampaging through every gallery in earnest.
Profanity against parents and family. Unspeakable vulgar abuse. Filthy curses that dragged genitals, mothers, and entire bloodlines into the mire. And the moment he was banned, he simply came back to life and spammed identical posts until gallery activity itself became impossible — over and over again.
The Curse Emperor had become the most famous, most infuriating, and filthiest user on the galleries. And it was right around this point that I started paying attention to him.
Was I impressed by his sheer capability — toppling gallery after gallery and burying users under abuse and crude taunts? Or was it that strange technique of his, one that seemed to mock Soul Net itself, letting him return no matter how many bans we threw at him?
And with that, the Curse Emperor crossed the one line that must never be crossed.
I already lost sleep now and then after my cozy little tea party with His Imperial Majesty — and this b****** had the gall to impersonate an emperor, outright?
"Tower Master. We have to catch this bastard."
"You'll have the full resources and funds of the Black Magic Tower behind you."
"I made an announcement to the entire network, and yet this is the first time anyone's ever told me to go to hell this openly. I think we need to establish a very clear precedent for what happens to those who ignore my warnings."
"I couldn't agree more."
The Curse Emperor had succeeded. He'd pulled aggro so hard that he'd mobilized me and the entire Black Magic Tower.
The first thing the Black Magic Tower and I set in motion was a deep dive through Soul Net's magic arrays and the data piled within them, to pinpoint where the Curse Emperor's soul signal was being sent from.
At its foundation, the structure of this artificial dimension borrowed directly from the way the gods of the God Realm communed with mortals. When a human soul prayed earnestly to the divine, the gods would hear those thoughts and emotional signals and grant divine power and various authorities in return.
Soul Net worked the same way: a 1st-Level spell reliably transmitted a signal into the artificial dimension, and once a soul's location was confirmed, the network granted access to images, text, videos rendered through illusion magic, and games. Naturally, by tracing a given soul's activity records on Soul Net, one could determine where the granted illusion magic, text, and images had descended.
Identify that region, and you could confirm where in the Wyrod Dimension a particular user resided.
By that method, finding where the Curse Emperor lived should have been trivially simple........ or so I thought.
"You're telling me you can't confirm the region where he uploads images and text?"
"We can confirm it, but........ the range that comes back is far too broad."
"What on earth does that mean?"
"Here, look at this. This is the range of regions where the Curse Emperor uploaded images and received them back. It covers a space approaching half of the entire Wyrod Dimension. This is........ this is deeply abnormal."
"Unless he's been teleporting with spatial magic every single second, there's no way a range this wide should come up."
The Tower Master and I both clutched our heads.
"How is this........ how is this even possible?"
"Take other users — myself, for example. If I trace my own Soul Net access range, it pinpoints precisely the area around the Black Magic Tower. In other words, it shows exactly where I live. A range this broad is unmistakably a sign that something is wrong."
"Even our own tower's mages, who use spatial magic as casually as breathing, don't show access ranges anything like this!"
"Could he be a ghost? If he were some ghost-type monster rather than a human, a range this wide would technically be possible."
"A ghost-type monster makes even less sense. Most ghost-types don't possess human-level intelligence. There are the occasional powerful spirits intelligent enough to reason — but if anything, those entities should show an even more restricted range of activity."
"Because a spirit that powerful would need an anchor to exist in the physical world rather than the spirit realm."
"Exactly. They latch onto a person, an object, or a location — which means their range should come back absurdly narrow, not wide."
"Then........ then what in the world IS this.........."
Just as the Tower Master and I were staring at Soul Net's data records with expressions of pure bewilderment—
"Elsie! Tower Master! It's a disaster! Come quick!"
"Third Elder? What's happened?"
"Pull up the Kraken stream right now! Watch the match between the Puaroda and Rondaim players! Everything's gone to hell!"
At the Third Elder's cry, the Tower Master and I hastily opened a Kraken window and pulled the stream up in front of me.
And there it was.
. . .
It was the end of the Age of War 2 regular season — the qualifying rounds for the Dimension Cup, where every regular-league team across the Wyrod Dimension would gather to compete. And the comment section beneath the stream of the elves and dwarves of Puaroda and Rondaim battling for a spot had been completely buried under the Curse Emperor's spam.
I frantically slammed a ban onto the Curse Emperor's account, but the bastard just snickered as though I'd told him a fine joke and kept flooding the comments without pause.
"Elsie! Do something, quickly!"
"The advertisers just contacted me by magic communication! They're asking what in the world is going on in the comment section! If we can't contain this, all hell breaks loose! Elsie!"
I frantically manipulated Soul Net, doing everything I could to rein the Curse Emperor in, but no matter how many times I banned him, he mocked me by resurrecting again and again, attacking the comment section without end.
In the end, with containment impossible, I had no choice but to shut the comments off entirely. Fortunately, aside from the comments he'd apparently had no other avenue to rampage through, so the match proceeded without further incident — ending with the Rondaim dwarven players defeating Puaroda's elven contender and advancing to the Dimension Cup.
Record-shattering viewership numbers came pouring in, but neither I, nor the Tower Master, nor the Third Elder could crack a smile.
"Elsie."
I had my eyes screwed shut at the Tower Master's voice before answering through gritted teeth.
"This is no ordinary bastard."
"What is he, then? Did banning him just now tell you anything?"
"Yes. It did."
I was staring at Soul Net's data window with an expression of sheer disbelief. The Curse Emperor's account — the first time I'd ever clashed with it head-on — was something of a type I had genuinely never seen before.
"Multiple souls are sharing the same account."
"What?"
"That's why he can keep operating even after being banned. He has souls to spare. Discard the banned soul, slot a fresh one into the account, and go right back to causing havoc."
The Tower Master and the Third Elder stared blankly at each other. I fell silent for a moment as well.
Why?
"The only beings capable of handling multiple souls are the priests of the Seven Orders, who hold contracts with the gods, or warlocks who hold contracts with Hell, or........."
"Necromancers who artificially extort souls from others. Those are the only ones."
If our suspicion was correct, then this was a being that fell entirely outside anything we could cover up or control on our own. I quietly closed the Kraken stream window and let out a long breath.
"The senior inquisitors of the Seven Orders who helped us at the game hearing last time. Among them, the High Inquisitor of the Holy Fire Order — do you remember Priest Akram?"
"I remember him."
"I believe we need to contact him. This is not something the Black Magic Tower can resolve by hiring a few adventurers."
I drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly.
"A being in possession of this many souls is something that calls for not a mere High Inquisitor, but a recognized Saint or Saintess of the Orders."
"I'll contact them at once. Since this is an official request for cooperation, it would be more appropriate for me — as Tower Master — to make the approach than you, Elsie."
"I'd appreciate that."
The Tower Master placed a direct call to the largest and mightiest of the Seven Orders: the Holy Fire Order.
And then—
"Did you say a being suspected of being a necromancer who handles multiple souls? Is that the truth of it, Tower Master?"
"It is. And it appears to be quite powerful. Could the Order dispatch one of its Saints or Saintesses?"
"For a matter of this nature, we do have one Saintess in our Order whose abilities are perfectly suited to it, but........"
"Can you send her? I'm begging you, Inquisitor Akram."
"I should warn you — this Saintess has a rather........ extraordinary personality."
"I don't care what her personality is like! I need her sent as soon as possible!"
And so, the dispatch of a Saintess was decided.