Dracula's sickly green eyes were pinned to Bell's face.
“On what basis do you say that?”
Seven meters.
The pressure rolled over him from the front, forcing Bell's shoulders down half an inch.
Pain signals in his spine and pressure signals were warring in his nerves. The overlapping sensations caused the edges of his vision to blacken.
He held his ground.
He shifted the Soul Vibration Cannon to his left hand, while his right hand quietly reached for the storage ring at his waist.
The pain in the back of his head was still there, but he used adrenaline to forcibly push it to the back of his mind.
Bell did not take a single step back.
In that instant, his thoughts were pulled back to half an hour ago.
The side hall of Night Rose Palace.
Just as the withered husk tide broke out.
Bell was frantically deducing the missing link in the logic chain.
Margaret stood two steps behind him, hands folded in front of her stomach, her fingertips unconsciously rubbing against each other.
“Is there anything else that has been missed?”
Bell's voice was flat, but Margaret could hear the irrepressible urgency beneath it.
“Regarding the Blood Race, the Ancestors... any abnormal events over the past hundred years.”
Margaret's breath hitched for a beat.
Her gaze shifted from the back of Bell's head to the crumbling stone pillars of the side hall.
Silence.
A long silence.
Bell turned around.
Margaret's lips were pressed into a thin line, the furrow between her brows deep enough to crush a fly.
“Speak.”
Bell's tone left no room for negotiation.
Margaret closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, something that had been suppressed for far too long flickered in her gaze.
“Ed.”
Two words.
Bell's pupils contracted by a tiny margin.
“From birth, something has resided within his body...”
Margaret's voice caught in her throat as if something were choking her.
“...Some kind of indescribable demon.”
Bell did not interrupt her.
“Once he relaxes his suppression, he loses his mind completely, triggering a rampage that warps reality.”
The frequency of Margaret's finger-rubbing increased.
“According to him...”
“The first time was about three thousand years ago. He killed his own kin.”
“The second time was seventy years ago. He slaughtered an entire adventurer team at the border.”
Bell's brain was working at high speed.
“Specific times.”
Margaret blinked.
“What?”
“The specific times of both rampages.”
Bell's tone was urgent.
Margaret's frown deepened.
“The first... was roughly the autumn of 3,027 years ago. I don't remember clearly; I wasn't the headmaster yet.”
“The second was the winter of seventy-three years ago. The specific date was...”
She paused for two seconds.
“November 17th.”
Bell's breathing stopped.
November 17th.
The autumn of 3,027 years ago.
Something in his mind snapped perfectly into place.
The timing of Ed's first rampage and the slaughter of his parents perfectly overlapped with the moment Leila died and Dracula's spirit completely collapsed during the War of the Rift three thousand years ago.
And the night of Ed's second rampage—
Bell looked up sharply.
“Seventy-three years ago, on November 17th, did anything happen at the White Tower Society?”
Margaret's face turned deathly pale in an instant.
“How did you know?”
Bell didn't answer.
“That night, a top-secret experiment at the White Tower Society suffered a catastrophic accident.”
Margaret's voice was trembling.
“Everyone involved in the experiment died in a bizarre manner.”
Bell's pupils suddenly shrank to the size of pinpricks.
It wasn't a loss of control resulting in a massacre.
It was causality stripping to silence them.
It was to cover up some terrifying power that had twisted the underlying logic of the world.
The perspective snapped back to the present chamber.
Bell stared directly into Dracula's sickly green eyes.
He didn't answer the question.
Instead, he coldly recited the dates, one word at a time.
“The autumn of 3,027 years ago. The War of the Rift.”
A pause.
“November 17th, seventy-three years ago.”
Dracula's pupils suddenly shrank to the size of pinpricks.
That crushing, sickly green pressure suffered a fatal flicker of instability.
November 17th, seventy-three years ago.
That was the day he had clearly died during the White Tower experiment, only to be eerily 'resurrected.'
Bell gave him no time to react.
“That's right.”
“You, and the entire Blood Race, have been deceived.”
“There is no residual soul of Leila.”
Bell's voice boomed through the chamber.
“Something capable of warping reality forcibly changed the fact that you and Leila were 'already dead.'”
“That face on your abdomen is just virus code it used to tamper with the inheritance stone pillar.”
Dracula's body shook violently.
His withered lips trembled frantically.
But the sickly green light in his eyes, after a brief collapse, turned into an even more pathological fanaticism.
“So what?!”
Dracula roared.
His voice shattered the remaining stone walls of the chamber. Debris fell from the ceiling, exploding into dust as it hit the ground.
“As long as this power allows me to resurrect Leila!”
“As long as it allows me to lead the Blood Race against the Star Dragon King!”
“Even if it is a gift from a demon, I will accept it all!”
Bell's heart sank completely to the bottom.
The former king before him had become nothing more than a monstrosity stitched together from power and obsession.
Any logic or negotiation had lost its meaning.
Only a battle to the death remained.
In the back of the chamber.
Tia's barbed claws were still embedded in Cecilia's shoulders.
Her Mithril perception circuit captured a highly discordant signal.
Cecilia's body was vibrating.
It wasn't a struggle.
It was laughter.
Laughter bubbled up from deep within Cecilia's throat—light, thin, her shoulders shaking.
With her feet off the ground, she hung from Tia's barbed claws, her shoulders pierced by Mithril, blood still trickling down.
She was laughing.
Her lips pulled back to reveal blood-stained teeth.
Eventually, air puffed out of her nose in short, ragged bursts.
That kind of laughter was the relaxed release one has after watching an entire play and being perfectly satisfied with how the final curtain falls.
Enduring the suffocating pressure, Bell turned his head with difficulty.
His gaze fell on Valentine, who was kneeling on the ground.
The petrification had already spread to her elbow.
He gave her a subtle tactical look.
Valentine understood instantly.
She lunged forward.
With her remaining left hand, she forcibly activated an overloaded Desolate Realm.
Gray folds of death rolled toward Dracula like a wild tide.
At the same time.
Leon unleashed the ultimate Ice Spirit Sky Frost.
Lilian reverse-gripped her Mithril dagger, turning into a blood-red afterimage.
Bell raised the fully charged Soul Vibration Cannon.
The four of them launched a desperate charge toward Dracula from four blind spots simultaneously.
However.
Dracula, having merged the blood source essence of nine Ancestors and the ley line array of Moon Phase City, was far too terrifying.
He didn't even bother to dodge.
With a single hand, he made a sudden grasping motion in the air.
A sickly green blood source storm instantly shredded the absolute zero ice domain.
The violent recoil sent Leon, Lilian, and Bell flying like tattered ragdolls.
Bell's back slammed heavily into the rock wall of the chamber.
A crisp crack echoed from his spine.
His vision was instantly swallowed by white light.
Pain.
It crawled all the way up from his tailbone, burrowed into his skull, and exploded.
He slid to the ground. The Soul Vibration Cannon slipped from his hand, rolling into a pile of rubble three meters away.
The laws of the Desolate Realm began to collapse under the absolute mana suppression.
Valentine spat out a large mouthful of blood as Dracula grabbed her by the neck and lifted her up with one hand.
“Three thousand years.”
Dracula's sickly green eyes stared intently at Valentine.
“You took on Leila's identity, guarding the inheritance stone pillar and the order of the ten Ancestors.”
“But you never once considered—”
His fingers tightened slightly.
“—what Leila actually wanted.”
Valentine's face turned a deep purple.
“What she wanted was a future for the entire Blood Race.”
“But what you gave her was nothing more than a lingering, gasping present.”
Dracula let go.
Valentine fell to the ground, coughing violently, a large amount of blood foam bubbling from her throat.
Bell lay amidst the rubble.
Pain signals and adrenaline were warring in his nerves.
His gaze pierced through the edge of the white light, falling on the Soul Vibration Cannon three meters away.
He couldn't reach it.
His right hand braced against the ground as he tried to crawl up.
His fingertips touched a sharp piece of stone.
It sliced him open.
Blood flowed from his fingertip, dripping onto the gray stone tiles.
Red and gray blurred together.
A scene suddenly flashed through Bell's mind.
The day Lilian had broken through her bloodline shackles by drinking his blood.
His soul frequency did not belong to this world.
His blood might be the only catalyst to break this deadlock.
Without hesitation, Bell pulled out his self-defense short sword.
He slashed deeply into the vein of his intact right arm.
Blood gushed out.
He scrambled and crawled to Valentine, who was suppressed and kneeling on one knee.
He pressed his gushing blood directly against her lips.
“Drink it!”
Valentine was filled with shock.
Her rigid, haughty pride as an Ancestor came to a standstill in that moment.
But looking at Bell's determined eyes.
Out of blind trust and a deep-seated love for this otherworldly soul.
She opened her mouth.
She bit down hard on Bell's wrist.
The moment the otherworldly blood entered her throat.
The blood source mana within Valentine's body was like a nuclear reactor being ignited.
The stone skin on her originally ashen right arm was forcibly shed.
Her eyes erupted with an unprecedented crimson blood-light, even outshining the sickly green in the chamber.
Her strength skyrocketing, Valentine let out a piercing, inhuman shriek.
She turned into a red streak that tore through space.
In mid-air, she engaged Dracula in a world-shaking melee.
The ceiling of the chamber was peeled away layer by layer by the aftershocks of their exchange.
Space collapsed on a large scale, and debris was sucked back up toward the sky.
Red and green light clashed frantically, each strike accompanied by sonic booms and the tearing of space.
Bell, Lilian, and Leon were completely excluded from this god-level battle.
Forget intervening—simply resisting the aftershocks of the battle exhausted all their strength.
After hundreds of brutal exchanges.
Valentine realized that even with the boost from Bell's blood, she could not completely kill Dracula, who possessed infinite mana.
A heartbreaking look of determination flashed in her eyes.
She looked down at Bell, who was being protected by Leon.
Valentine abandoned all defense.
At the cost of taking Dracula's heart-piercing strike to her chest, she locked his body in a death grip.
Then.
She detonated her entire life essence.
She unleashed a world-class forbidden spell designed for mutual destruction—the “Desolate Curse.” She compressed the entire world-class skill, the Desolate Realm, into a curse and used herself as a medium to drive it into his body.
Gray death energy instantly pierced through them both.
Valentine's life force was severed, and she fell toward the ground like a broken kite.
Dracula also let out a shrill scream.
His “divine physique” was covered in gray cracks, and his bodily structure was on the verge of total collapse.
Rate on N.U.
