章 16: Beautiful...ain't it?

The room, enveloped in a haunting stillness, was bathed in an ethereal glow from the shimmering doorway.

Despite the grotesque scene that lingered, the blood had congealed, and Wine's lifeless form had grown utterly frigid, like the heart of a dead winter.

Silence ate away at the seconds, the dead Wine's eyes fluttered open, even her eyelids felt heavy like lead, how long had it been since she opened them? A decade? A century?

Her mind slowly started to gain sanity, the crippling darkness faded away, and her enhanced instincts started to return.

The coagulated blood, dry and lifeless a second ago, unclogged itself from the floor, then reversed in the route it had come from, it silently returned, slithering into her body.

The wound on her throat mended by itself.

"…Wine Everhart?" she whispered under her breath,

her mouth was sticky with blood too, she reeked of death.

Sitting up gently, she cocked her jaw side to side, 'My body feels heavy, but the coast is clear.'

She looked around, her golden eyes shining dimly, she was in a wood-padded room.

Her eyes roamed around and then focused on one thing, a mirror-like knife stained with blood.

Her teeth clenched, memories flashed inside her mind, and she cursed with a tone of disgust, "These unrighteous filthy scums."

Whatever the case was, she was just a child! A mere child!

And this damned teacher of hers killed her regardless, he was the cruelest person she had seen her whole life of being on the rogue path.

Struggling to stand, she got up weakly, her servant robes sticking to her body, stained with blood.

With composure, she absorbed the blood into her body and realigned her bones with audible cracks.

"Should I just kill him somehow?" a thought echoed in her mind.

She smiled, and muttered, slightly happy, "The Iron cultists would love me for you at least, they like killing such devils after all, especially a true foreigner."

That was a plus, but anyway…What were the gains by acting as this Wine?

Her mind flashed, she closed her eyes, the surrounding started to dim, a cold wind whooshed around with her as its origin, and her true totems started to reveal themselves.

A bright green mark of a circle at the center of her forehead.

A white mark of a snowball below her feet.

She opened her eyes, they were of a peculiar light blue shade.

"AND!" she smiled in amusement, one of the best things about doing a transformative totem dance was that, Transformation.

Her one eye turned blurry, it stung, it turned golden in color.

"Uhh…That is some level of loss…" she sighed, rather regretful.

All of the troubles she had to go through and all she got… was a single not-so-helpful eye Wu.

At least my eyesight is better now…

But anyways, this was not going to be her biggest reward in the end, the biggest reward has to be collected yet, after all, someone had just taken one part of her soul away.

It will still take some time for him to be corrupted and turned into her clone and to be absorbed.

"Hey, system," she called.

A screen flickered in front of her, a hologram screen the size of a small tv from her past life.

"What is my "Teacher's" current situation?"

"You shouldn't ask that to them," a voice whispered in her ears, the sharp edge of the knife touched her neck.

Her heart skipped a beat, 'How?!'

"Do you think I gamble my life without a certainty?" Ethan asked.

Wine couldn't even move, her heart thumped like a tribal drum.

His hands silently slid through her waist and he hugged her from the back, "The people who are dumb enough to use the systems you guys provide might not know," his amused voice reached her core, shaking her soul.

"Wh…what do you mean?" she asked through her nervousness.

He could have already killed her, so he must want something as he hadn't.

The knife pressed harder against her neck, "Don't try anything funny, the moment one of your totems brighten is the moment your head will roll."

Wine clenched her hands.

"What do you want me to do?" she asked, her voice biting cold.

"Tell me the true method of connecting my foreign soul with this body's Wuma bead."

"Don't you already know that?" she asked, her heterochromatic eyes moving around the room.

Where was it, her escape route?

"Not the one your organizations gave out to mark its victims, tell me the true one, the one you people use inside." The only true way of entry into the path for foreigners, he wanted that.

Wine clenched her hands tighter, "You know of my clan and you still dare to threaten me?"

"No, student," Ethan chuckled, "I am not threatening you, I am just speaking facts, you either give it to me and live or don't give it to me and die."

Wine turned silent.

The knife sunk a bit deeper, and blood oozed out.

"I know you have blood control methods, but do you think you can use that again? I don't think so…" Ethan's voice whispered even more menacingly.

"Are you going to die for people who don't care?"

Ethan tightened his hug, Wine squirmed in his embrace, yet…there was no way out.

"Don't you remember the rats at the lowest rungs who fight for the king I mentioned? They die just like you… not even cared for by the king. Do you not see the hole you are in Wine? Even my naive student was more intelligent than you…you know?"

Wine didn't speak for a second and said, "I don't trust you."

"Well, I don't trust you either, one totem blink and I die after all."

Wine gritted her teeth, "Let's swear by blood."

"In the name of Everhart, my lineage, I swear that I won't kill you if you give me the details on the true method," Ethan said, already prepared.

His heart skipped a beat, a contract was signed, but the other party has to speak too…

"I swear by the blood of…" The knife tightened, "I swear by the blood of snow that I will truthfully say what I know and don't attack you physically as long as you don't attack me."

The contract linked, and a resonance bond silently got established between them, "Tell me the details," he chuckled and backed off. 'Physically attack…huh?' he chuckled in his mind.

Wine turned around and looked at him, a bit stunned.

A man with golden eyes, quite short, wearing clean white robes, a handsome face, and a… bald head?

"Speak," Ethan said with a smile, his golden gaze examining her too.

"The way we do it is simple," she answered coldly, wanting to get away from this creepy person, she will let the clan handle him, "Just achieve perfect mastery over the new body and it will normally resonate with your soul and Wuma bead, the glues and all, they are just artificial methods."

"I see…" Ethan nodded, and asked, a strange tension falling in the air, "How do I achieve perfect mastery?"

Wine grinned, her pulse pounding in fear of what may have been, "I never said I would tell you that," her face darkening, she then asked, irritated by her massive losses, "Filthy Swine from the seventh division, I could kill you like a bug now...Are you aware of that?"

He ignored her question, noted in his mind that Earth was the 7th division, and asked, smiling, "You won't tell me the details no matter what?"

Wine frowned, then said, she might have sounded childish if not for the words, "Not only that, I'm killing you before we part ways too, I can't kill you but someone like the ancestor of your family can for sure do so."

"Oh? Which ancestor, this one?" Ethan clapped his hands gently, and the bubble-like light doorway flickered and vanished.

The room itself darkened without the light and everything turned dark, but she had good eyesight; she could see.

The resonance outside started to enter inside, everything started to gently lift an inch above the ground.

Her heart skipped a beat, and she looked at what lay after the doorway.

Her mind almost screamed.

Glass Vessels, all floating some distance away from the ground, sticky blood all over each one of them, dead poking eyes bulging out and human bodies forced into it.

Distorted to the point the humans looked like noodles.

"I told you right? I will show you something beautiful," Ethan asked, then threw the knife at one of the vessels, the knife touched it and fell with a metallic thud, "That one, he should be the ancestor."

Wine's face paled, her heart sunk to the bottom, and looked at Ethan, "Wh…"

Shh! He shushed her with a finger on his lips and went past the doorway, "Look at that too," he said, pointing above.

Wine dumbly followed behind and her mind froze, it was a huge hole, like well, the place she and he had jumped off earlier, and above it was a big, thick rope dangling from above the darkness, and tied to it were…

Tied to it were…

Her face drained of color and she turned towards Ethan, he smiled gently at her, "You either tell me, or the maids, innocent people you have spent the past decade or so happily living with, Oh what were their names? Violethead? Mei Mei? All of them die on behalf of you."

Tied to the thick rope were people, each of them awake and looking towards them, their bodies tightly clung to by separate ropes, yet connected to the thick one…

"Hey little Wine, tell me…are you going to kill these poor people to just keep…what? some knowledge?" he whispered in a chuckling tone, the question made a chill go down Wine's spine.

This person…he was not like any of the other foreign souls… he was different.

She could feel it, the devil's maw closing in on her neck.

She could feel it, the fear.