I want to be a faded person for life

The magic professor secretly breathed a sigh of relief. Although he would not die here, it would be troublesome to destroy important parts of his body.

This woman has become even more terrifying and is really not to be trifled with.

"I take that back... Although we're both collectors, unlike my philanthropic nature, you're quite possessive."

"If that's the case, you won't need any other puppets. What a pity! I was planning to give you one of the children."

Deng shook his head.

"There's no need for that... The people I want don't exist in this world."

Servais produced a small silver-framed glass bottle containing a suspicious potion that was pitch black with a murky blue tinge.

"That's good news for me. I don't have that many potions to waste on you. Find the person you want and make her drink the potion."

"If there's nothing else, leave as soon as possible."

Only after the other person left did Servais slowly straighten his tilted hat.

"It seems this stronghold is unusable. I'd better move all the puppets to the Mage Tower as soon as possible. With the Moon Princess's protection, even this madman should be a little wary."

Servais couldn't help but think of the existence that made Takamatsu Deng so obsessed, and became a little curious about it.

"What kind of person would he be..."

He didn't dare say this out loud, for fear that any possible insects might hear him.

"It's dangerous, really dangerous..."

Chapter 23 Secret

Rodlika returned to Xiangzi. Behind her, the spirit of Gotok had a dark face and looked away, not looking at his summoner.

"Mr. Gotock is willing to reveal the secret, but on one condition."

The tall and thin security guard walked out slowly.

"I want you to promise me that you will bring my ashes back to the royal city of Rodel in the future. If you can agree to this condition, I can tell you the secret."

Xiangzi immediately breathed a sigh of relief.

"That's not a problem. The Golden Tree has always been my destination. I will become the King of Elden—there's no doubt about that."

The guard stared at the girl who was talking nonsense, but he could not see any hesitation in her eyes.

After more than ten seconds, Gotok spat fiercely.

"Okay, remember what you said."

Gotok began to narrate in that hoarse and strange voice.

It may sound strange when you first hear it, but under the dim candlelight, the faint voice gradually draws you into a strange and eerie story.

"It all started on the day Greg escaped from the royal city..."

"Kenneth Hyde didn't lie. He indeed fled after his defeat, disguising himself as a woman. He hid in Stonewell, the fiefdom of his father, Godwin the Golden, and took refuge with his brother, Godwin, the lord of the city..."

"Grek was a weak and incompetent king, but he never lacked ambition from the beginning."

"Even after his initial defeat, he had already considered limb reattachment... but there was one significant problem: a lack of materials."

Calling the human body material is truly disgusting, and it is also a twisted aspect of the Gotok father and son.

Xiangzi just frowned slightly and did not interrupt the other person. At this point, her ability to withstand things was much higher than before.

"Trolls, wild beasts, and the Faded Ones are all worthless. Even if their power is enhanced, it's barely enough. While there are knights and nobles willing to sacrifice their limbs... they are, after all, mere mortals."

"Besides...Greck rarely accepts the offerings of his knights. Besides that ridiculous ideal, Stonewell also needs the knights' protection."

"He's too weak—even the several attempts to send troops to hunt down Yakirhu's dragons ended in failure."

"Things took a turn at some point."

Gotok paused.

"A figure calling himself the Blessed King has seized the royal city, and the coalition of kings has launched another attack... Greg, having gained considerable strength from his limb graft, has also joined in, hoping to profit from the situation."

"The cowardly king stayed behind to garrison Stonewell. Graveyard, who had also gained power through the limb-reattaching ritual, took some knights with him to join the king's coalition forces. However, on the battlefield... Graveyard was captured by the knight Christopher from the royal city. Even the amulet engraved with his ancestor's portrait was lost on the battlefield."

Gotok let out a bellows-like laugh, as if he was mocking his father who overestimated his own abilities and also mocking his own fate.

"Grek was filled with despair. He knew full well that Gravurya's power was not much less than his own. But even with his limb grafts, he had transformed himself into a half-human, half-ghost... he was no match for a mere Royal City knight."

"He still needs a stronger sacrifice."

"When Greg left the royal city, he secretly took something with him, never revealing it even to his trusted knights. He once said he would never use it to reattach his limbs, but now he can't care less."

"No... Perhaps Greg had anticipated this day ever since he brought them out of the royal city, but he was just being hypocritical and unwilling to admit it."

"What exactly is that?"

This was the first time Xiangzi interrupted Getok. She realized that the thing that Gerik had secretly taken away from the royal city might be the source of the changes in Stonewell.

"Since it's a sacrifice that can be used for limb reattachment, it must be some kind of creature, or a limb of it... a dragon?"

Xiangzi thought of the dragon corpse deep in the city lord's tower, but it didn't seem like it.

"dragon?"

Gotok sneered disdainfully.

"There's no point in hiding something like that. Godwin's friendship with dragons is well known. Even his descendants who were driven out of the royal city received assistance from dragons."

"Besides Greg, I'm the only one in Stonewell who knows this secret!"

"What Greg actually took away from the royal city was half a human skin—"

When the guard told this secret, his eyes almost popped out of their sockets and his whole face was distorted in horror.

Even in an environment like the Round Table Hall, the guard subconsciously looked around and trembled, lowering his voice.

"...The skin of his father, [Gold] Godwin, who died on the Night of the Black Blade!"

Rodlika, who was standing by, couldn't bear it any longer. Thinking of her companions who had turned into pupae, she walked away a few steps and heard the sound of vomiting coming from outside the room.

Now even Xiangzi's face turned pale.

"To do something like this...it's truly disgusting and sick."

Although she had some conflicts with her bastard dad and sometimes wanted to kick him a few times, such a thing was too far beyond the bottom line of law and humanity.

Greg calls himself the Golden King and even has great reverence for his father.

Memories of Greg became jumbled in her mind.

It was like a faint candlelight illuminating a half-tall face in a dark room.

The part within the candlelight showed the majestic monarch, while the part outside the candlelight showed a gloomy old man sitting on a pile of corpses, peeling off his father's skin with a bloody knife.

Gotok lowered his voice, gasping for breath and shaking uncontrollably. It was also a relief to tell the secret that he had buried in his heart for so long.

"That's not the flesh and blood of an ordinary person, nor is it the flesh and blood of a demigod with a thin bloodline like Greg."

"Godwin is a genuine demigod, a perfect gold—if it weren't for the Black Blade and the Night of Conspiracy, he would have been destined to become the King of Elden, towering above all other kings."

"If one could complete the ritual using his limbs, even someone like Greg would surely gain immense power."

The guard pulled himself out of his memories, and the story he was telling gradually came to an end.

"Grek didn't use it directly for limb grafting. After all, it was just a piece of skin, not a whole arm... He buried the skin beneath the small golden tree in Stonewell, hoping that the power of blessing would restore the skin to its original form and allow it to grow into a demigod's body."

"...That's where the change started."

Chapter 24: Hundred Wisdoms

"The small golden tree in Stonewell withered, and all 152 knights and soldiers stationed at the bottom of Stonewell died."

The gatekeeper Gotok mentioned a number, which was an event that Storm Knight Eric had mentioned before, but Gotok wanted to know more about the hidden part of it.

"Blessings and drops are of no use, nor priests, perfumers, nor doctors."

"Iron-black branches and thorns took root in the bodies of those soldiers and knights, sucking all their blood dry before finally emerging from every conceivable part of their bodies... nailing them to the branches that rose from the ground like an execution."

"But those people only got relief, because the pus and maggots had eaten away their internal organs long before that, leaving only bones."

"But even with corpses damaged to this extent—those reduced to skeletons—they still rise. Not as zombies, their consciousness eroded, unable to return to the tree, but as something worse... new life born from death, outside the Golden Rule."

"Grek ordered his ally, the dragon, to use dragonfire to burn the bodies of the 150 or so soldiers and knights to ashes, sealing off the lower levels of the city."

"But it had no effect. The erosion continued to expand. Even the city walls and soldiers' shields were covered with thorns and the faces of the dead. The roars of wild beasts could be heard from the bottom of the blockaded city..."

"We kept cleaning out the boils that appeared across the city until we were cornered... Even dragons couldn't stop the death that was everywhere."

There was desperation in Gotok's voice.

"Greck drove out all the knights he brought from the royal city, leaving only the lost knights he recruited with him."

"He thought I was useless, so he sent me outside the city walls to be a gatekeeper."

Xiangzi was silent for a while and thought of a possibility.

"...Your father did this to make you leave early."

"After all, that's the closest place to leaving the city. Now that things have come to this, no one will need to register to enter the city."

"He just wanted his son to survive."

Gotok was stunned for a moment, his whole face fell, revealing an indescribable complex expression.

He stared straight at the oil painting of Chu Wang hanging on the wall, as if he wanted to poke a hole in it.

But in just a moment, the guard's eyes were filled with malice again.

"This is truly a great humiliation. Who wants his mercy? Don't I even have the right to die gloriously in battle?!"

"me--"

Gotok shook his arms violently twice, but finally didn't know what to say.

The guard turned back into smoke and returned to the ashes.

-

"Deadborn."

"Sure enough, the twisted body at the bottom of the city belongs to the first demigod to die, Golden Godwin."

Roger got the answer he wanted.

"So this is the reason why he appeared in Stonewell... Godwin's death led to the shattering of the Elden Ring and the outbreak of the Shard War."

"...Actually, I originally wanted to be a scholar, so I've been investigating clues to that conspiracy. I believe that in order to correct the distortions in this world, we must first understand the causes of these events."

He sighed.

"And it ended up like this... You should also be careful not to try to touch that cursed thing."

Xiangzi left the corridor.

She has a headache now.

Xiangzi actually felt that Roger's words made a lot of sense.

To be honest, she had no intention of going to Stonewell or investigating the dead prince's body.

There was no benefit for her in going to that kind of place.

Now that I've learned the truth behind the mutation through Gotok's mouth, I've helped Roger fulfill his dying wish - is that enough?

Perhaps the erosion at the bottom of Stonewell will continue to spread, but what does that have to do with her?

Since we have received the intelligence in advance, we should have stayed away from it as soon as possible.

Even if the erosion spreads to the entire Nimgfu, she can notify her acquaintances here in advance, and at most find a way to notify more living people.

However, she felt her scalp tingling when she thought that there might be pure-blood knights coming to Nimgefu to support her.

"Now that I've made some progress, I guess I can fool Ampach... No, I'm not a true pure-blooded knight. Isn't it all just a matter of avoiding those people from now on?"

Thinking of this, Xiangzi left the corridor and was taken to a room by Nefeli.

This seemed to be a study, with an old carpet with intricate patterns on the floor. Three walls of the room, except the door, were lined with tall bookshelves. Books that could not even fit on the shelves were neatly stacked on the ground.

The old man who was wearing the helmet with a hundred ears and thorns and whom I had seen before was sitting behind the long wooden table in the middle of the room. He lit a bright white candle on the table and was flipping through the pages of an old book that had become yellow and fuzzy due to excessive rubbing.

After leading the way, Nefeli slipped out on her own.

Even at such a close distance, Xiangzi could not see the man's face clearly. All the features of the old man's face were obscured by the shadow of the helmet.