68. Temple Of Defiance

“Why the corpse of a mutant Reric?”

— Hmm. How should I describe this sensation.

As though mirroring Fafnir’s tangled thoughts, the blue ghost-flame guttered this way and that.

— Yes. If I had to define it — hunger.

“There’s no Minyeong here to cast Sync for you, either.”

— It isn’t the sense of tasting. A fundamental hunger, a starvation. An instinctive craving to fill what is lacking.

Well, now.

Since when had Fafnir become the sort of man, or rather dead man, who strung together such refined turns of phrase?

Yujin fingered his chin.

“Interesting.”

The hunger of a zombie or a skeleton, surfacing now in an Eldritch Dragon, the highest grade of the dead. Huh. If a reaction he had never once shown before was rising now, the answer was simple.

“It must be trying to fill what it lacks.”

— What I lack?

“A Reric is lesser dragon-race.”

Half-formed thing though it was, spat out by a gate, the dragon-race factor was steeped into its body. A mutant Reric carried a stronger essence still.

“Feeling an appetite is probably an instinct to fill the part of you that’s incomplete as an Eldritch Dragon.”

— The other Rerics didn’t stir much in me, even looking at their corpses.

“Because those ones’ factors are too feeble to be of any help.”

The mutant Reric had awakened to power beyond the Stellar Ranks because the dragon-race factor inside it had reacted.

“It’s all conjecture, mind you.”

— Hmm. So this corpse — you’re giving it to me, yes?

“Try eating just one first.”

— Stingy.

Fafnir grumbled briefly, then split his jaws wide open.

— Kradunch. Krunch.

Bone snapped; muscle tore with a wet, grisly sound. The five-meter giant vanished into Fafnir’s maw as though sucked down by a vacuum cleaner.

Fafnir’s body heaved. The infused dragon factor swelled his bones, and the rest of him grew to match the now-larger skeleton.

Was “growth” even the right word for something already dead?

‘Nothing else comes to mind.’

He watched Fafnir’s ceaselessly heaving frame and thought as much.

“Eat the rest, all of it.”

— Is that really all right? You said it’d make a strong fighting force if I crafted it into undead.

“You getting stronger is the far greater gain.”

— Master…!

Fafnir strode up and gripped Yujin’s hand tight.

— Thank you. I will never forget this kindness!

“O-ow, ow, ow, ow!”

— My apologies. I overdid the strength.

“I think you broke a bone.”

His wrist dangled loose. Yujin let out a short sigh and used Life Drain.

The more mutant Rerics he ate, the less dragon-race factor was absorbed. To complete the Eldritch Dragon, it probably meant he would have to hunt something stronger.

As the dragon-race factor climbed, the stat correction rose to 45 percent as well. And one more trait, gained as he ate the fifth mutant, made Yujin happier still.

The very same trait Jo Seungcheol had acquired. For now the number it let him command wasn’t large, but as Fafnir accumulated more of the dragon-race factor, the undead under his command would grow as well.

‘I’ve gained something far more precious than the corpses of lesser dragon-race.’

Originally he had planned to bury the mutant Rerics’ corpses in the Profane Graveyard. Making a mid-grade undead like a Dragner required his own realm to sit at the 4th Rank or above.

‘Combat power strengthened, and the number of forces I can field increased on top of it.’

Compared to five Dragners he couldn’t even use yet, he had come out far ahead.

With Kronos nagging at him, Yujin broke off his musing and turned his head. The past, or rather the future, scene he had glimpsed through Memento. A cathedral on the verge of collapse stood before his eyes.

‘Shall I go eat the main dish, then.’

Yujin walked slowly toward the cathedral.

A cathedral stood at the island’s center. Calling it a cathedral was generous; aside from a statue of the Holy Mother worn down until its form was barely recognizable, not a trace of the chapel remained.

‘It was around here, wasn’t it?’

After recalling the scene he had seen through Memento, he ordered the Revenant to dig.

— Shff. Shff.

When it scooped up the earth with hands wreathed in Dark Fighting-Aura, the force rivaled an excavator. It dug down a good five meters.

“Hmm.”

An uneasy energy welling up from within the pit had drawn the instinctive grunt out of him. Yujin descended into the dug-out earth without hesitation.

‘Yes. It pointed to this stone.’

A fist-sized gray mineral sat snagged on the tip of the Revenant’s claw. Yujin carefully closed his grip around it.

A grade above Unique. If even a raw, unprocessed mineral rated Epic, then working it into an artifact could yield a Transcendent-grade result. Transcendent, the very grade of the Dragon-Scale Armor and the Ring of Black Darkness!

‘Well, that’s only a possibility, though.’

Yujin let out a soft snort. Even without weighing that possibility, the Shard of the Void had plenty of uses; to a Necromancer it was a mineral on par with a Transcendent-grade artifact.

Negative energy brought to mind the ‘dark-mana’ wielded by demon-kind or dark mages, but spirit-power, the mana of the negative dimension, possessed a negative medium of its own as well.

‘Your boundless grace humbles me.’

‘To put it to proper use, you’d need at minimum a 7th-Rank alchemist and a Meister-grade artisan.’

At this point in history, Meister-grade artisans were so few you could comb the whole world and barely turn one up. And an alchemist who had crossed the wall of the 7th Rank simply did not exist.

‘There’s a makeshift way to use it.’

The Oak Staff Harboring Lightning. He had taken it after bringing down the Red Spider officer Lee Seungyeon.

‘Its core option is that the property changes depending on the catalyst you slot into the staff.’

The staff was one of the few ways to draw that power out without first processing the catalyst. Come to think of it, hadn’t Kronos made that ‘fine-looking apricot’ remark¹ before, too, while eyeing the staff with the ‘Flame Orb’ mounted?

After removing the Flame Orb fixed to the staff’s tip, Yujin slotted the Shard of the Void into the empty socket.

The spirit-power boost had tripled. And the rearrangement speed had fallen a full 15 percent further.

‘The Flame Orb is a Unique-grade catalyst. It’s lower in quality than the Shard of the Void, so naturally.’

What mattered was the undead ability that had replaced the deleted flame-magic options. Double the command count. Spirit-power upkeep cut in half.

‘The number of dead I can field went up, and there’s no penalty whatsoever.’

A truly groundbreaking set of options. At this rate, the day he rebuilt the undead host of his old era into a so-called one-man legion wasn’t far off.

‘Never thought I’d feel grateful to the Red Spider.’

Thanks to the Oak Staff Harboring Lightning, he could now use the Shard of the Void without processing it. The drawback was that, with the staff itself only Unique-grade, it couldn’t draw out a full hundred percent of the catalyst’s power, but that beat not being able to use it at all.

‘When an artisan capable of processing the Shard of the Void turns up, I can pull it out then.’

The durability would take a small hit, but putting the gem to use one way or another beat letting it sit idle. Yujin gripped the staff tight, a satisfied look on his face.

Yujin climbed out of the pit. The cathedral’s bleak grounds came into view.

‘No. The only fortuitous encounter Memento showed me was the Shard of the Void.’

‘I told you. I said I’d build you a temple.’

Yujin swept his gaze over the cathedral, spirit-power breathed into the rims of his eyes.

Long ago it had been a place where the island’s residents offered up their prayers, and a contested ground where South and North Korea clashed time and again. Spiritual energy, the grudges heaped up by war, and the residents’ wishes had all gathered into one, until it became a place fit to anchor a temple’s foundation: a hallowed ground.

‘This should be enough.’

‘Thanks to the vision Memento showed me.’

The man-hunters had received an evil-god Constellation’s blessing here on the ruined cathedral grounds. Such a miracle could be worked only because both elements were present at once: the Shard of the Void buried beneath the cathedral, and the special nature of a hallowed ground.

‘You think it’s easy to receive an evil-god Constellation’s blessing somewhere that isn’t even the Tower of Babel?’

Thanks to the future scene Memento had shown him, Yujin was certain the crumbling cathedral grounds were a hallowed ground. An island no human foot reached. The perfect conditions for raising a temple to Kronos.

‘What is it you’re dissatisfied with this time?’

‘And then Zeus would figure out your identity in no time.’

Kronos swallowed a groan. Greedy to a fault, this one; covet what sat under your nose and you were bound to miss the bigger prize.

‘I covet because I’m confident I can devour the whole lot.’

He pushed Kronos’s psychic projection aside and called the Revenants.

“Bring down all the pillars. And fetch me that big stone over there.”

— Thud. Thud.

The half-collapsed building that had taken the flow of the ages head-on vanished from history.

After the Great Cataclysm, the world came to know that the gods, once handed down only by oral tradition or written record, existed as starlight. From then on, defacing a building that enshrined a Constellation, in any form, became taboo.

‘Because the Constellation metes out punishment directly.’

The cathedral on Yeonpyeong Island was an exception. Because the residents who had come and gone from it had left the island or died in the gate break, it was no longer a place a Constellation could dwell.

‘Lord Constellation. I don’t know much about construction, so I’ll build it makeshift, all right?’

What had gotten into him? Hadn’t the king of the Titan gods despised empty formality and ostentation? He had better finish the temple before Kronos changed his tune.

Yujin polished a broad boulder with great care. An altar for Kronos. The stone that would become the temple’s heart.

— Master. What are you doing.

“Building a temple to honor the Constellation I serve.”

— The one they call the Giant of Defiance, was it?

“That’s right. He’s a fairly frugal fellow, so this much should be enough for him to overlook the rest.”

As he chatted with Fafnir and laid the flattery on thick for Kronos, peals of booming laughter rolled through his mind.

Good. The flattery was working nicely.

— Still, it’s awfully bare for a temple.

“I don’t know much about construction. The Necropolis only got built thanks to the ring.”

— Master. In that case, may I try showing off a little of my skill?

“Do as you like.”

The instant Yujin’s permission landed, Fafnir was raising pillars on the old cathedral grounds with timber gathered from nearby. Walls stacked up out of the debris of the broken building. It wasn’t a temple, exactly, but you could say it had just barely taken on the shape of a ‘building,’ after a fashion.

“It hasn’t even been an hour. How’d you do it?”

— Before I awakened, I went out for a lot of volunteer work. That’s the knack I picked up then.

Fafnir said it proudly.

A modest altar, finished in makeshift fashion at least. Before it, Yujin knelt on one knee and raised up his holy power.

“Giant of Defiance. I offer this place unto you. It wants for much, but receive it graciously.”

— Hwaaaaack—!

A whitish energy surged up with the hallowed ground at its heart. The holy power of the Giant of Defiance, lord of the domain that defies death, began to wind around the shabby little house.