As Evendur walked through the halls of his vast manor, having sent his daughters off to the academy, he instructed the maids and butlers to attend to his personal knights.

The newer attendants exchanged confused glances, but those who had served longer understood. Their master simply desired solitude.

With that, the manor sank into an even deeper, stifling silence.

Evendur exhaled slowly, his gaze drifting across the walls of his home. A grand painting caught his eye, a silver-haired man standing atop a mountain of slain beasts, a sword driven deep into one of them. The image reflected faintly in his blue irises before his attention shifted.

Portraits of past patriarchs and Great Elders lined the halls, their expressions carved in authority and distance. None of them resided within the manor. They had long since retreated to the most isolated corners of the world, emerging only when absolutely necessary, during awakening rituals or when a threat demanded their presence.

Neither had occurred in years.

Stepping into his chamber, Evendur moved with quiet purpose. He sat on the edge of his bed and picked up a dark pill resting on a silver tray, swallowing it without hesitation.

Silence followed.

After a moment, he reached beneath a drawer and retrieved a frame. Within it was a woman of striking beauty, long, flowing green hair and eyes as dark as obsidian.

His gaze gradually softened.

His fingers brushed lightly along the edges of the frame, careful, almost reverent, as though touching the image itself might somehow disturb her.

“I might fail you…” he whispered, his voice low, strained.

“I know how much you wanted to keep that emptiness within you away from this family… but my selfishness, my greed got you killed.”

A single drop fell from his chin, landing softly against the glass.

Memories surged unbidden.

Their first meeting.

Their marriage.

The quiet joy of their first son’s birth.

And finally

The day she gave her life bringing their daughters into the world.

Each memory played vividly in his mind, striking at him with waves of discomfort, but none of them compared to what came next.

The moment he realized… his wife was never truly human.

In a world where multiple races coexisted, the revelation itself hadn’t shocked him. When she told him after Caspian’s birth, he had assumed she was an Eisoron, a race nearly indistinguishable from humans, known for their ties to the dwarves.

He had been wrong.

As she spoke, the truth unfolded piece by piece. She wasn’t from this world at all. She came from another plane of existence and was sent here to fulfill a mission.

When he asked what that mission was, she told him plainly that she could not reveal it.

Though dissatisfaction stirred within him, he chose to listen.

She told him about the Void energy within her, power that rivaled even the Progenitors of this world. She told him of her purpose: to plant that power within him, to alter his natural path of cultivation, to turn him into a force of destruction… and in doing so, conceal the quiet infiltration of her kind into this world.

She revealed to him that she had already begun to embed a fragment of that power within his heart.

But she could not continue with the mission

When he asked why, she hesitated.

And then she answered:

Because she loved him.

And as satisfying as her answer was, he still voiced his dissatisfaction, calling it weak, unbefitting of someone he had devoted his heart to.

There was no anger. No confusion. No shock at the revelation that he had married someone not of this world, nor that he had been a pawn in forces beyond his understanding.

None of that mattered.

All he wanted… was for her pride to remain intact.

His fingers clenched around the frame before he carefully dropped it on his bed.

“I wonder…” he whispered, a faint, sorrowful smile touching his lips as he stared at the image. “If I had been more content with our strength back then… would you have lived longer?”

A moment passed. Then he shook his head.

Had he not persuaded her to transfer a portion of her energy into their family ring, nor convened a gathering of Harmonic-realmed mages to construct an internal environment capable of concealing and sustaining it, then they would have been powerless.

They would have no means to protect their children, no way to guide their growth, no certainty of their future.

But they sorely realized that neither of them truly understood the power she wielded.

The infusion of energy had succeeded, that much was undeniable. The higher echelons bore witness to the feat, and even they could only marvel when fragments of its capabilities were revealed.

Still, not all were convinced. Some doubted, others coveted it, attempting to steal the ring or eliminate Evendur and his wife outright.

Each of those attempts was silenced quietly and decisively.

Yet every death sent ripples through the major families, until even the citizens began to feel the shift.

Their influence grew alongside their strength.

And in those early days, Evendur even formed a stable relationship with Alavric, back when the man still held the title of Prince.

But over time… something began to change, not with his rapid growth or fear from his peers, but from the only person he held dear.

His wife’s health had begun to deteriorate.

The decay was not like any human sickness his physicians or even Alavric’s royal healers had ever documented. It didn’t start in the blood or the lungs; it started in her Presence.

Evendur remembered the first morning he woke to find the bedsheets beside him cold, not from her absence, but from her touch.

Where her skin met the fabric, the color had been bleached away, leaving a brittle, grey void in the embroidery.

She was leaking.

The mission she had abandoned to love him was a structural one, and by refusing to turn Evendur into a vessel of destruction, the energy had no place to go but back into her own cellular fabric, unraveling her from the inside out.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep