Chapter 399: Solution

The blackness was oozing from the band, thick and intentional. It wasn’t just sitting on his skin; it was sinking into it. Dark, spider-webbing veins branched out from the base of his finger, crawling up his hand and disappearing beneath his sleeve.

On the side of his neck, a jagged line of midnight-purple stood out against his pallid flesh, tracing the path of his carotid artery. His fingertips were already turning a necrotic black, the flesh beginning to wither under the weight of the curse.

Eris let her fingers hover just a hair’s breadth above the obsidian band. She didn’t need to touch it to feel the malice. It was cold, not the clean, sharp frost of Soren’s magic, but a hollow, hungry cold that wanted to consume everything it touched. It felt intentional. Malicious. It was a spell designed not just to harm, but to hollow out the wearer from the inside out.

She noticed the sheer physical devastation of it and felt a jolt of grim realization. Caelen was effectively magicless. In a world where the average noble possessed a mana affinity of thirty or forty percent, Caelen Caldrith sat at a mere two percent. He was a man of steel and strategy, not sorcery.

And that was exactly why he was dying.

Because he had no natural magic of his own, he had no natural defense. A fire mage would have felt the corruption and met it with heat; an ice mage would have tried to freeze the flow. Caelen had nothing. The dark magic had found no resistance, no immune system to fight back against the rot. It had simply walked into his core and started tearing down the walls.

Eris reached out and gripped the ring, her jaw tightening. She pulled.

It didn’t budge. It felt like trying to pull a mountain.

She adjusted her grip, her boots bracing against the floor as she tried to slide the black band over his knuckle. The skin beneath the ring didn’t even bunch; the metal seemed fused to his bone, as if the ring and the man had become a single, cursed entity.

“We tried,” Ophelia said from behind her. Her voice was quiet, hollowed out by days of failure. “I tried to remove it. The healers tried. We used oils, spells, even a smith’s file. It doesn’t move. It’s magically bound to him.”

Eris stopped pulling. She didn’t let go of his hand, but she stopped the futile physical struggle. She leaned down, her eyes narrowing as she studied the intricate, microscopic etchings now appearing on the obsidian surface. The pattern was frantic, jagged, and deeply familiar.

Eris sat back, her hand dropping to her lap. Her mind was a whirlwind of dark pages and ink-stained memories.

Dark magic didn’t just appear in Nevareth. It wasn’t native to these mountains, and it hadn’t been seen in the South for generations, at least not until she had opened her grimoire.

It didn’t take too much to figure out there were only two possible sources for this kind of filth. One was herself, and she knew she hadn’t cursed Caelen. The other was Vetra.

Vetra had been the one whispering in Caelen’s ear. Vetra had been the one using the grimoire to summon demons in the outer districts. It was too obvious that even a fool could connect the dots. Vetra was responsible for this.

But why? Eris wondered. What did she promise you?

She deduced the likely scenario: Caelen, desperate to regain some semblance of control or perhaps driven by his desire for something or someone, had made a deal with Vetra.

He had taken the ring as a tool, a way to bind Eris, to influence her, or perhaps to protect himself from her fire. But something had gone wrong. Either Vetra had betrayed him from the start, or the spell had reacted violently to Caelen’s lack of mana.

Eris tried to categorize the spell type. Her brow furrowed as she looked at the black veins on Caelen’s neck. She had studied her grimoire for years in her first life, and she had spent months with it in this one, but she didn’t recognize this specific curse page-by-page. It wasn’t one of the common demon-binding rituals or the standard shadow-bolts.

She knew the type, it was a binding contract spell. It was meant to link two souls, or perhaps to force a specific behavior. Was it a memory manipulation curse? A loyalty contract? Or something more diabolical, like a soul-siphon?

The problem was that the grimoire was massive, and its dark ink shifted depending on the user’s intent. Vetra had been using it for a while while Eris had no idea initially. This was a spell Eris wasn’t familiar with, a dark corner of the book she hadn’t dared to explore since she wrote it down.

She looked at Caelen’s face. The grey pallor was worsening. The blackness was moving, slowly but visibly, toward his heart.

To understand the spell, she needed the missing variables. She needed to know what Vetra had told him. She needed to know what Caelen had asked for and what price he had agreed to pay. Only the man on the bed could tell her the truth of the deal.

But he couldn’t speak. He was drowning in his own silence.

The urgency of the situation hit her with the force of a physical blow. The dark magic was killing him. It wasn’t just keeping him asleep; it was consuming his life force to fuel the curse’s expansion. If she didn’t wake him soon, if she didn’t find a way to pause the corruption or break the initial seal, he would be dead within forty-eight hours.

And if Caelen died, the secret of the ring died with him. Vetra would remain a shadow, and Rael would lose the only father who had ever truly loved him.

Eris stood up, her eyes flashing with a dangerous, golden light. She looked at Soren, who was watching her with a mixture of dread and grim anticipation.

“He’s dying,” Eris said, her voice flat. “The ring is a siphon. If I don’t wake him up right now, there won’t be enough of him left to save.”

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