City of Sin

Book 9, 116

Debates On Time

Having killed the first aggressor, Richard didn’t rise and simply stared at Bloodtooth. The tanir man roared and raised his dagger to protect his chest, leaping forward in attack, but a flash of green stopped his momentum before splitting him in two. Moonlight was showcasing its continued worth; even with the distorted laws, its toughness and sharp edge weren’t affected in the slightest. In stark contrast, the holy sword lost its sharpness while the Judge had turned into an ordinary weapon that could break on impact with even the common daggers here.

Once the burly man and Bloodtooth were dead, the inn went deathly still and no one dared to move. Everyone continued to stare at Richard’s sword case, but the greed had been replaced by fear. The fact that he could use his sword case showed that his control was far beyond anything they could manage; with the green sword’s terrifying power, it wouldn’t take him a minute to slay everyone in this inn.

This was clearly an amazing sword, but one had to keep their life to use it. Fearlessness was a quality that the Darkness beat out of everyone within. The survivors tended to grow more cautious and reserved.

Richard sat quietly as two invisible souls floated out of the corpses, being absorbed by the power of his truename. Both were surprisingly powerful, giving him enough information to further his analysis and even craft two new saint runes. However, it wasn’t time to research them just yet, so he sealed the souls and waited to see just what would happen next.

The woman walked out of the back kitchen, carrying a large wooden bucket and a cloth so black that it left one nauseous. She headed to Bloodtooth’s corpse first and threw his scattered organs into the bucket, collecting the blood with the cloth and wringing it into the bucket as well. She sighed as she worked, “Such a waste! This much blood could have been used for another pot of soup. Be more careful, small wounds not dismemberment. You might be happy with killing, but that means less food for the rest of us.”

Richard was rather shocked by the chiding, and seeing the cloth his appetite went further down. However, the woman ignored him for a moment as she looked at the other patrons who were frozen still, “Go do whatever you need to! You, you, you, help me pack up the meat. Same rules, a ladle of soup each.”

The tavern immediately jumped back to life, the ones that were pointed out happily lifting the corpses and carrying them into the kitchen. Even the severed limbs weren’t let go; those who had been amputated simply shrunk into the corners with clotted stubs and no signs of pain.

The woman looked back at Richard, “Old Barduch wasn’t mistaken, but he underestimated your power. Don’t kill any more people, our town is already at its limits with so few people. And fewer and we might not be able to sustain the veil of order.”

“I wouldn’t have killed them if they didn’t want to eat me,” Richard replied calmly.

“It’s already great that you didn’t eat them, who else will try to give you trouble? Anyway, that soup of yours is clean, there isn’t any human meat inside. You’d best drink it, there’s no room to be picky here. Many of the people you saw were like you when they first came, look at them now.”

Richard continued to cringe at the thought, but he picked up the soup and drank a mouthful to test it. He was immensely relieved to find that it had almost no flavour to it, but as the contents entered his belly they turned into threads of pure energy that replenished his mana. He immediately drank a gulp of the alcohol, and despite the bitter taste it disintegrated in the same way. His expression changed as he realised that this was how one regenerated their energy in the Darkness; neither the tavern nor this woman were simple.

Upon closer inspection, he discovered that not all of the food and drink was turned into energy. As much as two-thirds turned into a residue that remained in his stomach, and the rate of disintegration slowed down. It would take ten days to exhaust everything, and some analysis revealed that the lost energy was mostly due to the distortion. It, too, would get better with his analysis of the laws here.

Richard now understood why almost no one in the town seemed to possess any internal energy or mana. Their grasp of laws was far below his own, so the food barely gave them anything. They gathered at the tavern every day, but it only gave them basic sustenance.

As he closed his eyes to think, someone whispered in another corner, “How could someone so strong come from Norland?”

“Quiet! You’ve been here too long, I heard Norland produced a number of powerful characters in the last century.”

“Bullshit, you’ve been here more than 300 years!”

“What are you talking about? I was still exploring the void a century ago. You’re so muddle-headed...”

Richard ignored these debates, focusing on his food and drink to leave a clean bowl and barrel behind. Most of the people in the inn sighed dejectedly; they only had tiny glasses of alcohol, some not even having enough for a mouthful, while the few that had soup could see into the bottom of their ladles.

He felt full as he walked out. Although most of the food and wine hadn’t been absorbed, it still replenished half of his energy and mana. This meant that he would be able to fully recover if he controlled all the laws of the Darkness, but that thought drew a bitter smile. It was near impossible to control all of a plane’s laws; in Faelor, it had taken him a war against the reapers and hundreds of millions of souls to get to that point. In the Darkness, things were even more difficult. If not for his control of space and experience with time, his analytical speed would have been a sliver of what it was now.

Just as he exited the tavern, he turned around and asked the busy woman, “Where’s Old Barduch?”

“He went out hunting, he should return in two days. Come back and look for him then.”

“Hunting? There are animals here?”

“Occasionally. Unlucky creatures in the void might end up in a rift that sends them here. If he’s lucky, he meets one or two; most of the time, he returns empty-handed.”

"Who else here can hunt?"

“Barduch is the only one. Maybe you? But you don’t have the experience yet.”

“Then I’ll be back in two days.”

He returned to his tiny hut, sitting down to analyse the two souls he had just captured. Both had legendary strength and controlled a number of laws, but their memories were too twisted and fuzzy for him to be able to decipher anything. This was another side-effect of this place; one slowly lost all of their original memories, forgetting where they came from, what they were, and even their own names. Once enough time had passed, they would regress into a feral state and live a life of instinct.

Still, there were some things to be gained from these souls, namely their own perceptions of this wretched place. Richard began working on the laws of the Darkness once more, using their experiences to further his analysis. The laws of this place weren’t too difficult to decipher, only at the level of Norland, but that was predicated on a fully recovered perception and clear recognition of spacetime. In this regard, things only grew more difficult as one adapted to the place, with their senses being permanently warped by it to the point that even recovering would be more difficult than analysing the fundamental laws of this plane.

He shivered at the thought. The Darkness was a place where differences in power were amplified. That reptilian that couldn’t grasp the laws of this place had been toyed with by people that should have been far below his level.