[Corruption Wielder] Chapter 62: The Library (Patreon)

Will had been separated from the rest of his party at some point during the transit between Main Challenge 1 and this library-like space he now found himself in. The same had happened to everyone else, so he wasn’t too concerned about it, but it was yet another oddity that he had to add onto the list of anomalies that had plagued the trial so far.

Now that he wasn’t in immediate danger, he had time to think things over.

Ataraxis hadn’t come from Earth or Arcadia, and where there was smoke, there was fire. Considering the massive reality break that had occurred during his transportation to the trial, it was almost certain that there would be more entrants from the other world here.

Will spent a couple moments sending out messages to everyone he’d come into contact with and had on the friends list, but nobody else had seen anyone like Ataraxis during their challenge. Liam had been in a separate challenge space named Valley, which hadn’t had the same deranged set of monsters that had been unleashed upon Archipelago, and he’d passed with ease, but he also hadn’t seen anything. Hua, Haoyu, Caiyeri, and Blurr had all been in the same scenario as him, so the question was basically moot.

He had to stay on guard, though. Right now, he was using the library as an area to network, which reminded him a bit too much of his college career fairs. It was a lot more entertaining to do these when you could teleport, which did help that impression a bit.

Although he couldn’t act against other Users in here thanks to the system restrictions, there was nothing stopping him from using his skills or familiars, so he had Sen scoping out the entire area. It looked as if the entire remaining population of the trial had been dumped into this one library safe zone.

There were all sorts of powerful people that Will considered speaking to, including many more human silver-ranks than he’d expected, but higher up on his list were the ones he’d already spoken to or knew of. Finding the life elf commander had been a lucky accident. Natalie had been on purpose. Sen had caught sight of her during the challenge itself, but she’d been handling herself fine.

Next on his list was Lu Jie. After finding him with Sen, Will had to hop through bookshelves that seemed to stretch on endlessly in both height and width, using peoples’ weapons when available and his hunger phantasm when they weren’t.

The global top-ranker had held his position on the leaderboard through the challenge, though Will hadn’t. Plentiful consumption of monster cores for himself meant he’d managed to keep advancing at a pace quicker than those around him.

Will found him alone, reading a freshly-plucked book from the walls.

“You don’t need to look smart,” Will said. “I can tell that thing is full of gibberish.”

A couple of Sen’s eyes were hovering behind Lu Jie’s shoulders, time-locked so that nobody could perceive them but Will. Omnilingual translated the words to English, but the phrases themselves seemed meaningless, as if it had been put through Google Translate to Tagalog, then Japanese, then Portuguese before returning to English and repeating that a hundred times until not a single fragment of the original sentence remained.

“There is meaning in all of life, Mister Li. Whether you seek it or not is up to you.”

“Not just a Li,” Will said. That confirmed that Lu Jie could see his character sheet just fine and hadn’t needed to ask him for his name when the two of them had met, since he had never given his last name to the man. “That’s besides the point, though.”

“And what is the point? Are you here, perhaps, to consider my offer?”

“The nonexistent offer that you didn’t make yet and is probably going to sound like ‘work for me and I will try not to kill you’? Yeah, no thanks. I’m here in part to say fuck you for the kaiju. You could’ve dropped it in the ocean.”

“Just to make it lose its sanity and go berserk?” Lu Jie shook his head. “You must be unperceptive indeed to have not seen that.”

“C’mon, man, don’t be like that. There were a thousand other places to drop it.” Putting the gestalt other places probably would have resulted in several hundred more deaths, though, so Will wasn’t too broken up about that. It wasn’t his real question, anyway. “Again, not the point. Did you happen to see anyone that didn’t seem to be from Earth or Arcadia?”

Lu Jie closed his book, properly looking at Will for the first time. “You saw one too.”

“Dealt with one,” Will said. “I’m surprised your sigil didn’t show you that.”

The older man shrugged. “What our gods choose to show us may be less than you believe. My encounter was brief and from a distance. While evading a small army of opportunists who believed my group was easier pickings than the changeling clan underneath the volcano—“

“There was a clan of them under the volcano?” Will asked, disbelieving. “The one that blew up?”

“Yes. As you were saying, that is besides the point. I sent us further and further from Archieplago until we came up against an invisible wall towards the edge of it approximately a mile from the island itself.”

“Makes sense. I was wondering where they got so much space on a tiny rock in outer space. I assume the boundary.”

“Parts of the wall were failing. They were small, but I received enough glimpses beyond to gain an impression of the beings that were beyond the forcefield. Their auras were not of this world.”

“So there is more than one of them,” Will said. “Thanks for sharing your info.”

“You are a powerful being,” Lu Jie said, stroking his beard. “If your path ever crosses over into the mainland—“

“No thanks. I’ve got a lot of shit to sort out first.”

“It was worth a try.”

That surprised a chuckle out of Will. “Fair enough.”

He teleported away, considering the situation.

Ataraxis had indeed not been alone. This entire business was smelling fishier, and Will suspected that this tournament would not draw to an end before this other-world shit came to a head.

“I can’t believe the isekai happened to other humans and not ours,” he muttered to himself. “That’s some BS.”

Will caught up with a few others over the next half an hour or so. Liam had found Haoyu and Hua, and though he didn’t seem to be close friends with them, they at least recognized each other.

“You did what?” Haoyu was saying.

“Hey, it’s not my fault,” Hua replied. “I was outnumbered, and I didn’t think I could 1v3 any other group. Besides, it worked out in the end, since Will—”

He chose that moment to make his entrance.

“Christ on a bike, mate,” Liam said, stumbling a step back. “Good to see you, Will.”

Will nodded in acknowledgment. “And you. Everything good?”

“Not bad,” Liam said. “I can’t believe you’re just somehow mates with the superheroes keeping Sydney from falling apart.”

“Turns out that the most powerful people are fine with forbidden magic for the time being, so long as you’re actually useful.” Will hoped that wouldn’t change anytime soon. Corruption and Marked for Death might’ve made him seem obviously evil, but he’d been able to at least form some relatively decent new connections.

“That they are,” Liam acknowledged. “I’m a couple steps down the ladder from them, but we’ve worked together without problems.”

“We cleared out a colony of self-replicating mutants that were getting out of control,” Haoyu said. “Liam’s a good man as long as you keep him away from magic-sensitive people.”

“Not my fault my aura makes them cry. They should consider being made of stronger stuff.”

Will snorted. “If that isn’t the truth. By the way, have any of you seen Caiyeri?”

“Not sure,” Liam said, shaking his head. “This place is an honest-to-god maze. Can’t make heads or tails of it, especially not that weird bit up north.”

“North?” Will’s minimap still displayed cardinal directions in here, though the layout of the library was largely hidden. “What’s up there?”

“We spawned in somewhere near,” Haoyu said. “The shelves shift. The books there kept flying off at us, and there was a bunch of dark magic there. Not the same kind that Liam uses, but pretty close.”

“More like what you were using,” Hua added. “I came in around there too.”

“Oh, shit,” Will said. “Hell, alright. We’ve still got like half an hour. I’ll go check it out.”

“Godspeed,” Liam said. “Don’t die, but if you do, I want you to know we’ll hold a lovely funeral for you.”

“If you can recover my body, try to contact a Levy Anderson,” Will replied in kind. “He’ll get something ostentatious in order, I’m sure.”

With that, he was out again, skipping north as quickly as he could. Thankfully, with the thousand and a half people populating this library, he could easily find people within range for Weapons Free. The relative lack of lighting was nice as well, allowing him to test the new aspect of his Wraith Cloak ability.

[Ethereal] - For a high mana cost, you can pass through very thin barriers while invisible.

“Very thin,” as it turns out, had a variable definition. He could actually pass through the bookshelves sometimes, but only when he knocked a ton of books down and reduced a section of it to basically a wooden frame.

Everyone was varying shades of shocked when he teleported to the weapons that they were invariably carrying. Most reacted like Natalie, initially tensing up before realizing that he couldn’t harm them. A handful didn’t react at all, apparently used to people teleporting into their personal space. A rare couple lashed out violently. One of them stopped himself, but the other fully tried to slash at Will with a sword. He froze in place as he did, system messages flashing around him, and then space distorted and he disappeared.

Good to know the warning isn’t an empty threat.

Fewer and fewer people were in the library the further north he went, so he started using Sen’s eyes with hunger phantasm wrapped around them to transport himself.

The library was much, much longer than he’d thought possible. There was something off about it, just abnormal enough that it triggered the uncanny valley sense of something is wrong, but he couldn’t point to anything for certain—that is, until he reached the area that Haoyu had been describing.

The visuals of the constantly morphing, magically darkened library beyond the boundary bothered him less than the magic emanating off of it.

“That is definitely corruption.”

The boundary wasn’t even physical. There was just a line that delineated the normal library and the area where the corrupted section began, but there was so much corruption that even Hua had sensed it.

Will: Yo. Section of the library’s corrupted to shit. Going to hop in.

Caiyeri: Good luck. I saw it earlier. Staying wide away. Even brief exposure nearly destroyed my corruption amulet.

Will stepped into the corrupted section.

#

You have been afflicted with a level of [Corruption].

[Corruption Resistance] negates [Corruption].

That pair of messages repeated itself over and over again in the corner of Will’s vision from the moment that he entered.

Corruption was so thick in the air that he could actually feel the thickness of it pressing against his skin like a particularly humid day. Books flew through the air as the shelves shifted around, and Will realized as he tried to use Sen that he hadn’t checked to see if his familiar would be affected by these conditions.

Thankfully, the Thousand Eyes seemed to have the same resistances that he did, so he was able to catch sight of the pages flying by.

Where the books in the library proper were nonsensical but still translatable, these pages were just full of unintelligible garbage. The hieroglyphs and scratching that marked every page were completely unreadable, corrupted beyond repair.

Wraith Cloak allowed Will to see in the darkness, but it quickly became clear that the darkness here wasn’t just from a lack of light. The storm of magic  His sight became limited to only what his aura senses and Sen’s truesight could see, which, to be fair, was quite a bit. He’d only had the familiar for a couple of hours, and it was already paying massive dividends.

As he stepped forward, the library’s shelves started to thin, revealing… nothing. Just seemingly endless, flat ground.

And then it wasn’t so empty anymore.

Will paused as the furthest of the time-locked eyes saw into reality, picking up the signatures of three humans.

A dozen of Sen’s eyes moved closer, giving Will enough sight to tell that every last one of them was a gold-ranker.

More otherworlders.

A section of his inventory lit up. Will navigated over to it, staying well out of range of aura senses, and took it out.

It was the Executor Token. Moving it from his inventory to reality didn’t change the aura it put off at all, but it burned. The flat, black metal of the disc was so hot that Will nearly dropped it before placing it back in his inventory.

Text scrolled through the center of his vision, harsher than the usual system messages Will got.

CERTAINTY THROUGH DEATH.

ORDER THROUGH CHAOS.

PEACE THROUGH DREAD.

ELIMINATE. ERADICATE. EXECUTE.

Current targets: [Corruption Cultist] x3

Reward: 1 Awakening Shard of the Beyond per target executed.

“Aw, shit.”

Will drew his slayer sword as quietly as he could.

Could he handle this? He was used to fighting a rank above, but that was against monsters and elves that had stagnated across the decades. These were human golds, and more importantly, they were perfectly fine despite being in the highest corruption area Will had ever seen.

And, of course, there were three of them.

On the other hand, he had six awakening shards of the Beyond and just as many unaligned awakening shards. To meet the 13 shard requirement to form a tablet of the Beyond, which his tutorial helper Ayla had told him to do as her last request, he needed just one more shard.

If he could just take one of them out…

They were speaking with each other, and though Will wasn’t quite able to understand every piece of their conversation, he got the gist, especially once he started hearing the name Ataraxis. These three were part of the same group, and they were working on breaking into the tournament.

For what reason, Will couldn’t tell exactly, but the phrase transcendent-rank magic was enough for him to assume that the results would be disastrous.

Forget earning rewards. Could he afford to leave them alone?

He checked the time. Fourteen more minutes until the next challenge began.

Shit.

Will put the slayer sword away and drew his bow instead. Getting into a melee fight with them would be an impossible task. At least like this, he could run away if necessary.

He selected a basic arrow, then decided to at least give it a shot of doing some damage.

It had been a while since he had last used the axe of despair, and he was quickly finding that the slayer sword was much better in close quarters. With no uses left for it, Will decided it was finally time to give a real solid weapon up to his skills.

Skill: [Destructive Synthesis]

- Spell (consumption).

- Cost: variable.

- Cooldown: none.

Silver

Activate this skill to consume an item. Consuming an item grants mana restoration proportional to the power of the item.

Consuming an item grants a temporary skill reflecting and magnifying the item’s use for a variable time depending on the item’s rarity and power.

[Effect Transference] (silver) - You can also shift the temporary skill to another item. All skills transferred, whether to an item or yourself, will be upgraded one rank to a maximum of the rank this skill is at.

Will was sad to see the axe of despair go, but he hadn’t been spending resources on it anyway.

[Implement of Despair] has been added to your [Adaptive Quiver] for [1 hour].

The skill was simple enough. Every arrow he drew would gain the ability to inflict Altrien’s Despair and Bleed in addition to the poison and paralyze afflictions based on the two runes he’d loaded the quiver with. With the silver-rank ability of Destructive Synthesis, those would be some potent afflictions, though Will was sure the gold-ranks would be able to resist it.

After consuming one of the few remaining regular bows he had left to gain the Sharpshooter skill, he took aim, using Sen’s eyes to guide him, and loosed the arrow.

There was nearly a quarter mile betweeen him and the three cultists, but his temporary skill gave him the knowledge he needed to make the arrows arc true.

He marked them for death through Sen’s eyes, the familiar’s senses close enough to his own to count as seeing the targets.

Will’s arrows impacted at roughly the same moment, the enchantment on the bow allowing him to guide them so that all three hit their targets in the chest.

[First Blood] doubled the damage of your attack.

[Mark for Death] increased the damage of your attack.

Critical hit!

Critical hit!

Critical hit!

You have inflicted a level of [Altrien’s Despair] three times. You have inflicted a level of [Bleed] three times.

It was nowhere near enough to take them down, but the damage left the reeling, bleeding heavily. All three of them readied themselves immediately, turning towards the direction the arrows had come from.

Will didn’t hesitate, instantly drawing more arrows. The sacrifice he’d made hadn’t been an insignificant one, and he would make the most use out of it he could.

On his fourth shot, he activated the second feature of the starstrike bow, splitting the arrow into five separate arrows all carrying their own afflictions. He also added on the Warp Strike feature that Weapons Free had finally granted him at silver, making his arrows originate from various points around him.

Not all of the arrows landed, especially when all three of them were now using gold-rank defensive abilities, but enough did to apply second levels of all the relevant afflictions.

Just as he’d suspected, corruption did nothing to them.

That was fine. He had more opportunities.

Through Sen’s eyes, he saw the gold-rank cultists, and through Sen’s eyes, he cast The Bell Tolls. It could only target one opponent, but the wither affliction it added alongside the removal of healing abilities would do a lot in addition to the bonus damage.

The cultists noticed the cast and exploded with power, obliterating a dozen of Sen’s eyes in an instant.

This wasn’t going to be enough. The one he’d applied the most afflictions onto looked pretty rough, but they all had skills up to block further attacks now. With Ghostflame, he could ignore the rank disparity long enough to maybe take one of them out, but Will could understand the basics of risk. Against golds, one kill wouldn’t be enough momentum to segue into a second.

Will was about to retreat when that same harsh sensation that had accompanied the Executor token giving him an unconventional quest spread across the area the cultists were in. He paused, looking through the surviving eyes he’d had in the area.

A rift opened in the air, though it differed from the transportation teleport’s reality break in how clean it was. A door opened, then closed, and a man stepped out from within.

He was a gold-rank too, but his aura was different. Cleaner. More refined.

The man turned, looking straight towards Will despite how far apart they were.

You have received a chat request from [Nynn].

You cannot turn down chat requests from a Dread Executor, past or present.

Nynn: A candidate. You’ve done well, taking the initiative. Join me.

Raw power pulsed out from the new arrival, blinding Sen’s eyes.

“Well, shit,” Will muttered. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

He teleported forward.