Chapter 112 – The Forgotten and the Obsessed

Even if the three of them combined their strength, they were no match for the goddess.

The idea of an outsider challenging the Creator God was absurd.

Thus, neither Lin Wei nor Adrishig ever considered confronting the goddess head-on—this was not the same as facing the Goddess of Light, and besides, there was no second Holy Spear for them to use.

Their only viable method to restore the Dark Element to the continent was to persuade the goddess to return—but they clearly hadn’t succeeded. Just think of the bard who had been humiliatingly hung outside the hall.

The only turning point was the resurrection of Elvis.

Once the goddess’s obsession was fulfilled, she would no longer need to plunder souls from the Sea of Stars.

As for Elvis…

“I don’t think Elvis and the goddess are the same kind of person,” Lin Wei frowned slightly. “I’ve seen the memories of the goddess and Elvis traveling the continent. Her eyes were only on Elvis, but that Necromancer loved many things.”

After Elvis’s resurrection, everything remained uncertain.

They watched the goddess from afar.

Lin Wei observed her especially closely.

The goddess was about to form a life contract with the soul she had just collected and then awaken its memories.

The light orb floated in her palm.

She withdrew her hand, and the orb hovered in the air, emitting the soft glow unique to a soul.

Katanaphia stared at it.

Lin Wei had seen her memories and could thus understand her feelings.

The person she had lost was about to return.

The long journey had finally come to an end, and there was no need to look back.

The thousand years she had spent searching through the vast sea of stars seemed fleeting compared to this moment.

At this moment, her mind must have been filled with past memories, both happy and sad, like scattered stars drifting and gathering, coming back to life.

Anyone witnessing this scene would feel anticipation.

The moonlight suddenly brightened, rising higher until it reached the center of the night sky, its silver glow gently illuminating everything.

She began to form the contract seal.

The ancient contract would establish an inseparable bond between the two souls.

The first rune of the contract seal touched the soul.

The goddess’s understanding of souls far surpassed Lin Wei’s. From the start, she had transformed her soul tendrils into the most conducive state for forming a contract—soft, almost mist-like.

But it didn’t penetrate.

Lin Wei’s pupils constricted.

The goddess’s soul tendrils extended again.

“No…” Lin Wei murmured.

“What’s wrong?” Adrishig, not being a Spirit Channeler, couldn’t see the events in the soul world, but he sensed something from Lin Wei’s reaction.

“He’s rejecting her.”

The chances of a blank soul rejecting a contract with a goddess of such soul strength and attitude were minuscule, unless there was a deeply ingrained, intense will.

He was a soul that loved freedom. In life, it was so, and even after forgetting everything, he remained the same.

“What will she do… Force the contract?”

Adrishig gazed at the goddess’s figure and slowly said, “Perhaps.”

The expressions of the two suddenly lost their earlier ease.

“What’s the difference?” Duan Yu asked.

“A life contract is an equal contract, where the master has no special status. But if it’s forced, it creates a master-servant relationship,” Lin Wei explained to him. “This goes against the original intent of a life contract. Although it still establishes a very thorough soul connection, it’s just a vastly enhanced master-servant contract.”

—What would she choose?

She had searched for a thousand years, only to find a free soul that refused to form a contract.

That was the person who had led her out of the oppressive forest before the Dark Age.

“—You are free.”

It was those words that had moved her, and the Necromancer had taken her hand, leading her into the sunlight.

She wanted to bring that person back, but to do so, she would have to betray his original intent, forcing his soul to live under heavy shackles.

“A difficult choice,” said the bard, who had seen countless stories across the continent.

Katanaphia slowly closed her eyes in front of the soul orb, like a statue devoid of joy or sorrow.

When the goddess opened her eyes, there was a look in them that Lin Wei recognized.

It was the same stubborn, longing light she had as a girl in the small, dark room when Elvis spoke of the “outside world.”

She hadn’t changed. She had something she wanted and was willing to pay a price for it.

The contract seal emitted a dazzling white light, overwhelming and pressing down on the soul before her.

The orb trembled violently, its form shifting wildly.

If it had a voice, if it could move, it would have been screaming and struggling in desperation.

But it was no match… How could it compare to the goddess who had accumulated a thousand years of power in the Realm of the Undead?

After a fierce flicker, its light scattered, nearly disintegrating, but Katanaphia’s soul power wrapped around it tightly, forcing it back into one piece—just as she had done when merging the fragments in the Sea of Stars.

The contract seal slowly sank into the orb, imprinting a mark that could only be broken by death.

Once the contract was complete, the soul floated quietly, its light dimmed from the earlier resistance.

He began to take on a body.

Pale skin, long silver-gray hair, a black robe, his eyes closed, like a noble from an ancient painting on the continent.

The goddess’s slender fingers brushed through his hair, her touch incredibly gentle.

The soul, with the body as its only permanent dwelling outside the Sea of Stars, was now “alive”—even if in the form of an undead.

He opened his eyes.

They were a deep, mysterious green.

But they were blank.

They only reflected Katanaphia’s figure, nothing else.

He had no memories yet.

Lin Wei watched as the goddess’s soul tendrils delved into Elvis’s soul. At this moment, the soul was completely submissive, merging with hers.

—Use your soul to guide his soul, use your memories to awaken his memories.

Elvis’s eyes closed again, a look of confusion on his face, as if searching for something.

“I think every fragment has shards of memories from the soul it once belonged to—the most profound, unforgettable fragments—and these fragments awaken the entire memory.”

“Then what memories is she searching for?”

“I don’t know,” Lin Wei shook his head. “If that’s the case, Elvis’s soul shattered into countless fragments and returned to the Sea of Stars, experiencing thousands of lives. How could she awaken the one she wants?”

He suddenly fell silent, looking up at the moon, his expression inscrutable. “I think…”

He closed his eyes and sighed.

Elvis’s body floated in the air, the goddess standing silently before him.

Lin Wei quietly sensed the goddess’s soul strength, thinking that she had grown so powerful, there was nothing she couldn’t do—even if it meant traversing thousands of memories, she could…

Elvis opened his eyes and saw Katanaphia before him.

At first, his gaze was blank, but it gradually focused on the goddess.

Katanaphia whispered, “El…”

Elvis frowned slightly. “Serdis?”

He wasn’t speaking the Common Language of the Continent, which was common in Katanaphia’s memories, but the human language Lin Wei was familiar with.

The goddess took a step back, her face pale.

“No…” he looked at her in confusion. “Angelia? Who are you?”

Even Adrishig could see that something was wrong. He stared intently at Elvis’s expression. “…It’s over.”

She had been a goddess for so long, though she had witnessed countless stories of life and death, joy and sorrow across the continent, she had never truly understood them. To her, the emotions of ordinary people were like the sorrow of an ant, the love and hate of a fly, insignificant and weightless.

The only thing deeply etched in her heart was her memories with Elvis. Everything else, she could face with indifference.

She naturally assumed that Elvis would be the same, that even after his soul fragmented and experienced countless lives, it would be like a meaningless dream, leaving no lasting memories, except for that period during the Dark Age.

She was wrong.

She didn’t know that her memories with Elvis were just one ordinary fragment of his life. Over the past thousand years, he had lived thousands of lives, each with its own vivid and real loves and hates.

“I am…” the goddess murmured, but her expression gradually changed, a hint of madness in her eyes.

“You can’t forget me, how could you—” Her slender fingers tightened around Elvis’s neck. “Look at me, who am I?”

Elvis—or perhaps not, he wasn’t Elvis now, just an undead forcibly awakened from too many memory fragments—looked pained and shook his head with difficulty.

She had thought they were each other’s lifelines, but in reality, she was just an ant on that lifeline. Without her, another ant would have taken her place, sharing the journey with that lifeline.

Years later, when the ant grew up, gaining power unmatched by anything, she returned to the stream that had once trapped her, waiting on the shore year after year, going through great hardship to retrieve the lifeline that had once saved her, holding it in her arms for the rest of her life.

—But the lifeline didn’t remember the ant. Too many ants had walked upon it.

The ant exhausted all her efforts, but the lifeline couldn’t recall her, nor could it mourn or be grateful. It would only be angry at being forced away from the free stream and the wide world, confined in someone’s hands.

Adrishig let out a heavy sigh. “This is the result.”

“Both of them are on the verge of collapse,” Lin Wei said. “No one can bear so many memories at once, and few… could accept such an outcome.”

She had searched for a thousand years, filled with joy.

But the person she found had completely forgotten her.

The goddess let out a stifled sob, her eyes red.

She took a deep breath, glaring at Elvis, her voice cold and hoarse. “Remember, I command you.”

She exercised her authority as the master.

Elvis looked confused and disoriented, instinctively reaching to pry Katanaphia’s fingers from his throat. “Let go of me—whoever you are… Who am I?”

But he couldn’t resist. The pressure from the contract was like heavy chains, binding his limbs. After a fierce struggle, the power of the contract forced him to let go, staring helplessly at the goddess. “Who am I…”

“Elvis,” Katanaphia’s voice was like an icy river in winter, commanding and unyielding. “Your name is Elvis.”

She forced the undead to turn and look at the desolate, lifeless world around them. “This is your domain.”

The crescent moon illuminated the earth, the silence deafening.

No one could feel happy.

Lin Wei’s expression was momentarily blank, then he suddenly said, “Duan Yu.”

“What is it?”

“If one day—just if, you regained the memories you lost, would you also be in pain?”

“Pain?” The Lich repeated the word, as if it were an emotion his frozen world had never encountered.

“Though it’s not comparable to Elvis’s situation now, it’s still completely opposite to your current memories,” Lin Wei looked at him and finally said, “In that timeline, we were very close friends, but now we’re not—even enemies for many years. Would you hate that other version of yourself, unwilling to accept those memories?”

“No,” Duan Yu answered without hesitation, surprising Lin Wei slightly.

“You said that was another me,” the Lich continued. “Then every action he took had a reason, and he would never regret his choices, even if it were me now.”

Lin Wei stared at him, his expression softening.

A flood of emotions surged in his heart, but in the end, he only said, “That’s good.”

They turned their gaze back to the scene above the hall, the forgotten and the obsessed, tormenting each other.

Whether it was the goddess who wanted to resurrect Elvis or them who wanted to bring the Dark Element back to the continent, they were all caught in a joke of fate, a dilemma with no way out.

The Goddess of Fate seemed only to bestow complete suffering upon people, never granting pure joy, save for a faint fragrance wafting from the flowers she held, hidden in the Lich’s words, faintly perceptible.