Vichy Mordor Talos Boethiah Hircine Mehrunes Meridia... This Everdusk elf from the distant past had not been born incompatible with noble virtues, nor was she an innate demon or fanatic. Most people could read about her unbridled, domineering second life in the Spectre Manual, but only a precious few wise individuals could glimpse the suppression and anguish of her first life between the lines.
In truth, it was a rather trite story: during Vichy's first life, the Everdusk elves were exterminated, and she, as one of the few surviving remnants, had struggled desperately to stay alive.
The clan's extermination had not been an accident. Their origins traced back to an ancient Divine Lord, the Everdusk Glow Lord. Both the Everdusk elves and the Dusk Glow Dragons were high races blessed by Him, endowed with extraordinary talent and innate miracles. Even today, Vichy still possessed a Dusk Glow Dragon guardian spirit.
Consequently, even after the Everdusk Glow Lord fell, powerful figures continued to emerge from the Everdusk elves in droves, and they lived in great abundance and comfort. Yet as time marched on, Everdusk sorcerers were murdered one after another, and their population dwindled rapidly. By Vichy's generation, they were clinging to survival by a mere thread.
The root cause was none other than the Everdusk elves' innate miracle: Duskfall.
When an Everdusk elf died, their soul did not descend into Hell. Instead, it condensed into a Duskfall crystal, which contained all the predecessor's knowledge. Through it, Everdusk elves could not only assimilate their ancestors' sorcery experience to advance with astonishing speed, but they could also absorb the crystal to strengthen the foundation of their own souls. It was an endless, self-sustaining legacy system.
Under normal circumstances, other races could not use Duskfall crystals, and while the Everdusk Glow Lord was alive, none dared harbor such designs. But once the Everdusk Glow Lord fell, and because sorcerers were the beings most capable of working miracles, miracles capable of crossing racial boundaries to absorb the crystals naturally came into being.
Sorcerers could do far more than merely absorb them. Before dying, a sorcerer could even pack their own soul into a crystal, turning it into a transit vessel of power to pass an entire lifetime of accumulated cultivation down to their descendants!
The successive falls of Everdusk elf powerhouses were driven entirely by other sorcerers coveting the Duskfall crystals. Early on, only elf sorcerers held any value, since ordinary elves were not worth plundering. But once the concept of a "transit vessel" arose, even the Duskfall crystals left behind by ordinary elves could be used for inheritance between sorcerers. That became the true seed of the Everdusk elves' extinction.
After her clan's demise, the six-year-old Vichy hid in the wilderness with her mother, surviving by hunting. As her mother guided her to resonate with the Void Realm, she also poured a heart full of hatred into her young mind; the survivor's grief and agony gave neither mother nor daughter any room to live a cowed, quiet life. When her mother died, Vichy happened across a human merchant caravan, hiding her identity to join them as a mercenary and infiltrate the world of sorcerers.
When Vichy was reborn on the day of the clan's extermination, it happened to be an Everdusk elf festival. Every elf drank the fine wine laced with poison—except Vichy.
On the day of the massacre, when the dying patriarch asked the six-year-old Vichy why she was doing this, she gave only a single response:
"All beautiful things in the world will ultimately vanish like smoke."
She hid in the shadows. Once all the elves were poisoned to death, she emerged to dig out their Duskfall crystals.
"Since all of you were going to die anyway, you might as well serve as stepping stones for me."
She did not say the second half of that thought, but history recorded how she put it into practice.
She hid all the Duskfall crystals away and fled alone. The fully armed perpetrators of the massacre arrived only to find an empty settlement. Believing foreign evil forces had beaten them to the punch, they cursed the scoundrels for draining the pond to catch the fish and failing to leave even a single breeding pair of elves behind. Only when no Duskfall crystals entered the market afterward did they faintly realize something had gone terribly wrong.
She was the last, the only, and the entirety of her kind.
The Spectre Manual recorded only that Vichy hunted genius sorcerers; it never mentioned that she could dominate sorcerers' souls, compelling her victims to willingly channel their life's work into Duskfall crystals.
With every Duskfall crystal she absorbed, she added another middle name to remember.
Yet after having had nothing for so long, the Spectre Prophet seemed to have lost even the desire to want anything.
Back then, the continent had been divided into three great powers, and Vichy had found herself in an assembly-governed nation formed by an alliance of sixteen sorcery factions. Its name was immaterial and had long since faded naturally into slumber alongside her soul, so she simply called it the Alliance.
As it turned out, during the massacre, a brother and sister elf had been rescued by a kind-hearted soul and made it alive to the Alliance capital. The entire Alliance was outraged by the Everdusk elves' tragedy. Prizing itself as the most civilized, democratic nation on the continent, the Alliance naturally could not tolerate such a genocidal atrocity. Supported by donations from well-meaning people across all sectors, the siblings settled down comfortably in the capital.
When Vichy arrived in the Alliance capital, she was astonished to discover that a surviving family of Everdusk elves lived there. She did not reveal her identity, instead manufacturing chance encounters to gather information. Perhaps out of an innate kinship toward their own kind, the elf family quickly warmed to her, even inviting her to a traditional Everdusk elf banquet and teaching her how to cook Lalafell dishes.
Yes, by the time Vichy arrived in the capital, the brother and sister had already produced an offspring and were living peacefully and happily. Although the genocidal tragedy had been attributed to an attack by foreign evil forces and vengeance seemed impossibly remote, they no longer cared, intending to spend the rest of their days in tranquility within the capital. Their only misfortune in all those years was the sudden disappearance of their eldest child, whose fate remained unknown.
Then the people looking after the elf siblings told them that they were the last surviving descendants of the Everdusk elves, and that the race's continuation and the expansion of their bloodline rested solely on the two of them.
Although Vichy had deduced the truth, she still did nothing, intending to leave quietly. Unluckily, the Alliance's foremost legendary sorcerer suffered grave wounds during an adventure in the Void Realm, his soul on the verge of fading into total annihilation.
And so, on a dark, windy night, two intruders used a slumber miracle to lull the siblings' family to sleep before slaughtering the eldest child and gouging out the Duskfall crystal within. Having anticipated this, Vichy had watched from outside the entire time—watching them break in, watching them kill.
Once they left, Vichy entered the house, slaughtered the elf siblings' entire family, and stomped all their Duskfall crystals to pieces.
Later, Vichy came to understand: had the elf siblings truly been ignorant of the truth? It was simply that they treasured their family too much. With bonds came weaknesses. Investing emotion into fragile, transient things was tantamount to surrendering one's life to fate, allowing oneself to become its plaything.
After slaying her final compatriots with her own hands, Vichy did not rush to flee. She knew the legendary sorcerer's heir was his useless birth son, a second-generation sorcerer who was only a four-wing sorcerer at the time—and Vichy, too, was a four-wing sorcerer.
She did not know who had orchestrated the clan's extermination, but that did not matter. As long as she directed her vengeance at the most noble, as long as she made the vested interests pay the price, and as long as she felt satisfied, that was enough.
When the sun rose on the second day, the flesh and mangled remains of that second-generation sorcerer were scattered across the capital.
Before the legendary sorcerer could fly into a frenzy, Vichy had already fled the capital. When she returned, she was already a legendary sorcerer. She made the entire capital wail like ghosts and howl like wolves for ten days and ten nights, until not a single sliver of sunlight could pierce the darkness, not an ounce of justice dared linger, and not even a maggot survived within.
Across her long sorcery career, her worldview gradually took shape. Looking back on her past deeds, Vichy felt there had been much childish inadequacy in her actions, and many things she had done wrong...
"Since everyone dies in the end, why invest any emotion at all?" During her first life, she had often regretted stomping the Duskfall crystals of that elf brother and sister's family to pieces just for the sake of damned dignity, throwing away so many opportunities to grow stronger. Upon obtaining the Glazed Time Lord's "Second Cycle" god, she knew she finally had the chance to right her mistakes.
Vichy was a stingy sorcerer; only transactions where she could never lose were worthy of the investment of her feelings.
If one never gained, one would never lose.
She was not cold and unfeeling. Over the millennium, countless sorcerers had crossed paths with her by coincidence. Some had wished to become her friends, and others had even pursued her, but Vichy only ever exploited them, never wavering in the slightest.
Even so, Vichy had no desire to get drawn into anything.
So when Yaxiu bound the two of them with chains, Vichy had nearly gone mad.
It wasn't merely because she had been enslaved. If Yaxiu had truly treated her like a cleaning rag, she would have had ways to deal with him. The problem was that while Yaxiu guarded against her with the utmost caution, he was simultaneously trying to be her friend.
If not for the chains, Vichy could easily have devoured him and slipped away, or at worst turned and walked off. But the chains allowed Yaxiu to erode her defenses little by little. What made it worse was that her body was that of an ordinary young girl, possessing nothing more than the Knowing and Guarding Fire sorcery spirit. On the surface, she could control her emotions, but her heart still experienced the highs and lows of an ordinary girl. She would grow angry when Yaxiu treated her differently; she would feel happy when Yaxiu acknowledged her contributions and offered rewards; she would worry in moments of life and death, and she would feel grateful when she was saved. A cold, detached demigod had been stuffed into a young girl's body, rendering her nothing like the Spectre Prophet.
Her affection grew uncontrollably, accumulating bit by bit inside her, but Vichy believed that as soon as she returned to reality, she could suppress it piece by piece.
Yet fate granted her no such opportunity. The moment they returned to reality, they were forced to undergo the demigod promotion ceremony immediately, and Vichy's feelings found their sublimation in the dream that summoned the god.
Of course, she had forgotten the vast majority of the dream's details. Although those sweet feelings were indeed a crucial factor, what mattered most was that Vichy suddenly realized: Yaxiu was not a beautiful thing that would fade with time.
He certainly was no saint, but he might well be the person closest to eternity in this world.
And as it happened, Yaxiu was someone she could allow herself to fall for.
Only with him did Vichy have no need to fear loss, no need to worry that the emotions she invested would vanish into nothingness... When Vichy reached eternity, Yaxiu would be her banner.
Chapter 1083