Chapter 3002: Among Us
Chapter 3002: Among Us
Date: Unspecified
Time: Unspecified
Location: Myriad Realms, Dark Realm, Gelid Alps, Snow Elven Region, Frosell District, Frosnow City
"Ahh!" the Snow Elven Crown Prince shrieked at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing throughout the Heathen Stone Lab in a raw, frantic display of uncharacteristic madness.
The brilliant, calculating prodigy had completely lost his grip on reality. He had tried every single method he could possibly think of to pinpoint the intruder. But the result was always the exact same, maddening truth: according to every sensor and array in his fortress, there was absolutely no one else inside that Heathen Stone lab except for his real body and his clones. Yet, like clockwork, his proxies just kept dying, one after the other.
At first, he forced himself to stay cold. He refused to let the creeping fear and his absolute failure to find the intruder break his composure. He commanded the surviving proxies to drop everything and conduct a brutal, hyper-precise postmortem on the corpses of the fallen clones. He believed, with the desperate logic of a mad scientist, that if he could just understand exactly how they were being executed, he could reverse-engineer a countermeasure or trace the trajectory back to the source.
But the results of the autopsy only plunged him deeper into the abyss.
All his grand medical arrays and alchemical tools could deduce was that the clones were dying instantly from their divinity / devil core / unholy core being utterly, cleanly destroyed.
And the biggest kicker? He couldn’t find a single trace, wound, residual energy spike, or curse signature explaining how their unholy core was being shattered. All he found—the only residual trace left behind on every single corpse—was his own distinct energy signature. It led to one horrifying, mathematically absolute conclusion: the clones had committed suicide.
On numerous occasions during the frantic search, the weight of this impossibility drove him to the brink of insanity. He became utterly convinced that the intruder was walking among them, wearing his face, disguised as one of his own perfect clones. He would violently pause the entire dragnet, forcing every single proxy to stand perfectly still as he manually counted his own numbers, desperate to spot an extra body. But he only ever reached the exact same conclusion over and over again: the math was correct. There were no extra bodies.
He couldn’t help acting out of this crippling paranoia. If he didn’t stop to verify it, the terrifying thought would keep ticking away in the back of his mind, completely corroding his concentration. For the sake of his own fraying mental stability, he had to entertain these mad suspicions, even though time was of the absolute essence.
Now that the collective, peak-scientific knowledge of his entire life and his multi-threaded clones had completely failed to uncover the mystery behind the deaths, he abandoned logic. He turned to the mystic arts, initiating a high-level divination.
The initial results were almost entirely inconclusive, a chaotic blur of static showing that the fundamental forces involved were far beyond his current divination ability. But with the clock ticking down and his clones dropping like flies, he immediately narrowed the focus of the divination to a single, hyper-specific question: was a ruler-class curse involved in their death?
To his immense relief, the divination array finally flickered, confirming it.
That single revelation finally anchored his drifting sanity. It helped him confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that the nightmare unfolding in his Heathen Stone Lab was entirely the work of the masked opponent standing right in front of him in Frosnow City.
Now that he knew why his clones were dying within his sanctuary, his hyper-analytical mind immediately pivoted to the next logical step: he needed to figure out exactly how they were being cursed. Even someone completely new to the intricacies of the curse field knew that blood was one of the most potent, universally utilized mediums in the entire discipline.
His thoughts instantly flashed back to the border of the Frosell District—to how his first clone had mysteriously died, and more importantly, how its physical body had gone completely missing afterward.
The pieces clicked together in his head. He immediately guessed that there was never a physical intruder sneaking through his corridors to begin with. The masked opponent standing before him was simply using the missing corpse of clone as a perfect, high-level catalyst to channel a remote curse, systematically forcing his clones to commit suicide one by one. This conclusion was born mostly from his unshakable, deep-seated trust in the physical security of his Heathen Stone Lab. He refused to believe anything could actually slip past those walls.
It wasn’t overconfidence in his laboratory that gave him such certainty, but a universally accepted fact. No one could survive for long in the presence of such a vast quantity of heathen stone. However, he had overlooked one crucial exception: the celestials, whose very physical form produced the heathen stones as part of their ecosystem.
However, just as a wave of relief began to wash over him for solving the mechanics of the attack, a sudden, icy chill ran straight down his spine as a terrifying thought crossed his mind.
It led to a glaring, terrifying question that began to bug him, scratching at the back of his mind. If this curse master possessed a medium as perfect as a clone’s corpse, and if the curse was potent enough to effortlessly wipe out Ruler-class divinity from hundreds of miles away... why was he only targeting the expendable clones? Why wasn’t he executing the original body directly?
Killing the true Crown Prince in his bunker would solve all of the curse master’s problems in a single stroke. There would be absolutely no need for him to stall, play mind games, or open a dialogue here in Frosnow City. He couldn’t understand the purpose of this charade. What was the Curse Master’s endgame? Why wasn’t he coming after him? Or was he simply incapable of doing so? Had he overlooked something important?