Chapter 3003: I’m Here, Your Highness!
Chapter 3003: I’m Here, Your Highness!
Date: Unspecified
Time: Unspecified
Location: Myriad Realms, Dark Realm, Gelid Alps, Snow Elven Region, Frosell District, Frosnow City
Was the curse master simply incapable of directly attacking?
Had he overlooked something important?
Snow Elven Crown Prince’s hyper-calculating mind just ran with going over every little detail since his encounter with Curse Master at the border of Frosell District. He noticed how the curse master was only terminating a single clone at a time, sequentially, every several seconds. And never targeted two or more at once.
In that exact instant, the final piece of the puzzle seemed to snap together perfectly inside his mind.
He realized that because his Snowomb had created a massive, multi-threaded workforce of identical souls, the curse master didn’t actually know which vessel held his original consciousness and soul. The stolen corpse provided a perfect link to him and his clones, but it couldn’t pinpoint who among them was the original. The curse master had no choice but to blindly fire the curse on one of them, systematically burning through the proxies one by one, desperately trying his luck to hit the original like pulling tickets in a high-stakes lottery.
By appearing to negotiate here in Frosnow City, the curse master wasn’t showing mercy or playing a grand tactical hand. He was effectively stalling for time, keeping the conversation alive while his automated curse took multiple consecutive shots at the prize. It was a brilliant, win-win scenario: if the negotiation worked, he got the half-bloods along with the Froslings. If the lottery hit the jackpot first, the Crown Prince died anyway.
Coming to the absolute conclusion that there was never a physical intruder within the lab, and that the hostile curse master was merely firing blindly into his army of clones from a distance, the Snow Elven Crown Prince’s deflated posture instantly vanished.
A surge of bold, arrogant confidence flooded back into the third proxy’s face. He believed he had completely uncovered his opponent’s ultimate trick, stripping away the terrifying illusion of an omnipresent grim reaper breathing down his neck.
He straightened his spine in the sky and a cold, mocking laugh finally broke from his lips as he called the curse master out.
"A lottery! You’re playing a blind lottery using one of my clone’s corpses!" Thalorien’s proxy in the Frosnow city sneered, his eyes flaring with newfound disdain as he gestured broadly. "You never broke into my Heathen Stone Lab. You’re sitting out here, burning through a stolen corpse, hoping one of your attempts to curse me lands on my real head and not on my clones. You are a brilliant actor, I will give you that, but your little parlor trick has a massive flaw. I have millions of clones cultivating across this realm, in my lab and I could always make more. I don’t think that single corpse can last you a million tries, even if you could try cursing me a million times?"
I stared at Thalorien’s clone before me with absolute, unadulterated dumbfoundment before finally shaking my head and remarking, "Your Highness, you have a very deep imagination. But I assure you... you have sorely mistaken."
As the words left my lips, hundreds of miles away, my clone inside the Heathen Stone Lab capitalized on his moment of blind triumph. From within the spiritual channel of Thalorien’s clone, my clone cleanly shattered its unholy core. Before the corpse could even hit the floor, my clone dipped its fingers into the fresh, glowing royal blood and rapidly painted large, jagged words right across the dark Heathen Stone wall:
I’M HERE, YOUR HIGHNESS.
Up in the sky of Frosnow City, the clone’s smug, arrogant expression suddenly froze mid-laugh. His jaw literally dropped, his eyes bulging as he saw that blood-stained message through their shared consciousness. I knew instantly that Thalorien had received my clone’s little greeting.
Taking full advantage of his absolute psychological paralysis, I quickly used Hive Spirit to check on the progress of the evacuation. To my immense satisfaction, the mass migration was already 70% complete.
When the Froslings had learned that their entire race was being permanently migrated out of the Snow Elves’ tyrannical reach via mass teleportation arrays, they didn’t hesitate for a single second. They completely rushed the teleportation hubs, ruthlessly abandoning their homes, their meager possessions, and everything else that reminded them of their oppressors. They were entirely focused on a single goal: surviving to start completely anew. As a result, the sheer momentum of their desperate compliance was pushing the migration forward significantly faster than we had ever anticipated.
Meanwhile, the psychological whiplash was too much for the crown Prince. Watching his absolute logical deduction shatter in a pool of his own blood, Thalorien’s mind violently snapped into a cornered, frantic rage.
"I have had absolutely enough with these tricks and mind games, you damned charlatan!" Thalorien’s proxy screamed, his voice cracking with manic fury.
Driven by this wild, coping denial, the Crown Prince completely abandoned all caution. He unleashed his full, unrestricted unholy energy, wildly attempting to shatter the spatial stability of the entire Frosell District to stop the mass migration of the Froslings.
Because the continuous, heavy spatial vibrations and energy signature of the mass teleportation had spread throughout the district, the Crown Prince had little idea about how far the Frosling migration had actually progressed. If he knew the real number was already at 70%, he would have a massive stroke right then and there.
I had no intention of letting his frantic tantrum ruin our 70% milestone.
Before his spatial-shattering spell could fully detonate and ripple into the district’s space, I instantly deployed the Reality Isolation Seal.
Isolating the clone in my sub reality, severing his connection to the Dark Realm in a microsecond, I cleanly executed the clone, and swept the fresh corpse straight into my dimensional storage before the blood could even freeze.
Next, I didn’t wait around for the crown prince to send in another or multiple clones to finish what the last one failed to do...