There are many monsters in the world. There were a lot of them even before the apocalypse. Sure, they didn’t have razor sharp teeth, nor they could suck out your life through terrifying rituals, but darkness has always been there, lurching, twisting, snaking around the balls of our feet.

And some people had to rely on the darkness to fight. Some, instead, embraced it just for the thrill. Again, others took to it because their hearts were incredibly black to begin with.

But it didn’t really matter whether it was good or bad people.

Fighting darkness was very similar to lowering yourself in a pool of jet-black ink. There’s no way you wouldn’t get stained. You can try and wash off some, maybe leave it there to dry, scratch it out even if it costed you flesh.

The point, though, was that to fight darkness, you get some of that taint that affects those who have lurched too long into it. You see some of the crooked monstrosities spawned by the vicious minds who have no qualms about butchering, taking, tearing, and eating.

The Eater, in particular, had no qualms at all.

She never had any, to be even more precise.

Nerea, the Queen of Queens, the nightmare that would eat Dragons for sport. The woman who killed countless heroes, whose fame was only surpassed by another creature even more despicable than her.

The Black Dragon.

Nerea had slowly ascended to power, unlike the insane Dragon, who already arrived on Earth close to the highest level known to cultivators.

But she had started butchering as soon as her lovely forms got on the new planet.

Nerea was beautiful, charismatic, smart, and twisted. She was the closest being on Earth to what the humans in ages past imagined the Devil should be. And she reveled in it.

Jacob had fought the woman at the apex of his power, but he had lost. It had been a close call for her, but she had been stronger than him, only a step away from the biggest and baddest monster of them all.

But, unlike the Dragons who preferred their isolation and who would seldom partake of mortal events, Nerea had been very active.

After the Charybdes had taken over most of South America and the humans had finally managed to repel them, she had launched a series of ruthless attacks against the weakened enemy. And she had led them all.

Jacob was now weaving the same Blood Magic that characterized her species. While it was true that his expertise laid in Time Magic, he was still the equivalent of a cultivator polymath. He knew of their rituals, their debauchery, and the most wicked methods they had developed to torture, exploit, eat people. and not just people. Every single creature on the planet was prey in front of them. They considered even the mighty Dragons just a grumpy and dangerous, albeit delicious, snack.

This particular ritual he was using was not something that belonged to the Sirens, but something closer to Necromantic Magic. It was half-way from Blood and Necromantic stuff.

Jacob had extracted this specific ritual from the libraries he had found in the Necromancer fortresses posthumous to his death. It was sort of a ‘truth-spell’ plus ‘insanity-inducing-torturing-pain’ Spell.

The Necromancer had been a monster, but he had crafted means to make even the mightiest monsters shiver and shit themselves.

Jacob did not know if Nerea was close to the coast. Someone else would have waited before telling Hektor to start moving troops here. ‘You could risk giving up everyone to the Plague Doctor.’ And it wasn’t the stupidest argument, in fact. Well, that was unless you did know who Nerea was.

If there was even the slightest chance that they might meet her, Jacob needed everyone here. As soon as Helena would mention The Eater to Hektor and Epagogia, they would both come running. They knew what was at risk right now.

Plus, since Jacob knew how Karma worked and he had started suspecting that the Plague Doctor would be attracted by Juliet, then Nerea would soon start moving toward Hektor.

Jacob rested his weary eyes on the two soon-to-be empty corpses. He was alone, thankfully, without Juliet or Helena to judge what would transpire soon after.

Tendrils of Blood Magic started crawling up the two limbless bodies.

Jacob felt the wrongness of his actions but continued. His face was… neutral. There was no other way to describe it. These practices had become—not normal, but habit.

Really, how would you describe a being that has lived much more than any other human and who had to fight insane monsters who dragged him to the bottom of the abyss?

And if said abyss had indeed stared back, how would you explain it to someone who had never been there?

Consider this for a second, in an era with countless quotes thrown around left and right, anyone has pocket-wisdom to quickly dispense. You can hoard hundreds of smarty-pants sayings, metaphors, similes and so on.

But how do you understand truly how a person condensed a wealth of knowledge into one single sentence? How could someone just say ‘the abyss will stare back’ and understand what it truly meant.

Pocket wisdom would never suffice to describe what Jacob was, who he was, especially in these moments. He could laugh and joke with Juliet and Helena, tease them, eat some Alchemic Food with them.

But could they understand this part?

No.

Jacob had dived into more than one abyss, and he was simply weary.

Let one word be enough for what he went through, for what he had killed, tainted himself with, even broke bread together.

As soon as the Blood Magic tendrils started burrowing inside the bodies like flesh-eating spiky worms, Jacob used the Necromantic part of the Ritual.

“So, let’s start with the questions, now.”