The Poison within

The mission was simple...at least. In the end, the one who held the most ether would live. The others... would perish.

This was also why the Protagonist chose not to stay here and went to the other stage...He had to sacrifice his loved ones...

The idea sounded cold, brutal even. But that was the nature of this world. And truth be told, he had always been this way. Living as a shadow of someone as "Great" As the Dark witch of calamity wasn't easy. Meeting Xin and venturing into Oasis hadn't changed him; it had only revealed a part of himself he never knew existed...and Xin was right maybe he did intend to use everyone around him for his own goals...But, For the first time in a long time...maybe ever...he felt something like...Companionship.

To hell with that!

Friendship. It was a new concept he learned but it can also be a poison.

Poison...

Throughout history, demons had been unparalleled masters of it. Where others relied on steel and Some type of technology, demons turned to tinctures, venoms, and cursed fumes. To them, poison was not a coward's tool—it was an art, a philosophy, a weapon of elegance and terror alike. It did not roar like fire or cleave like a blade, but it lingered. It crept. It claimed.

In war, poison became a silent trumpet of doom—killing captains in their tents, rotting food stores from within, breaking sieges not with force, but with festering breath. And none wielded it more beautifully, or more brutally, than her.

Among them, one name echoed louder than all.

The Flower Demoness.

She was a vision of grace upon the battlefield, adorned in silken robes laced with thorns and blossoms that exhaled lethal pollen. Her soldiers marched in clouds of perfume, each scent a death sentence. Fields she crossed never bloomed again. Rivers ran black for days. Her enemies died hallucinating gardens that clawed them apart. Her poisons were not merely crafted—they were composed, like symphonies.

Whispers said she never raised her voice, nor unsheathed a blade. She never had to.

General of the 6th Brigade.

Her legacy was as beautiful as it was deadly. Tales whispered through ruined temples and cursed libraries spoke of her mastery over both healing and destruction. She could restore a shattered body with one breath—and unravel it just as quickly with another. Her control over ether was so precise, so meticulous, she could divide it in two: one stream pure and life-giving, the other laced with death.

A technique so advanced, so incomprehensible, that even now—centuries later—no one truly understood how she had done it.

And that included him.

"Damn it…"

He sat cross-legged in the center of the cold floor, fingers tangled in his hair, eyes dark with frustration.

"Argh!"

He slammed his fist into the crystalline bedding.

It hurt? No it didn't, the bedding was smooth.

Dust scattered. A shallow gust stirred the dead petals around him—faded blossoms that had once bloomed under her influence. All that remained now were brittle husks.

If anyone could poison the Chrysalis Apocalypse, he thought, it would have been her.

But she was gone.

And he… didn't even know how to begin.

The Chrysalis Apocalypse...an evolving force of mutation and entropy. It consumed and transformed everything it touched. Flesh, magic, mind—it reshaped all. The only way to stop it, to slow it even, was with a poison strong enough to rot its very nature.

And that required mastery of etheric poisoning. The kind only the Flower Demoness had wielded.

"Everyone talks about her EMR techniques," he muttered bitterly. "Her controlled resonance. Her layered outputs. But that's not what I need! I need the poison—not the purity!"

Still, it wasn't like he could afford to ignore EMR. That alone had made her legendary, her ability to channel multiple forms of ether at once, her mind like a conductor navigating a thousand poisonous notes in harmony.

Xin was a really good one as well…

And he? He couldn't even reconstruct a single particle.

Even if I had her journals, he thought. *Even if I had her notes—which he didn't—I wouldn't be able to replicate what she did.

He wasn't her.

And yet, the irony cut deep.

He had the ether for it. His nature, his lineage—it pulsed with the same kind of volatile flow. He could feel it, coiled within him like a sleeping serpent. But to awaken it, to command it, to split it the way she had…

It was like trying to divide a flame with bare hands.

He took a slow breath, tried to center himself. But the frustration was too much.

"What am I even doing?" he whispered.

He wasn't a healer. He wasn't a general. He wasn't a demoness who bloomed death and life from the same hand.

He was a struggling fool trying to poison an apocalypse with techniques he barely understood.

Still… The Flower Demoness could be out there somewhere, hiding in plain sight—just like he was.

Or she could be dead.

The thought lingered like ash on his tongue, bitter and unwelcome. Part of him hoped she was gone—gone and beyond reach, so he could let go of this obsession, this endless search for something he wasn't sure he'd ever be worthy of. But another part—stronger, more human—hoped she lived. Not for the sake of history, not for the sake of legend, but simply because he wanted to meet her.

Even if it was just once.

Even if it was just long enough to ask, "How do you poison something… from the inside?"

His thoughts stilled.

That phrasing stuck in his mind.

Poison from the inside…

He turned it over slowly, as though each word carried a key.

The inside.

His breath caught.

Eyes widening, he straightened from his slouched posture. His hands trembled faintly, whether from excitement or sudden understanding, he couldn't tell. But there was something there, something in that simple phrasing that made everything else click.

Poison from the inside.

Then it hit him like a jolt of lightning.

He had poison.

He had it this whole time.

A wild laugh threatened to tear free, but he bit it back, grinning in disbelief. His hands covered his mouth as he exhaled in a long, trembling breath.

"The lake…"

Of course. The lake atrocity. That miserable day when his squad had been ambushed by the drowned monstrosity, its body a writhing tangle of flesh and acidic tendrils. Everyone else had fled or fallen. He'd nearly died fighting the thing—and worse, it had left its mark. A venom that no spell or salve could purge had settled into his body, binding itself to his ether like a parasite.

He had cursed it for weeks for slowing him down, It really was at there was a few times where he couldn't move the way he wanted because the damn thing. Xin himself

But now—

Now it made sense.

The Flower Demoness had to make poison in her ether.

But he… he already had it.

He crossed his legs again, grounding himself, and closed his eyes. The world dimmed, and he slipped inward.

Breath by breath, the surface faded.

He dove deeper.

Ether flowed around him in waves—threads of light that pulsed in time with his heartbeat. At first, it was chaotic. Too fast. Too much. He adjusted, slowed his breathing, narrowed his awareness.

Soon, the world was still.

He watched.

Tiny, near-microscopic particles drifted through his body like plankton in a deep ocean. Some bounced against the lining of his inner channels. Some phased straight through.

But he wasn't looking at those.

No, he went deeper.

He turned his gaze inward, past the surface channels, past the reflexive ether flow that most people never even sensed. Deeper, down into the root where his essence truly lived.

There it was.

A small pool of ether, shimmering faintly, like a dying ember floating in water. Pathetic. Frail. It had always been that way—stubborn, unwilling to grow.

But now, something new.

Behind that first pool was another. Larger. Darker.

He could see it—just barely—behind a veil of something thick and clouded. It pulsed slowly, a dull, sickly hue that had no name. It felt wrong. Tainted. Not pure ether. Not exactly. But alive. And it was part of him now.

He reached toward it mentally, unsure, afraid it might burn or corrode him from within. But it didn't. It shuddered at his attention, like a creature startled from sleep—but it didn't reject him.

This… this was what had been left behind after the lake. The thing no healer could remove. The thing no purification spell could touch. Because it wasn't a foreign poison anymore.

It was his.

He sat there for a long while, watching the dark pool ripple behind its veil. It didn't move with his breath. It didn't flow with the rest of his ether.

The poison was already inside him.

This was going to be his weapon.