The Nameless King

Vlad was given his Rank Ascension quest seconds after he left the teleportation building.

He left the area and, using the system map navigated to the Hall of Ascendancy, a place that offered private chambers for warriors to train.

Vlad was in the third ring, where the wealthy merchants and esteemed artisans lived, so the streets brimmed with life. The hum of conversation, the clatter of magic wagons, and the sound of heavy rain mixed in the air.

The sun was setting, so the magic lamp poles that lined the streets had come alive, painting the streets in hues of blue and gold and casting shimmering lights.

The architecture was neat and beautiful, with houses made of carved stone and polished timber, graceful pitched roofs, and high-rise buildings constructed in different styles, representing the city's rich and mixed culture.

The wide roads, paved with rugged blackstone, gleamed under the rain, while shallow channels on either side guided the water into clear streams that fell into the large streams woven throughout the city.

At the heart of the city stood the White Palace of Drakmoor, a grand masterpiece of architecture. Its towering spires pierced the sky like spears of marble.

Vlad arrived at the Hall of Ascendancy and booked one of its finest chambers for twelve hours. With everything in place, he was ready to make his first spirit contract.

Vlad stood in a 20-by-20-meter chamber, a plain room of white marble, its walls protected with magical inscriptions designed to withstand physical force and magical onslaught.

But its real value was the immense density of mana, which was 10x that of the outside, pure, rich mana, which would greatly improve an individual's growth and recovery.

"Let's get started," Vlad voiced with a deep exhale, feeling equally excited and nervous.

The world of Ascension had magic as its mainstream means of power, but it had two types: common magic and spirit magic.

Similarly, the world of Ascension had two planes of existence: a physical plane and a spirit plane.

The magic used by most physical plane inhabitants was classified as low-tier magic, which required intricate magic circles to achieve any results. The stronger the effect, the more demanding the process.

However, true magic, as it was called, was different.

It required an individual to make a contract with a spirit, naturally creating his mana core and ascending to the path where one could cast magic without spells, creating phenomena like fire to catastrophic fire storms.

One could also use a spirit crystal, a treasure that can be formed naturally or artificially by spirit artisans. While a crystal is expensive, it would essentially do the same thing as a true spirit, but then one would obviously not have a real spirit on one's side.

A real spirit was much better in all areas and had much to offer, from spirit spells to spirit fusion, but since each spirit was alive and had its own personality and goals, it was much harder for even a talented individual to make a contract with high-tier spirits.

However, if one had the money, one could buy a spirit crystal of any grade to form their spirit core and keep enhancing it with each rank ascension.

The Spirits were divided into seven grades: Common, Lesser, greater, Noble, King, Sovereign, and Ancient.

The spirit crystals had the same ranks except for only six, and even then, just like the real deal, finding a sovereign-grade crystal was nearly impossible for someone not of extremely high status and influence.

A person needed to know the true name of a spirit and write it in a spirit circle to summon it into the physical plane, and if it was available and willing, then one could forge a spirit contract, binding the two in a near-unbreakable bond.

"Now, let's hope everything goes smoothly, or I'll be jumping through even more hoops," Vlad muttered under his breath.

Vlad was planning to contract a Noble or king-grade poison element spirit. He was going for a low-grade spirit when he could easily secure a contract with a powerful sovereign-grade spirit because the spirit was special.

In the world of Ascension, the reason the world would end in the next eight years was not the Demon kind, some great war for supremacy, or an unavoidable world calamity.

The world would end because of a single entity.

The Nameless King.

The first Primordial spirit who took birth in the spirit plane, a realm of chaos and constant instability. At that time, the physical world itself was still young, and civilizations had only begun to take root amidst the raw, untamed land.

The Nameless King was not evil, at least not in the way most understood it. To call him such would be a simplification.

He was born that way, shaped by a nature so alien that his terrible desires, while monstrous to others, were pure and untainted in his own eyes.

The Nameless King has seven and only seven desires in their very purest and all forms. Unknown, Abyss, Dominion, Corruption, Bloodshed, Madness, Mutation.

But, the world only knew of Six. No one knew about his aspect of the Unknown.

Even Vlad, who had seen the future, did not know the seventh; everyone just referred to it as Unknown.

Ironically, these aspects were also the primal desires of every living form, and entire civilizations had fallen to them. In the world of Ascension, many of them were because of the Nameless King.

In the chaos era, there was a great war in which every power of the physical and spiritual planes united to fight against the Nameless King.

They won, and the Nameless King was killed.

At least that's what everyone believed, but in reality, the nameless king shattered his soul into seven shards.

Seven autonomous shards, each representing one of his essences, each a shard of his perfect will, not separate, not servants, but reflections, extensions of the same soul.

After centuries of recovery, the shards would begin to act, and the world would soon find this terrible truth. However, it would not be the first shock since they would soon discover that killing the shards of the Nameless king is impossible with normal means.

Killing a shard was not possible by normal means, but it was with a special method: making a spirit devour the shard.

Very few, maybe less than a dozen spirits, could devourer a primordial shard and not be corrupted and consumed by it.

In a few months, the first of the shards, the shard of Corruption, would make its appearance, destroying the city of Thalmaris and unleashing the Verdant Blight of False Immortality.

Vlad was about to make a contract with the spirit capable of devouring the Shard of Corruption, stopping one of the major world-altering events.

"Velcrissa Syth'Mavet," Vlad softly murmured the name he wrote on the floor using mana crystals.

Vlad bought the rare-grade mana crystals needed from the reception, using them to create the spirit summoning circle.

The summoning circle consisted of two circles perfectly overlapping each other, one representing the physical plane and the other the spirit plane.

Magic runes wrote the command at the edge, and the spirit name was written in its spirit tongue in the central space created by the overlapping circles.

There was a small space left unfilled, and after a deep breath, Vlad filled it with two mana crystals, completing the summoning circle.

As if waiting to be completed, the crystals came alive, shining with growing intensity like the stars in the night sky.

In less than a minute, every crystal shone brightly and had already begun to thin down as virulent green and deep violet hues, the colors of poison and blight radiated from them.

The poisonous hues rose like thick smoke from a fire, leaving the entire area of the circle obscured beneath it. The poisonous mana kept filling the chamber as seconds ticked by.

Vlad focused, steady and unblinking, as the air stirred and a sharp wind swept through the chamber. At the center of the summoning circle, the poison began to coalesce, writhing tendrils of virulent mist gathering the poison essence to form the vessel for the summoned spirit.

"The Harrowed Empress..." He murmured inwardly, eyes narrowing as his trait stirred to life. "Let's not give each other too much trouble,"

The poisonous mist thinned before fading away, leaving behind a figure, a small child-like figure barely three feet tall.

Vlad's brows furrowed, unease settling in as his eyes narrowed. This was not right; this was not what he had expected, and then the voice came. It didn't just confirm his fears, it fed the growing anxiety in his chest.

"Mortal, You summoned me?" The voice rang, childish and sweet, doing a bad job of sounding deep. It made Vlad tense, stepping forward as a storm of questions stirred in his mind.