Epic Of The Demonic Sage

Lucius found a relatively 'clean' place to sit down. It was a boulder that was on the northern side of the battlefield. It was actually not there before and was uprooted there due to the Lost.

Nevertheless, it gave Lucius the perfect place to sit and meditate for the time being. Plus, due to the distance, it also kept the eyes of the others away from him. Lucius had actually decided to join the battle because of a few reasons, with the main one being the souls of the dead.

The lack of a divine pull was a key aspect that made him want to do this as souls were a very valuable resource and were also quite hard to get… At least, normally. But in this world, he was free to do as he pleased and there was no divine intervention which was rather surprising to him.

And thus, Lucius closed his eyes and entered a meditative state before entering his soul space. His soul was floating calmly with the mark of nexus and Hell imprint doing their work. 

The nexus regenerated the Aether had used up while the Hell imprint gathered more Hell energy. In addition to this, there were fifteen doors that had appeared in his soul space as well.

The doors released a small amount of hell energy every so often, which met with the hell energy of his Hell imprint and then circulated. This pattern continued non stop and slowly the amount of hell energy could be seen increasing.

One thing was certain here, that being the fact that the total amount of hell energy that Lucius now had far many times more than about a month ago. This increase was almost exponential and was only possible due to the discovery of Lost and how they increased his hell energy capacity.

"Let's get to it, shall we…" Lucius muttered to himself and merged his consciousness with his soul.

Once that was done, he was ready to use the soul resonance spell. The Soul resonance spell was a different type of a magic spell that came under soul spells. They did not use magic, but rather soul energy to cast.

Thus, it limited the number of times that the caster could use it. And not only that, but the uses a single mage had were also dependent on their innate strength. Some of them would have more soul energy than others.

In addition to this, if someone used a little too much of the soul energy, they would end up permanently damaging themselves. There were even cases when some desperate mages overdrew on their soul energy, causing them to break apart.

For such mages, becoming vegetables was a mercy, for the ones that were a bit more unfortunate, they would experience one of the worst pains known to people of getting their soul imploded.

Perhaps only the hell torture was something that could compare to pain of that level. But it was also said in the rumors that the pain of the dead in hell was far less than that of a soul implosion.

This showed just how terrifying it was when even the devil did not reach it.

But for Lucius, this was not really a troublesome thing, because he was not going to use soul spells that drew on too much soul energy. The soul resonance spell wasn't something offensive or harmful either, thus it took even less energy.

~HONG~

An invisible wave of energy was emanated from Lucius's soul as it spread out in the surroundings. The more the energy spread, the more Lucius could observe. Soon, the energy wave had spread in a range of about a kilometer.

Within that radius, Lucius could sense nearly everything, including the souls.

"One thousand two hundred, and ninety three wandering souls… perfect," Lucius said upon sensing the number.

With the Soul resonance spell active, the wandering soul that were aimlessly floating around suddenly felt a calling. All of them looked in the direction of Lucius and started to float towards him.

In just three seconds, the first wandering soul had entered Lucius's body. Ten seconds later, three more had entered. A minute later, there were over a hundred souls. The number kept on increasing more and more and finally, ten minutes later, all of the wandering souls on the battlefield had disappeared.

But if one looked inside Lucius's soul space at this moment, they would see it being filled with souls. The wandering souls had been pulled into his soul space and they were trapped here now.

A wide smile appeared on Lucius's face after seeing this.

"Now… for the next step…" Lucius muttered and spread his soul's hands apart.

~shua~

All of the wandering souls shivered at that moment and looked towards Lucius. Their expressionless faces that were dull suddenly showed a fearful experience. Some of them even tried to run away from where Lucius was, but it was useless.

~HONG~

The Hell Imprint on Lucius's chest let out a blinding goal as a long spike rushed out of it. The spike was made out of hell energy and attached to it were chain links. Each of the chain links had strange runes imprinted on them and if one looked at it they would hear the cries of a million people in their mind.

The spike that had just appeared rushed towards the wandering souls and started to impale them. One soul, two soul, ten soul, hundred souls, thousand souls… soon all of the wandering souls had been pierced by the spike.

All of them were strung together into the chain that was attached to the spike. Once that was done, Lucius opened his eyes. He placed his hand on his chest, right where the chain attached to the hell imprint, and ruthlessly pulled out.

It gave him a shock, but he held on while gritting his teeth.. The color of his soul had significantly paled after doing this, but the drive in his eyes was still present.