Ch256-Cult Of Personality (Patreon)

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Ch256-Cult Of Personality

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It wasn’t exactly a smooth procedure, but the curse had been removed, and the boy would “live.”

He would spend the next couple of months bedridden and hooked up to a drip-fed healing potion, but Sylver wasn’t a healer, he was a necromancer.

And say what you will about Finland and the people that live in it, but at least they respected that difference.

Before removing the curse Sylver had asked for ownership of the land surrounding the crack, and while he couldn’t quite understand what Tristen’s father had said, through a series of yes/no questions he understood that there wasn’t any problem with Sylver owning that piece of land.

He got the feeling everyone involved in this wanted everything that happened to stay as quiet as humanly, or fishily, as possible. So there weren’t any armies being prepared to find and bring Medusa and Euryale so that they may be hung, or whatever the preferred underwater execution method was.

Beheading most probably, or maybe they tied a balloon to them and allowed them to float out of the water into the air, where they couldn’t breathe. It wouldn’t be the weirdest execution method Sylver had seen.

Since he was done Sylver went shopping while he waited for Edna to return.

He exchanged 4,000 gold coins for 50,000 Finnish Markka, small glass beads that had a droplet of some unknown liquid inside. The woman who worked at the exchange desk handed Sylver a pamphlet written by hand in Eirish that explained that the liquid inside was “important” and that was all it had to say about it.

After a fair bit of swimming Sylver found a stationary shop, where he bought one of each available ink, and had a wooden chest with tails made [Black Mass] swim the chest behind him as he continued shopping.

Apart from the language barrier, the people here were almost suspiciously friendly.

They didn’t smile, but Sylver could tell they treated their job as shopkeepers with a level of respect that was rare in Arda.

Shop owners worked with a sense of pride, as did the craftsmen, but the people lower on the hierarchy often seemed like the work they were doing was somehow beneath them.

Sylver had visited 14 shops so far and had yet to see a single worker who wasn’t enthusiastic about helping him find even something as insignificant as the perfect tea blend.

The only time he had a bit of an issue was when he was trying to buy 8 crates of silt wine. The employee kept trying to explain to him that buying such a quantity in barrels would be cheaper, and he would get more wine for his money.

Even then the man wasn’t arguing with him, he was genuinely trying to sell Sylver what he thought would be the best product for him.

But Sylver needed the wine to be in bottles.

Because Edmund enjoyed finishing a bottle far more than he enjoyed drinking 4 glasses from a barrel. Because if the wine was particularly good he would spend however long it took for him to finish the barrel thinkingabout the wine inside of it.

Obviously, he had enough discipline not to overindulge, but it was a needless temptation when he could simply open a bottle, finish it, and be completely done with it until he felt like opening another one.

Sylver didn’t have enough Markka to pay the shopkeeper, so he ended up trading one of his component pouches in exchange for the 8 crates of wine. The diamonds and platinum shavings alone covered the cost of the wine, at least by Sylver’s estimates, but he was feeling generous, and given the level of service and the quality of the wine he didn’t feel like he was being taken advantage of.

He felt like he was celebrating prematurely when he bought clothing in the rough size of the 3 Gorgon sisters, but the women were extremely helpful, and Sylver was a bit drunk from all the wine sampling.

Plus, because of the presence of gills and such, most of the clothes available left the torso largely exposed, and on dry land, the clothing the locals wore would be best described as swimwear.

Sylver also bought more conventional clothing, pants, coats, and a handful of mage robes that covered everything but the hands and face. And given that the snaked-haired women felt to be cold-blooded blooded there was a pretty high chance they would prefer warm clothing.

But he bought all the other stuff just in case they breathed through their skin and needed as much exposure as humanly possible.

Sylver was sitting inside of a small bar when Edna found him.

She was smiling ear to ear, had a tightly wrapped grey-colored satchel under her arm, and was clutching it so hard her knuckles were white.

Edna explained that Amelia and Tristen were doing better than either parent could have hoped for and that both fathers were more than happy to hold up their end of the deal. She also not so subtly implied that it would be for the best if he didn’t tell anyone what he had done.

“Did you see anything interesting down there?” Edna asked after she had finished her rehearsed speech.

“Quite a few ships. There was also a fish that made itself look like me. And tried to use my skills and perks against me,” Sylver said, as he carefully put the engraved piece of glass back into its box and handed the box to Spring to add it to the pile of floating chests.

Sylver couldn’t read any of the glowing loopy letters, he could only read his name which was written in regular Eirish, in big capital letters, with the family’s signet stamped on top of his name.

Not that anyone was going to contest his claim of that piece of sea floor, given that the translation of the local name for the area was “The Land Where Things Become Dead.”

Given how much dark energy was leaking out of the crack, that was an admittedly fair description.

“Ships as in… Like ship ships?” Edna asked.

“Regular ships, that float on water, and use sails, or some form of magic, to move across the water. Most of them were broken to pieces, but the lower I went, the more there were that were in pretty decent condition. To my eye at least,” Sylver explained.

“But how did they get down there?” Edna asked.

Sylver thanked the creature that brought him his food, a vaguely woman-shaped translucent jellyfish thing, and poked his metal straw into the bubble of liquid glued into the bowl. There were pieces of some kind of vegetable inside, and as Sylver sucked it out through the straw, the bubble became smaller.

It tasted like someone mixed orange juice with mint and garlic and then shaved cauliflower into the concoction to give it texture. It sounded disgusting, but it… It kind of worked. It wasn’t better than the world’s most basic chicken soup, but Sylver wouldn’t go as far as to describe the liquid he was drinking as unpleasant.

“I thought they’d use something stronger,” Sylver said mostly to himself, as he put the bowl down. “As for the ships being down there, I have no clue. How long do you plan to stay in Finland?” Sylver asked.

Edna’s shoulders squared, and she straightened her back.

“Why do you ask?” Edna asked.

Sylver took another drink from his bowl of soup.

“I have some work if you’re interested,” Sylver offered.

To her credit, Edna didn’t hesitate.

“What kind of work?” she asked, with an ever so slight decrease in volume.

She wasn’t whispering, but she was preparing to whisper, should the conversation require whispering.

Sylver leaned towards her and spoke just barely loud enough for her to hear.

“I want you to help me overthrow the King of Finland,” Sylver said.

Edna leaned back so much she hit the back of her head against the wall her seat was attached to.

“Seriously?” she whispered after a good 10-second pause.

“No,” Sylver said with a small grin. “Maybe later, but for now I need you to gather information for me.”

Edna didn’t find the joke as funny as Sylver did, in fact, it seemed to have made her quite uncomfortable, but she blinked 3 times, and continued as if it hadn’t been made.

“When you say information do you mean potential business opportunities?” Edna asked.

“History. I would like to know everything there is to know about this city. Historical documents, ancient texts, what religions were practiced, rumors, myths, fairy tales, songs, anything that would help explain how this place came to be. Basically, I want a big pile of notes, in simple Eirish, explaining how the country of Finland came to exist,” Sylver clarified.

“Huh…” Edna said.

Sylver finished his bowl of soup and made a final calculation in his head. He had roughly 15 more minutes to kill, given his size, and what they estimated his weight to be.

“How soon would you want this pile of notes?” Edna asked.

“Would 2 months be enough?” Sylver asked.

“Are you looking for something specific, or are you just curious?” Edna asked.

“I’m looking for something… But it would cause problems for me if I were to tell you what it was,” Sylver said.

Edna crossed her arms over her chest and stared off into the wall a little left of Sylver’s head.

“Alright… I don’t usually do this kind of thing…” Edna explained.

“But you know how to,” Sylver guessed.

“At the very least I know who to speak to, and I can actually speak to them,” Edna said.

Sylver waited for a while as the woman tried to come up with a figure.

“10,000 gold?” Sylver offered.

It seemed like a good starting point.

“You meant to say Markka?” Edna asked.

“Standard gold coins, or the platinum bar equivalent if you prefer,” Sylver said.

“I’ll do it for 3,000,” Edna countered.

“I didn’t say 10 because I’m trying to give you free money I-”

“-I didn’t say you did, but it would be… It wouldn’t be right to take that much for a task I’m not even risking my life for,” Edna said.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

“I can pay 1,000 upfront, and the rest when you’re done,” Sylver offered.

He moved his hand across the table and 10 tightly wrapped cloth bags appeared in a neat row. Edna waved her own hand over them, and they disappeared.

She looked like she was about to stand up, but she remained seated.

“Aren’t you going to ask what this is?” Edna asked with a nod towards the satchel she was clutching up to her chest.

It was the wrong shape to be a tome, Sylver didn’t feel any magic coming off it so it wasn’t a wand or an enchanted item, and given that Edna was a [Druid] there was a limited number of items that would be of use to her.

“I don’t believe they would have a plant you would be interested in, so I’m going to guess it’s the large tooth of some sort of underwater creature,” Sylver said.

Edna’s proud grin slipped for a second and was replaced by surprise at the fact that Sylver had guessed correctly, but she recovered within the time it took her to place the tightly wrapped package on the table.

“I was planning to slowly save up for the chisel I needed, but now I’ll be able to start tonight!” Edna explained as she unraveled the material and showed Sylver a yellow triangular tooth the size of a watermelon.

“You can start now if you prefer, I’m leaving the city once I’m done with this,” Sylver said with a gesture to his bowl of poisoned liquid.

Edna proceeded to explain that the tooth was a family heirloom and that one of Amelia’s great grandfathers hunted whatever a “Megalodon” was and kept their jaws as trophies. And once Edna bought her chisel and finished carving her totem, she would be able to summon a Megalodon.

After going over the particulars of where Edna was supposed to send the notes in the event she finished early, she hugged Sylver goodbye and did the swimming equivalent of girlishly skipping away.

Sylver waited until she was well out of earshot, stood up from his seat, placed his hands on his back, and leaned back to crack it.

There were 6 people left inside the bar, the barman, the waitress, and 4 guests who sat in such a way that they were blocking the only 2 exits and were in the perfect position to hit Sylver from where a normal person would have a blind spot.

As Sylver leaned forward, he brought his hand up to his mouth and coughed up a cloud of bright red blood.

***

The ambushers timed their attack so perfectly that Sylver had no chance to defend himself.

They shoved a rapier into his side, slashed his throat with a dagger, and the other two threw a sort of net at him.

Sylver struggled but for all his efforts, all he managed to do was make the blood leaking out of his sliced open throat leak out faster.

The poison they used was masked by the taste of garlic, and while it was unlikely to kill a man of Sylver’s size, it was more than enough to slow him down, and most importantly, cloud his mind enough that he wouldn’t be able to use magic.

The 4 that had killed Sylver were men, as far as Sylver could tell, they had a similar appearance to Gregory, although their spikes were dark orange as opposed to brown.

The net covering Sylver’s body was slippery, and it contracted all around him, which made his exposed arms, legs, and face, look like a piece of meat wrapped in butcher’s twine.

The 4 men didn’t waste any time celebrating and quickly got to work hiding Sylver’s corpse inside a bag that looked like it was meant to store mattresses. With surprising ease, they shoved the floating corpse into the bag, sealed it shut, and the two men that threw the net got to work wrapping the bag up to make it as small as possible.

The man behind the bar, who had replaced the barman who had been here when Syvler first walked in, was trying to open the back door when he noticed that the bright red blood in the water wasn’t dispersing. In fact, it was clumping together, and there were now red flakes of congealed blood floating around.

When the man pulled at the door handle, the door didn’t budge.

He pulled again, and as he took a deep breath, he noticed that around the edges of the square door, there was a thin layer of red-clumped blood.

The man turned around to the sound of coughing and saw one of the men pulling something out of the gills on his torso.

His fingers came away red.

He dug deeper into the slits on the side of his body, hidden by the spikes covering him, and the more he dug, the more red blood clumps he found.

Within seconds everyone was shoving their fingers into their gills, except the jellyfish woman, who was running her tentacles on the top of her scalp. Her head was shaped as if she was a normal person wearing a large hat, sort of mushroom-shaped, which was ironic given the current predicament.

As all 5 men and 1 woman grabbed at their equivalent of a throat and with all the strength they could muster tried to cough out the thing blocking their breathing.

The man nearest to Sylver’s corpse yanked at his gills hard enough that he tore something, and the dark green liquid dispersed in the water almost immediately, unlike Sylver’s bright red blood.

The man bleeding from his gills tried to stab the tightly wrapped corpse in the head but unlike his earlier attack, it didn’t glide through the head like he was cutting soft butter, the dagger slipped out of the man’s hand because of the unexpected shock.

As everyone’s vision began to blur from the oxygen deprivation, they saw small black creatures swim out of the bag containing the corpse. The creatures looked like they were liquid, as they quickly swam over to all 6 ambushers, and wrapped so tight around their heads that their skulls felt like they might crack.

When they tried to grab at the ink-like creatures, they found their hands glued to them, and the more they struggled the less strength they had, and the more their hands got stuck.

Sylver used a single piece of [Black Mass] to cut the bag open, and somewhat dramatically rose out of the bag as if he was some puppet being pulled up by a string.

He carefully pulled the mushroom glued to his neck off and surrounded it with the remaining red spore floating inside the room. Sylver condensed the red sticky fungus into a sphere, touched it with his hand, and disintegrated it into fine ash.

At Spring’s reminder, Sylver pulled the bent rapier trapped in the side of his robe out and discarded it towards the ceiling.

Roughly 10 [Petty] shade-infused [Black Mass] blobs swam out of Syvler’s robe, removed the ambushers' weapons, checked their bodies for suicide capsules, and after cutting off their clothing until only their undergarments remained, glued all 6 ambushers to the floor, in a seating position.

Sylver floated over to the bar and looked through the bottles they had, while one of the blobs of [Black Mass]suffocating one of the ambushers released his face so he could see and breathe. The red fungus inside the man’s gills deflated enough for some oxygen-infused water to pass through.

As the man began to regain consciousness, Sylver floated over to him, placed a stood a foot away from the man, on the floor, and sat down on it.

As the man coughed up chunks of slimy red mushroom, Sylver merely stared at him and waited for the man to meet his eye.

“Can you understand me?” Sylver asked.

As a response the spikes on the man’s body spread out and flapped around wildly, but with almost 40 kilograms of shade and mana-infused [Black Mass] holding him down he couldn’t even make a strong enough current to move Sylver’s hair.

“Nod if you understand me. Or I’m going to break one of your fingers,” Sylver said, with a glance at the man’s left hand.

With a great deal of reluctance, the man-made proper eye contact with Sylver and nodded.

“Alright,” Sylver said, as he pointed at himself. “My name is Chrysanthemum. My friends call me Chrys. But my full name is Chrysanthemum. Try to say it with me. Chrys-am-them-mum. Chrys-am-them-mum,” Sylver said but the man’s mouth wasn’t moving.

Sylver held his other hand up so the man could see it, opened it so his fingers were clearly visible, and very slowly, curled his pinkie closed.

There was a popping sound from the man’s left hand, followed by him breaking eye contact, and struggling once again against the impossibly sticky, fluid, and harder than any rock, [Black Mass] liquid.

“Say it with me,” Sylver repeated, as he wiggled his ring finger, “Chrys-Am-Them-Mum.”

Sylver waited a good 20 seconds but the man did nothing more than sit there and catch his breath.

He curled his ring finger, his middle finger, his pointer, and only when the thumb was left did the man make a noise Sylver’s ears were able to register.

“Kris-um-thium,” the Finnish man mumbled.

“Close enough. Say it ten times,” Sylver ordered.

His pronunciation only got worse with each attempt but with the 7th Krisi-umi-thium-mimum, the man’s left eye flickered with lightening.

The struggling man took a very deep breath, and then green blood exploded out of his face. Sylver made the [Black Mass]holding him down pull his head back, and he saw that both of the man’s eyes were scorched black and that there was a small crack on his forehead. The crack was wide enough that Sylver could see the man’s brain.

Sylver flinched as the bottom of a sandal appeared in his face, and as he floated back, he saw that Chrys was floating in the water, upright, but sideways, facing the left wall.

Her hands were on her hips, she was leaning forward, and she was squinting at the left wall.

“Can you hear me?” a disembodied voice said from somewhere farabove Sylver, far higher than the ceiling allowed.

“I can hear you,” Sylver answered.

“I saw them kill you… I thought…” Chrys couldn’t put the right words together.

“Right. I can see how me getting my throat cut open, and then being fully motionless might have made you think they killed me…” Sylver said.

“In hindsight, I may have overreacted,” Chrys said with a fair amount of awkwardness in her voice.

Sylver chose to not dwell on how little trust she had in his ability not to die from an unenchanted dagger, after consuming what tasted like relatively cheap and weak poison.

“Who are these guys, and what do they want,” Sylver asked.

“They want to kill you,” Chrys answered.

Sylver rolled his eyes and gestured for Chrys to continue.

She remained silent and continued squinting at the wall.

“Why do they want to kill me?” Sylver asked.

Chrys’ image flickered and shifted 4 meters to the left.

“Because they… they… uh… they are…” Chrys’ voice came from the floor, then from the ceiling, then from the tip of Sylver’s nose, right in front of his face. “They…”

“Alright, the why doesn’t matter, where are their headquarters? Their secret underground lair, their cult temple,” Sylver asked.

One of the unconscious creatures started struggling with inhuman strength and managed to get one hand out from the binding [Black Mass]. But before he could do anything the dark material on his face exploded, and left behind 2 fully burned-out eyes, along with a giant crack down the forehead.

“Chrys?” Sylver asked.

“They have some kind of resistance. Give me a minute,” Chrys said through gritted teeth, although her image was just standing there, squinting.

“Let me try something,” Sylver offered, as he floated over to the barman, and removed the suffocating helmet from his head.

Sylver forced water to flow through his now clear throat and fins, and just as the man began to wake up, Sylver placed his hands on either side of the man’s head, pulled them away, and using the lower portion of his palms, struck him square on the temples.

The man didn’t even make a sound, he went from being unconscious to being dazed.

After 10 seconds passed and the man’s face started to move, Sylver pulled his hands away, and once again struck him on either side of his temple.

“Better?” Sylver asked, as the man leaned back, and his face exploded with dark green blood. Some of the chunks of eyeball reached Sylver, but his robe immediately brushed them away.

“Fuck’s sake…” Chrys’ voice said from the ceiling.

“Let me guess…” Sylver said.

“They’re in the government… And there are over 500 of them…” Chrys said in a whisper, that wasn’t any quieter than her normal speaking voice.

“Ah… That would have been my 6th guess…” Sylver said.

“They’re… They are trying to gather the medallions to… Conquer the surface world?” Chrys asked.

“Of course they are... They don’t have a set location, they have a small group of priests that no one knows the identity of,” Sylver offered as he crossed his arms over his chest and sat back down on his stool.

“Yes…”

“They don’t know how to find the priests, because the priests always find them when they need them to do something,” Sylver said.

“That… explains quite a bit, yes…”

“They have a birthmark that gets cold when a real priest is nearby,” Sylver said.

“They… Yes… You’ve met this group before,” Chrys guessed.

“In a sense… Do you know if the priests are all men, all women, or a mix?” Sylver asked.

The 4th man’s face exploded with heat, and now only the jellyfish woman and one of the net holders remained.

“I don’t know… You’re not going to fight them?” Chrys asked.

It sounded more like a statement than a question, but the fact that she was confused by what she said was what made Sylver interpret it as a question.

“Priests armed with holy magic aren’t a good matchup for me. Especially underwater. So I’ll-”

“Wait, stop moving,” Chrys said.

Sylver felt the skin on his spine shiver, and then it was as if he had had the breath knocked out of him, except he could tell that no amount of sucking up of air or water would relieve the pressure.

Both feelings slowly dispersed as Chrys began to speak.

“Ok. Your main concern is that they will target Edna if you leave… But we’re lucky, she’s known for working with everyone who comes from the surface, so they think there’s no further connection between you two… And she is romantically involved with one of the locals… If you leave today, they won’t do anything to her,” Chrys explained, as her image slowly began to turn clockwise.

“Fantastic, I’ll leave today,” Sylver said.

“They don’t have any agents outside of the sea… And they don’t know what you were given by the girl’s father… They only know you spoke to the snake women because… They were told you spoke to them by the priests…” Chrys said, as the second to last fish creature’s face exploded, and left behind an eyeless corpse with a crack on its forehead.

Only the jellyfish woman thing remained.

“Alright, great work Chrys, thank you very much for the help,” Sylver said, as he called back all the blobs of [Black Mass]and saw that the inside of the jellyfish woman’s head was pitch black. Presumably her eyes and jellyfish equivalent of a forehead were inside her head.

“The amount of mental pressure I need to apply to get into their heads is like rolling a bowling ball on a paper-thin glass sheet,” Chrys explained sheepishly as if she was talking about having burned an omelette, as opposed to killing 6 people.

“Fair enough… While you’re here, do you mind passing a message to Lola, Zelvash, and Ging?” Sylver asked.

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