It was an odd day.
Elli had learned long ago to trust her instincts. She didn't believe in luck, fate, or coincidence—not in a place like this, where the gods watched and the walls whispered.
But the moment the cell door groaned open, and the guards tossed in a limp body like discarded meat, a knot of unease tightened in her heart.
She didn't move, but her eyes flicked to Izora, who had already taken a step forward.
"Don't," Elli said quietly.
Izora halted mid-stride. Ceaer and Emith glanced over, but said nothing. Years of surviving in this dungeon had taught them all: when Elli used that tone, you listened.
The body on the ground twitched just once. Elli eyes narrowed.
She recognized it instantly.
A Soul Devourer.
Not a mature one—this one was young. Barely formed. A flickering thing, like a candle guttering in a storm. Its soul was chaos incarnate, writhing and unstable, the edges of it fraying like burnt cloth. But the most terrifying thing wasn't its madness. It was the hunger.
Soul Devourers were most dangerous when dying. When pushed to the brink, they didn't go quietly. They swallowed. Spirit, light, people—worlds, if you believed the old legends. Death wasn't an ending for them. It was a collapse, a singularity.
This one wasn't even a year old, Elli realized. Captured straight after its birth. Its spiritual energy drained to the point of near-death. Probably by THEM. They must've thought it would recover by feeding prisoners. So they tossed it into her prison cell.
But that was the part she didn't understand.
She had masked this cell. Shielded it from every watcher, even from their thoughts.
I was careless. It sees there is a mistake in her part. But that is for another time. Now.
She couldn't let this thing recover. The risk was too high.
Elli stood slowly. With a whisper and flick of her fingers, a subtle spell laced through the air. Her cellmates slumped into sleep, gently and without pain. They didn't need to see what came next.
She cast a barrier around the Soul Devourer, locking it in the barrier.
But it stirred. Its eyes flicked open—wild, white—and in an instant, it consumed the barrier.
Elli did not blink.
She whispered, "Prison of Endless Earth."
No magic circle appeared but by flick of her wrist, the air groaned.
The room trembled as a stone pillar shot upward, its trajectory precise—meant to crush the Devourer's skull. But at the last moment, its body twisted, joints bending in ways that defied anatomy, narrowly evading the strike. A second pillar erupted from below. The Devourer reacted instantly, driving its fist through the stone. It shattered on impact—but the recoil disrupted its momentum, forcing it to land.
It crouched low, claws scraping the floor, eyes locked onto her. By all calculations, it should have reached her by now. The prison was small. Distance meant nothing to something that fast.
And yet—she remained impossibly far.
Its gaze flicked between the stone walls, then back to her.
Confusion crept into its features.
Elli watched without expression. The spell had taken hold.
Endless Earth.
A spatial-folding construct—a maze of illusory terrain overlaid atop the cell's true dimensions. No matter how fast it moved, how directly it charged, it would never reach her. The prison bent space, extended ground, made the immediate infinite.
Another stone mass dropped from above—bigger than the last. The Devourer didn't dodge. Instead, its mouth opened wide, unnaturally wide, and it swallowed the boulder whole.
Its eyes flashed white.
Then it moved.
Elli didn't react.
A spike jutted from the left wall—fast. The Devourer sidestepped. Another rose from the floor. It leapt. A third followed from above. Then another. Then another.
The rhythm was relentless.
Stone after stone, strike after strike.
It smashed some, dodged others, consumed a few. But the pattern never ended. There was no room to rest. No rhythm to master. Only survival.
It screamed—shrill, primal, defiant.
Elli remained motionless. Observing.
This wasn't a fight.
It was a containment.
It screamed. Fought. Lashed out at the earth itself—until it couldn't.
Until it stopped.
Through the veil of dust and rising stone, Elli saw the creature slumped to the floor. Its limbs twitched weakly, pinned beneath slabs of conjured rock. Its once-flaring presence had dimmed to a flicker—like the final breath of a candle's flame.
It was dying.
The damage from its soul being drained had been far more severe than she initially assessed.
Perfect, she thought.
Without a word, she reached into her sleeve and retrieved a golden plane bell—small, delicate, tuned not for sound but for souls.
She let it float, whispering a simple command in an old tongue. The bell drifted through the air toward the Devourer, its chime silent, waiting.
As it hovered above the broken creature—eyes half-lidded, barely aware—it snapped.
In one final surge of instinct, it lunged upward and swallowed the bell whole.
Elli didn't flinch.
A moment passed.
Then the sound came—a single chime. Clear. Final.
Its body jolted. Eyes widened. For the first time, something like understanding—or fear—crossed its face.
Then nothing.
The light in its eyes faded. Muscles slackened. It collapsed, still and silent.
Dead.
Elli released the spell. The summoned earth dissolved into dust and the bell returned to her. The pressure lifted from the room.
She stood over its corpse, expression unreadable. Soul Devourer bodies were valuable—ritual components, potion bases, bloodlines—but she wouldn't keep it. Not this one. Too risky. The higher-ups were always watching for anomalies, and even she couldn't hide everything.
She turned to leave.
And then it happened.
The heart beat.
Once.
She froze. No. Just an echo. Residual magic?.
Then it beat again. And again.
Elli's eyes widened.
I killed it. I drained it to nothing. There was no physical damage—intentionally, to avoid detection. The body should've been nothing but a husk.
And yet—
The soul that should have been obliterated.
She looked—not with her eyes, but with her other sense. The gift that let her see into the hearts of things. Souls had shape, and color, and truth. The soul of soul Devourers were dark blue—viscous, shapeless, like the warped ether of the Void.
Not only that it still there, it is turning yellow.
The only beings with yellow colored soul is human.
She reeled back. Possession?. That's impossible. Mutation?. No its like possession. She don't know how the human's done it especially its a soul devour. She had to stop it.
Her mind spun. If she killed it now—whatever was inside—it would trigger something. Whoever had done something like of this magnitude, they will became alert.
Have they found me? Her spellwork was perfect. There were no traces. No slips.
And yet, here it was.
A variable.