Chapter 355: Weakness

Chapter 355: Weakness

Dug and the others quickly turned their mounts around and rushed towards Gerald.

The sudden shouts and screams of pain came out of nowhere and they thought they were under attack. However, as they tried to calm him down and see what was wrong, they were confused.

Gerald didn't have any visible wounds or bruises, and he also seemed to be calming down rapidly.

But, a while later when his situation seemed to have stabilized, his expression remained...odd. A blank stare adorned his face as lifeless eyes now pierced into the distance.

He still had a pulse and was breathing normally, he was just completely unresponsive. Light, movement, sound, even pain...he reacted to none of it. It was as if his mind shut down all of a sudden, leaving him in an uncanny state between consciousness and unconsciousness.

***

Gerald was dead.

Or at least, that's how he felt. His mind was currently a bloody mess.

When his Soul touched the orb, his mind suddenly experienced so much pain that he thought he was really going to die. Nothing he ever felt before came even close, and he even felt what could only be described as his Soul leaving his body.

What only lasted a second in reality felt like endless centuries to him. And now he was trapped in his own mind, unable to leave, buried deep beneath the surface, where the origin of his life was stored.

He was currently staring at the black mist, completely speechless. His Soul It It was split apart. Straight down the middle, nearly bisecting his Soul was a crack, edges burning and crumbling off into dust, like a tall building after a fire.

A third of it was gone. A third of his Soul was simply evaporated, disappeared, gone in the blink of an eye. It was simply wiped from existence in that split second.

He could not believe it. Months of battles, thousands of mortal Souls, simply gone just like that. What kind of insanity did those orbs contain?! Updated from novelb(i)n.c(o)m

It came like a bolt of lightning that could kill hundreds in a blink of an eye, and tried to dosomething.

Despite experiencing it, he had no clue what happened. It was too fast, too painful.

He could not move a muscle.

Feeling the rhythmic movement of his body up and down, he realized something was under him, moving. But he had no energy to lift his body and look. He just remained like that, motionless, for who knows how long.

Slowly he felt his body waking up, and he could wiggle his fingers.

Weirdly, there was no magic he could use. It was completely blocked inside his body. It was not the first time he experienced it, but it made him extremely nervous nonetheless.

It seemed that the damage to his Soul was much more severe than he thought. It was becoming dangerous.

He once again gathered the little bit of focus that his mind was currently capable of, and this time summoned a bit of water directly into his mouth.

Despite quite a bit of it spilling out, it felt so nice drinking a sip of cool water on such a hot day. It was barely enough to moisten his throat but felt so heavenly.

He waited some more time as the energy was gradually returning to his limbs, all while slowly drinking sips of water every few minutes. He felt so tired all the while, and only his stubbornness kept him awake.

It was towards the evening, when the air cooled down, and the sun was low on the horizon, that he finally gathered enough strength to lift himself up. It was a monumental task. Just moving slightly required him to use all his willpower, as if he spent the last month motionless in a coma.

"Ugh" He groaned.

He was currently on some sort of an improvised bed on top of the Earth Dragon. Looking around, he noticed the rest of the gang riding their own mounts, and they didn't yet seem to have noticed him waking up yet.

The men all looked tired and exhausted from constant travel under the hot sun, and the small shade made of white cloth under which they sat didn't seem to help much to brighten their mood.

A while later they stopped and began setting the camp for the night.

The cold of the night helped in giving Gerald a bit more strength as he didn't feel like his entire being was cooking in an oven anymore. One of the warriors notice him sitting upright, and quickly notified the boss.

"Gerald!" Dug came running, clearly relieved to see him awake. "Oh, thank the gods, we nearly thought you were dead!"