The Karmic Needle and Thread.
The two couldn’t have recognized anything else more than this pair of items. This wasn’t just because they were Seijin and this treasure had long been the storied item of their Clan. It was because this was the item that they had personally crafted as the most ancient Ancestor of the Seijin.
And now, it had somehow ended up in Theron’s hands.
How? How was that possible?
So many items across the continent had so randomly vanished just weeks ago. How had Theron gotten his hands on them? It just felt so...
It was like these items had flown in with just a single purpose in mind, the purpose of making themselves home with the only one that mattered to them at all...
The Luminescent Tower. The Ebonstone Mines. The Mandate Core. The Dagger Call Platform. Theron’s father’s necklace. His father’s short sword. The slab in his heart. The library. And finally...
The Karmic Needle and Thread.
"I don’t know why these items came to me, or even how this fake world formed them in the first place. But I know that they’ve chosen to acknowledge me for whatever reason, and each one will play a role in my truest revenge.
"But you two... I have truly run out of ideas on how to make your existence more miserable. The only thing left seems to be time, but I feel like... I am also running out of it."
Theron’s voice had always been gentle, the sort of voice you could listen to for an eternity and fall asleep to every night. But when a voice one spoke such chilling words, it made them feel tens of times more potent, as though the cold of the world was worming into their souls.
"So... we’ll do this instead..."
Theron took the needle. It radiated an aura of blue steel, pulsing with might. It was thin, but only relatively so. Being about a foot in length, its width was about a third of a finger or so.
It was this needle Theron stabbed right through his own heart.
He didn’t even hesitate, his eyes radiating the same cool chill, a dense violet pulsing from within it.
Slowly, he tied the end of the transparent thread to it and a hand. Illusory scissors formed and he snipped them. Then, he repeated the process.
He walked forward after he was done. Raising his free hand, he pointed forward.
The twin threads, attached to the needle piercing into his chest, rushed out, thrusting through their hearts.
Their screams filled the skies, and yet Theron continued to speak so softly, so slowly, so gently.
"I have run low on patience. So... I believe the best death for you two is to experience a mere fraction of what I have..."
What followed was a sight that could chill the most ardent criminal’s soul. The hearts of Gian and Garethon fluctuated from an icy cage to a billowing heat.
They weathered the storm of their heartbeats slowing to a crawl and then rapidly rising again until it seemed like they might burst.
Their hearts began to shear apart as though rubber under tremendous loads, their blood, or what was left of it after Theron’s dissection, pooling out sometimes in gushing waves, and sometimes in slow pulses that froze before hitting the ground.
The horror on their faces was painted for all to see as their heads slammed back again and again. As their eyes rolled to the back of their skulls, they desperately tried to kill themselves, to end the suffering they were experiencing.
For so long, they had clung to the hope that they could live, that they could live out their dreams.
But right now, they didn’t even want it.
The waves of heat and cold weren’t the problem. Ironically enough, they were the easiest thing to deal with. It was what they were rooted in, where they came from, originated from, that was the real problem.
The Karmic Needle and Thread did something very simple. It tied the fates of two otherwise unrelated things together. It was actually how Garethon had forcefully tied Wren to an ordinary sword.
The results of this were quite shocking, and if not for Theron, Wren might have become Garethon’s fifth Divine Realm expert, having successfully illuminated the path of his blade to make it sentient.
However, Theron wasn’t using it right now at all.
All he had done was reverse the Karmic Tie that Garethon had formed on him the day his family died.
Right now... these two were experiencing the pain and turmoil in his heart as he was experiencing it. Not only this, but they were forced to experience it as someone of his Mandates would as well.
The constant chill and oppressive heat were eating them alive.
They slammed their heads into the tree continuously, their howls filling the air.
Gian accidentally bit off his own tongue, but the rest of the pain was so great he didn’t even notice.
Garethon clenched his own jaw so hard that his jaw fractured down a line, causing his mouth to hang limply to one side. And yet he too didn’t seem to notice.
They unleashed one violent slam after another, their bodies begging, pleading for death.
At this point, their souls seemed to have long atrophied, any will they had remaining collapsing into heaps of depression and helplessness.
And then they finally fell silent.
They didn’t succeed in killing themselves by smashing their heads against the tree. The irony of it all was that these trees were just sturdy enough to hold them in place in their weakened states, but too frail to cause lasting damage to their skeletons.
Every smash had only dented the tree far more and added to their pain, but they were so desperate they didn’t even notice.
Those two sounds just now... that was actually their hearts finally exploding between the violent tugs of Theron’s path.
They hung there, bleeding out, their lives slowly wilting away in real time. The desperation they felt still there, and yet their bodies hopeless to do anything about it without their hearts pumping.
That was it. That was a death fitting for these two.
And yet, so perfect as it was...
He still felt so very empty.
Theron fell to his knees, silent tears streaking down his cheeks.
Right at that moment, an invisible blade appeared behind his back.