{Chapter: 141: Absorbing Pain II}
Those were not just whispers in the void, nor were they aimless shadows clinging to the ruins of a forgotten city. They were curses. Resentments. The lingering emotional remnants of native souls who had met their brutal ends at the hands of abyssal invaders. Every echo of their pain, every unspoken scream, remained suspended in the spiritual air like festering wounds that refused to heal.
To most beings, these aftershocks of suffering were just ambient negative energy—useless, maddening, or toxic to the soul. The kind of force that twisted nature, drove mortals insane, or corrupted the land into a necrotic wasteland. But for Dex—who held little dominion over the very concept of [Pain]—these fluctuations were more than noise. They were coherent. They were legible. They were messages.
Faint. Fractured. But undeniably present.
He didn't need the skulls to speak. Their pain already had a voice.
Dex narrowed his eyes and inhaled deeply, drawing in the invisible haze of anguish like a priest drinking from a sacred chalice. His lungs burned slightly—not from any physical irritant, but from the sheer intensity of spiritual torment now pouring into him.
He wanted to try something. Something few demons would even dare consider.
He wanted to read the pain.
Not simply feel it, or use it as fuel—but to peel apart its layers, extract the individual memories beneath the agony, and reconstruct them like a shattered mirror reforming its reflection.
His body tensed. His wings twitched.
With a thought, he activated his innate ability: [Pain-Torture].
The world around him shifted.
The giant tower beneath his feet—the grotesque monument formed of fused skulls and steel—ceased to appear as solid stone. In Dex's altered perception, it twisted and pulsed like an immense, writhing creature. The bones seemed to melt, reform, and ripple, exhaling waves of cursed energy that rolled across the land like invisible tides.
Within these pulses, he heard it.
Whispers.
Screams.
Cries for mercy that never came.
They came from all directions, a storm of voices clawing at his ears, at his soul, at the very concept of peace. They were desperate to be heard, to be acknowledged, to inflict the pain they could no longer release upon the living.
Dex didn't flinch.
A slow smile curled across his lips.
He knew this sensation all too well. He had felt it before—when his body tore itself apart during his last evolution, when his bones reassembled in a new configuration and his mind split open to accommodate higher understanding.
This wasn't suffering. It was information.
The pain was telling a story.
Chaotic fragments of memory began to surge into his consciousness like shattered glass being swept into a funnel. Faces, landscapes, languages, screams, the iron taste of blood, the terror of children being ripped from their mothers, the howls of defiance from soldiers, the screams of women who were r@p£d brutally the silence of betrayed priests and gods—it all flooded him in jagged, overlapping slivers.
And yet... he could piece them together.
Memory by memory.
Bit by bit.
Dex remained motionless atop the tower for several minutes, eyes closed, heart steady, breath shallow. From the outside, it looked as though he were meditating—but on the inside, it was a maelstrom.
He began to learn things. Small things. The city had been called Taliemar, once a center of arcane scholarship. Its people had developed rituals to resist corruption, but the attack had been sudden, overwhelming, and meticulously planned. The Abyss had not simply consumed the city—it had studied it first.
Dex absorbed these facts, filing them away. Every scrap was a piece of a greater puzzle. He didn't yet know what the full picture looked like—but he would.
He would.
Then, pain.
Real pain.
His body stiffened.
A sharp gasp escaped his lips—"Hssst!"
His vision blurred. His heartbeat thundered in his ears.
Something had gone wrong.
Like a dam breaking, the flood of suffering turned from a stream into a tsunami. The agony of hundreds of thousands surged into him at once. Every dying breath, every torn muscle, every shattering bone slammed into him like a divine hammer.
Dex staggered, nearly slipping from the peak of the skull-tower. His claws sank into the steel to anchor him as his entire body convulsed.
"Ah... Damn... You bastards...!" he hissed through clenched teeth, his voice raw and ragged.
Even for him—a creature who had once flayed his own body during the evolution—this was beyond tolerance.
He tried to sever the connection.
The ability obeyed, but the pain lingered.
His arms trembled. His knees buckled.
Every cell in his body screamed with the phantom sensations of thousands of horrific deaths. His nervous system began to glitch—like a puppet trying to dance on frayed strings.
Somewhere inside his chest, he could feel his heart fluttering irregularly. Not out of fear. But from the massive neurological overload. Even a demon's body had its limits.
If he were human, his mind would have already snapped.
If he were weaker, he would've been reduced to ash by the sheer force of memory-pain.
But he was Dex.
And Dex endured.
After several agonizing minutes, he finally stood straight once more. His body ached. His muscles throbbed. His hands were still clenched, bleeding slightly from where his claws had pierced his palms—but his gaze had sharpened.
A slow exhale escaped him.
"I overreached," he admitted aloud, speaking to the wind.
But his voice wasn't angry. It was thoughtful. Calculating.
This attempt had not been a failure. No—it had proven the potential of the method.
The location had simply been too weak. Too few survivors. Too few detailed impressions. It had been a test run.
But the idea worked.
In a truly ancient battlefield—like the inner rings of the Bottomless Abyss, where trillions had died over tens of thousands of years—he could harvest memories beyond reckoning. There, the pain would be so dense it could form a living archive. A psychic library written in blood and agony.
And he would be the only one able to read it.
One day, when he ascended to the rank of Greater Demon, or perhaps even Demon Lord, he would return to such places.
He would walk through the fields of the dead as if strolling through a study.
He would pluck secrets from the bones.
He would learn forgotten truths, uncover hidden weapons, perhaps even glimpse the strategies of elder gods long erased from history.
It would all be his.
And the best part?
All those who died believing they were lost... would still serve him.
Even in death.
Even in agony.
They would be useful.
He chuckled, a dark, dry sound.
"No rest for the damned," he murmured. "But they'll make fine librarians."
With that, Dex unfurled his wings once more. The wind howled in response, kicking up ash and bone dust from the ruins below.
He took off into the sky, leaving the tower behind—but already imagining the next site. A deeper graveyard. A greater city. A blacker memory.
And this time... he'd be ready.
*****
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