Shadow Slave novel Chapter 3244

The Jade Palace was a place of stark contrast. The fuming volcano, the soaring peak of a mountain; the white snow, the black ash. Heat and cold clashed here like sworn enemies, even if they were like two sides of the same coin.

Sunny and Mordret had been the same once, a long time ago. Both shadows and reflections were masters of mimicry, after all, so their powers shared a common trait. However, as people, they could not have been more different.

Now that neither of them was truly a human, though, their past differences seemed faint and distant. Sunny could not bring himself to feel the same intense emotions Mordret had stirred in him once — fear, anger, caution, bitterness, distrust... it was not the same Mordret anymore, after all.

He had not been the same when they entered the Nightmare, and after thousands of years that they had been apart, that distance could have only grown.

And yet, Mordret did not feel like a stranger. On the contrary, meeting him made Sunny feel a faint sense of nostalgia.

The dire passions that had once blazed in his heart were like cold embers now, and meeting someone from the distant days of his youthful innocence felt like meeting an old friend.

Sunny offered Mordret a reserved smile. That said... he had no intention of trusting the King of Nothing. The man had always been a wild card, deviously unpredictable and entirely impossible to prevent. Thousands of years spent in the Nightmare must have only exacerbated his strange personality, no matter which version of Mordret had become the last and only one.

‘Still. Seeing him is strangely... reassuring.’

Sunny looked at his own face reflected in Mordret's eyes.

“So, how have you been?"

Mordret lingered for a moment, studying him with a neutral expression. Then, wrapping his dark cloak around himself to stave off the frigid wind, he shrugged.

"My Nightmare has been uneventful.”

Sunny could not help but scoff.

Countless years spent in a world where gods and daemons mingled with humans, battling beings of the Void from time to time, and this guy had the audacity to say that nothing particularly notable had happened?

It was hard to believe.

Then again, very few things seemed truly notable when one looked at them from the towering height of eternity.

Mordret smiled faintly and looked away.

“Well, maybe I did have one or two close brushes with death. And perhaps I did experience many wondrous things... and countless harrowing things, as well."

He sighed.

"Unlike the rest of you, I barely experienced the Unmaking. I spent some time in the Great Mirror, side by side with Mirage, sharing in her vibrant fantasies. Then, I ran away and hid myself in the eyes of humans, experiencing life after life through them. Some of those people were wonderful; some of them were monstrous. Most were somewhere in the middle. Sharing their lives was my attempt to engineer my own Unmaking and prepare myself for Apotheosis."

Opening his arms, he gave Sunny an elegant bow.

“But as you see, I am still mortal. Eventually, I was overcome by nostalgia and decided to travel down memory lane... perhaps to remind myself who I was, or maybe simply because I had no other ideas. So, I snuck into the Ivory Tower, thinking of killing Hope... but instead, I stayed there with her for a few centuries, trying to spy on Nether in the Sky Below in the process. With little success, naturally."

Mordret smiled faintly, then shrugged.

“So much time has passed, so I thought that I would have changed. And I did. But in many ways... the most important ways... I am still the same. Don't you find it curious? I thought I had left my Flaw behind, but even after becoming whole, after living immeasurably longer as a complete being than I had ever been broken... I am still the same shattered, fractured person. There's still no place for someone like me in the world, because there's no one else like me. So, if anything, I have become more like myself than I have ever been — despite all the time that has passed."

Sunny studied him silently for a while, then nodded.

"Yeah. It's a bit curious. Perhaps I am the same... honestly, I can't tell just yet. My mind is still reeling.”

Mordret looked at him with interest.

"What about you? How have you been?"

Sunny let out a quiet chuckle, his voice dark.

"Not too great, to be honest."

He inhaled deeply, then spoke in a neutral tone:

"I was quite unfortunate. My Unmaking was as vicious as they come, and at the end of it, there was barely anything of me left. My spirit did not collapse entirely, but that was about it."

He shook his head.

"But I was incredibly lucky, as well."

Sunny paused for a moment, a pale smile illuminating his face.

“After the Unmaking, I did not really remember who I was. All I wanted was to hide and lick my wounds. So, I crawled into a dark cave and tried to dissolve into the world, sinking into its vastness to escape the pain. I did not know it back then, but that was the first time I almost failed the Nightmare — because if I truly did fuse with the land around me, I would have become a force of nature void of personhood instead of a deity. But, luckily, a little girl wandered into my cave and pulled me back from the edge."

His expression turned warm for a moment, then wistful.

Sunny sighed.

"Later, I went a little mad. I swallowed a human city and killed everyone who lived there... I had a reason, of course, but not a good one. Not nearly good enough to justify my actions, let alone redeem them. That was the second time I came to the precipice of failing — because if I continued in the same manner, I would have probably still become a deity at the end of the Nightmare. Just not the kind of deity our world needs or the kind I wanted to be.”