Pain is an exceptional teacher. But right now, it was just an executioner.
I lay crumpled against the splintered wall, my right arm hanging at a sickening, unnatural angle. Every breath felt like inhaling ground glass. My collarbone was shattered.
Above me, the man who sired me stood panting, the heavy iron poker dripping with my blood.
"Worthless," he spat, kicking me in the ribs for good measure. "The Baron better still pay full price. If he docks my coin because you're bleeding, I'll carve out that cursed eye of yours myself."
I couldn't speak. I was drowning in the metallic taste of my own blood. I tried to retreat into the cold, detached vault of my mind—the place I used to go when my own syndicate interrogations got too messy—but the vault was burning.
Because the grandfather clock had finished striking midnight.
And the freezing prickle in my heart had just violently inverted into a searing, necrotic fire.
I let out a strangled, gurgling scream. The veins beneath my pale skin visibly blackened, tracing a web of dark rot across my neck and arms. My back arched completely off the floorboards in a rictus of unimaginable torment. My organs felt like they were turning to ash inside my abdomen.
"What is this? "my mind shrieked, sheer animal panic finally overriding my intellect. "What is happening to me?"
Then, the voice returned.
It was the same voice from the void. The entity that had judged me. It didn't echo in the room; it detonated directly against the decaying walls of my skull.
"The Seventh Year has come. The Curse awakens. Hear the absolute conditions of your existence, Sinner."
I writhed on the floor, my fingers tearing desperately at my own chest as the black rot spread toward my lungs. My crimson left eye flared with blinding intensity, roasting my optic nerve.
"The Monthly Tithe,"
the voice thundered with cold, unfeeling justice.
"To halt the decay of your flesh, you shall harvest the corrupt. One noble, stained by sin, must fall by your hand every thirty days. Failure is ash."
My heart stuttered. An executioner's quota.
"The Innocent's Blood. Should your blade strike down the pure, or a noble whose heart is free of corruption, the covenant shatters. The rot will consume you instantly, without salvation. You are the executioner, not the judge."
Before I could process the absolute impossibility of those rules, a heavy, rhythmic knock cut through my internal hell.
"Viscount !" a reedy, aristocratic voice called out from the alleyway, dripping with absolute disdain. "Open this hovel. I do not have all night to breathe this filth."
My father panicked. He dropped the bloody poker, scrambling to unlatch the broken door.
A tall man stepped into the shack. He was draped in an opulent velvet cloak that looked absurdly out of place against the rotting wood, his face obscured by a silver-tipped plague doctor's mask.
Baron Sterling. The black-market alchemist.
"I have him, my Lord! " my father stammered, gesturing wildly to the corner where I was convulsing. My skin was turning a sickly shade of grey as the necrosis rapidly advanced. "He tried to run, I had to discipline him, but the eye is perfectly intact! Look at it glow! "
The Baron approached, holding a scented handkerchief to his silver mask. His eyes narrowed behind the glass lenses. He observed my blackening veins. The choking gasps. The unmistakable aura of dark magic devouring me from the inside out.
"You imbecile," the Baron hissed, his voice dropping to a freezing whisper. "He isn't just cursed. The curse is actively consuming him. His mana coils are collapsing. By the time I get him to my laboratory, his blood will be necrotic ash."
The Baron stepped back, disgusted. "He is entirely useless to me."
"No, no, wait!" my father begged, grabbing the Baron's pristine velvet cloak. "You promised! The debt! You said the eye would clear the ledger!"
The Baron looked at the grubby hand staining his cloak. A flicker of profound annoyance flashed across his eyes.
Without a single word, the Baron casually flicked his wrist. A concealed blade, glowing with a faint, acidic green enchantment, slid from his sleeve.
With a movement so fast it blurred, he dragged the blade across my father's throat.
The drunkard's eyes bulged. He let go of the cloak, clutching his neck as corrosive magic instantly ate through his vocal cords and arteries. He collapsed backward, drowning in his own blood, dead before his skull even hit the floorboards.
I watched through a hazy veil of agony. The absolute disregard for human life. The casual, sterile murder to solve a minor inconvenience.
It was exactly the kind of execution I used to order on a daily basis.
The Baron stepped directly over the fresh corpse, looking down at me with mild pity. "A wasted trip. At least I won't have to listen to that pig beg anymore. Enjoy your rot, demon spawn."
He turned his back, preparing to walk out the door.
Thirty days, the God's voice echoed faintly in my dying mind. One noble.
My vision was tunneling into blackness. My heart was struggling to pump the thick, ashen sludge that used to be my blood. I had perhaps ten seconds left to live.
My intellect, entirely stripped of its past-life arrogance, zeroed in on the absolute, primitive core of my being: the desperate, burning will to survive.
My right arm was shattered, but my left hand still possessed a fraction of movement. I remembered my failed trap. And I remembered the small, hollowed-out needle I had stolen from a slum apothecary three weeks ago, heavily coated in concentrated nightshade extract. It was hidden in the seam of my ragged trousers. My last resort.
I stopped thrashing.
I let my head loll to the side. I forced my shallow breathing to stop entirely.
I played dead.
The Baron paused at the doorway. A sadistic, academic curiosity seemed to grip him. He slowly walked back toward me, crouching down to inspect my cursed eye, perhaps wondering if he could quickly gouge it out before the necrosis ruined the optic nerve.
"Fascinating shade of red," the Baron murmured, leaning in close. His exposed neck hovered mere inches from my trembling left hand.
I didn't think. I didn't calculate angles or physics. I simply reacted with the viciousness of a cornered rat.
My left hand snapped upward with the very last ounce of strength my failing body possessed. I drove the poisoned needle directly into the soft, unarmored flesh beneath his jawline.
The Baron let out a sharp gasp of shock, jerking backward. He slapped a hand to his neck, pulling the dirty needle free.
"You little—! " He raised his enchanted blade to strike me down.
But slum nightshade acts fast...
The Baron's eyes rolled back in his head. The green-enchanted blade slipped from his trembling fingers, clattering onto the floorboards. He stumbled, clutching his chest as his heart underwent massive, catastrophic arrest, and crashed down heavily beside the body of my father.
For a long moment, the only sound in the shack was the dripping of blood.
Then, a miraculous, terrifying sensation washed over me. The freezing cold vanished. The searing fire extinguished. The black, necrotic webbing on my skin rapidly receded, fading back into healthy, pale flesh.
I gasped, sucking in a massive lungful of air. The pain of my broken collarbone remained, but the soul-deep rot was completely gone.
In my mind's eye, a spectral, bloody hourglass materialized. The sand at the top was full.
29 Days, 23 Hours, 59 Minutes.
I lay amidst the absolute carnage, the blood of two men soaking into my ragged clothes. I stared at my trembling, blood-stained hands.
I had survived. But the cost was undeniable. I was no longer a phantom architect pulling strings from the safety of a penthouse.
I was in the dirt. And to stay alive, I was going to have to become a monster all over again.