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Evil Occultist

It's not easy being an evil CULT LEADER! Impulsive and charismatic beginner occultist Ted tries to murder someone with a forbidden spell and instead gets the attention of a hostile sun god. The only way Ted can shake off the influence of the divine being and avoid being absorbed is to perform a sacrifice - ten thousand souls, and they have to be willing. While Ted has no problems getting some poor sods to give up their souls for free, ten thousand is still quite a number and he decides to form his cult somewhere safer than his own homeland: the FIN, a great island in the cold, dark south where the sun god is weakened for half of the year. Ted needs to fight for dominance during his race to control the population of the Fin - first in order to get the technology needed to push through the unnatural storms that have plagued the ocean around the island, then in order to actually get the people to support his evil, insane, self-serving cause. He recruits people left and right, charming them with his silvery tongue and charisma, but there seems to be a conspiracy against him. Someone wants Ted dead, and it is not the hungry god of sun. Ted is not alone, though - his best friend, Eknie, is like a rabid yet loyal dog. She will stop at nothing to get Ted to share his life with her, but Eknie, the diplomatic bard lady from the Great Eastern Kingdom, is a benevolent stalker. Probably. Mostly. She arranges a meeting with someone who can invent a machine that will get the cult to the Fin in no time at all: the genius engineer and scientist, Madorn. He isn't cheap labor, of course... The sun god is nothing like Ted would have imagined. Always breathing down on his neck once the dreaded morning comes, its intrusive and sinister ways make him fear daylight. The god can make him its slave if it is not pleased with the regular sacrifices, and this ends up in Ted creating an army of ZOMBIES. The world of Ad Rath is in the middle of a technological revolution. Steam is utilized in all forms of transport - steam cars, steam trains, whatever one can imagine, it probably runs on steam. There is potential for more, though - the southern islands have been simmering inside a megastorm for years and supplies are running low in the barren land of the Fin. To travel all the way down to the cold and uncomfortable South from the safety of the Kingdom of Sennas with its luxury and degeneracy would be a punishment for most. IMPORTANT: The MC is intentionally selfish and evil, causing misfortune and hurt wherever he goes. The other characters are not much better. Don't like, don't read. Mostly, though, Ted is just saving his own skin and gathering wealth, and being evil just for the sake of doing bad things. Don't expect a virtuous hero here. ALSO IMPORTANT: This is a sequel-ish to Water Belongs to the Dead: Heart of the Witch, set 100 years after the end of WBttD:HotW. While it is not needed to read it to understand Evil Occultist, giving it a look can help you familiarize yourself with the world. Love it, hate it, tell me in the comments anyway, vote, make me work even harder. discord link finally. it's an actual functioning server afaik: https://discord.gg/tmeZKG5dqT

IkuSaari · Kỳ huyễn
Không đủ số lượng người đọc
254 Chs

Sacrifice Anything

By midnight, the sun had obviously disappeared long ago, and Ted was as delirious from hunger as he was feom sleep deprivation. Of course, this was nothing compared to what the initiates had to be experiencing.

They seemed to be doing just fine when it came to trance-like concentration.

Ted had tasked them with making a mystical connection with the weather as they chanted. He did not know if anyone would actually get lucky and get something right about the fictional forecasts, but that would have been a pleasant surprise, considering that he had claimed that no one was an expert on their first try. Technically speaking, that was not exactly wrong. The elusive art of weather forecasts was only partially based on conventional science. The other parts were downright comparable to occultism.

Ted ordered a confused servant to bring him and Eknie some strong, black coffee. Of course, this meant that he would have to urinate sooner or later, and dehydration was already causing him muscle aches and a terrible, desert-like drought inside his mouth. He was not all right, but he had to pretend to be.

He had orchestrated this madness, therefore he had to bear it.

Eknie did seem to be faring a bit better. She took dainty sips of her cup, while Ted guzzled down the coffee like a thirsty horse, and he had never seen her twitch or even change her position in the chair. Perhaps it was some feminine resilience, something that Ted could never have. This made him angry. He liked things that had the potential to include him as well.

The ceremony felt so unbelievably long that Ted was sure that his brew had stopped working hours before the whole thing ended and that the recruits were running on sheer insanity, whipped into a feverish frenzy by the power of repetition. It did end, though, and soon the initiates, now as fully developed Fireflies, burned strands of their own hair with the help of sunlight and a magnifying glass and told Ted about their forecasts. The ones who got the most points would gain some upper level benefits in advance, since flexibility in giving them motivation was very important.

Ted was not as present and awake during the rest of the tedious ceremony as he probably should have been, but Eknie could cover for him, remember what he did not.

He yawned and went to bed, hoping to wake up after sunset, with none of that torture crawling through the curtains.

At this point, he could barely stand candlelight.

He woke up with his curtains mysteriously drawn aside and a terrifying force keeping him down. Someone was in the room, someone he could not see. Everything was bathing in bright sunlight.

A horrible thought crossed Ted's mind – that the sun itself was evil.

If things were indeed so, the whole world was doomed.

He tried to even out his breath, but not even his lungs obeyed him anymore, instead, his breathing took a mechanical rhythm that he had no control over. He felt the intrusion in his body and mind – someone was here, maybe that someone or something was even inside him in an insidious, spiritual way. He was not his own person anymore. The edges of his consciousness were nowhere to be found. Every sharp angle in the room, he felt them as pain, as if he had been nailed to exist all around his field of vision.

The panic attack was such a transcendental one that he did not know who he was anymore. Or what he was, for that matter. Everything was so sharp, like a migraine that enveloped his entire being.

Then that invisible something began to make him levitate.

This feeling of such a hostile force being in his body and all around him was so dreadful that he would have done anything to release himself from its grip. He would have killed Eknie. He would have killed a dog.

He feared what would happen if his body would hit the ceiling. For some reason, the further up he floated, the more terrified he got, and the jolt shook him, except that he shook internally without moving on his own at all.

The ceiling seemed like the last stop on the way to what was probably an infernal place, one to end everything that Ted was or thought he was.

He was willing to commit any sacrifice to spare himself from the fate of being absorbed by the bright, harsh light.

Then everything stopped. He fell back down onto his bed and his vision went black for a split second.

He thought he had died, but he had nothing to prove this with.

He opened his eyes to see a pleasantly dark room, but his heart just would not stop pounding in his chest.

He smoked three clove cigarettes back to back, sitting on the edge of his bed and using a teacup from a fancy set Eknie had gifted him as an ashtray.

He did not know what to make of this, except that he would probably have to please the solar deity somehow, immediately, with bloodshed.

He stretched his legs. The ball was still to be arranged. He had made his servants send out all the invitations with the magnificent art and everything. Ted had decided to use a solar theme. As much as he hated the sun nowadays, there was something about ghe imagery that captivated him.

Something was wrong. There was a trail of blood on the floor.

Ted looked around, but he saw nothing noteworthy. Perhaps he himself had taken some damage while possessed. At least he thought it counted as possession.

He checked his body for wounds or bruises and found none.

He looked around again, rather puzzled, and wiped the blood away. Maybe he did not want to know where it had come from. In any case, he could not be too proud to clean his own messes.

If it was even his own mess.

The servants could not find out what he was actually doing.