Other kingdoms knew this well. This was why they had severed all ties with Humanity, why they had marked it as a forbidden land. Stations were set up along the borders, manned by watchful soldiers and priests, their sole duty to ensure that nothing, no person, no animal, not even a traveler's wagon left the kingdom to carry the corruption beyond. To the outside world, Erik's kingdom was not simply decadent. It was a quarantine zone.

When Erik came to truly understand this, the peace he had felt was shattered. His earlier calmness, his strange acceptance of the kingdom's state, evaporated. Panic gnawed at him. If nothing was done, if he let things continue, then every last soul under his crown would be twisted into a cursed being.

The ordinary, untainted citizens who remained were the last hope of the Humanity Kingdom. The future of his people depended on them. They had to be preserved, protected, kept far from the spreading influence of the cursed spirits. But how?

Once, he would have simply commanded his knights and soldiers. He would have sent them riding across the land, gathering those still sane and drawing them back under his watch. But those days were gone. The culture of indulgence had corroded their discipline. Now there were hardly any men left to order. And even if there were, sending them would be more curse than cure, they themselves might fall to temptation and drag down those they were sent to save.

Erik's steps carried him to his lab before he even realized it, as though some instinct had guided him. The heavy doors creaked open, and he wandered inside, his body weary, his mind heavier still. He let himself collapse onto a worn chair, the air thick with the smell of old parchment, tinctures, and iron.

His eyes fixed upon the figure at the center of the room: a statue of a god.

It was no idol of Mahu, the Origin god his people had long revered. No, Erik's gaze rested on a likeness of Ikem, the God of Verdant Communion, or as Erik had come to call him in secret, the God of Microcosm.

Once, Erik had no interest in Ikem. His devotion had not come from faith, but from necessity. When he began his great project, the transformation of Humanity's bloodline into something closer to his own elven heritage, he quickly found himself lost. To alter a single man's blood was daunting enough, but to reshape the destiny of generations? He had no idea where to begin.

In his desperation, he scoured the doctrines of gods, searching for one whose dominion touched upon what he sought. That was when he found Ikem, whose domain reached into the hidden world beneath the world: the cellular, the infinitesimal, the very language of life. A god who could weave communion even between man and the unseen microcosm that formed him.

Ikem's blessing promised insight into the building blocks of blood, flesh, and inheritance. To Erik, this was salvation and so what began as a plea for guidance slowly twisted into reverence. Before long, Erik was no longer merely studying Ikem's doctrine, he was a worshiper, a believer, a man who whispered prayers between experiments and saw the divine hand in his own work.

To Erik, Ikem was not merely a guide but a great god, one who had revealed to him truths hidden from mortal sight. Though his experiments had ended in failure, in a way, he had succeeded. He had uncovered why his dream could not yet be realized.

The answer was twofold.

The first lay in the gentle aspect of his elven blood. It was a bloodline refined, subtle, and delicate yet because of that, it was easily overwhelmed. When forced into the human frame, its finer traits bent, were swallowed, or pushed aside until only fragments remained. What should have blossomed into beauty withered into frailty.

The second reason was more daunting, and far more damning. Erik's elven bloodline was not of this world. Nana, the living world herself had never known the elven race. To her, they were foreign, invasive. Thus, every attempt to rewrite humanity with elvish essence was met with silent resistance. The world rejected it as though the very soil spat out what was not born of it.

Erik alone was an exception. His body had accepted the merger only because of two unique factors: the dominance of his human counterpart, and the divine artifact he bore, the Last World Spear. Through it, his alien blood had taken root and flourished. But that was his case alone.

Others would not be so fortunate. If he pressed the experiment further, if he tried to seed the same bloodline across his people, the result would not be a reborn race of beauty.

Erik had stumbled upon a new dilemma. Of the two problems weighing on him, he pushed the second to the side, knowing full well it lay beyond his reach. The first, however, he refused to abandon. He had glimpsed a narrow path forward, one born of dangerous compromise: to take the elvish bloodline's most defining trait, their gentle, harmonious nature and twist it into something aggressive.

But in doing so, he would strip the elves of what made them who they were. They would still be elves, yes, but not the kind Erik had once admired, dreamed of, or imagined. Even so, he consoled himself with the thought that they would remain elves in name, and perhaps in form. That small thread of continuity was enough to drive him forward. Sadly, despite his efforts, he had yet to find a way to overwrite or rewrite the elvish gentle aspect.

Alone in his lab, surrounded by faint traces of cursed energy and half-finished experiments, Erik could not help but circle back to another thought, a thought that had been growing in him ever since he began to dwell among his own people in their cursed state. Weeks of immersion among cursed beings had changed him. He had lived with them, endured the suffocating weight of their pervasive aura, the constant pressure of their corruption seeking to draw him in, to bind him to their hunger and despair. Yet something in him resisted. Not only resisted, it transformed.

Erik discovered he could take that aura, that suffocating miasma, and bend it to his will. Instead of breaking him, it enhanced him. He could turn their cursed presence into a mirror that magnified his beauty, heightening his allure, fueling his desire, sharpening his vitality. What drove others to ruin seemed to nourish him.

It was then the realization struck him: his elvish bloodline. Perhaps it was not just a shield but a bridge. Where others would crumble under the spirit of lust and desire, Erik found he could weave it into his very being, make it serve him. The curse was not a curse to him, it was a gift.

So why not merge the two paths? If he succeeded in reshaping his people into elves, would not their cursed nature find harmony, if not balance within that form?

The thought thrilled him. Two birds with one stone: salvation for his people, and peace for himself.

Erik's mind was a storm, torn between the pressing needs of his kingdom and the memory of countless failed experiments. As his thoughts tangled, a sudden sensation tore him from his reverie. It was faint at first, a whisper brushing against his ear, a pull deep in his chest as though an unseen hand beckoned him.

He froze, frowning, his sharp mind immediately alert. Then, with deliberate steps, he rose from his seat. His boots echoed softly across the cold stone floor as he moved through the dimly lit corridors of his laboratory.

Glass tanks lined the walls, their warped shapes filled with the remnants of experiments that had never borne fruit. Some still contained the husks of malformed attempts faintly twitching, forever trapped in states between life and death. Each one was a monument to years of toil and disappointment. Erik's gaze brushed past them, his focus already fixed elsewhere, drawn inexorably by the whisper.

His steps carried him deeper, until at last he stood before a peculiar door. Unlike the rest of the lab, this threshold was not meant for daily use. Erik had built it with his own hands, every curve of the wood and metal reinforced with sigils only he could decipher. The entire surface was etched with runes, now glowing faintly, pulsing as if responding to a heartbeat from the other side.

This door was his greatest safeguard, and his greatest fear. Behind it lay a mystery he both dreaded but could never abandon. Something he had uncovered years ago, buried where it should have remained hidden. He knew little of its true nature only enough to understand its danger.

The godlings themselves had shown how much they feared this. Erik knew this, for their evasiveness had spoken louder than words. They had not taken it from him, not because they were indifferent, but because they could not. By the twisted bargains of politics, it had been found within his lands, and thus ownership was his. Even the godlings, with all their pride, had no say.

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