The Ruined Death Knight

Watching the dark green light that was the soul essence of the shaman, Danzel immediately went to get a hold of the soul essence.

'It's difficult as before, but...!'

Danzel swiftly started refining his grip on the soul essence to make it easier for him to control it. Being now able to see the soul essence enables him to see mistakes of before and correct them now.

Alas, learning how to properly and efficiently control soul essence wasn't something that he could do in a matter of seconds.

Nevertheless, he saw the potential to improve.

'There seems to be some resistance to the traveling of soul essence at the sword. But for now, it will do.' Danzel thought as he guided the foreign soul essence and traveled it to the other side of his arm.

'One more time.' Danzel said internally to the Draugr.

Seeing through his lieges will, the Draugr stepped forward.

In the next moment, Danzel touched the runes of the Draugr and directly fueled those runes with the necessary soul essence. Making the runes glow in a dark green light.

Though it took him just a moment later that he felt the gaze of someone else on him.

"Who?" Danzel said as he turned his head around.

The next moment, he felt turbulence in mana just outside his door.

To Danzel's sharp perception, it was like someone screaming and knocking at the door.

As he gazed towards where he felt the gaze and mana, he already had a pretty good idea of who could it be, but his eyes, revealing the soul essence of a small figure did confirm his doubts.

"Shiro?" Danzel said confused as to why she was hiding and so obviously.

He didn't hide his abilities after all.

Runesmithing was something that couldn't be easily understood without prior knowledge of the subject while necromancy was something that he was already teaching Shiro.

He also knew that Shiro, despite her curious nature to learn magic, was smart and patient enough to understand that you couldn't rush magic.

Several other reasons went into his head as to why she was hiding.

But within the next moment, the reason became clear.

"Kyagggghhh!!!" A scream of pain penetrated through the walls of the house.

The moment he heard them, Danzel's ethereal eyes flared up.

'Shit!!!! It can't be!'

Danzel immediately yanked his sword out of the chest of the shaman, stopping the process of sucking out his soul essence, making the shaman aimlessly look at selling with unfocused eyes. Still felt the pain of before, but his throat was too exhausted to scream anymore.

Though his regeneration was sure to fix that in a minute or two.

Danzel only spared the shaman a glance before swiftly swinging his sword and cutting his throat, making the shaman's unfocused eyes to re-focus on the scene in front of him.

"I don't have time to deal with you." Danzel said his body turned into mist and exited the house.

Only to come at the sight of Shiro falling to the ground and screaming in pain with black veins coming out of her body.

'Crap, it already started!' Danzel cursed internally.

'Talon, Leyone, Rayone, Sylas, Baron. Hold Shiro in place, don't allow her to move an inch!' Danzel gave a command to his Anabast, who immediately started acting up.

The Shadows under Shiro started to become alive and engulf the limbs and torso of Shiro.

The Anabast used their hands while adding up [Animate Shadow] for more safety.

While they haven't been around the first time that Shiro's condition started to act up, they could feel the urgency in their lieges command.

"That's sooner than expected..." Danzel said as he gazed at Shiro.

"Endure, Shiro or everything would have been for nothing."

He reached out and removed her mask, revealing her growing horns and the signs of dead mana inside her eyes.

'This brat! Don't tell me!!!' Danzel cursed as he noticed the dead mana. The urge to slap her in the head appeared for a split moment as he recognize her attempt to try necromancy.

He pushed such thoughts away, knowing that he had to focus.

Drawing his sword slowly, Danzel said.

"No, even if you can't endure it, you will survive. For the sake of that promise, I will make it happend." He said with his cold voice, bringing out several corpses of ice trolls from his storage ring to the side before hovering his sword above Shiro's head.

The runes of his sword lighten up in crimson color. Next instance, the blood of the ice troll corpses started to fly towards his sword.

That to his spatial storage ring, the corpses didn't decay the slightest, making their blood as fresh as it could have been. Additionally, he also has chosen the highest quality blood with the help of [Blood Sense].

When he got the skill from Azrael, he didn't think it would come to any use except of expanding his knowledge of blood magic.

But who would expect that it would come in use like this?

He certainly didn't.

In fact, he never thought the day would come when he would try to save someone's life that wasn't of an undead.

While guiding only the highest of ice troll blood that he had in hand inside Shiro's throat carefully. Danzel looked at her status.

He notice the blood slowly taking effect, but the amount of health that it recovered was pitiful.

Maybe if he had refined the blood somehow and created some kind of elixir, it would have had greater effects.

Alas, he had no knowledge of alchemy.

As he continued the treatment, he notice a change in one of Shiro's talents.

The previous talent [Demon Mana Eyes (Incomplete)] had it is (Incomplete) removed while a skill was added.

He was able to notice the new skill among the dozen for the sole reason that each new skill was added near or at the bottom every time.

It was a skill called [Demonic Gaze of Mirroring State].

Once he read it, it seemed at first extremely similar to his [Eyes of the Damned], but it mentioned being able to see the mirroring state of beings or whatever this meant.

'I will have to ask her once she wakes up, but first I have to make sure that I don't deliver a corpse to Agares.'

He already decided to make the effort to bring her to Agarrs, letting her die now would have made his efforts pointless.

Yes, he could go out of his way to repay Agares in some other ways.

Though it wouldn't be sincere if he had the chance to save his granddaughter and choose not to.

He didn't want to disregard the fact that Agares saved him from potentially ending up in the realm of the dead for good.

A situation that he absolutely wanted to avoid and would never allow to happend.

Also, it wasn't that he wasn't receiving any benefits from Shiro.

Wasting a bit of time of his immortality was no big deal after all.

...

***

After a few hours later~

"Sigh~, her attributes, level, and classes increased." Danzel said as he successfully treated Shiro this time around and put her temporarily in one of the houses to rest with Baron as a guard.

'That would have been good if it weren't for her growth extending for longer and consuming more vitality...'

Danzel found the state of Shiro's body as fortunate as it was unfortunate.

If it weren't for one of her talents increasing the power of her other talent, she would have been experiencing more durable growth even if it was slower.

Because of that though, it was becoming worry some.

It was like treating a wound that was bound to re-open.

Alas, that was all that he could do.

Opening the door of the house where he was before, Danzel saw the corpse of the shaman stuck into the ice.

Seeing that made him sigh internally.

'Too bad, I wasn't finished with him.'

But after getting closer to him, Danzel noticed a faint light of soul essence.

"Weird, there is still soul essence?"

Considering that the soul essence was tired with the soul according to the status, he thought that once the soul left one's body, it would take the soul essence with it.

While some part of it was true, Danzel noticed a severe cut of the soul essence in the corpse.

So much so that he had to get closer to notice it.

"I suppose I should make use of it." Danzel said as he put his arm at the corpse and like before, he dragged the soul essence.

'So I don't need to inflict damage to drain the soul essence from a corpse.' Danzel made a mental note to write that down in his notes.

He then tried to put the soul essence back into the corpse just to see if it works.

Only you find out that it was impossible.

Or rather, so hard that it seemed possible.

It was totally different compared to pulling his own soul essence and putting it back in.

'My sword has accumulated quite a bit of soul essence thanks to the curse, so storing soul essence isn't impossible...'

He found that quite the problem.

The fact he couldn't store soul essence was a huge issue.

"I will have to figure something out if I were you to carve the great rune of Ruined Vessel on me." He mumbled out loud.

Though he pushed the issue of now for later as he still had a few things to test out.

"Just in case..." Danzel said as he pierced his sword at the corpse trying to drain the remaining soul essence.

He succeeds but found out that dragging the soul essence through his sword result in conflict.

The most probable cause that he could think of was the curse of his sword.

While it was easier to draw mana up to a certain point, afterward getting the soul essence away from the sword was way more difficult, proving one of his suspensions.

The next experiment was to watch what will happen if he let the soul essence float into the air.

Which resulted into the soul essence to spectacularly do nothing and disappeared.

What he did next tried to make an undead with a corpse with zero soul essence.