Neither True Hero Nor Last Boss I Will Be The Villain

chapter 8: A strange power

“Who could have imagined it? The power of darkness held such futures. Not the power to raise the dead or craft beings from one’s own will, but something far more insidious. The power to twist what already exists.

To corrupt. To make an army not of the lifeless, but of the living.”

Ngwan Le lay sprawled across his sofa, speaking with Darkness, the spiritual entity. This was after he had returned from the village, but his persona, the dark god, was not among them. After all, he was still in the village.

Ngwan Le had left the village soon after the near-dead bodies rose again. He hadn’t witnessed the bloodshed that followed the torture.

“And that’s not all. Check your realm,” Darkness whispered, its voice like a shadow across the floor.

Ngwan Le stood. As he drew upon his power, dark energy flickered around his body like oil and flame.

Then…

“Even though I remain at the First Orifice of the Fourth Cycle,” he murmured, eyes wide, “my realm, it has already ascended to the Fourth Realm.”

The Cycle Realm could reach as high as the Twelfth Cycle. Each Cycle was divided into seven Horizon Stages, and each Horizon Stage split into four power levels known as the Orifices.

Power at the Orifice level was measured by realms, and the Twelfth Realm represented the apex of Orifice power.

“Heh heh heh. Each time you use an aspect of my power, your realm will expand,” Darkness boasted with pride.

Ngwan Le narrowed his eyes. “Oh? So there are more aspects than this one. Tell me, Darkness, what else hides in your depths?”

Darkness sneered, its voice dripping with mockery. “Dream on. You’ll discover them only when the time comes. Don’t think you can wring secrets out of me.”

Ngwan Le sighed, then leaned back on his sofa.

“Light, I know you’re weak, but please, make an effort,” he said in a humble tone, calling out to the spiritual entity of Light.

Darkness chuckled darkly. “Desperate, are we? What need drives you to call her so humbly? Do you not understand? It may carve away at her life if she even tried to use her power. Do you truly want her to die for you?”

But Ngwan Le ignored him.

Ngwan Le said nothing. He could not afford to listen. What he needed now was Light’s power, even the faintest spark. But her silence pressed down heavier than chains, more torturous than the horrors he had already witnessed, horrors his own persona had shown him as he tortured the villagers.

Ngwan Le rose abruptly. His footsteps carried him far, carried him away.

At last, he stood before a massive white door, towering twelve feet high and eight wide. The surface gleamed faintly in the dim light, unmarred by time. Far from his home in the mountain, nearly a thousand miles away.

Hidden deep beneath the sea. To reach it, he had plunged into a drowned abyss. And across an endless stretch of water, he dove until he found this mysterious realm.

Yes. This place was submerged, hidden in a mysterious space that only the bearer of a unique power, the power of Light, could enter.

“Is this the place?” His voice left his lips with hesitation, born of doubt.

“To think the day would come, that I, Ngwan Le, would have to come here.”

He had never wanted to, but he had no choice. He had no way to contact Light, not to talk about using her powers. Only by opening this door could he find the solution, a way to nurture Light.

Even so, not even in his wildest imagination had Ngwan Le expected what he found inside.

The space was filled with statues.

They stood in endless rows, from the entrance of the mysterious realm all the way to the towering door before him, lined up as if welcoming his arrival.

“Now that I feel it more closely, the aura from these statues are the same as that of the door. The same as Light,” Ngwan Le exclaimed.

But when he turned back to the door, confusion clouded his expression.

“How am I supposed to open this? What are these mysterious characters written upon it?” he asked aloud.

He searched for answers, moving left and right, tracing his hand across the door’s surface. Eventually, he sank to the ground, leaning back with his hand stretched behind him.

“No use… Oh Light, why did you ask me to come here? If I had known this day would come, I would have pressed you for more details,” he muttered.

But the statues only stared in silence, and the door loomed unyielding, guarding its secret.

Ngwan Le stood absentmindedly, unaware that distant eyes had already found him.

Not the statues.

But other figures, watchers from afar. Beings who did not even dwell in the same place where Ngwan Le stood. From a realm unknown to him, they gazed upon his presence.

“Is that him?” asked a blurred, hologram-like figure, its voice echoing as if through water.

“You mean the one who broke the boundary, not once, but twice?” replied another. This one resembled a maid, though her attire could not conceal the voluptuousness of her form. Angel, they called her, a being of breathtaking allure, whose beauty could ensnare both men and women.

Knowing that the blurred figure never turned to face her, his attention was fixed elsewhere.

Angel’s eyes drifted toward her left. There stood a statue, no ordinary carving of stone, but something more vivid, more alive.

It was Ngwan Le.

The statue captured him mid-stride, as if tearing through space itself and stepping into another world. His stance was neither that of a saint nor a supplicant, but of a warrior daring the unknown.

This was no ordinary hall.

This was the most sacred zone in all the gods’ realm, the place where the boundary of power lay.

And there, only a millimeter before that boundary, stood Ngwan Le’s statue.

Silence filled the chamber. Angel’s thoughts darkened. Because of this statue, anyone from the mortal side who dared to approach the threshold, the Boundary of Threefold Realms, would be cast back before they could even glimpse across.

Her reverie was broken by the blurred figure’s voice.

“To think even death could not stop him, Ngwan Le…”

A slow smile curved Angel’s lips.

“After all,” she whispered, “he is the one who will rise as a god, the god who will change the very order of the realms.”

Ngwan Le, the one watched upon, who only a moment ago seemed lost in thought, rose abruptly as though a hidden truth had struck him.

It was as if he had finally glimpsed the solution, the key to the towering door that loomed before him.

“Everything has happened so quickly since my rebirth,” he whispered. “I almost, forgot something.”

His fist tightened. His stance shifted, strange and deliberate, like one preparing to bend the very fabric of the world.

Then, without warning, his body began to change. A corruption spread over him, creeping like rust devouring iron. A substance, alien and unfathomable, emerged the instant he tried to summon a power unlike the power of darkness he had always relied upon.

And as that substance coursed across his flesh, the door responded. The characters carved into its surface stirred, one by one igniting with light.

Ngwan Le’s eyes widened.

“Is there, a connection? Between this power I cannot name, and these symbols?”

Though confusion clouded him, he pressed on. He called forth more of that strange energy, letting it engulf him. Soon, his entire body was coated in the substance, as if dipped in molten paint.

The door blazed with brilliance. All the characters flared to life, and with a thunderous groan, the massive gate parted.

Ngwan Le stood motionless, his breath caught in his chest.

“To think, it was this power that awakened the door. That these symbols would yield to it…”

An aura of orange fire enveloped him, crackling with unknown strength. In awe, in disbelief, he whispered to himself:

“What is this power? This force whose name I don’t even know?”

Before long, Ngwan Le dove inside the space behind the door.

But who could have thought. The very thing Ngwan Le would witness.

The thing that lay dormant behind this mysterious door would be one of the keys that Ngwan Le himself didn’t know would aid him in his quest for dominion.