“Cat? You’re not in the raid? Great, I was just thinking of calling you!” He seemed happy to see me. “Listen, I need you to make a quick round trip to the Bazaar, find a carrier for the ship Veils crafted with your blueprints. We don’t have time; we can barely make it! Write down the coordinates where they have to be delivered...”
“Wait,” I interrupted him. “Where’s Weldy?”
“Your girl? No idea.”
“I was told that civilian NPCs were carted out,” I insisted.
“Yes, she was on the list, but your girlfriend refused to go without you. When we tried forcing her, she drank an invisibility potion and ran away somewhere. It hardly needs saying that we had no time to go after her,” Olaf said, shrugging.
I didn’t like his tone. Yes, looking for Weldy in a huge castle full of players and NPCs was pointless, but I really didn’t want to leave her anywhere around this place, seeing as the castle might be destroyed in a few hours. Of course, if she died, she would resurrect at her “home” resp point in Dan-na-Eyre a day later, but...
Weldy shivered and cuddled against me, resting her head on my chest. Her blond hair tickled my chin.
“I’ve never died,” she confessed. “I’m really scared of that. It probably involves a lot of pain.”
“So what about it, HotCat? Take a Teleportation Scroll from the clan storage,” the Prophet pressed on. “No need to think; we need to act!”
Something changed in Olaf’s appearance. His features became sharper and more expressive, and tiny red dots glimmered in his eyes. I looked at him with my shadow vision and saw that I wasn’t mistaken. The Prophet wasn’t an ordinary player anymore: in the Shadow Plane, he looked like a tall thin demon with eyes like burning coals. His chitinous armored body was shrouded in an unseen aura of power, and black wings fluttered on his back.
“Racial Metamorphosis?” I interrupted him mid-speech. “What did you turn into, Olaf?”
“How can you...ah, shadow sight, I get it,” the Prophet said. “Yes. Today, we must use every advantage we have. Do you understand it, Cat?”
“This is my combat form. I got the epic archetype of Wrathful Seer,” he continued. “There are drawbacks, of course, but the perks outweigh them. If we had more Blood, I would have given such elixirs to the entire clan. We would have been invincible!”
After getting the coordinates of the delivery destination and a long list of additional errands, I returned to Weldy’s room, futilely hoping that she had hidden somewhere nearby and would return to wait for me. She wasn’t there. Either she had gotten lost in the labyrinth of castle corridors, or something was seriously wrong. I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled out a flask sealed by a golden cork in the shape of a demon maw. A thick blood-like substance bubbled inside.
The Elixir of Racial Metamorphosis... There was a catch to it. Dar, the alchemist from Hird, had brewed two of them, one from Daine’s blood and one from her consort’s. I had given the former to Olaf and kept the second for myself. However, the vials looked identical, and I wasn’t sure I didn’t accidentally switch them.
There was only one way to test it.
Chapter 9
THE ELIXIR TURNED OUT to be bitter, cold, and salty like mineral water. An icy lump rolled down my throat and cast a wave of tickling coolness across my entire body. I felt my hair electrify and my organs convulse in spasms that I couldn’t stop.
Attention! You have launched an irreversible process — Racial Metamorphosis! Character data calculation in progress...
Your race has been changed to Half-demon!
Suddenly, a message with a description similar to the one I had seen during character creation popped up.
Half-demon: as this race cannot be obtained naturally, demonic half-bloods are a rare sight in Sphere of Worlds. Most of the time, they are encountered in the Netherworlds. Depending on their bloodline, they can possess various abilities. Just like demons, they have several forms, ordinary and combat. In their weaker guise, they inherit all weaknesses of their kind.
The half-demon race really wasn’t included in the starting list. There were tieflings, available for silver accounts, and demons, who could only be picked by owners of diamond accounts. I started to realize the advantages of diamond races when new icons appeared in front of me, one after another.
You receive racial ability: Netherworld Portal!
You receive racial trait: Dark Speech!
Attention! Generating random racial abilities...
You receive uncommon racial ability: Demonic Allure!
All right, it was time to sort things out. The Portal was similar to Soul Stone, an additional binding point in the Netherworlds. Dark Speech allowed me to speak and write in Abyssal, the dark tongue of the lower worlds. Demonic Allure, however, increased Charisma by a whopping ten points — not bad at all! As a bonus, the system threw in five attribute points, which I concluded were the starting bonus for all diamond races.
There were drawbacks, too. A negative Weakness to Light trait blinked on my paper doll, increasing all damage received from light magic, silver and holy weapons, and some abilities. How ironic — not too long ago, we had been preparing for a battle against a creature like that, coating our blades with liquid silver and holy water, and now I was one of their kind? Sphere worked in mysterious ways...
New archetype unlocked! Revise your character data to identify it?
Identifying archetype...
You were assigned an epic archetype: Demon Prince! Congratulations! You are the 54th player in Sphere of Worlds to possess this title! Rare achievement unlocked: Netherworld Noble! You receive 1 free attribute point!
Hmm, that seemed yummy. Let’s see what’s inside.
A Demon Prince is a supreme demon descended from one of the thirty-three bloodlines ruling the Netherworlds.
