I Died and Became a Noble's Heir

Chapter 542: Hidden Quest Complete

’What’s happening?’ Warren’s thoughts raced with normal speed, his consciousness processing at the accelerated rate his enhanced mind had maintained for centuries.

But his body wasn’t responding to commands, his limbs refusing to move despite neural signals being transmitted properly.

Everything around him was moving slowly.

The frozen creatures that had been staring began shifting their attention away, but the movement took several minutes to complete a simple head turn.

A sprite that had been hovering nearby began descending toward the grass, but its wings beat perhaps once every three minutes, creating a flight pattern that looked wrong to Warren’s perception.

Even Ren’s chest rising and falling with breath occurred at a fraction of normal speed, making the simple biological function appear labored and deliberate.

Only Warren’s consciousness operated at a normal rate.

His thoughts processed information with typical efficiency, his enhanced perception cataloged details as quickly as ever, and his tactical mind analyzed the situation with speed born of three centuries of combat experience.

But his body had become a prison, unable to execute any action his mind commanded, forced to observe as time itself appeared to slow to crawl around him. At the same time, his awareness remained trapped at normal velocity.

Ren’s mouth began moving, words emerging with the same distorted slowness that made immediate comprehension impossible.

But Warren’s enhanced mind could process the stretched syllables, could reconstruct what was being said despite the temporal distortion affecting how sound reached his ears.

"By the time you hear these words completely, you’ll be dead from your perspective," Ren’s explanation came through in fragments that Warren’s consciousness assembled into a coherent statement.

That one simple statement took Warren hours to hear.

"But one ability of my sword is to slow down time for my opponents. It accelerates your perception while keeping your body anchored to normal time flow."

The hooded figure’s hand, still gripping the sword embedded in Warren’s chest, moved in what looked like slow motion as it adjusted its grip slightly.

"From your perspective, everything appears to move slowly because your consciousness is processing information much faster than events actually occur. A second in real time feels like minutes or hours to you, creating the illusion that the world has slowed while you remain at normal speed."

Warren’s mind recoiled from the implication even as he understood what Ren was describing.

"Your body can’t respond because it’s still bound to normal time flow. The commands your brain sends take a normal amount of time to reach your muscles, but your perception is running so fast that the delay feels infinite. You’re trapped in your own accelerated awareness, unable to act while fully conscious of your helplessness."

The sword’s retraction from Warren’s chest proceeded with extreme slowness, its movement perceived in millimeters per second from his heightened perspective.

"The heart I just destroyed should kill you within minutes under normal circumstances. But from your perspective, those minutes will stretch across what feels like years. Decades. Your consciousness will remain active throughout, fully aware of your dying body, experiencing every second at a rate that will make brief death feel like slow torture extending across lifetimes."

Ren’s face began shifting, features blurring and reforming in a process that looked like wax melting and reshaping under a heat source.

The hooded figure’s jawline altered, its nose adjusted, and its skin tone changed as the transformation progressed.

When the change was completed, Warren found himself staring at his own face.

Ren now wore Warren’s features with perfect accuracy, replicating everything from facial structure to the small scar above his left eyebrow that marked an injury from decades ago.

Even his voice, when he spoke again, carried Warren’s distinctive cadence and tone.

"There’s another ability I rarely used," Ren continued, still speaking with distorted slowness that Warren’s consciousness had to reconstruct.

"Perfect mimicry. I can assume another person’s appearance and voice so completely that even magical detection can’t identify the deception. Useful for infiltration, for eliminating targets by becoming someone they trust, for walking into places that would normally be inaccessible."

The individual, now indistinguishable from Warren, offered a smile that conveyed a cruel intent, despite the familiarity of their features.

"I’m going to have fun being you in Erbeon. Your position, your connections, your reputation, all of it becomes mine. The Council will never know their member was replaced, will never suspect that Warren Frost died on a demon-infested floor. At the same time, someone else assumed his identity and began working from within their organization."

But Warren’s accelerated perception meant he’d only process his statement in a couple of years if he were lucky.

His body stood motionless, heart destroyed, consciousness trapped in accelerated perception that would make his remaining minutes of life feel like a millennium.

The sword’s ability had effectively killed him.

Not through immediate death, but through condemning him to experience dying across a timeframe that would break his mind long before his body actually stopped functioning.

------

Jack stood motionless in the exact spot where he’d thrown the lightning-magma bolt, his enhanced physique maintaining perfect balance despite exhaustion and the accumulated strain of channeling dual Contractee states.

The mushroom cloud still blocked vision completely, smoke and steam combining with residual fire to create an impenetrable curtain, making seeing beyond the immediate vicinity impossible.

The dome’s interior had become a gray void, the explosion’s aftermath obscuring everything, including whether his attack had connected with his intended targets.

His discerning gaze followed the smoke’s trajectory, observing the gradual dissipation of the mushroom cloud as the dome’s fissures facilitated pressure release.

The barrier that Loryn and S had promised would hold was doing exactly that, containing the explosion while allowing gradual venting that prevented complete structural failure.

Then his vision erupted with system notifications.

[-688,500 HP]

The damage number appeared first, floating in his field of view with clarity that cut through the obscuring smoke.

Six hundred eighty-eight thousand damage from a single attack, the number so large it took Jack’s mind a moment to properly process what he was seeing.

[Congratulations! You have slain one of the Seven Council Members: Mira Fireheart.]

[Congratulations! You have completed a Hidden Quest!]

[Congratulations! You have developed one of Sarin’s original 13 Skills!]

[Congratulations! You have completed a Hidden Quest!]

[Congratulations! You have leveled up!]

[Congratulations on reaching Level 30!]

[Congratulations on reaching Level 40!]

[Congratulations on reaching Level 50!]

The notifications cascaded through his vision in rapid succession, each one triggering before the previous had fully registered.

Jack’s mind processed the information at a speed that made tactical assessment effortless despite the overwhelming volume of data presented simultaneously.

Then the rewards began appearing, correlating to specific achievements the System had just acknowledged.

[Reward: 1,000,000 EXP, 1,000,000 Reputation Points]

[Hidden Quest Completed: Kill a Member of the Council]

[Description: The Council exists to hunt Soul Wardens. They have killed forty-two of your predecessors, eliminated threats to their supremacy, and maintained dominance through the coordinated assassination of anyone who posed a challenge to their authority. For they live to kill you, and you live to kill them. Balance must be maintained.]

[Reward: 2,295,090 EXP, Information on the Moonveil Serpent]

Jack’s consciousness registered the Moonveil Serpent reference with immediate recognition.

The creature was a key component for accessing the Soul Realm.

The dimensional space where Malakai’s consciousness allegedly resided, along with past Soul Wardens, and information on how to restore and collect the Lantern of the Soul Warden.

[Hidden Quest Completed: Recreate one of Sarin’s Legendary Skills]

[Description: You have recreated Sarin’s 1st of his 13 Legendary Skills. The ancient god once commanded the Seven Monoliths, the most powerful entities of their respective classifications, and used their combined might to shape Erbeon as it exists today. You have added your own twist to the technique, changed its fundamental nature through dual elemental fusion, but the essence remains recognizable to those who remember Sarin.]

[Skill Analysis: Sarin’s Judgement]

[Damage Formula: Magic × Magic Talent Rank × 10]