I Died and Became a Noble's Heir

Chapter 778: King Maelor’s Plight Part I

Jack set down the first vial and retrieved another.

The second cut went deeper into the muscle, penetrating past the initial layers of skin into the tissue beneath.

This time, when the healing began, Jack felt it more intensely.

The cells rebuilding themselves from smallest to largest, blood vessels reforming with precision, the entire wound closing from inside out in a cascade of regenerative force.

The sensation was strange and intimate, like watching his own body function at a level usually hidden from consciousness, having access to the secret machinery that kept him alive.

He filled the vial methodically, watching the blood accumulate, watching the light glow brighter as more of Sarin’s essence mixed with the crimson tide.

The third cut was deeper. Jack cut across the width of his wrist, creating a wound that took longer to stop bleeding.

The regeneration responded, but more slowly this time, as if his body were beginning to recognize the pattern and adjust its pace accordingly.

Jack felt the strain in his demonic essence, felt the pull of power being diverted entirely to the task of healing and reconstruction.

The fourth vial filled.

Then the fifth.

By the sixth vial, Jack’s body was responding more slowly to the wounds.

The regeneration still occurred, still seamless in its restoration of tissue and vessel, but the process took measurably longer.

Jack could feel the edges of his demonic essence beginning to strain under the continuous demand for healing.

The cuts were deep now, serious wounds that would have crippled a normal human, rendered them helpless and bleeding out.

Jack cut again anyway.

The seventh vial filled slowly, blood dripping rather than flowing as his regeneration caught up with the bleeding.

By the time this vial was three-quarters full, Jack could feel the tremor in his hand from the exertion. His entire body was aching, not from the wounds themselves but from the constant channeling of power required to keep healing them.

He withdrew the blade.

The healing was slower now, visible as a process rather than instantaneous. He watched as the flesh knitted together, the bleeding stopped, and the wound closed from deep inside his wrist and worked outward toward the skin.

When the final cut had healed, Jack had seven vials filled with blood that glowed with emerald luminescence. Each vial contained enough of his essence to guide the process of rebirth and reformation.

Jack gathered them carefully, cradling them in his arms as if they were precious artifacts.

In a sense, they were; each drop represented a piece of his own being, power, and essence.

He opened a portal.

‘Loryn,’ Jack called through the Soul Link, his thought carrying the exhaustion of the exertion, ‘I’m sending the blood now. Seven vials. Begin the preparation immediately.’

The portal collapsed as the vials passed through, materializing in Loryn’s domain on Floor 25 in the exact configuration Jack had arranged them.

‘Received, Master,’ Loryn confirmed, his presence in the bond suddenly focused and intense. ‘The quality is extraordinary. I can feel your will integrated throughout the blood itself. The harmonization will be flawless. Preparation will commence at once.’

Jack closed the connection and turned back to his room.

His wrist ached where he’d made the deepest cuts, a dull throb that his regeneration was beginning to reach the edges of its capability.

The pain was exhaustion rather than injury, the sensation of having pushed his power nearly to its limits. He would need to rest, allowing his body and his demonic essence to fully recover from the exertion.

A knock came at his door.

Three sharp raps that carried with it the confidence of authority.

Not the hesitant knock of a servant seeking permission to enter, but the assured strike of someone accustomed to command and obedience.

“Enter,” Jack called, his voice steady despite the fatigue that clung to him.

The door opened.

King Maelor stepped into the chamber with the particular grace of elven nobility.

He was tall, his frame was lean but capable, his features refined with the particular beauty that characterized high-elven bloodlines.

His distinguished silver hair cascaded over his shoulders in undulating waves, reflecting the afternoon light, and his pale blue eyes conveyed a profound depth of knowledge.

He fixed on Jack with an intensity that suggested he had spent considerable time deciding how to approach this conversation.

Jack stared at him without moving from where he sat.

The silence stretched between them, heavy with the weight of history and betrayal.

Maelor was the king who had sent Jack to die.

The ruler who had made the calculation that Jack’s life was expendable, that an army of dragons was a reasonable price to pay for removing a complication from political equations.

“We need to talk,” Maelor said, his voice carrying the accent of the elven court, every syllable precisely articulated with the practiced refinement of noble breeding.

“We do,” Jack agreed, his voice controlled and even and carrying undertones that this conversation would operate by different rules than Maelor expected.

The air in the room shifted.

A presence materialized behind Maelor with sudden, absolute force.

Ren.

The Sovereign-rank warrior had appeared from nowhere, manifesting from dimensions Jack hadn’t even known he was observing from.

His blue eyes burned with barely restrained fury, and the sheer bloodlust radiating from him was suffocating.

A weight that pressed down on the chamber like a physical force, like the presence of death itself made manifest.

His hand rested on the pommel of his sword, fingers flexing slightly as if deciding whether to draw.

Jack raised one hand in a gesture of restraint.

“Calm yourself, Ren,” Jack said, his tone carrying absolute command. “We are a guest in his home. A guest that he sent to be killed by an army of dragons, but everyone is expendable if they’re not a pure-blooded elf, right?”

The words landed with the force of a blade.

Maelor’s face remained composed, but something flickered across his features.

Recognition of the controlled malevolence beneath Jack’s carefully neutral tone.

The king had expected negotiation.

He had expected to arrive and find a mortal still recovering from injuries, still willing to listen to reason and practicality.

What he encountered instead was an entity that had surpassed mere anger, evolving into a state where emotion had been transmuted into something considerably more perilous than fury.

Ren withdrew slightly, though his presence remained like a storm cloud gathering on the horizon, waiting only for the wind to shift in a particular direction.

“I was doing what was best for the nation,” Maelor said, his voice steady and carrying absolute conviction. There was no apology in the statement, no hesitation or self-doubt.

Simply a statement of fact, delivered with the confidence of someone who believed absolutely in the righteousness of his decision, in the correctness of prioritizing collective safety over individual life.

Jack’s hand clenched into a fist at his side. The motion was small, barely perceptible, but it conveyed everything he was feeling.

A controlled, compressed anger waiting for the moment to release.

“If dragons came for your daughters,” Jack said, his voice dropping into something colder than winter, something that the depths of what lay beneath his composure.

“Would you have given them away to survive? Sacrifice the few to save the many, regardless of who they were?”