Read Novel Full Chapter 789: Saltbount Covenant
Chapter 789: Saltbount Covenant
The dark took Ainen the same quiet way it always did, and when it let him see again, he stood once more in the small grey room, four tiles glowing where five had once hung.
[Choose one deck to rebuild. This process cannot be reversed.]
Feast Golem. Communal Feast. Spiceweave. Cellar Aged.
He read them over slowly, without the urgency his first rebuild had carried. No fresh loss was pushing him toward an answer this time. This time the choice was about a question he’d been circling his whole life without ever quite naming it.
His eyes settled on Communal Feast, and he thought of every meal he’d ever offered a stranger, and how little of that generosity had ever once been treated as a weapon rather than a kindness.
"Feeding someone was never just feeding them," he said slowly. "Every kitchen I ever ran understood that better than I did."
"Communal Feast," he said, and touched the tile.
[Communal Feast: erased.]
The tile crumbled to grey dust, and Ainen felt the small, strange absence of every shared table he’d ever built, gone now on purpose, for the sake of the older, stranger truth underneath them.
"Hospitality was never just courtesy," he said to the settling dust. "It was always a bargain. I just never bothered collecting on it."
[Choose a prefix.]
Salt— / Bread— / Hearth— / Guest— / Board—
He read each one slowly, thinking of every old story where sharing a meal with someone meant something far heavier than manners. A guest fed at your table owed you something, whether either of you said so out loud or not.
He chose Salt—.
[Choose a suffix.]
—oath / —bound / —rite / —pact / —ward
Bound, he thought. Not a polite gesture. An actual tether, sealed the moment the food was accepted.
He chose —bound.
[Enter one word of your own.]
The blank space opened, and Ainen thought of every old, half-forgotten rule that said the moment you broke bread with someone, certain things simply stopped being allowed to happen between you.
He wrote: Covenant.
[Deck seed accepted: Saltbound + Covenant]
[Entering first trial.]
The grey room dissolved into a long, salted table stretching further than any kitchen should ever need, place settings laid for guests who had clearly stopped arriving a very long time ago.
[Stage 1: The Uninvited Feast]
Hungry, oath-bound spirits rose from empty chairs, starving in a way that had nothing to do with food, and Ainen fought the first few with nothing but his blade, since the deck built to answer this exact question no longer existed yet to help him.
[Boss: The Oathbreaker’s Ghost]
It had broken guest-right once, harmed someone it had fed at its own table, and had been starving ever since, cursed to hunger forever for breaking a rule older than most kingdoms.
Ainen didn’t fight it directly. He offered it something instead, the first true test of a deck that didn’t exist yet, a small, honest token pressed into a desperate, grasping hand before the Ghost even understood what it had accepted.
The moment it took the offering, something ancient and absolute settled over the space between them, and the Ghost found, for the first time in longer than it could remember, that it could no longer raise a hand against the one who’d fed it.
[Stage cleared. Choose one card.]
Saltbound Offer — Active. Force or trick a target into accepting a token of hospitality, binding them to the covenant the instant it’s taken.
Guest’s Due — Passive. Bound targets suffer a penalty every time they attempt to attack their host directly.
Hearth Ward — Defensive. A protection that activates specifically against anyone currently bound to you.
Ainen turned all three over carefully. This was new ground, and he wanted to walk it the way he walked into any kitchen for the first time, curious before cautious.
"Saltbound Offer," he said. "Let’s see what it actually costs someone to accept a meal from me."
[Card acquired: Saltbound Offer]
The second trial opened onto a broken banquet hall, table overturned, chairs scattered, every sign of a feast that had ended in betrayal rather than farewell.
[Stage 2: The Broken Board]
Faithless hosts drifted between the wreckage, each one having violated their own hospitality at some point long past remembering, and Ainen bound them one by one, patient, letting each covenant settle before pressing further.
[Boss: The Faithless Host]
It had poisoned its own guests once, a crime old enough to have curdled into something that could no longer trust a table at all, and it fought with the frantic energy of something that expected betrayal in every offered hand.
Ainen didn’t rush the binding. He let the covenant sit, felt it settle and deepen the longer it went uncollected, and by the time he finally called on it, the weight behind it had grown far heavier than the first offering alone could ever have managed.
[Stage cleared. Choose one card.]
Covenant’s Weight — Passive. A binding grows stronger the longer it’s left uncollected before being called upon.
Bread and Salt — Active. Force a binding through direct contact alone, bypassing the need for the target’s consent entirely.
Table’s Turn — Utility. Transfer an existing binding from one target onto another.
"Covenant’s Weight," Ainen said. "Patience has never once hurt a good reduction. I don’t see why it should hurt this."
[Card acquired: Covenant’s Weight]
A soft chime sounded as the broken hall began to fade.
[Mini-Challenge available: The Long Grace. Hold three separate bindings at once without collecting on any of them for a full sixty seconds. Reward: mutate an acquired card.]
It tested every instinct in him that wanted to finish a dish the moment it was ready, and Ainen passed it only by reminding himself, the entire sixty seconds, that the best things were rarely the fastest ones.
[Trial complete. Choose a card to mutate.]
He chose Saltbound Offer.
[Saltbound Offer → Saltbound Offer Absolute: A single offering can now bind multiple targets at once if they share the same table, plate, or fire.]
The third trial opened onto a table that never ended, plates refilling themselves in every direction, a feast built for guests who had long since stopped being able to leave it.
[Stage 3: The Endless Table]
Ainen recognized the shape of the place immediately, an echo of a banquet hall he’d once cleared with Rudra standing at his shoulder, and moved through it now with Saltbound Offer Absolute settling multiple bindings at once across every guest still seated there.
[Boss: The Unwelcome Guest]
It had overstayed its welcome at a thousand tables and honored the covenant at none of them, and it fought by trying to take without ever once accepting the terms that came with taking.
Ainen simply made sure it couldn’t avoid the terms at all, binding it alongside everything else still lingering at the endless table, until the whole room owed him at once.
[Stage cleared. Choose one card.]
Feast’s End — Active. Collect on every currently active covenant at once, in a single decisive strike.
Shared Plate — Utility. Bind multiple targets simultaneously with a single offering, so long as they eat from the same source.
Hearth’s Grace — Defensive. Bound targets cannot bring harm to anything you’re actively protecting either.
"Shared Plate," Ainen said. "If I’m feeding a room, I might as well feed the whole room at once."
[Card acquired: Shared Plate]
The fourth trial opened onto a hollow banquet hall, every plate empty, every guest thinner than starvation alone could explain.
[Stage 4: The Hollow Banquet]
He fought through it with Shared Plate finally letting one offering settle over an entire gathering at once, binding after binding compounding the way Covenant’s Weight had always promised they would.
[Boss: The Starving Sovereign]
It had broken every covenant it had ever made across a very long life, and the hunger it carried now was the accumulated weight of all of them at once, endless and undying.
Ainen offered it exactly one thing it had never once been given honestly.
A meal with no betrayal hidden inside it.
[Stage cleared. Choose one card.]
Absolute Covenant — Active. A binding that cannot be broken or escaped by any means for its full duration.
The Long Grace — Passive. Covenants never expire, held indefinitely at no cost to maintain.
Reckoning’s Plate — Active. A precise strike that collects the single heaviest covenant currently active.
"The Long Grace," Ainen said. "I don’t see why hospitality should have an expiration date any more than a good cellar does."
[Card acquired: The Long Grace]
The fifth and final trial opened onto a single quiet table set for exactly two, no feast, no crowd, just a plate and a question neither of them had asked yet.
[Stage 5: The First Table]
[Boss: The First Guest]
It was the very first thing to have ever accepted a meal from another hand, before betrayal existed as a concept worth naming, and fighting it felt less like a battle and more like finally sitting down to a question this whole cave had been setting the table for.
Did hospitality mean anything, if the host was never willing to be the one who ate first?
Ainen sat across from it without raising a blade at all, and offered the same plate he’d have offered any guest at his own table, honest, unhurried, entirely without a hidden edge.
The First Guest accepted it, and the covenant that settled between them was not a weapon at all.
It was simply, finally, an actual meal, shared the way meals were always supposed to be shared.
[Final stage cleared. Choose your signature card.]
Saltbound Covenant — Ultimate deck signature. Bind every present target at once through a single shared offering, absolute and unbreakable, scaling with every covenant already held.
Absolute Hospitality — Passive. Permanent, cost-free binding on anything that accepts even the smallest offering from you.
The Final Feast — Transformation. Temporarily extend every current covenant’s benefits to every ally standing beside you.
Ainen looked at the three, and thought of a lifetime spent feeding people and calling it simple kindness, never once noticing it was also, quietly, the strongest thing he owned.
"Saltbound Covenant," he said. "Let the deck finally admit what every good meal was always doing anyway."
[Card acquired: Saltbound Covenant]
[Deck complete: Saltbound Covenant]
1. Saltbound Offer Absolute — binds multiple targets sharing one table, plate, or fire. 2. Covenant’s Weight — bindings grow stronger the longer they’re held before collection. 3. Shared Plate — one offering binds an entire gathering at once. 4. The Long Grace — covenants never expire, held indefinitely. 5. Saltbound Covenant — binds everyone present at once, absolute and unbreakable.
The grey room reassembled itself, quiet and still, and Ainen stood there a long moment, five new cards settling into a deck built from the one truth every good kitchen had ever actually taught him.
"Covenant," he said softly, testing the word the way he once tested a new dish before trusting it near real guests. "Yes. That’s what a shared table was always quietly asking for."
The stone arch opened behind him, and he stepped back out to find the others, already certain of one thing this whole cave had confirmed for every single one of them by now.
The kindest thing in the room was very rarely the weakest one.