Young Master's PoV: Woke Up As A Villain In A Game One Day

Chapter 390: The Crimson Guild [I]

So... I now had six fingers on my right hand.

Yeah, it should’ve been the first thing for me to notice. But in my excitement, I didn’t.

Where there was supposed to be one pinky finger, there were two, both the same size as my ring finger.

Aside from that, there were some other minor differences.

Take the distribution of weight, for example.

Contrary to what I expected, my left arm — my original, human arm — was significantly weightier than my new right one, despite being almost the same in size and less in muscle.

Like, make it make sense?

On top of that, my grafted right arm ran much colder than my biological one. And when I say it was cold, I don’t mean the kind of cold you feel when you forget to put on a jacket on a chilly winter morning.

No, no.

I mean something deeper.

I mean an under-the-surface, skin-deep cold that felt as if it originated from deep within the bones — or whatever passed as bones in this thing — and seeped out of the flesh in waves.

The texture of the flesh itself was rough to the touch, with patches of hardened, charcoal-black mass layered over the entire limb like petrified bark.

It wasn’t unpleasant, exactly— it was just alien. It felt hard like rock and soft like clay at the same time.

Small cracks like fissures on dry earth ran along its surface and emitted faint glimmers of crimson light. They were like veins of molten lava crawling up until where my fingers ended and the nails began.

And those nails were darker than the darkest shade of black, pointed like the tips of knives and just as sharp.

I flexed the arm as an experiment. The joints moved so smoothly that it was eerie. The sounds of tendon and muscle were replaced by nothing but rustling whispers, like dry leaves brushing against each other.

"How do you like it?"

I turned toward my aunt’s voice and gave her a tired nod. That was because I was tired. Beyond tired, in fact.

I had passed out near the end of the grafting surgery and woken up in Aunt Morgan’s bed a few hours later, feeling hollowed out, as if the process had siphoned away a piece of my soul.

It wasn’t physical exhaustion. Physically, I felt fine. It was mental, or maybe spiritual. I just wanted to do nothing and talk to no one.

It was a sensation similar to when you experience a crushing hangover after a wild night out — utterly, emotionally drained.

Mustering a bit of will, I sat up on the edge of the bed before rising to my feet.

There was an IV drip and a few other monitoring machines attached to my body. The healers who had been attending to me immediately rushed to my side.

"Relax, sire," one of them said, gently taking my arm in his to offer some support. "You’re stable. No complications. Unusual sensations are normal in cases like this. You’ll grow accustomed to the graft in a few days."

I stared at him blankly. Unusual sensations, he called them? That was like calling a hurricane a ’breezy day.’

Another healer, an older woman with a braided crown of silver hair, quickly began unraveling my surgical dressings.

She cleaned the graft site and removed the wires and tubes and sensors connected to my shoulder and chest and torso.

In the meantime, I scanned the room and found Master Urvil. The old man was sitting across from my aunt on a sofa nearby, studying me with those cloudy white eyes of his.

He was a very creepy dude for a master healer, I won’t lie.

"It feels cold," I told him, my voice as devoid of emotion as my face. "Uncomfortably cold."

He shared a look with my aunt, then gave me a polite nod. "That is expected, Young Master. That limb was harvested from a parasitic beast that lacked its own Essence core. Its kind must feed on others to extract Essence. If they don’t, they shrivel up and enter a state of cold hibernation."

Shouldn’t he... I don’t know...

Shouldn’t have told me all this before we started the procedure?

"So, will I always feel this chill in my right arm?" I asked. "That’s going to be more than a little... bothersome."

"Don’t worry," it was my aunt who spoke this time. "If you ever feel your arm is becoming too cold, you simply feed it. Once it drinks blood, it will convert that blood into Essence and use a small fraction of that energy to warm itself up."

Master Urvil stood up, keeping his hands tucked into his sleeves like a monk. His potbelly jiggled beneath his loose, golden robes. "Before you ask, sire — no, you do not need to kill someone every time you feed it. A blood bag will suffice. Do not try to channel your own Essence into the graft yet. That arm comes from a Greater Spirit, and you are only B-rank. Trying to channel your own Essence into it will destabilize your nervous system and put unnecessary strain on your body. Wait until you reach at least mid A-rank for that."

I squinted at him as the healers finished their work and stepped back. "Okay... so can I get one? A blood bag? Like, right now?"

Aunt Morgan offered me a knowing smile. Then she stood up as well, her silence only deepening my confusion. "No, no, kid. We have something much better planned for you. You’ll get to test it properly."

Everyone in the room, except for Master Urvil, frowned at her cryptic phrasing. That included me as well.

What did she mean by that?

Was she asking me to go out and kill someone?

I tilted my head, echoing her words back at her. "Test it properly?"

Instead of answering right away, Aunt Morgan strolled toward me... then bypassed me entirely, walking behind the line of healers who were tidying up the surgical trays and instruments.

With exaggerated slowness, she started passing them by one by one. They all tensed as she moved.

Finally, she reached the end of the row, circling a younger healer — a slender man with chiseled features and a nervous twitch in his eyes.

Everyone seemed a little anxious from the sudden change in the vibes of the room, but this man in particular looked like he was standing on a landmine.

He was clearly on edge.

But he pretended to stay busy, unhurriedly packing away surgical scalpels even as Aunt Morgan’s gaze stayed fixed on the back of his neck.

She kept her steps deliberate, like a predator circling a cornered animal. Then, she stopped directly behind him.

Even I knew what was coming next. So he definitely realized it, too.

The man licked his dry lips, keeping his back to my aunt even though every eye in the room was on him now.

And just then, all of a sudden, he grabbed a scalpel and whipped around in a blur, imbuing the thin blade with Essence before thrusting it toward my Aunt’s throat.

I noted that the man must have at least been an A-rank, because the speed at which he moved was far beyond what my eyes could properly track.

But for the Queen of Smiles, that wasn’t an issue.

Morgan Kaizer Theosbane simply lifted a single finger and her mountainous spiritual pressure dropped upon the man.

SWOOO—!!

The healer grunted and let out a sound that was a mix of pain and shock, before crumpling to his knees, panting and wide-eyed before my aunt.

"Everyone out," Master Urvil commanded.

No one questioned him.

The staff filed out as quickly as it was humanly possible, leaving the room silent. The thud of the closing doors sounded much louder than it had any right to.

I finally looked at my aunt. "What is going on?"

"We have caught a little rat, Young Lord," Master Urvil answered for her.

The man in question thrashed, attempting to break free from the invisible hold pinning him to the polished floor. When he failed, he opened his mouth to shout. "Listen to me, you—"

He never got to finish. Aunt Morgan swept her leg around and connected a brutal kick to the side of his jaw, dislocating it and sending him sprawling.

THWACK—

Then, she stepped onto his face and returned her gaze to me. "Go ahead, Sam. Test your new arm."

"What? But who is this—" I started.

Though my aunt simply waved me off. "Don’t worry about that for now. Just do it."

The man was squirming and convulsing on the ground, like a fish pulled from the sea and now desperate to get back to the water.

It must have been a terrifying feeling — knowing exactly what was coming for you and being utterly unable to stop it.

I saw the raw, unadulterated fear in his eyes as they met mine. He was wordlessly begging me to spare his life.

"Test it," Aunt Morgan said with a hint of impatience in her otherwise honeyed voice.

"What has he done?" I asked, though I feared I already knew the answer.

"Just do it, kid," she repeated.

Now, I wasn’t exactly keen on killing innocent men... but if my aunt was going to force me, I figured I might as well see what this arm was capable of before I started panicking.

I took a deep breath, then flicked my wrist backward and curled my fingers. The obsidian nails extended out in response, swiftly growing in size until they were actually as big as small daggers.

The man on the floor tried to scream, but the sound clawed out of his throat in a series of broken gasps.

God, I really hoped he wasn’t innocent.

He was about to be my third kill, after all.

Swallowing hard, I reached down... and plunged my dark claws into his back, piercing straight through to his heart.