Chapter 51: The Rank Advancement Trial
The notification hung in the air, waiting on him.
[Please select the difficulty level for your Rank Advancement Trial.]
[Difficulty Level: Easy]
Fill all Soul Contracts with Mortal-Rank souls and one Awakened-Rank soul.
[Difficulty Level: Medium]
Fill all Soul Contracts with Mortal-Rank souls and five Awakened-Rank souls.
[Difficulty Level: Hard]
Fill all Soul Contracts with Mortal-Rank souls and ten Awakened-Rank souls.
[Difficulty Level: Hell]
Fill all Soul Contracts with Awakened-Rank souls.
Malrik read through the four options twice before he let himself think about any of them seriously.
His base requirement was the same regardless of what he picked — fifty Soul Contract slots, filled. What changed was the composition. Easy asked for almost nothing; Hell asked for everything.
He considered Easy first, if only to rule it out properly.
Nine empty slots. Nine more Mortal-Rank contracts, filled with whatever wandering Morveth crossed his path in the next hour. He wouldn’t even need to try, and the Trial would consider its conditions met.
He set the thought aside almost as quickly as he’d picked it up.
Meeting the minimum isn’t the same as making good use of it.
Every soul he bound cost Evolution Points to properly raise—points that were both incredibly difficult and outrageously expensive to obtain.
Spirit Stones were exceptionally rare to begin with, and consuming them for Evolution Points was a luxury that even powerful nobles couldn’t indulge in carelessly. If a soul was going to occupy one of his fifty slots, it needed at least Rare potential, ideally more. Anything weaker wasn’t worth the investment.
Which meant Easy and Medium were both off the table before he’d finished reading them.
That left Hard and Hell.
Hell was the option that actually interested him. Fifty Awakened-Rank souls, no exceptions — a roster that would put him leagues ahead of anyone who advanced with a handful of Mortal-Rank stragglers padding out their contracts. If the reward scaled with the difficulty the way everything else in this system did, the gap it would open between him and his peers would be enormous.
He wanted it. But wanting it and being able to survive choosing it were two separate questions, and he made himself walk through the answer honestly instead of letting ambition decide for him.
In reality, there were three major problems that made that option far less appealing than it seemed.
First problem.
Binding fifty Awakened-Rank souls meant severing his authority over every Mortal-Rank soul currently under contract. All of them. Fenrir included — a wolf he had spent real Evolution Points dragging up to Epic potential, one step at a time, with nothing to show for the effort if he cut the bond now. Losing him wouldn’t just cost a soul. It would cost everything invested in making that soul worth having.
Second problem.
Time. He had exactly one day left before they reached the Marquisate of Ashmoor. Binding fifty Awakened-Rank souls wasn’t something he could do gradually — it meant paying the mana cost for all of them inside that single day, and he doubted his reserves would survive the bill, let alone leave anything behind for the rest of the journey.
Third problem, and the one that actually mattered.
There was no guarantee he could control fifty Awakened-Rank souls while he himself was still only Mortal-Rank. The system had already warned him about the risks of binding souls beyond his own level. Trying to command that many powerful souls at once carried a very real possibility of everything spiraling out of control.
It was a gamble he had no intention of taking, especially with so little time left before the Trial.
Ambition is worth something. Ambition that gets me killed before the Trial even starts is worth nothing at all.
He let Hell go without much hesitation and shifted his attention to Hard.
Hard asked for the same fifty slots, but only ten needed to be Awakened-Rank. He could fill the remaining forty with the Mortal-Rank souls he already had — Fenrir included, intact, no severed bonds, no wasted Evolution Points. Ten new bonds, spread across whatever time remained, was a mana cost he could actually survive paying.
In truth, controlling ten Awakened-Rank souls while providing the mana required to sustain them would have been an impossible feat for almost anyone at the Mortal Rank. But Malrik was different. Thanks to his immense mana reserves, what would have been an impossible challenge for others became a task well within his reach.
He pressed the third option.
[Difficulty Level: Hard ]
[Progress:
Mortal-Rank souls: 40/40
Awakened-Rank souls: 1/10]
He looked at that second line longer than he needed to.
One.
That didn’t make sense.
His first thought was Lilith, before becoming his contracted soul, she had been a Saint-Rank existence. After forming a contract with him, the system had forcibly suppressed her to Awakened-Rank because the gap between their Ranks exceeded the limit allowed by Soul Calling.
Could that be the reason?
Was the system still recognizing her original Rank instead of the one she currently possessed?
He couldn’t tell.
If that was true, then it would explain why only the Spider Queen was being counted.
But another problem immediately surfaced, his gaze shifted to the skill description.
[Skill: Soul Calling]
Grants the authority to call a random wandering soul from the Realm of Souls and establish an eternal Soul Contract.
Note: If the summoned soul exceeds the Soul Binder’s rank by more than one tier, its power will be forcibly suppressed to one rank above the master’s current level. Attempting to command a soul beyond your contract’s threshold significantly increases the risk of a backlash or loss of control.
Cooldown: One use every 3 months.
He read every line in silence.
Lilith had been summoned directly through Soul Calling, unlike the wolves and spiders, which had only become his contracted souls after they died.
Yet nowhere did the skill mention that souls summoned directly through Soul Calling were treated differently from souls contracted after death.
Then why wasn’t Lilith being counted?
The numbers only made the mystery deeper.
According to the system, he possessed forty-one Soul Contracts. But if Lilith were included, the total should have been forty-two after adding the wolves and spiders.
No explanation appeared.
The system simply displayed the requirement as though nothing about it was unusual.
Malrik stared at the screen for a long moment before letting out a quiet sigh.
Eventually he let the question go — not answered, only postponed. Whatever the reason was, it wasn’t going to reveal itself before nightfall, and he had exactly one day left to fill nine more slots with souls actually worth keeping.
"You’ve had that face on for a while now."
Lilith had drifted closer while he’d been working through it, her wings tucked in, her expression carrying none of the sharpness it had held minutes earlier over the Spider Queen’s handiwork.
"Thinking," he said.
"About me, I hope."
"About soul contracts."
He turned to the rest of the host, gathered along the treeline, waiting on him the way they always did.
"New target," Malrik said. "We’re done wasting time on ordinary prey. From now on, we focus on powerful Awakened-Rank Morveths. The stronger, the better. Chiefs, alphas, and any Morveth with the potential to reach greater Ranks. Those are our priorities. Those are the ones we’ll hunt."
The Spider Queen lowered her head.
"Give the order, Master.""I shall destroy anything that stands in your way."
Lilith glanced at Malrik before a faint smile curved her lips.
"Finally...I was beginning to grow bored of those weak insects."
Malrik didn’t answer.
He simply took a step forward.
The forest fell silent, then, One by one, the souls bound to his will emerged from the darkness.
Tonight...The hunters had become the calamity.
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Author’s Note: I’ve renamed the skill Soul Contract to Soul Calling to avoid confusion between the skill and the Soul Contracts it creates. Nothing about the skill has changed except its name.
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