Heaven’s Corruptor (Will Bender: A Dark and Dirty Fantasy Adventure #4)

Chapter 1

How could I not feel like a god in that moment? I was an abyssal sovereign. I possessed the power of creation. I owned a whole kingdom of men already and was building myself a second.

I knew those kinds of thoughts were dangerous.

This was the hubris before the fall that Aurketzu so often warned me about.

The more of it I tasted, the more I realized the true threat of that kind of thinking wasn’t overestimating yourself or underestimating your opponent.

That’s not what got leaders like Aurketzu killed.

That lack of judgment was the byproduct of the real problem: addiction.

That feeling I had watching Ludwig the Lawful die was like nothing I had experienced before.

The blend of thrill, power, and cruelty was the happiest I had ever been.

While that might read as an exaggeration, the fact that it’s not is part of why this addiction consistently kills those who contract it.

The high of that moment, the soaring feeling of total joy and contentment, I would do anything to feel it again.

Addiction helps you tell a story about why another hit of the transcendent is just around the corner and why you deserve to have it, but addiction also knows that logic is ineffective.

To have achieved that level at all meant that you had a rare mind, and such a mind was not so easily tricked into making mistakes regarding facts and reason.

So, the addiction targets your ego, filling your mind with sweet words until the reality in your mind is different from the one outside.

When you know you’re smarter and more powerful than anything in the known universe, your logic becomes poisoned.

Your brain feeds it what it now believes are objective facts, and your logic misses the trick.

All it cares about is feeling thoughtful and in control, so it doesn’t stop you from making choices with bad information because well-structured logic is just as much about pleasure as it is rampant chaos.

Awareness of your intelligence is a joy. Having control over a situation is gratifying. Having a sense of what the future holds well in advance is reassuring. By the time overconfidence comes into play, addiction has already won a critical battle, and you’re not aware that there ever was a fight.

That’s why I say overconfidence is not the killer people think it is. When someone dies by a sword, we ask who wielded it because that’s where the power came from. The sword didn’t slay the enemy. The user did. Overconfidence is just a sword. Addiction is the killer.

I visited Lilac with the hope that a retired prostitute could give me some normalcy and provide a sense of grounding to my heady thoughts and fears, none of which had anything to do with the ongoing threat of paladin attacks.

That group of enemies would be a perpetual annoyance.

The danger they presented was a stiff breeze compared to the forces bearing down on me from the abyss.

Ludwig the Lawful would have informed his order the second he confirmed the existence of an antipaladin.

The secret was out, and more paladins would come for me.

Hiding was pointless. Any effort or resources that could go into concealing my identity were better spent getting stronger, and I needed to fix that thought in my mind if I was to keep addiction at bay.

Strength solved all problems. And the message about Abaddon was a reminder that someone far more powerful than I believed me to be a problem. The King of the Abyss was a fellow sovereign, and the system gave us competing quests. Whoever survived won.

While my desire to have a conversation with Lilac like we were two regular human beings had initially been great, I lost interest in talking when I read the notification that Abaddon had made a massive leap forward in his plans to end me.

I needed to be alone to let the notification process. Hearing her middling thoughts or listening to her adopted baby coo and cry wasn’t the backdrop I needed at that moment, not anymore.

Since Penny’s Bar and Bathhouse, my brothel on the 10th floor of the Grubiit dungeon, wasn't open yet, I stepped away from Lilac’s and back into the dungeon.

I used the dungeon core menu to teleport myself to the empty business.

No one knew where I was, and presently, the bar was sealed off to the outside world.

I had yet to even install a working door to the rest of the dungeon.

I soaked in one of the baths to help myself think.

The festival to celebrate the union of Queen Ashley and Queen Invia was going strong in the Capital, so most of the Silk were still in a party mindset.

Choosing work in those times for humans was usually difficult.

The lure of a few dozen women lusting for my cock was hard for me to ignore, but they would want to talk and laugh and fuck.

I wasn’t in the headspace to celebrate, and surrounding myself with people who were would only stoke my growing rage.

Instead of savoring my victory against the paladins, I needed to plan.

I earned 483 good-aligned levels when I drowned the do-gooders in slime monsters.

That had me thinking about making a purchase with my Corpse Builder ability, choosing something that would either make my position more defensible or give me an advantage over one of the many beings in the universe who wanted me dead.

For a while, I thought I wanted to unlock the zombification and ghoulification abilities the Spirit of Death made available to me.

With those, I could gather up a bunch of humans and turn them into obedient minions.

But I had a dungeon core now. I could buy an army with Dungeon points.

Good-aligned levels were much harder to come by in comparison, and the monsters I could grow with the dungeon core were far smarter and stronger than ghouls and zombies.

Unfortunately, the majority of the lower-cost options I could actually take in Corpse Builder were less appealing because I had other abilities that offered the same, or better, benefits already.

These were the only options I wanted, and they were still well out of reach:

3,000 Levels - Create an exact shadow duplicate of your build to fight on your behalf.

5,000 Levels - Designate an area you control as your kingdom.

Anyone within this area who has prayed to you within the last 48 hours receives a 10% bonus to their stats, a 10% bonus to Healing magic used on them, and immunity to diseases.

If you lose control of the area, this bonus is lost and must be purchased again to reactivate.

10,000 Levels - Upgrade your class from sovereign to dark emperor.

Viceroy abilities were excellent, and I learned that sovereign abilities were even better. Dark emperor, therefore, had to be incredible.

That class upgrade was so far away, though.

I would need an army sweeping through the countryside of an unfortunate nation, razing villages and culling resistors, to collect 10,000 good-aligned levels.

The least problematic part of that plan was that innocent people would suffer and die.

The logistical and political headaches that would come with launching an invasion of that scale and viciousness?

Absolutely awful.

Sanctuary South, the kingdom I planned to build under a force field in the northern lands, had to be the immediate priority.

I didn’t need Corpse Builder unlocks for that kingdom to be official, but giving my citizens blanket buffs and immunities was the foundation for a series of other kingdom-based perks, such as the ability to receive a system notification the moment my kingdom was under attack.

Too often, wars were won because an invader worked faster than messengers could travel.

By the time the King was aware he was under threat, important chunks of his kingdom were already in flames.

I wouldn’t let that happen to me.

In parallel with building Sanctuary South, Penny’s would open for business, which should bump my daily DP earnings.

Dungeon core unlocks weren’t cheap, most of them with costs in the millions when my DP gain was only 17,821 per day.

That was up from about 16,000 but still prohibitively small compared to what I wanted to spend.

Penny’s should help with that.

Should.

I was still learning how dungeon cores worked, and I loathed the lack of information available to me.

My dungeon core was the cornerstone of my survival strategy, and the potential for me to misunderstand or misuse it could cripple everything I attached to it.

That was another of a thousand reasons I could fail to protect what was mine.

And then Abaddon would kill me, or more paladins would find me, or the Frozen Fiend would see the wisdom of placating the King of the Abyss by stabbing me in the back.

Or the Church of the Goddess burned me at the stake. I couldn’t forget about the threat they posed.

Right. Celestials were also a concern. They could become a problem as I continued my search for more liquid sunlight.

I had all the crystallized hatred I needed from banging elite demon women, and that was one half of the rare ingredients needed to craft an Immunity from Holy potion.

Once I acquired enough liquid sunlight, I could turn my party undead and give them the same protection I had.

I groaned and leaned back in the tub.

Maybe someday I could breathe easy and do nothing but adventure.

If you’re thinking that I should have done that instead of scheming, then you have already forgotten how often my solution for one crisis simply set the stage for a bigger, more dire crisis to take its place.

For example, I didn’t really need to install my own shadow monarchy, nor was that my original intention, but in defusing a threat that the now Queen Ashley once posed, I bound my fate to hers, so her enemies became my enemies.