The sky had turned dark.
Dark clouds gathered above the capital, and the cold wind hit the city.
The icy downpour came without warning.
Even when it was already the beginning of spring, such a heavy downpour was rare. The rain was mixed with an earthy stench akin to the smell of corpses; there was also the irritating noise of the rain barraging the buildings.
Even those having something good happen that day would become gloomy and irritated because of the sudden heavy rain, losing their excited mood entirely.
Sure enough, people must be complaining about the rain coming too suddenly.
That was indeed the reality.
Any contact with the rain would immediately turn your mood worse… or, in other words, synchronize your mood to the spell caster.
This was Dream Stealer Danton’s signature spell, [Notion Rain] of the Soul Snatch school.
“The Purest Spiritual Medium…” The white-haired old man murmured in a low voice while looking at the heavy rain outside.
His icy blue pupils were as calm as water. Those who caught a glimpse of those eyes would feel at ease.
Danton felt around the wall, staring intently at the wall in front of him. It was like he could see the person outside the palace through the wall.
He was not a hunter and certainly did not have the visionary ability that sees through walls.
But for Danton, the rain in the city was his eyes.
Through the soul state, one could see an ice blue brilliance on Danton’s head, which soared straight to the sky.
The light beam penetrated the dark cloud. It resembled a cold, emotionless eye calmly looking at the earth.
Under the dark clouds, thousands of faint silver threads fell along with the raindrops. These lines were connected to the heads of the royal guards.
Without receiving an order, they directly rushed to the side hall where the Fourth Prince was, holding their weapons and fully armed.
Then, the slightly more remote transcender units came.
Then, there were the hidden troops gathered from all directions.
Those exposed to the rain rushed over at the exact moment in silence.
At the bottom of their pupils, there was a faint, icy blue halo.
That was the trace of the Gold Rank’s standard Soul Snatch Spell, [Full Control].
Whether it was a mortal, a ritualist, or a transcender, those who fell under the spell would lose control over their body if the Will attribute checks succeeded. [1]
Unlike Silver Rank’s [Mind Manipulation] aura, [Full Control] did not require the spell caster to look directly into the opponent’s eyes. As long as an object or sound was used as the medium, it would rob away the victim’s will out of thin air.
As long as the medium was not interrupted, the mind-controlled state would not be dispelled even when the target was far away.
Danton could also feel the state of these “zombies” under his manipulation and control of the individual actions precisely.
He could take those in a poorer state to the backline and send those in the peak state to the frontline; he would have the ordinary mortals resist the ghosts’ attacks and let the transcenders work together to kill those evil spirits in the rear.
Of course, they could not see where the ghosts were.
But Danton was able to do it.
Through the spell [Notion Rain], he shared his vision with his puppets, allowing them to see where the spirits were and focus on attacking.
Faced with death, people would be timid, angry, and mad.
Compared with people who could release their full potential in the face of death, most people had no tactics and calmness in the face of the crisis.
For a Soul Snatch Wizard, that was not a problem at all.
Those were not his bodies.
They were not his lives.
What he manipulated, modified, and discarded was nothing but the “others”.
The wizards of the Soul Snatch school had the poorest moral standards.
For them, “people’s heart” was within reach. It was the last thing they did not need to care about or pay attention to.
They just had to modify it — others’ will, feelings, and memories.
In addition to the instant spells used in battle, the Soul Snatch School also had spells that subtly changed the target’s will.
It was like the players with a console command in their hands.
Sometimes, the players would lose control of themselves when their anger was surging, even if they knew from the beginning that their fun would be gone if they pressed that tilde button.
The “Purest Spiritual Medium” in front of him was another direction of the Soul Snatch school. He was from the “traditional school” of the Soul Snatch Wizardry known as the “Necromancer” in ancient times, manipulating the souls of others at will.
Different transcenders could come together to form a “school” because they had something in common — a core idea that their group could agree on.
Just like the Alteration School had a core idea, “to give birth out of nothing”.
The core and essence of the Soul Snatch school were “everyone shall serve me”.
Whether it was manipulating the mind and will or manipulating the souls of living and dead, it was an act of manipulating others as pawns.
But, they eventually split.
The reason was that even if the will was robbed, the victim could break free at any time; as long as the victim’s will was strong enough, the controlled person could regain control of his body at any time. At most, it would only end in death.
However, the necromancer was different.
Spirits could not resist necromancers.
They had only two options: to be controlled or evade it. The control was permanent, usually enslaved to fight or used as a ritual material.
At the same time, ordinary people could not even see spirits. Most living beings were vulnerable to the attack from the spirit bodies that the necromancer harnessed.
In the end, the public hated necromancers more than the Soul Snatch Wizard, who altered others’ will silently.
The fear was based on “having absolutely no way to resist”.
These wizards, who also pursued the core concept of “everyone shall serve me”, preferred death over the living.
Then, external suppression, internal exclusion, and resource plundering came.
As a result, the necromancer was wiped out.
The “Purest Spiritual Medium”, Bernardino Telesio, was the last Gold Rank necromancer of this era. He was also the only one who knew how to evoke a spirit body from a corpse that had been dead for more than a hundred years, how to summon a spirit body from the immaterial world, how to pull out the spirit body of the living, and how to attach the spirit body to himself and acquire blessings. He had inherited a complete necromancer lineage.
His death would represent the complete severance of the necromancy lineage.
Dream Stealer Danton certainly knew about it.
Not just the “Purest Spiritual Medium”, he was also a Black Wizard excluded by the righteous.
The official Soul Snatch Wizard was usually based on memory manipulation. They could make others forget a specific memory or let someone quickly learn a particular skill and spell. At the same time, they would also simulate a conscious space that offered infinite death. Plus, the wizards could interfere with others’ nightmares and break into them for rescue.
The Soul Snatch school was a vital wizard school.
It was precisely because they could easily alter the minds of others, so they cared so much about their reputation and morality.
However, Dream Stealer Danton was different.
He quietly stole others’ skills and privacy under the pretext of helping others with mental illness. He soon became a veritable all-rounder and used the memories he got from the minds of others to go against the original skill owner. With that, he snatched a lot of wealth and gained high status under different false identities.
So far, his actions had not been discovered.
Instead, the high-level wizards acquiesced his actions.
He was wanted while providing psychotherapy to the royal heir of the United Kingdom. After taking away all his memories, he killed and destroyed the body directly.
He used the ritual he had learned from the minds of others to act as two people at the same time. Then, he disguised the other person as himself, let the “Dream Stealer” leave the capital, and used this as an opportunity to replace the heir directly.
In the end, when he was trying to seize the throne, he was personally caught by the Elegant Elder, who could not stand it. No one had doubted him before that.
So his act of stealing the country was wanted by the five countries at the same time.
It could be said that the “Dream Stealer” and the “Purest Spiritual Medium” were the spokespersons of Soul Snatch Wizard on two paths.
They were the typical example of two unforgivable sinners who utilized Soul Snatch spells for personal gains.
Therefore, all the eyes in the capital were focused on them.
But there was no one stopping the battle between them.
