Fake Professor, Misunderstood As Strong - Chapter 98

Salvation or Mercy? Part-4.
At Jareth’s insistence, the faces on the tree trunk started to tell their story to him, and Jareth listened to their story with great interest.

The story was quite long, but to summarize it all in short,

Phoebus and Aphos are twins; they once lived far away in the northern areas, where it snowed every single day.

Their parents were beggars in that small village at the foot of a snow-covered mountain, and they often had nothing to eat.

Their father frequently went to the mountain range to search for food.

That man had no hunting skills, so he couldn’t even bring back wild animals to cook; he used to scavenge what other predators had left behind after hunting and eating other prey.

Although they were living a malnourished life, the twins were pleased to stay with their parents.

But one day, a massive snowstorm appeared.

That snowstorm lasted for nearly a month, and as a result, the father didn’t even dare go to the mountain range to look for food.

A hungry stomach can make humans lose their rationality and turn them into beasts.

The same happened with that beggar family.

The father killed his wife with a wood-chopping axe and then resorted to cannibalism.

The twins were horrified by this, but they couldn’t go against their father as they were powerless and malnourished ten-year-old kids.

Hunger took over their minds, and they also followed in their father’s footsteps. They ate their mother’s flesh and survived the snowstorm.

But when rationality returned to their minds, everything came crashing down.

Their father went insane and lost his mind in guilt, and the people of the village couldn’t tolerate a mentally ill person who was purposely disturbing the lives of other villagers.

Consequently, the enraged villagers soon banished the three of them.

They wandered the mountain range for days, ate whatever seemed edible, and survived for several days.

Eventually, they found a small, hidden cave and decided to rest there for the night before heading to another place.

Although the twins had to wander around with their mentally ill father, they were happy that, at least, they didn’t have to be stared at by the villagers whenever they went out.

Heavy snowfall happened that dark night, and the three of them shivered continuously due to the freezing temperatures.

The twins were intelligent enough to light up a bonfire; otherwise, the three of them would have really caught frostbite that night.

But lighting that bonfire to keep themselves warm was their biggest mistake in life.

A strange mutated bear caught the smell of burning wood.

A man wearing the robe of the ‘cult of Therath’ was sitting on the back of that bear and traveling leisurely from this mountain range.

When the bear smelled the burning wood, it led the cult member to the hidden cave, and everything instantly went downhill from there.

The cult member laughed at the three prey that he had found at random.

He immediately cast a fire spell to kill the twins’ father, and then fed his dead body to his pet bear right in front of the twins’ eyes.

No matter how the twins begged for mercy, the cult member didn’t listen; he bound them with magic cuffs and took them with him when he left the next morning.

Whenever the twins’ fell on the ground from exhaustion due to walking too much, the bear will roar at them and force them to walk.

They had to travel for days with hardly any food, and their legs began to bleed as the skin became damaged.

Days went by, and the twins reached a small underground chamber. In that chamber, mutilated human corpses littered the ground, and numerous workers utilized these corpses to craft various items.

Some were using their bones to make accessories, some were using their skins to make decorations, etc.

Blood had painted the floor so red that even the stones had changed color.

The sight of everything was so horrifying and repulsive that it terrified the ten-year-old children to their core.

By that time, they knew that their fate was sealed and they would die a horrible death that day.

But it seems that the strings of destiny had planned more pain for them.

A high-ranking member arrived in the underground chamber that day, and he found out that the two children had an unusually high amount of mana in their bodies.

They were both talented, and they were extremely suitable for sacrifice.

The high-ranking member took the children with him to the headquarters of the cult of Therath.

The cult was at its peak in those days; the whole world feared them, and no one dared object to them.

That high-ranking member himself was a sadistic mad scientist, and he was researching healing magic.

He wanted to create a self-working healing magic that could regenerate the user’s body infinitely, without any problems.

His past experiments had all failed, but now his preparations were complete.

And the appearance of these two talented children gave him the final piece of the puzzle.

He conducted experiments on the twins and used a variety of cruel methods on them.

He dug out their brains and embedded them into a tree severely infected with miasma and corruption.

Then he cast the forbidden spell of ‘soul merge’ on the tree.

The power of miasma and corruption had already deeply taken root in the tree, and the addition of those two brains gave it consciousness, memories, and a will of its own.

The experiment was a success from the perspective of the cult member, but it was a great punishment for the twins.

Even though they were twins, their souls were incompatible with each other and refused to merge properly.

This caused their souls to collide with each other again and again inside this artificial body.

This collision of souls caused massive and endless pain for them, which stems directly from the soul and can’t be solved by any physical healing methods.

Only grade 1 or higher-level healing magicians can heal a person’s soul and fix an issue like this.

But a grade-1 healing mage is so rare that you can count on your fingers the number of grade-1 healing mages in the long annals of history.

There were barely three grade-1 healing mages in the past two millennia. Thus, during that experiment, there were no grade-1 healing mages to help solve this problem with souls.

Even necromancers can only embed a soul into a dead body and control the body; they can’t dig out the soul from a living entity’s body and can’t interfere with the soul of a living entity.

And even if there was someone capable of helping them at that time, the twins likely still wouldn’t have gotten any help because there was no profit for the other party in helping them.

In the first place, why would a grade 1 healer even help a demon cult who wants to destroy the very life the healers want to protect.

So, time passed, and the twins continued to suffer endlessly without any relief in sight.

They couldn’t even scream because they didn’t have the ability to talk in the first few years.

Only after they awakened telepathy could they talk.

But by the time they were able to talk, they had already gotten used to all that pain, and now they wanted to be free of it.

The mages destroyed the cult of Therath after years of struggle.

The person who embedded the twins’ brains in the miasma-infected tree actually ended up locking the door of the chamber from the inside and survived the attack on the cult.

The attackers weren’t able to break the magic barrier on the gate, so they cast another barrier of their own and sealed the door from outside.

The researcher got stuck in the hall along with the humanoid skin covered tree.

Time passed, and the researcher died due to extreme starvation. His lack of social interaction drove him insane.

In the final moments of his life, the researcher stared at the tree that was his greatest creation with a smile.

Years passed, and the cult suffered from landslides and thunderstorms.

Its ruins got buried in the ground, and only the maze that was created to confuse others was left intact, along with the hall that had the tree inside.

The tree finally gained the ability to control its branches and roots, and the first thing it did was beat the researcher’s skeleton into powder.

Once done with that, they spread the branches and roots in search of more life force.

Although the tree can keep regenerating by absorbing mana with its body, the speed of regeneration is considerably slower.

Using a stored amount of life force is a much faster way to regenerate; that’s why the tree was able to regenerate so fast for ten times when Jareth attacked it first.

But its regeneration speed slowed down afterwards, as now it’s only regenerating on mana.

Moreover, after continuously regenerating and living for eight centuries, the mutated tree has already tapped into the power of the ‘Law’ of ‘regeneration’, and now its regeneration won’t stop at all.

In other words, this mutated tree is immortal.

Unless you eliminate the law of mana from the space-time fabric in this place, you will not be able to properly kill this tree as it will keep regenerating.

This is also the reason why they are trying to make a new body; they want to escape this unkillable body.

{Immortality is not a blessing; it’s a curse. It’s a punishment that can drive even the most stable soul to madness…} (Source: Trust me bro…)