Transmigrated as the Villainess Princess - Chapter 232

Chapter 232: Consumed by Darkness (4)

The war forge crackled with energy, faint smoke curling from molten joints and humming wires as Rohzivaan crouched beside his unfinished mecha. Sparks flew like fireflies, dancing in the shadows that lined the chamber walls.

His hands were blistered, dark smudges staining his cheeks, but his eyes, his eyes burned brighter than ever. He had not left this room in days, maybe weeks. Time no longer mattered. Only progress did. And today, progress came in the form of a single ancient book, heavy, leather-bound, etched with runes so old they seemed to whisper when the pages turned.

His mother had given it to him at last. After months of pleading, after he’d nearly fallen to his knees in front of her, Fiorensia had stared into his unrelenting gaze and understood that he would not stop. He would not rest. He would either destroy himself or become something far worse.

So she gave him the book. No lectures. No warnings. Only the cold acceptance that her son was no longer the boy she once held in her arms. Rohzivaan clutched the book as if it were a holy artifact, opening its pages with a reverence he had never shown to anything, not even life itself. Each line was a passage into power, each diagram a doorway into madness.

The knowledge written there wasn’t meant for a mortal to hold. It wasn’t merely magic. It was a cursed will, the kind of demonic force that came with a price measured not in coin but in soul. Still, he devoured it.

He copied symbols onto parchment, his fingers trembling. He etched them into the frame of his mecha, whispering the syllables beneath his breath like a sacred prayer. The mecha’s metal responded slowly but surely.

It began to pulse with dark light, its veins flickering with unstable energy. He didn’t smile. He didn’t dare. This wasn’t a triumph. It was only the beginning. During the few hours when the forge cooled enough to breathe, he sat in the corner of the room with the book cradled in his lap, eyes bloodshot, lips murmuring incantations.

Words lost to time flowed from him like instinct. Pain came with each chant, searing through his veins like acid. But he endured. Pain was a friend now. A loyal companion. And Fiorensia? She watched him.

Sometimes from the shadows of the doorway, sometimes from across the room. She never interrupted. Never mocked. The arrogance that once defined her seemed dulled in the face of her son’s transformation.

One night, when the moon bled red in the sky and the forge had grown too silent, she finally spoke. “When you’re ready,” she said, her voice lower than the growl of flames, “I will train you myself.”

Rohzivaan didn’t answer right away. He was too busy binding the soulstone to the mech’s core, his hands steady despite the swirl of demonic energy trying to claw at his mind. But the corner of his lip lifted, barely visible beneath the grime. He had been waiting for those words.

Not because he sought her approval but because Fiorensia was the strongest demon he had ever known. And if he could surpass her, even for a breath of a second, then he could surpass anyone. “I will tell you when I’m ready,” he finally said, eyes still fixed on the soulstone.

“Not before.” Fiorensia didn’t laugh. She didn’t bristle with offense. She only nodded once and vanished, like a ghost folding into the walls.

Alone again, Rohzivaan turned back to the mecha. The frame stood taller now, shoulders plated in cursed obsidian, its limbs charged with faint pulses of demonic current. It wasn’t sentient. Not yet. But it was close. Too close.

He could feel it breathing with him, even though it had no lungs. He began whispering to it at night, telling it what he would do, who he would become. He told it about Ahcehera, about her smile, about the day he tore the bond between them with hands shaking like a dying man’s.

The mecha never answered, but sometimes the core flickered brighter, as if it heard and understood. The book taught him how to manipulate the emotions locked in the stones, rage, sorrow, hatred. He harvested these from his memories, feeding them to the core, twisting his pain into power.

The more he gave, the more the machine responded. And still, it wasn’t enough. So he pushed deeper. Into the darker chapters of the book. Into spells that clawed at the boundaries of reason.

Some days, he bled from the ears. Other nights, he woke screaming, unable to remember why. He didn’t stop. He couldn’t. For Ahcehera, he reminded himself. For the girl who never asked for this fate.

Fiorensia returned often after that. Sometimes, she would correct his stances as he practiced the cursed forms. Sometimes, she would slap the spellbook from his hands, barking, “Again! You missed the fourth sigil!”

Other times, she simply stood behind him while he summoned black fire from his palms, watching in silence as the flames trembled and danced. Her training was brutal, relentless. She stripped him of grace and rebuilt him from the ashes. And still, she held back.

He could feel it. She was testing him. Waiting. Seeing how far he’d go before he broke. But he never did. Each failure only sharpened his resolve. Each scar became a story etched into the canvas of his transformation.

Fiorensia began to change, too. She no longer looked at him like a son. More like a soldier. An heir to something terrible. A legacy bound in shadows. “You’re not ready,” she would say after each session, pushing him harder, forcing him to rise with wounds still fresh. “But you will be.”

And he believed her. Not because of blind faith, but because he had felt it too. The shift. The fire rising inside him no longer needed her permission to burn. The mecha neared completion. It stood now like a titan in chains, its core throbbing with raw fury.

It wasn’t a puppet anymore. It was becoming something more. Fiorensia watched it with wary eyes, though she never voiced her concern. She had unleashed something she could no longer control. And Rohzivaan? He welcomed it.

Each night, as he lay on the cold floor, body trembling from the day’s toll, he stared at the ceiling and whispered the same words. “Not yet, but soon.”

Because soon, he would command darkness itself. Soon, he would rise not as Fiorensia’s son but as a force of his own. A storm crafted by loss, sharpened by purpose, and bound to one name alone, Ahcehera.