Hades' Cursed Luna novel Chapter 407

Chapter 407: Two Months

Hades

Was that why she was old? Was it taking her energy—therefore her youth?

"What does that mean?"

She ignored the question.

Her fingers twitched, almost unconsciously, as if remembering the ache of something unseen. "Eve... she doesn’t just survive it. She’s untouched by it. No mark. No toll. That’s the difference. And Darius knows it."

"Then why did he let her go?"

"...Over the years, he’s stocked up on her blood, marrow—anything that might be used to replicate her immunity. He kept her alive because, as long as he had her, he had the key to his own survival."

Her voice didn’t waver, but there was something in it that made my jaw tighten.

"It wasn’t enough to just bleed her," Ellen said. "The cells he needed weren’t always present in high enough concentrations, even with the wolfsbane he had her injected with twice a day—so he learned to force them."

I stared, not yet understanding.

"In medicine," she went on, "there’s something called a granulocyte harvest. You stimulate the body into overproducing a certain immune cell, flood the bloodstream with it, then extract it at peak concentration. That’s what he did to her. Except instead of growth factors and controlled environments, he used pain. Prolonged, calculated, escalating pain. The body responds by producing not just immune cells, but hyper-adaptive ones—cells that learned, over and over, to counter the lunar affliction."

Her fingers tightened into a fist. "It took him five years to find the threshold—how much agony she could take before the cells reached the potency he wanted without killing her. That was when her blood became... perfect. Not a cure, but potent enough to distill into a serum that could hold the Blood Moon at bay for weeks at a time. With that serum, they might as well be wearing full armour."

The room blurred for a moment because red had filled the edges of my vision. My hands had clenched into fists without my permission, nails biting into my palms.

Ellen’s eyes flicked to me, reading the change in my breathing, but she didn’t stop. "They have enough stored now to keep his inner circle safe until the endgame. But the rest of Silverpine? Let them suffer."

Kael spoke. "Lunar Cataclysm." His voice sounded far away through the roaring in my ears.

I didn’t need to turn around to know that Maera was as white as bone.

I realized only then that my teeth were grinding together hard enough to ache. The image of Eve—broken and restrained—came unbidden, and the sound of her screams followed before I could shove them away.

"And then they rise," Ellen’s voice lowered to an eerie whisper. "And feast."

My eyes focused on her. Her gaze was glazed over, like she was looking into somewhere far away.

Kael’s head snapped toward her, his tone low and deliberate. "Who will rise, Ellen?"

Her eyes stayed on the floor, the shadow of whatever she was seeing flickering across her face.

Verify captcha to read the contentVerify