Shadow Slave novel Chapter 2501

Chapter 2501 Hidden in Reflections

Sunny remained silent for a while, thinking about Mirage and her whimsical kingdom. A land of towering dams, sprawling forests, lakes that glistened under the sun, and illusory castles that drifted upon the bed of reflected clouds… a place where fantasies came true.

A playground populated by beings she had imagined to сure her solitude and entertain her.

Sunny thought about how it had ended up, as well.𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

A broken sky, a shattered moon. A great castle that lay in ruins, and a drowned city hidden at the bottom of an abominable lake, with countless bones buried in the silt.

The only untainted things that remained of the Demon of Imagination were the illusory simulacrum on her beautiful citadel and the imaginary palace hidden in the reflections.

The former had been usurped by the Nightmare Spell and fashioned into a great stronghold for the Awakened, while the latter… the latter was slowly falling apart, having been left without a master for too long.

Sunny sighed.

He had always loved unraveling the ancient mysteries of the Dream Realm… but at some point, delving deeper into its dark past became intertwined with a sense of wistful melancholy.

Perhaps it was because he had become so much more powerful now. The protagonists of those ancient stories were not as distant and unreachable as they had seemed once… the gods, the daemons. Now that Sunny was halfway to becoming a deity himself, he could not perceive them as vast, faceless forces of nature anymore.

He could relate to their woes and sorrows, somewhat, and therefore was unable to deny their personhood.

'Should I really be feeling sorry for them, though?'

Those bastards were the ones who had ruined the world, after all. They were to blame for turning all of existence into a graveyard.

But no matter how Sunny tried, he could not bring himself to hate the deities of bygone eras. Their fate was already tragic, and their ends were already bitter enough. It was all one big mess of cosmic proportions, and that mess was too distant and too vast for him to care about it personally.

"A wonderful lecture."

Morgan had approached him and Saint at some point, and chose that moment to speak.

"I did not know. It is strange, really, how little we knew about Bastion — my grandfather had conquered it, after all, and my father ruled it for decades. I guess it was only to be expected, though, considering how wary both of them were of the Great Mirror.They spent decades guarding against it instead of trying to unravel its mysteries… I can't help but wonder if things would have been different if they were more curious."

Effie, who had brought the last box from the trunk of her PTV — or rather, her family PTV — placed it on the floor and shook off drops of water from her shoulders.

"Of course, things would have been different."

She looked at Morgan and smiled.

"Your grandfather, your daddy, and you would have been replaced by the Others decades ago. I hate to admit it, but let's give credit where credit is due… if there was one thing Anvil did right, it was keeping the Great Mirror covered at all times. As the current ruler of Bastion, that is precisely what I am doing, too."

Morgan gave her a dark look, then shrugged.

"...Fair enough."

Sunny interrupted them in a neutral tone:

"That is great and all, but shall we get down to business? Effie…"

He gestured to Saint, who seemed to have tensed as a result.

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