While Asher was highly tempted to simply stab the woman in the head and be done with it, she was his only actual lead to finding Eight, and he had a few questions he needed her help answering before he disposed of her.

Unfortunately, she didn't seem threatened by him in the slightest.

"Spatial, Knowledge, and Eternity," she grunted, tapping the vial of magadrine powder against her chin as she continued to stare at him. "My, what a unique combination of elements. Are you aware you're running around with an element that doesn't actually exist?"

"Are you aware of the predicament you're in right now?" Asher asked, pointing his dagger toward her heart. "I have this tier 2 concealment skill for a reason, and while you seem quirky, you don't seem stupid. Why would you even make me aware you were able to bypass it and see my elements?"

"Curiosity mainly," she shrugged. "You heard what Theorn said, didn't you? I primarily spend my days in my workshop testing alchemical combinations that most alchemists wouldn't dare to experiment with. I call it the brute force method of alchemy. Elnor has had to resurrect me over three dozen times by now!" She said this last bit with a cackle, as though the fact was utterly hilarious.

"I thought resurrecting people had consequences," Asher frowned, wondering if the repeated trips back from the dead was what had made the woman so odd.

"Would you believe there's a resistance for that?" she snickered, grinning at him. "Even the evolved form doesn't remove them entirely, but it takes the edge off at the very least. And despite how I act, I take extremely thorough notes of all my experiments. Even if I lose my short term memory, it's simple enough to check my notes to see what experiment I tried and write down 'leads to death' in the results section."

This woman is certifiably nuts, he realized, watching her as she began absentmindedly chewing on the stopper keeping the magadrine powder contained within the vial in her hands. Deciding he'd danced around the subject long enough, he dove right into it.

"I'm hunting down Eight from the Assassin's Guild," he said, watching her carefully for any sort of indication she knew more than she was letting on. "Do you have any connections to them?"

"Connections to the Guild?" She snorted, shaking her head as if the question were hilarious. "I wish. Do you know what I would do with that kind of power? I'd force Elnor to let me bring a bed down here!"

"This is serious!" Asher snarled, stepping forward and thrusting his dagger toward her chest, only stopping it when the blade was inches from her heart. "Eight is threatening people I care about, and I will see the Finger dead. The only lead I have is from someone with the Ink element who traced the ink Eight used in his assassination orders back to this estate. So either you're secretly Eight and are doing a damn good job of trying to throw me off your trail, or you're supplying ink to them for some reason."

"In that case, it sounds like I'm the only lead you have in your little treasure hunt," Leighann snickered, tapping the vial of magadrine powder carefully against the flat of his blade. "And unfortunately for you, I'm not afraid of death, and my evolved pain resistance makes torture more of an annoyance than anything, which means all you can do is try to convince me to give you the information you need within the next few minutes before Theorn reaches the guards and this place is crawling with people." She grinned at him, those dark pits of her eyes never wavering in the slightest. "I'd recommend you put that dagger away so we can have a nice little chat. Now that I know what led you here, I can tell you I do know where you can find Eight, and I'll even be willing to share that information with you if you answer a couple of my questions."

Asher started as she came clean and admitted she knew where he could find Eight, and he took a hesitant step back. As much as he hated to admit it, she was entirely right. He had no way to force the information out of her, and while he could try and convince her that she wouldn't come back from the dead this time if he killed her, he had no way of proving his skill worked as he claimed.

This woman was old friends with death, and he didn't scare her in the slightest.

"Fine," he said, storing his dagger back within his rift and frowning at her. "What do you want to know?"

"For starters, where in the realms did you find that Eternity element?" she asked, cocking her head to the side again as she pointed at him with the vial of magadrine powder. "Seeing as you have the Spatial element, you're clearly a realm wanderer. Did you pick it up along your journey?"

Asher was tempted to lie, but now that he was spilling his secrets to this woman, he'd already come to the decision he was going to have to kill her. While her aura wasn't nearly as tainted as some he'd come across, she was far from a squeaky clean slate such as Theorn. Her past was checkered with questionable deeds and more than one murder, which meant he'd have no qualms against killing her. As soon as he got the information he needed from her about Eight's whereabouts, he'd kill her and shove her body in his rift. Hopefully, the lack of a corpse would make Theorn simply think she'd run off or something. It wasn't a very elegant solution, but it was the best he could do in his current situation.

To make sure she didn't teleport away before he silenced her, he quickly threw up a large Spatial Lock that extended beyond the room to keep it hidden, and he ensured that the bubble locked down spatial travel.

"When I came to this world, it was an accident," he admitted, thinking back to his sudden appearance before the undead wizard. "A lich summoned me from my own realm, and during my escape from his tower, I stumbled upon the Eternity element."

"Wait, a lich summoned you?" she repeated, her grin vanishing in an instant as she grew serious. "Just one, or were there more?"

"I only saw the one," he shrugged, curious as to her sudden shift in tone. "Why, is that a big deal?"

"Tell me about the Eternity element, where did you find it?" she snapped, ignoring his question completely. Her entire demeanor had changed without warning, and Asher felt an entirely new kind of chill go down his spine as the woman suddenly seemed a lot less crazy than she had moments ago.

"It was behind a sealed door that looked like an army wouldn't even be able to break down," he said, remembering how he'd accidentally tumbled through it via the astral realm. "The element was sitting on a pedestal, surrounded by a bunch of old pieces of junk that didn't show up to my Identify skill for whatever reason."

"Describe the junk to me. How many pieces, exactly?" she demanded.

"Uh, I'm pretty sure there were fourteen pieces," he said, desperately trying to remember the exact scene. The room had been lit with nothing more than a flickering match, and he'd been on the end of an adrenaline rush from being chased through the tower by a bloodthirsty demon. "There was a wedding ring and an old locket… and some sort of stuffed animal, like a child's toy. I can't remember the rest."

"Fourteen," she gasped, the black voids that were her eyes growing even wider. Asher swore the very light from the gemstones illuminating the room seemed to bend toward them, as if being drawn in. "I can only assume the worst, but I might as well ask. The lich that summoned you, did you speak with it?"

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"I tried, but it pretty much ignored me completely," he admitted. "It just kept talking to itself. It insulted my intelligence, I remember that. Then it realized I was from a different realm, and mentioned needing to inform 'the council.'"

"How long ago was this? Did you tell anyone about this encounter, anyone at all?"

"A bit over a month ago, and no, of course not!" he said, deciding for obvious reasons not to tell her about Samantha and Brian. "I'm trying to hide my elements, not announce them to the world!"

"You have no idea what you've stumbled upon, do you?" she frowned. "Does 'The Council of Death' mean anything to you at all?"

"No, never heard of it," he said, shrugging. "What, is that the name for a group of liches?"

"Oh, you sweet child," she muttered, leaning back against her workbench and tutting at him. "I don't know whether to try and tell you everything is going to be okay or scream at you for being so dense. The Council of Death is a group of liches that have existed for countless millennia. Their members are scattered far across this continent, and they predate our tiny little kingdom by an age and a half. According to the history books, the council contains nine liches of overwhelming power, who take whatever they want and stop at nothing to further their research. Though based on what you've told me, it would seem either the history books were wrong, or they've been recruiting. To think the council has a base set up so close to our own kingdom…"

"Is it really that big a deal?" Asher asked, beginning to grow a little concerned based on her reaction. "I escaped the tower and never looked back. Sure, I took an enchanted weapon or two, but I didn't touch any of those weird objects you seem so obsessed with."

"And a good thing too, because you wouldn't be standing here if you did," she said. "I'm almost certain those were the phylacteries of the entire council. Objects of great importance to each of the fourteen liches that contained their immortal souls and allowed them to break the bonds of mortality. I have no doubt they are warded to the realms and back, and touching a single one of them probably would have either liquified you or made your heart explode on the spot."

"Good to know," he gulped, shaking slightly at the realization of just how close he'd come to death back then. "If they are so important, why keep them all in one place?"

"Are you seriously that daft?" she asked, frowning at him. "The Eternity element, you dolt! They were clearly attempting an experiment to create a never-before-seen element! Thanks to a lich's phylactery, they are able to live as long as they want, if you can call their undead existence living at all. They are eternal. They must have suspected they'd be able to force such an element into existence, and clearly, they were correct. Though I can't imagine it was a fast process."

Asher's mind replayed the scene of him running into the demon guarding the tower, recalling just how shaken the demon had seemed that second time around. His entire experience with the demon had been terrifying enough that he'd replayed it over in his mind again and again the past few weeks, to the point where he could practically see and hear the demon like he was still back there trapped with it in the tower.

"It finally formed, didn't it?" The demon whispered, its voice quiet like a dying fire. "After all these centuries it actually happened… and you took it?" It paused, a horrified expression like nothing Asher had ever seen crossing its face.

"They were working on the experiment for centuries," Asher said, nodding slowly. "They also have some sort of extraction ritual they can use to rip elements out of people."

"I'd say something like that is entirely impossible, but then again, I'd say the same about an element of Eternity," the woman cackled weakly. "Forget Eight and the Guild, child, your true enemy is The Council of Death. And it is a fight I'm sorry to say I don't see you winning."

"You guys are the leading noble family for this portion of the kingdom, right?" Asher snapped, not liking the defeatist tone Leighann had already taken. "If they are such a big deal, wouldn't you help?"

"Oh, we'll certainly try, now that we know they are so close," she nodded, offering him a sad smile. "...Though that doesn't do you much good. You took something of theirs, something of critical importance. The Council of Death is going to come for you."

"It's been over a month, and they haven't done anything," Asher argued, praying she was blowing this all out of proportion.

"The Council consists of beings that have lived for thousands of years," she said, a sorrowful gaze in her eye as she looked at him. "Time moves differently for them. For beings with plans that operate on the scales of centuries or longer, a month is but a blink of an eye."

"Then it sounds like I don't have to worry about them until after I'm done here," he said, glaring at her. "I've answered your questions. Where can I find Eight?"

"I don't know his exact location, but I only have one pen pal who I ship my own personal ink to on a regular basis," she said, grabbing a scrap of paper and jotting down what looked like an address. "We often talk about the state of the city, and he sends me stamina potions that largely remove the need for sleep. I can't say I'm a huge fan of throwing him under the wagon like this, but if what you say is true, he did just try and have me killed, which isn't a very friendly thing to do. My guess is that he realized you'd figured out about the ink somehow and wanted to silence me in order to buy himself time. It would take at minimum a few days for Elnor to summon the healer capable of bringing me back from the dead, and probably longer."

"Thank you," he said, tucking the paper away within his rift after Incorporating it just to be safe. "So again, if I tell the nobles about The Council of Death, they'll take action, right?"

"No need to worry about that, I'll bring it up to Elnor first thing in the morning," Leighann said, her eyes shimmering with darkness as she watched him. "You just worry about Eight."

"Right," Asher said, taking a deep breath in preparation for what he was about to do. He'd killed plenty of people of course, but after speaking with Leighann for so long, this felt more like an execution than anything. He briefly wondered if he could try to goad her into attacking him to make this easier on himself, before realizing he didn't have the time. Theorn and the guards could be back at any moment. "Anyway, thank you for-"

Before the words could even get out of his mouth, Leighann's hand glowed black, and the vial she'd been playing with all this time shattered, causing the magadrine powder inside to explode outward. Asher barely managed to slip into the astral fast enough to dodge the suicide attack, and he blinked in confusion as Leighann's body crumpled to the ground, dead in an instant from the blue powder already covering her front.

What in the…

It took him a moment to realize what she'd done, and he gasped when it finally hit him.

She'd taken her own life rather than let him kill her.

She knew about his skill, or least suspected. By killing herself, her family could resurrect her again, and she could tell them everything he'd told her. She might miss pieces here and there from the after-effects of resurrection, but if she'd truly picked up an evolved resistance to help with that, there was no telling how much she'd remember.

"Damn it!" he hissed, watching the magadrine powder slowly settle on the ground and vanish as though it had never existed. As soon as the glowing blue powder was gone, he returned to the material realm and immediately stabbed her corpse in the heart before cutting off her head. He still hadn't learned exactly what was required for resurrection to take place, and in the off chance a person's body wasn't actually required, it was the only thing he could think of doing in his panic. He doubted his skill would do anything now that she was already dead, but it was still better than nothing.

Shoving her remains into his rift, he briefly looked around for the glowing ball of violet shards, blinking when he couldn't find one. She was obviously dead, which could only mean that she didn't keep a single shard on her.

For anyone else, that would be crazy. But seeing as she'd admitted she sort of had a habit of dying unexpectedly, he supposed that made a lot of sense. Otherwise she'd be constantly losing her shards to shard decay.

While he double checked he wasn't just missing the orb somehow, he heard what sounded like the pounding footsteps of at least a dozen people rapidly approaching from down the hall. Cursing himself one last time for being played, he quickly returned to the astral and made a break for the estate wall.

He'd managed to further narrow down Eight's location, but at what cost?

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