October. The air turned prickly, soaked in the smell of rotting leaves and impending blood. I arrived at the designated place. Alexia and Draconite were already waiting for me. They had fulfilled their part of the deal: a thousand people in shackles, a living wall of doomed bodies stretching across the gray field.

  I looked at them, and against my will, fragments of their fates began to surface in my head. Criminals, paupers, accidental victims of ambition...

  "Set the tables," my voice sounded like the rustle of dry snow. "Bring out the best food you can find in this kingdom. No one should leave hungry."

  They obeyed silently. Three days later, everything was ready. Massive tables groaned under the weight of the feast, and I sat in the center of this banquet during a plague. Alexia stood nearby, resting a hand on her stomach—there, inside her, a life had already sparked, demanding an exorbitant toll.

  "Eat," I ordered, staring into the empty eyes of the condemned.

  They started timidly, suspiciously, but hunger took its course. When the feast was in full swing, I opened my palm. Fine, glowing yellow sand trickled between my fingers, and a light breeze carried it along the tables. Everyone who inhaled this golden dust froze.

  I began to show them dreams. The very ones they were afraid to even wish for.

  It was the hardest work of my life. I wasn't just broadcasting pictures—I was filtering their fates through myself, absorbing all the blackness and filth that had accumulated in their souls. For a soul to become clean, I had to take its darkness into myself.

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  I sat there and saw a thousand smiles.

  One finally reunited with a brother lost in the war. Another knelt before his mother, begging for forgiveness, and received it. Someone sat at a set table surrounded by the family they never had. Someone simply lay in silence in an endless field, feeling like they were home. A thousand individual heavens, woven from their longing.

  It was unbearable for me. The weight of a thousand lives pressed against my ribs, making my heart clench with pain.

  When the moment of happiness reached its absolute peak, when their souls became transparent and radiant with pure joy...

  SNAP.

  A thousand heads burst simultaneously, like overripe fruit. No pain. Only an instantaneous transition from a perfect dream into the eternal void.

  I threw my hands up, pulling the escaping sparks toward me. I compressed them, crushing them into one another, until a single sphere formed in my palms, pulsing with a toxic yellow light. The concentrate of a thousand lives.

  I walked over to Alexia. Her face was pale, her eyes burning with a feverish gleam. I simply placed my hand on her stomach and pushed the sphere inside.

  She collapsed to her knees, crying out from a sharp pain. Draconite immediately caught her, pulling her close.

  I turned away, staring at the gray sky.

  "Is it done?" Draconite's voice trembled. "The child... will it live?"

  "Yes," I answered coldly, without turning around. "Now it's strong enough to digest your blood. Rejoice."

  POP.

  I teleported as far away as I possibly could. Far away from that field, far away from those two. What... monsters they are. Vicious, selfish monsters. And I am their loyal executioner.

  I collapsed in a forest on all fours. The hum of a thousand voices in my head turned into a roar. Their memories, their most horrific moments that I absorbed to cleanse their souls, were now tearing me apart from the inside.

  I threw up a dark, viscous liquid that looked like tar. But the roar wouldn't stop. Thousands of screams, thousands of unfulfilled hopes...

  "Weakling..." I hissed to myself.

  KABOOM!

  A massive pillar of black flame, mixed with crimson sparks, rose all the way to the heavens, turning centuries-old trees to ash. I screamed, but my voice was lost in this fiery chaos.

  I did it. I saved one life by stealing a thousand, and for what?