The Royal Military Academy's Impostor Owns a Dungeon [BL]-Chapter 899: Beyond Purification

And try he did.

See, normally, they wouldn’t have had to try.

In cases involving corruption, the process was fairly straightforward. The patient would be placed inside a containment cube. The Purification Chamber would be activated. The corruption, forced out from the body by sheer incompatibility, would be cleansed away.

Simple. Clean. Efficient.

After all, spiritual energy and corruption did not like sharing space. Like oil and water, they resisted mixing inside a living body. Corruption sought spiritual energy to contaminate it, yes, but it was still an invader. As long as enough spiritual energy remained to circulate and defend the core, the corruption could actually be suppressed.

But introduce a stronger and more potent source of spiritual energy, like the purification field, and the corruption would do what corruption always did.

It would switch.

Black tendrils would spill out of the body, writhing and retreating in search of greener, easier pastures. The patient would pass out for a good while, but by the end of it all, the body would be purified.

And Luca, the little money-grubber, would walk away with a pleasantly increased CP balance afterward.

That was how it usually went.

But today was clearly not a usual day.

"Hmm."

The sound alone made several elders tense.

Luca stared at the readings with his brows knitted together, his nonexistent tail stiff behind him. Sure enough, it was exactly as strange as he had originally guessed.

The elders had briefed him immediately, explaining what they had found. They were, without question, experts in spiritual energy. They could read fluctuations, pressure, density, and circulation better than most people could read text.

But corruption wasn’t exactly their specialty.

That part belonged to their young Lord.

Luca studied the scan again.

A whole section of pathways was simply... gone. Just as they said.

It was bad enough on its own, but then Luca glanced at the unconscious Elven Prince on the bed and finally spoke.

"I actually didn’t notice it at first either."

Everyone turned toward him.

"If it weren’t for Princess Kira," he continued earnestly, "I don’t think I would have caught it at all."

The room froze.

Theo blinked. Doctor Philip leaned forward. The elders straightened in unison.

"...Princess Kira?" one of them echoed.

"Yes," Luca nodded, entirely serious. "Every time she spoke to him earlier, his pathways changed."

The elders stiffened further. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

"Changed?" Doctor Philip asked carefully.

Luca tilted his head, struggling to put it into words. "It was like... every time her words destabilized him emotionally, his body reacted. His pathways would crack open."

Well, not exactly a crack, but like an overwhelmed door trying to stay shut but eventually opening because of pressure. It was like that.

He even made a small gesture with his hands, fingers splitting apart.

"And every time that happened," Luca continued, eyes growing brighter with both fascination and concern, "I could sense corruption."

The atmosphere shifted.

"But that’s the weird part," the curious Guide added quickly. "It didn’t feel like the usual corrupted environment a contaminated person would have."

The elders exchanged looks.

The problem was the oddness of what he could sense. It was as if, instead of the corruption simply monopolizing the spiritual pathways, preventing spiritual energy from circulating properly and defending the core, this one had merged with the pathways.

He hesitated.

"It felt like it merged. As if the pathways themselves were complicit instead of compromised."

Silence.

Merged.

Several elders visibly recoiled.

"Um, I think his pathways have mutated into corrupted ones."

Doctor Philip sucked in a sharp breath.

"And if that’s true, I think it would explain the scans," Luca said suddenly, looking relieved to have connected the dots. "Scans detect pathways by tracing spiritual energy flow, right?"

The Doctor nodded slowly.

"So if there’s no spiritual energy circulating in those pathways," Luca continued, voice picking up speed, "then there’s no contrast for the scan to pick up. It likely wouldn’t have anything to show at all."

Realization hit the room like a wave.

"!!!"

It made absolute sense.

For a brief moment, awe filled the room. It was a tense moment, but they couldn’t help but marvel at something groundbreaking.

And in a sense, it was really a big deal. But unfortunately for everyone, he was just getting started.

"Hmm," he said, rubbing his cheek. "I’m not completely sure yet."

Everyone leaned forward.

"But I think...with how this is progressing, he might actually be mutating."

The room snapped from stunned silence to instant panic.

"That instead of ending up with Spiritual Imbalance, he would actually be taken over by corruption as a mutated creature."

"!!!"

Someone could have dropped a nonexistent clipboard.

Another elder swore.

And Theo? The poor cadet felt his spine tremble.

__

Luca must have said something deeply unsettling.

Unfortunately, Rahil couldn’t hear a single word of it. The spiritual barrier around him was doing its job a little too well.

But he could see.

And what he saw made his stomach sink.

One moment, everyone had looked tense but cautiously hopeful. Next, their expressions shifted so abruptly that it was as if someone had flipped a table inside the room. Awe twisted into disbelief. Relief curdled into horror. Theo looked like his soul had briefly left his body, and Doctor Philip’s face had gone several shades paler than medically appropriate.

That alone was enough to make Rahil feel sick.

He stood there, hands clenched uselessly at his sides, heart pounding so hard he was certain someone else could hear it even through the barrier.

And yet he couldn’t do anything.

All he could do was watch.

More than mortified, he felt helpless.

The feeling was overwhelming enough that it took him a moment to even process how surreal the scene was.

Because there was Luca.

Right there.

Close enough to see clearly.

Not only awake. Not only speaking. But leading.

Giving instructions. Explaining things. Having elders and doctors listen to him with rapt attention.

For a split second, Rahil’s mind stumbled over the dissonance. The Luca Kyros they had known for so long versus the Luca Kyros standing there now.

The vegetative heir they had watched over, guarded, and quietly pitied.

And the terrifyingly competent young Lord commanding the room and practically holding the Empire’s interest in his palms.

It almost didn’t feel real.

And for just a moment, Rahil felt something dangerous bloom in his chest.

Hope.

Because if Luca could recover not just well but spectacularly, then surely, surely, there was a chance for his master too.

Surely miracles were still on the table.

While his boss deserved to grovel to his beloved, the aide was certain he didn’t deserve to die. Also, Elior wouldn’t exactly be able to wipe the floor with his face and express his apologies as a dead person, so he hoped he would live.

He hoped they would be able to help him even if Prince Elior had to kneel for a very long time after he regained his health.

Anything, provided he lived.

That fragile thought barely had time to settle before Theo’s expression shattered it.

Theo looked wrecked.

Not panicked. Not confused.

Worse.

He looked like someone who had just been shown an answer he didn’t want to understand.

Rahil’s knees almost gave out.

From where he stood, locked inside the barrier and stripped of any usefulness, all he could do was focus on not fainting next.

Then again, why had he been asked to stay when they were going to put a barrier around him anyway?

Well, that was because he was the only elf there, and even if they didn’t want to, he was really the best comparison as of the moment.

But more than that, those surrounding Elior actually asked to know more about his master’s condition.

So he said everything he knew as fast as he could, and eventually summed it up: his master’s twin brother had become a mad scientist and decided to use his very own brother as an experimental specimen.

Honestly, they hadn’t witnessed it, nor had they received confirmation that Eren had experimented on the prince, but everything pointed to that when they saw what he had been doing in his hideout.

More importantly, Elior entered that hellhole without physical ailments only to come out of it with scars that wouldn’t even heal with modern technology, spiritual abilities that he suddenly had difficulty using, and worse, a sudden and punishing terminal diagnosis for something they couldn’t really even identify.

How did such a thing even work, right?

But that was all Rahil could tell them. Honestly, he shouldn’t have ever spoken about it. But if this was going to be how they died, he wanted someone to know what happened to them. He wanted someone else to know what kind of hell they had gone through just to get to today.

And yet at the very back of his mind, Rahil hoped that it would help call forth a miracle.

Because more than any other time, they needed one right now.

Actually, correction—the Empire needed one right now.