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*****
{Chapter: 120: The Price of a Wish}
In the end, life offers two choices to those desperate enough to make deals in the dark corners of the world: either get ripped off by the powerful, or spend the rest of your pitiful existence groveling as a loser, waiting for death to show mercy.
There is no middle path.
No redemption.
No third option.
So Hart, trembling, disheveled, and reeking of sweat, stood before Dexâthe being of nightmares and whispersâand did the only thing left to him.
He stuck his neck out, ready for the knife. Ready to be bled. Ready to give up his very soul.
Of course, Dex was not going to be polite about it.
The demon didn't even pretend to be civil or subtle. Instead, he did what he was known for across the realms: he smiled. A cold, terrifying smile that felt like it could freeze blood. Then, with the elegance of a bureaucratic demon from the deepest circles of the Abyss, he conjured a flaming quill and parchment made from some kind of blackened flesh that still twitched on its own.
Dex began writing.
And writing.
And writing.
The ink hissed and sizzled as it touched the contract. It smelled of scorched sulfur, rotting flowers, and something unnamably foul. Dex listed, in excruciating detail, clause after clause of unreasonable, torturous conditionsâeach one worse than the last. Hidden meanings. Twisted language. Riddles wrapped in legalese. It was the kind of contract that would make a lawyer weep and a scholar go mad.
This wasn't a dealâit was a slow, spiritual execution.
When Dex finally handed it over, the abyss contract was hundreds of thousands of words long. The scroll was so heavy with magical significance that Hart nearly collapsed under its weight when he took it.
As his shaking hands unrolled it, Hart felt something sink in his chest. The sky itself seemed to darken. Even the sunlight, once warm and golden, grew pale and distant. It was as if the very concept of hope had been removed from the world for a moment.
A silent wind passed. In his mind, Hart heard somethingâhis own inner voice wailing, echoing through a vast emptiness. The grief he had felt at his mother's funeralâraw, aching, soul-crushingâwas nothing compared to this dread. It wasn't just the fear of death. It was worse.
It was the certainty of ownership.
He no longer belonged to himself.
Dex, watching him without pity, simply tapped his long, skeletal finger on the final signature line. Hart, with lips trembling and breath coming in shallow gasps, dipped the quill into his own blood and signed.
The moment the signature was completed, Dex snapped his fingers.
The contract ignited into flames of blue and violet and vanishedâabsorbed into Dex's chest as if swallowed by a void.
"The contract is established," Dex said coldly. "The transaction begins now."
And then came the scream.
"AHHHHHHHHHH!!!"
Hart doubled over, his scream tearing through the air like a butcher's blade through bone. It was pure, animal agony.
Something had gone horribly wrongâor rather, exactly as Dex had planned.
His chest erupted with a sensation like white-hot knives slicing through every organ. He fell to the ground, his body jerking and spasming, his mouth foaming, his limbs contorting in unnatural directions. His skin turned pale, then flushed red, then began sweating an oily, black fluid.
If he could see what was happening inside, he would have wept in horror.
His organs were being rearranged like building blocks, shifting violently, tearing, merging. His blood vessels expanded. New glands, tissues, and alien structures were forming from his bones and flesh. Portions of his DNA were deleted outright, while others were twisted into new sequencesâinhuman ones.
It was as if a god of biology had decided to redesign him, but had never cared about anesthetics.
Dex, reclining lazily against the moist pistil of a massive flowerâwhose petals pulsed and breathed like a sleeping beastâwatched the boy's suffering with the mild disinterest of a man listening to a distant storm. His pointed ears twitched at Hart's screams.
"Tch. Annoying. Sounds like someone is butchering a pig," he muttered, half tempted to block his ears.
Unknown to Hart, ever since he had entered this cursed territoryâa garden of monstrous, towering flowers drenched in death flowersâDex's plague had already infected him. It wasn't active yet, merely dormant, lying in wait within his cells. Normally, because of a prior deal Dex had made with a higher being named Shield, his plagues were not meant to harm mortals who passed throughâmerely make them a bit sick. Fever, chills, vomiting. Nothing fatal.
But Hart had signed the contract.
And that changed everything.
Now, the plague was no longer a curse. It became a conduitâa living tool for Dex to remold the boy's body as he saw fit.
From Dex's perspective, the inside of Hart's body looked like a blueprint unfolded in midair. Each organ, gene, and magical potential was rendered in glowing detail. Systems humans didn't even have names for danced before his mind's eye. Recessive genes, long-forgotten evolutionary relics, and buried power fragmentsâDex saw them all. Manipulated them with the ease of a child building with blocks.
"The recessive gene has been activated. The base biological energy furnace is now under construction..."
To Hart, this was hell. To Dex, it was Tuesday.
He worked casually, not unlike a bored artist doodling on parchment. He shifted flesh here, altered nerve paths there. He didn't care about Hart's screams or his convulsions. The boy was the clay; Dex was the hand of the sculptor. The pain meant nothing.
And Dex had all the rights of interpretation.
It took over forty minutes.
Forty minutes of agony. Of writhing in his own fluids. Of praying for death, then begging for it.
And then, finally, it stopped.
The pain ceased.
Hart lay there, twitching slightly, gasping like a fish flung onto dry land. Blood pooled around him, though it was hard to tell how much of it was his. His skin glistened. His eyes fluttered open.
He could breathe.
More than breatheâhe felt alive in a way he never had before.
He could hear the heartbeat of insects in the flowers. He could see the scent trails left behind by birds. Every color was sharper. Every breath was sweeter. Every cell in his body felt... new.
He had been remade.
Hart choked out a sobânot from pain this time, but from gratitude. He had survived. He was reborn. And in that moment of delirious clarity, he swore to the heavens above and all the Wizards he had once mocked:
"I'll be good... I swear... I'll never come back here again... I'll never ask for more... never..."
Dex didn't even look at him at first. He yawned. The flower beneath him shifted lazily.
Then, eyes still half-lidded, he glanced at the boyânow curled in a pool of blood, shivering like a beaten dog.
"Why are you still lying there?" Dex asked with irritation. "The wish has been granted. Get out of my sight."
The words echoed through the still air like the tolling of a bell.
*****
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