Nysa Nael was branded with the Sin of Lust.
Eren wouldn't have minded branding Nysa in the "traditional" way. He was sure that Maya wouldn't mind his debauchery. At most, she would ask him to do this privately after he settled his matters.
However, Eren had seen Nysa throw up. Thus, the butcher thought that maybe he should reserve the act of traditional branding for later on.
Nysa was the first to rise from the three rankers Eren had decided to spare. She was branded while keeping her personality and her memories intact. As a result, she remembered everything she did and said while under the lust mana's influence.
"You…"
Nysa looked at Eren scornfully when she got up. She quickly disappeared from her place after using spatial magic. Before vanishing, she also decided to destroy the nearby ground she had slept on.
Eren smiled wickedly as he saw Nysa disappear from his eyes. Only now did he come to know that the girl was a space-element ranker– a rare kind. Of course, she hadn't really left the testing grounds. She had just manipulated the space around her to make herself disappear.
"Hehe. She will come around. But why are they not waking up? Did I break them by introducing so many changes to the living undead's creation?"
Eren scrunched his nose in dissatisfaction when he saw that Darven and Harja Mel were yet to awaken as living undead– something they should have done by this point. He looked at them as if it was their fault for not making his experiments a success.
The butcher was about to regret the fact that he had brought gluttony mana into the mix to create another form of living undead. Maybe adding more than one type of Sin Series mana was a no-go. Or maybe the way that they had been added was wrong, he thought.
But just then, two distinct array circles around the two rankers' lifeless bodies lit up. The process of turning rankers into living undead was restarted.
"Grrrrrrrr!"
"Aaaaaaaargh!"
Darven and Harja Mel started making a bunch of noises from their mouths. Some noises were human-like, others were not. A few guttural sounds also escaped from their wide-open mouths. It was as if they were speaking a demonic language without even knowing what it meant.
Various otherworldly runes began to climb over the two rakers' bodies. They also started to grow tiny horns on their foreheads. Their skin started to turn dark brown and the color of their eyes turned bright yellow.
Darven and Harja Mel's ranking statuses also started shifting. It seemed as if their mana cores were becoming incompatible with their changed identities. The mana cores started spinning around their axis in a haywire manner inside their bodies. And the two rankers' mana circuits were overloaded with their own mana.
This was a painful process for both rankers. It was surprising because they were supposed to be living undead who shouldn't process pain in the same way as normal beings. It indicated that pain had crossed the threshold beyond the physical. Their souls hurt, and their souls were changing.
Just when it looked like Darven and Harja wouldn't survive the process, the death mana that Eren had poured into them acted as a stabilizer of sorts. It started flowing through their visible veins and changed the runic patterns all over their bodies with its flow.
Darven and Harja will return to their normal appearance in due time. Their mana cores and their mana signatures also stabilized. However, Eren had come to understand something about his recently created living undead specimen. He knew that they could shapeshift into their previous forms if they wanted to.
Eren looked at Darven and Harja Mel with the fascination of a researcher in his eyes. He had a feeling he had created a completely distinct existence on the land of Anfang by turning Darven and Harja Mel into what they are at this point.
Upon completing the process within themselves, Darven and Harja Mel both opened their eyes completely. They both stood up and bowed in front of their new master, waiting for his order.
"My liege."
Darven and Harja Mel said in unison. It indicated that their sentience was intact for the most part. Eren also had a reason to believe that their core memories and their experiences as rankers were also with them. This allowed them to use their skills to the fullest extent possible.
"Shapeshift."
Eren commanded the two entities to shapeshift and the two obliged without asking any questions. They both turned into their newly acquired forms and started looking inhuman. As if a different type of monster the likes of which had not been recorded in the history of Anfang.
Eren started feeling the wrath and gluttony mana coursing through Harja Mel and Darven's mana circuits as they stood still. He couldn't help but wonder how he managed to create something like that.
Sometimes researchers are just as clueless about their creations as anyone.
This would happen when the researchers conducted experiments on their whims, not expecting anything of worth. They were only interested in the process and not the aftermath when they started. However, they would be surprised if and when they gained desirable outcomes from their wild experiments.
Eren was in the same boat.
The butcher knew that the creatures of wrath would explode into nothingness after a while because the wrath mana was incompatible with rankers' bodies and mana cores. Due to gluttony mana exposure, they would also be unable to function normally as rankers. However, the death mana that he had poured into the two rankers' bodies as a necromancer took away the destabilizing factor.
Eren had come to understand that Darven and Harja Mel wouldn't be able to progress on their ranking journeys anymore. However, their shape-shifted forms would allow them to level up differently. This attribute sets them apart from the rest of the living undead.
However, Eren wondered if Harja and Darven would be able to come back to their human forms if they tried leveling up through their shape-shifted forms. There was a chance that their forms would become destabilized if they attempted, forcing their bodies to implode.
Eren told them to come back to their human forms. He then asked Alephee as he circled the two beings.
'Miss Timeless, what are they?'
Alephee's voice was heard in Eren's mind for some time.
'Umm... Let's say that you have managed to create your own brand of fiends by experimenting with Sin Series mana.'
Alephee remarked after observing Darven and Harja Mel using Eren's senses.
