Endless Horde: Through the Eyes of a Godking

--

Cedric held the pendant and sent out a slight spiritual probing.

"Ha! You dumb thief! Give me your body!"

The words he heard caused his brows to rise. Then, he felt a strong attraction from the pendant, which he resisted fairly easily.

"What!? How is this possible!?"

Disbelief was very obvious to the voice of the lunatic's soul. Yes, it turns out that the lunatic wasn't completely dead yet. He was smart enough to save a piece of his soul in this pendant.

What he wanted to do was very obvious too. But unfortunately for him, his plan won't work on Cedric.

"Damn! Damn! Damn! Wait, sir! Please, hear me out!"

"No," Cedric flatly replied.

Then, he sent out a wisp of spiritual fire into the pendant. It's laced with Fire Laws, something that a soul remnant couldn't possibly defend against.

"ARRRGGHHH!!! NO! NO! NO! I DON'T WANT TO DIE!"

Yet no matter how unwilling he was, the spiritual fire continued to burn him mercilessly, deaf to his pleas and pain. It didn't take long before his voice faded away. His soul mark was erased, and only a pure soul remnant was left, one that Cedric unhesitatingly consumed.

As soon as he did, the lunatic's memories surged in his consciousness. Cedric assimilated these memories and browsed through them leisurely, making sure to pay attention to everything that's worth his notice.

"What a hot mess you are, Cade..." Cedric muttered after reading through the memories.

Cade, as it turns out, was a very jealous and opportunistic man. He's the embodiment of humanity's bad tendencies pushed to extremes.

Despite only leaving a remnant soul in this pendant, which turns out to be a life-saving artifact, by the way, his memories were intact, allowing Cedric to see everything from start to finish.

Cade was born and raised in the Dreadstar Civilization, which happened to be the nearest human civilization to this death zone. This civilization wasn't so advanced but not that prosperous either; it's mediocre at best.

He's an orphan. He's never known his parents; he tried, but as he grew up, his ambitions occupied his mind, and he had completely forgotten about it. Though, at a young age, Cade wondered why he wasn't normal.

Even at the orphanage he grew up in, he was an outcast. While his fellow orphans were being adopted by loving and caring families, nobody extended the same love and care to him. He tried his best to be good. He wanted to be good because he wanted a family, but nobody wanted him.

This coldness and indifference left a deep scar on Cade's young mind. It was here that his thoughts started becoming warped, but it's a slow descent to madness instead of an instant.

The more he's exposed to the cruel, merciless, and cold world, the more cracks appear in his sanity until finally, all his inhibitions are unleashed and the seed of evil sprouts within him.

Because he was an orphan relying on the mercy of the government for protection and sustenance, he had deficiencies growing up. Ones that became glaring once he began his path to Life Evolution. Moreover, he wasn't adopted at all; he was kicked out of the orphanage at the age of 10 because they could no longer support him. Cade had to rely on himself from that point onwards.

Life Evolution, everybody raves about it. Its promises were particularly attractive to Cade: strength, status, wealth, and maybe love...weren't these the very things he craved?

These promises weren't necessarily a lie. Alas, Cade's qualifications were mediocre at best. He wasn't some hidden genius and wasn't lucky either. He's just another one of those hopefuls who were lured by the luxurious promises of Life Evolution.

His descent to evil and madness started when he began to compare himself with others. He didn't need to look far; there's a considerable gap between him and normal people like him.

Unlike them, he didn't receive any proper care, love, and consideration as he grew up. Kids with families could afford to send their kids to schools for education, while Cade had to scrape by with what little he had available. Hell, he even had to budget the meager allowance he receives from the government so that it will last for an entire month. Forget about buying meat; Cade only has enough money to eat twice a day, and he'd be lucky enough if he could buy something with bones to suck on.

This was already a massive gap between him and his peers, and this wasn't even including those who won at the genetic lottery.

Kids who were born in middle-class or rich families, those who were born with unique physiques and talents, those who were born with both and maybe so much more...Cade was jealous of them all.

He spent many nights dreaming that he was in their place instead, and those dreams were always pleasant. So pleasant that sometimes, he didn't want to wake up from them. Whenever he does wake up, the cruel and harsh reality places its entire weight upon and crushes his remaining hope little by little until it is ground to dust.

The older he got, the more despair he felt. He used to believe that hard work can make up for the lack of talent, but he eventually realized that that's a lie. It's only meant to comfort him, to prevent him from sinking further.

Cade's breaking point was when his first girlfriend cheated on him with someone better.

As someone who lacked love and affection growing up, Cade cherished his girlfriend. He worked extremely hard to give her what she wanted, anything to keep her with him. He endured so much, only to be repaid with a harsh slap to his face that his efforts wouldn't amount to nothing.

Inferior will always be inferior. This is a simple and easy concept to understand, one that Cade finally understood after experiencing this heartbreak.

This is where Cade began to unravel...

He thought that since this world insists on taking things from him, it'd only make sense if he stole it back, right?

But since he's not capable of stealing from the heavens yet, then he'd get some practice by stealing from others around him first.

And on his first attempt, he received a windfall. He marveled at how easy and how utterly simple it was from start to finish. Others have in abundance what he lacked, so it would only make sense to take it from them, right? They don't have any use for it anyway.

Cade got addicted. And as his deficiencies were made up from stealing things, the gap between him and others he used to look up to lessened as well.

When Cade trampled someone who everybody used to refer to as a 'heaven-sent genius,' he felt cathartic. It's here that he finally realized that he made it. It's this event that solidified his belief that what he did was right. It's as if he was enlightened to one of the fundamental truths of the world.

And things just got worse from there...

Cade stole and stole. In the beginning, he set a bottom line for himself, but as time went on and his needs became more extreme, that bottom line became increasingly blurred until he had completely forgotten about it.

Once, he justified his actions by saying that he's only making up for what he lacked. But at some point, that turned into greed. As his mind descended deeper into madness, he became voracious, thinking that he deserved to have everything that's good in this world, and if some people have something to say about that, then they can go to hell.

Cade used to only steal from bad people. Then he turned his eyes to strangers. The more he got away from it, the greedier he became. At some point, he had no qualms about stealing from his friends, lover, master, and the very world itself.

Suffice it to say, Cade came to the point of no return.

Alas, Cade wasn't invincible. As he descended further and further into madness, his cunning mind and strategic schemes had been eroded by greed. He made one fatal mistake that allowed Oliver, another person he stole from, to undo and expose everything he did.

When the weight of his sins bore down on him and he was forced to face the consequences of his actions, Cade panicked. He's been able to escape the consequences before, but not anymore.

He tried to flee, change his name, move to another civilization, and do it all over again. But he was hunted down and forced to flee in this death zone, where he eventually unraveled even further and met his unfortunate death.

Sigh...

Cedric was honestly speechless. What else can he really say in this situation?

Cade was an embodiment of human tendencies taken to extremes. His yearning for love and affection wasn't wrong; it was normal given his upbringing, yet it also became his most fatal flaw that turned him into a person Cade himself couldn't even recognize anymore.

'Humans are humans, no matter the environment, I suppose,' Cedric muttered to himself.

Cedric put the pendant away and sat down to comb through Cade's memories once more; this time, he wanted to learn other important things instead of knowing who Cade was.