The sunken city that had been this demon prince's seat of power for who knew how long had stood untouched in its timeless way, but now it was completely devastated. It took the blade some time to figure out what had happened, let alone why or how. First, though, it looked to the cyan wreaths of the damned souls that lingered above it.

Before they had hung above the city as a churning, luminescent spiderweb. Now they had clumped up above the ruined temple, practically all within reach. The blade took advantage of that to reach out and devour hundreds, refilling its reserves. As it did so, it pondered that vital clue.

Most of them were outside of my reach before; what changed? It asked itself. No matter how much it compressed or stretched space, it couldn't reach out beyond that limit.

It took several seconds, but eventually it figured out what had happened. When it had stretched out the space defined by its Aura of Hunger in a bid to escape the prince's powers, it had made a great vacuum by stretching space a hundredfold. The waters of the deep had filled those phantom spaces, but in doing so, the onrushing torrents had wrecked everything in their path as they'd flowed into the phantom space.

Now that its magic was fading as the blade no longer renewed the effect, those waters were flooding back out, but slower than they'd rushed in. The result was that they pushed away the clouds of silt, revealing more and more piles of rubble. If there had been anything of value here before, it was gone now.

Still, the blade wandered the ocean floor for several hours in a lazy, expanding search. Those efforts were interrupted twice. The first time was by a crab larger than a wagon that took offence to the blade wandering through its territory, and the second was a strange sort of sea serpent that descended from the darkness above to strike at it.

Neither beast succeeded in their efforts.

The weapon had opted not to use any of its powers to do battle with the giant crustacion, if only to limber up after spending months as a statue. That had been enjoyable, given that its shell had provided the thing some measure of protection against its terrible blow. The crab's giant claws even succeeded in denting its wielder's steel armor; the eel didn't even do that much.

-27 Life Force.

+112 Life Force. Energy Reservoir Full. +1 Demon Soul.

The blade simply side-stepped its fearsome maw and left a quarter-mile-long wound as its giant serpentine body followed in its wake. It didn't even get the chance to make a second attack. Instead, it bled out as it tried to turn around for a second, dry, filling the water with black ichor that fogged the water throughout most of the city.

+8 Life Force. Energy Reservoir Full. +1 Greater Demon Soul.

That shroud of darkness didn't stop its search, but it did keep any other leviathans from noticing it, giving it plenty of time to think. The weapon had slain another lord of the pit, but this one had been a close-won battle that it had been largely unprepared for.

Knowing the nature of your enemy is the most important thing in any fight, and this time I knew nothing. I didn't even know for sure that it was here, the blade cursed itself.

Was it even a fight, though? It reflected when it was finished, berating itself. The demon never raised a hand to me. It was simply a force of nature.

That complicated things further. If one demon prince existed that had such strange powers, then there were no doubt others. It was also obvious that even if the circles themselves weren't getting stronger, their rulers were. As far as the circles went, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the nature or the severity of the sins that sent the damned souls to them. It was almost random.

It had asked Prince Cerirvall about that before they had become enemies, but the demon had brushed him off. "Mortals don't understand the nature of true evil. They are mere participants in the act. Only demons will be able to see things in their proper context."

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That annoyed the blade, and despite the danger, it was tempted to ask one of the powerful souls it possessed more about that, and the hazards that lay ahead. Only the idea that there were more powers that it might strip from them stopped it. It could only use each soul once, and it seemed a shame to waste any of them on anything so straightforward as 'What powers does my next opponent wield?'

Still, after being weighed down by unfamiliar and unearned disappear, just moving and thinking was good for the blade. For so long, it had feared oblivion more than anything, but it had finally found something worse. This strange experience made it less inclined than ever to try piecing together the remaining cracks in its soul, though, and as much as it pondered what it might face next in the jungles of the next circle, the weapon also contemplated the emotional suffering it had been assaulted by.

The souls that lived and died to make it had felt every kind of pain there was to feel; so had the wielders who had died holding it. Gar-lok had burned alive for several minutes while his nerves continuously regenerated because he held the weapon. Var'gar had suffered an even grislier fate, and though neither of those agonies was inflicted directly on the blade, they were educational.

It thought that it felt every kind of pain that there was to feel, but somehow, the prince of this realm had turned the guilt that it didn't even have into a hell all its own, and the blade had been entirely defenseless to it. Even now, those tectonic emotions had left scars in the form of empathy that it did not care for.

Monsters and warriors were one thing, but it wasn't clear how it would feel about killing innocents and other collateral targets when the time came. Would it hesitate? It told itself that it would never hesitate to strike someone down and harvest their souls, but there was some doubt there now, too, and no matter how much it contemplated it, that complex tangle of emotions only grew more complicated, not less.

The blade wandered the ruins in peace until its meandering search spiral eventually met up with the road that had brought it here. Here, at least, the devastation that the blade had unleashed had done some good. The strange currents its magic had caused had ripped away the foot of soft silt covering the road, revealing its worn white stones for miles. The blade had been able to see through the muck by studying the world weave, so this offered it no benefit. Still, it was a welcome change as it started back the way it had come.

It still didn't know the way out of this watery hell, but this was its best lead, and it was going to take it. The Ebon Blade had months of power again, and though it moved with caution, it had every confidence that it would find its way to the next circle eventually.

Eventually took longer than it would have imagined, though, unfortunately. The stone road stayed uncovered for a day. After that, the blade followed it for two more with methodical steps before it encountered a place where it had been blasted to ruin by some ancient avalanche. By then, though, the land had a slope to it, and it followed that slope upward, seeking the surface.

-489 Life Force.

If all oceans had bottoms, then they also had shores, and it was that shore that the blade sought. As it made its way up from the depths, the waters slowly filled with life, or at least the mockery of it. It couldn't yet see the light of the sickly yellow sun, but there were more luminescent souls in these upper regions, and they revealed any number of hazards.

Some of them were even brave enough to try to devour it, and the blade was forced to leave any number of dissolving carcasses in its wake. It didn't matter whether the demons were sleek, twenty-foot-long shark-toothed predators, or stranger creatures with fanged tentacles a hundred feet long; none of them stood a chance against its edge.

-217 Life Force.

+712 Life Force.

+9 Lesser Demon Souls.

+2 Demon Souls.

The only demon that even gave it some trouble were the strange barnacle creatures that fastened onto random parts of its steel wielder at irregular intervals. Harmless though they seemed to be, they drained small amounts of live force from it as they devoured small pieces of soulsteel from the metal man. They stiffened the joints too, slightly reducing its range of motion, and the blade was forced to use Poison Blade at irregular intervals to purge it. The clouds of poison did nothing to it, but they exterminated the least demons with great efficiency.

Two weeks after it left the dead city in the depths, the blade finally saw the sun again. This was enough to speed its steps, as it took the long circuitous route up the jagged landscape of the underwater slopes. That distant sun started as a dark blue, but step by step it became lighter, before becoming green, then the toxic yellow the blade was used to.

-1689 Life Force.

+46 Least Demon Souls.

+13 Lesser Demon Souls.

+1 Demon Soul.

When the blade's wielder finally broke the surface, it expected that it had found the next circle, but that was not the case. All it had found was a small island, barely larger than a sandbar, without a hint of vegetation. It cursed silently as it scanned the horizon, looking for where it should go next.

There, distantly, it saw another island. That one was larger, but how much larger, it was impossible to say. The Ebon Blade paused and examined the weave of the world, looking for some clue. It looked in the currents of the Sea of Dispair, and in the gusts of the breeze, but in the end, it was unclear, and all it could say for sure was that the center of hell was probably somewhere in that direction. So, it walked back toward the surf to start again.

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