Married To The Mad Vampire Lord - Chapter 432

Chapter 432: Punishment_Part 2
At first, Belle felt nothing, and then everything began to go wrong inside her head. Memories started to reveal themselves before her eyes like a storybook opening page after page. A life she had believed didn’t belong to her played out as if it were hers.

Belle sat there as memories swirled and shifted violently in her head. At first, she lived her life inside Isabelle’s. Everything that had once belonged to Isabelle was now happening to her. It started from the time she was a toddler, moving swiftly through the moments she fell in love with the wrong man, the man who, in the end, took her life after ruining it piece by piece.

On the day she died, she felt her soul drift out of her body, and she was still standing in that room, watching the man who had killed her set her body on fire. Just like her body, her soul became disfigured in the exact same form her body had.

She watched as her body burned, some parts turning to bone, when a reaper appeared to harvest her soul. She tried to fight off the reaper, but in the end, she was taken away to another world when all she had wanted was revenge.

Many souls, after crossing over, lost most of their memories. Even when they carried those memories with them, they eventually faded with time and make the soul settled in the world. But Isabelle never did. She never forgot. Her hatred and anger made her desperate enough to want to return and live again.

She had been offered the chance to cross into the Gate of Peace, but she denied that privilege. “I need to go back to my world!”

Her stubbornness and fierce determination to return had led the reapers to throw her into the part of the realm meant for miserable souls. A soul that couldn’t forget was dangerous, it could ruin the peace of the land beyond the gate of peace.

Isabelle never rested. She never accepted her fate. She caused chaos in the land by attempting again and again to find a way back. Her rebellion grew so great that she was eventually brought before the Elders to be judged and sentenced to the part of the vengeful souls.

However, one of the elders looked once at her and saw something different.

“You were taken at a time you held too many emotions,” said the elder to the disfigured soul. “And a fragment of you is left where you died because you tried to fight the reaper who brought you here. You made the reaper tear a part away from you.” The elder read out the report given about the soul when it was taken.

Souls with unfinished business always fought back and ended up leaving behind a piece of themselves. That fragment would then haunt the living, and the reaper who had taken them could do nothing but let it remain.

“I want to go back,” Isabelle said emotionlessly.

“You can’t go back. Once dead, you belong here, not there. This is your afterlife. Your time is over.”

Isabelle didn’t like those words that urged her to accept a miserable fate that shouldn’t have been hers, if that man hadn’t taken everything from her.

“I don’t want to accept it,” she said, shaking her head stubbornly.

The elder reaper regarded the soul in silence. Souls rarely arrived carrying so many emotions and such powerful hatred. But when they did, it often took nearly an eternity to make them settle. And when they didn’t, their strength could be used for another purpose in the land of the dead.

“You can be reborn as a reaper’s pet. If you do your duty as a pet, you can become a Watcher and then a Grim Reaper, who can move into the other world. But you can never return as a human or a living person.”

Many of the Reapers in this land hadn’t simply come to exist, except the elders. They were once unique souls, souls who had been given the chance to transition into another form, giving up their human selves and everything they had once lived for.

Once you transition, there was no way to become a living person ever again. The transition was like a rebirth without parents, without a name, without memories.

“I will be able to go into the other world?” Isabelle asked.

“You shall,” the elder said, “but only to work and take back souls. You will no longer be human and will have no memories of it.”

Rather than remain in the mirrored world of a world she once knew, Isabelle agreed to the transition. It was better than being miserable.

“Take it to the River of Souls and perish it,” the elder ordered.

Isabelle was thrown into the River of Souls. Everything she had ever lived for was washed away, or so they believed. Her entire existence was erased. Her body in the grave turned to dust, wiping away every trace of her mortal form ever being in the world of the living.

Just like how humans cast fishing lines into rivers, her essence was fished out, dangling on a hook, a small object that, if left to dissolve, would have melted away completely, erasing her from every memory of the living people who once knew her. But that wasn’t the aim here; only her own memories and mortal form were meant to be erased.

And since the purpose of falling into the river was for transitioning, her essence was preserved and carried to the Chamber of Birth. It was stored there for only a few hours. Yet those few hours in the land of the dead stretched into long, silent years in the living world.

Her essence took the form of a reapers pet, a being with no visible shape and no gender.

It became the companion of a reaper, following it closely and feeding on the last lingering moments of dying souls in order to grow. In no time, the pet grew into a larger, more defined form and was given a position as a Watcher.

“You shall be called Astral,” the pet master declared, granting the new Watcher a cloak and a position of the lowest rank among Watchers.

Astral had no memories of who it had been before. All the creature knew was that it was here to work, to serve the elders, and to earn its place in the world of the dead. No emotions. No feelings. That was how Watchers and Reapers were born.

Astral had come into existence alongside Watcher Selric, who became its constant rival. But Selric could never quite match a creature born with such fierce determination to rise beyond its station.

It didn’t take long for Astral to earn the trust of its peers by keeping stubborn souls in line. The elders, every single one of the four, took notice of the creatures ambition. Astral kept track of time, of order, of wandering souls, and its precision impressed even the most austere of them.

The first elder, in particular, grew fond of Astral and made it a favorite.

When Astral finally became a Reaper and earned the pass to step into the living world, the creature worked as it always had, silent, obedient, efficient. But then flickers of inchoate memories began to stir inside it. A faint pull began to draw the Reaper toward the living world more often than normal.

Sometimes, without having a mission, the reaper would go there just to watch humans and their lives, feeling something stir inside its empty consciousness.

Reapers never defied order. They never acted without the command of their watch. But Astral, guided by something it could not name, wandered to the Marchant residence one night. It caused a disaster without even realizing it. The house was set ablaze, and Astral harvested the souls inside without the command of his watch to tell him it was time.

Then, as if possessed by an unseen force, it moved on to two other houses and did the same.

“You are not to take souls who aren’t due, Astral,” the elder reaper reprimanded. The tone was stern but not harsh. Astral had never made a mistake since being given its position, unlike the others, who had fumbled and failed countless times before learning their place and getting things right.

“It felt right when I did. Forgiveness,” Astral bowed its head.

Mostly, some new reapers made the mistake of taking souls before their time, which caused unexpected deaths to humans. And when something like that happened, they couldn’t fix the mistake by returning the soul to the body. The only way to make it right was to preserve the soul for a rebirth, allowing it to relive its shortened life in another lifetime.

“Now we have a soul who has arrived before its time,” the elder said. “What is the identity of the soul?”

“Deven Marchant,” Astral replied without emotion.