Chapter 784: 784

The true weight of this gift manifested one morning shortly after his feverish dreams which was the goddess’s visitation. Nwadiebube woke to find his wife sleeping peacefully beside him. But the blessing had stripped away the comfort of the mundane.

He no longer saw merely the woman he loved, the curve of her shoulder or the rise and fall of her breath. He saw more. His vision pierced through the veil of skin and bone, revealing the shimmering, intricate pulse of her soul.

For Nwadiebube, the world of the living had become a glass house, and he was the only one forced to see what lay beneath.

If that had been the extent of his vision, Nwadiebube might have found peace. But what he saw in the depths of that soul made his blood run cold.

Under his piercing gaze, his wife’s soul possessed two faces, joined at the back of a single head. The face in front was the woman he knew, the soft, familiar features of Queen Taiwo. But the face on the back was a stranger to this bed: it was Queen Amina, the wife of Osita.

As if sensing his intrusion, the second face, Amina’s face suddenly snapped its eyes open. Her gaze locked onto his with predatory precision. The shock sent Nwadiebube reeling; he leaped from the bed in a blur of motion, his hand reflexively grasping his sword. He leveled the cold steel at his wife, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

Queen Taiwo stirred, her eyes fluttering open. She looked around the dim room, confused and vulnerable, only to find her husband hovering over her with a bared blade.

"What are you doing, husband?" she asked, her voice thick with sleep.

Before Nwadiebube could find his tongue, his new sight showed him a sickening shift. Within the spiritual tether of her body, the two faces swapped. Taiwo’s face receded into the darkness of the skull, and Amina’s visage rotated to the front, seizing control of the vessel.

The expression on his wife’s face shifted instantly. The sleepiness vanished, replaced by a sharp, inquiring gaze that didn’t belong to Taiwo.

"Can you see?" she asked.

A chill raced up Nwadiebube’s spine. The voice was identical to his wife’s, the same pitch, the same cadence yet he knew with terrifying certainty that it was not her speaking.

Despite the dread pooling in his stomach, he remembered his crown. He was a King "See what?" he asked, his voice steady, feigning a perfect mask of confusion.

The Queen remained silent, her eyes boring into his, searching for the slightest flicker of recognition or a crack in his armor. Nwadiebube held his composure, refusing to blink as the entity wearing his wife’s skin weighed the truth of his words.

Through his new, cursed vision, the shift happened once more. The faces rotated with a sickening fluidity, and suddenly, it was Taiwo looking back at him, innocent and concerned.

Before she could voice her confusion at the blade still in his hand, Nwadiebube lowered his sword, his voice dropping into a well-practiced, sorrowful register. "I am sorry, my lady. I had a rather harrowing dream," he said, the lie tasting like ash.

The Queen rose from the bed, her movements graceful and unburdened by his action. She stepped toward him, pulling him into a firm, grounding hug. "Are you still worried about the return of Ikenga?" she asked softly, her voice muffled against his chest, assuming the weight of his fear was for the god he had wronged.

"Yes," he replied, leaning into the lie to shield the truth.

Taiwo’s embrace tightened. "Whatever it comes out to be, we will handle it together," she promised.

Nwadiebube offered a low hum of agreement, a sound that vibrated with a hidden tension. "I must go. There is a long day ahead," he said, planting a gentle, lingering kiss on her forehead.

He turned to walk away, his boots clicking rhythmically against the stone floor. But his attention never truly left her.

Even with his back turned, the "Revelation" gifted by Keles allowed him to sense the shift. He didn’t need to look to know that the air in the room had cooled, or that the soul behind him had rotated once again.

He felt a gaze boring into the space between his shoulder bladesheavy, it was no longer his wife watching him leave. It was the other one.

The week following the revelation was a slow descent into madness for the King. Keles’s blessing did not fade; it intensified, turning his world into a gallery of spiritual horrors. Nwadiebube, once the proud architect of a thriving kingdom, became a ghost in his own palace. He spent those seven days in hiding, avoiding the court and, most of all, avoiding the woman who wore his wife’s face.

In his isolation, the pieces of a jagged puzzle began to fit together. Every strange new habit Taiwo had developed, her sudden interest in the culinary arts, her shifting mannerisms, even the way she laughed, now had a sinister origin to him. It wasn’t a "new spark" in their marriage, it was smiply the influence of the second soul, bleeding through the cracks of his wife’s identity.

On the seventh night, sleep was an impossibility. Nwadiebube lay paralyzed, staring at the dark ceiling as the weight of his ignorance crushed him. He suspected that Mei’s master, the shadowy hand behind so many of the realm’s recent upheavals was the weaver of this spiritual knot.

He turned his head to the side, intending to watch the rhythmic flicker of the two souls within his wife as they slept. Instead, he froze.

The air in the room didn’t change. No floorboard creaked. To his mortal eyes, the room was empty, draped in the velvet shadows of midnight. But as the Goddess’s blessing flared within his vision, the truth was revealed.

A third presence stood by the bed.

It was a massive, radiant soul, burning with a brilliance that made the twin-faced spirit of his wife look dim by comparison. The entity didn’t move; it simply stood over the sleeping Queen, watching her with a gaze that held no malice, no hunger, and no threat. It was filled with a profound, aching love, the look of a man watching his most precious treasure.

As Nwadiebube traced the features of that giant, glowing face, his heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.

"Osita," he whispered into the dark.

As a Sixth-Tier figure, Osita’s essence was sensitive to the weight of a gaze. He felt the King’s eyes pressing against his spirit, and slowly, his head turned. His eyes drifted from the sleeping Queen to Nwadiebube, noting the raw, unadulterated fear etched into the King’s features.

For a brief moment, Osita was confused; a mortal should not have been able to perceive a soul of his magnitude. Then, he saw it, the faint, shimmering trace of divinity clinging to Nwadiebube’s pupils. The golden light of Keles.

Osita raised a spectral hand, perhaps to speak or to gesture, but he stopped mid-motion. A large, ornate key had materialized in Nwadiebube’s grip. The dead King’s brow furrowed. Every instinct in his refined spirit began to tingle; whatever that key represented, it was a problem he wasn’t prepared to solve. With one final, inscrutable look at the man in the bed, Osita vanished, his radiant soul snapping out of existence.

The silence that followed was deafening. Nwadiebube collapsed back against the pillows, his breath coming in ragged, shallow heaves. His body was slick with sweat, the physical toll of witnessing such power.

Since knowing the true extent of Osita’s strength, it had cast a long, suffocating shadow over his heart and now, that very shadow had been pacing his bedroom, watching his wife, and lingering in the corners of his life.

Without the Goddess’s blessing, he would have remained a blind man in his own home. From Osita’s calm demeanor, it was clear this wasn’t a first-time visit. The realization hit him like a physical blow.

How long had Osita known about the twin-faced soul?

How long had his private sanctum been laid bare under that divine gaze?

Was his Queen even his own anymore, or was she merely a vessel for another man’s widow?

The insecurity was a poison, fast-acting and cold. Nwadiebube realized with a sickening lurch that he might not have the strength to defend his own crown or his wife from the entities now playing for his kingdom.

Sleep was gone. Peace was a memory.

His figure became a blur of motion as he bolted from the room. Driven by a frantic need for certainty, he began to run through the palace grounds. He was a man possessed, his "new eyes" scanning every servant, every guard, and every shadow. He needed to know if his world was still his, or if his entire kingdom had already been replaced by the ghosts of his enemies.

Nwadiebube’s frantic sprint through the palace grounds was a spectacle of pure, unadulterated terror. He was a king stripped of his dignity, his eyes darting toward every shadow, every pillar, and every servant.