I AM A MAGE BUT WITH MILF SYSTEM

Chapter 674: Taking control over Kraven

They talked for almost an hour.

The Crown Prince was easy company. He asked Kraven about his cultivation, listened to his answers with actual interest and offered his own advice. He talked about the upcoming marriage, about how deeply he loved Kraven’s sister and how strong their family would be after the ceremony.

Kraven’s sister sat between them and said very little. She had faint blush coloring her cheeks.

This was in every right completely wholesome. A young man meeting his future brother-in-law, a sister watching the two people she cared most about opening up to one another.

Meanwhile,

In the back of Kraven’s sea of consciousness, the mental battle he had abandoned continued on without him.

His fire mana, no longer actively directed, began to lose ground.

The black flame didn’t rush. It simply maintained its pressure steadily and Kraven’s unattended defenses gave way part by part.

Julian watched the battle unfold calmly and said nothing. There was nothing to say. He was inside a memory.

The conversation soon reached its natural end.

The Crown Prince stood, and Kraven and his sister stood with him. Farewells were exchanged. His sister embraced Kraven briefly, then the Crown Prince extended his hand.

Kraven took it.

To Kraven and Julian’s surprise, what followed was something neither of them had expected. A massive flood of black flame seeped into Kraven’s body, slamming into his sea of consciousness at the exact point where his defenses began to weaken.

Kraven’s entire body changed.

Even Julian could feel it from the memory. It was as if he was loosing something fundamental.

The boy’s hands went cold. His breathing stopped for a full second.

What is happening.

The thought was clear and completely alone inside a sea of consciousness that was rapidly becoming someone else’s

How is this happening.

His fire mana surged desperately, throwing itself at the flood of black flame with everything it had left. But the damage was already done.

Who is doing this.

His eyes moved up slowly, finding the Crown Prince’s face.

The Crown Prince was smiling.

It was a warm smile, entirely unchanged from the smile he had been wearing for the past hour.

Except that his eyes were wrong.

Completely, absolutely wrong.

It had gone fully black and somehow hollow... empty. And from those empty sockets, a thick, black fluid began to spill, falling down his face.

It can’t be.

Kraven’s gaze snapped sideways to his sister.

She was looking out the window, completely unaware of what was happening.

He turned back—

But it was too late.

The black flame washed over him completely.

And Kraven was gone.

*

After that, the memories were fragmented.

Scattered images, half-formed scenes, moments without context.

Then even that stopped.

Julian finally opened his eyes.

He was still floating in Kraven’s sea of consciousness. He took a slow breath and held it.

That was wild, he thought.

He floated there for a moment, letting everything he had seen settle into order. The feast. The servant. The handshake. The Crown Prince’s black eyes over a wide warm smile. The corruption had rotted the entire kingdom.

He turned his attention to the black flame surrounding him.

It burned steadily, maintaining its hold over Kraven’s inner world. Julian studied it carefully without touching it.

I can’t force it, he thought. Not directly.

The servant would feel it. Whatever connection existed between the black flame and its origin point, a direct assault would be nothing but suicide. He had no interest in alerting the Servant of Death to his presence.

He needed another way.

He turned his attention away from the black flame entirely, focusing instead on what remained beneath it.

Twenty percent.

It wasn’t much. Only a fraction of Kraven’s original sea of consciousness was still intact. It was preserved and it seemed that the black flame’s corruption hadn’t quite finished its work. Pockets of original mana, fragments of genuine memory, the residual shape of the man Kraven used to be.

It was useless to Kraven now. He had no access to it, and more importantly, no ability to wield it against the eighty percent that already controlled him completely.

But it was there.

Julian drifted toward it slowly, carefully, keeping the black flame in his vision without engaging it.

He reached them and examined it.

The quality of it was different from the corrupted sections — warmer, more alive, carrying a specific personality rather than the cold, emptiness that the corrupted version had. He could feel Kraven underneath it. The serious disciplined boy from the early memories, the proud eighteen year old walking out of a throne room.

Enough, Julian thought. It’s enough.

He settled into the space slowly, not forcing anything. He then found the edges of Kraven’s remaining will and wrapped around them.

There was no resistance. The original soul had nothing left to resist with. Julian surrounded it gently, absorbed its pattern, then he replaced it with his own.

Kraven’s will slowly drifted slowly, as if even they were tired from the long battle and simply wanted to vanish. Meanwhile, Julian’s will flowed into the empty space, taking shape and form of its own.

The black flame continued burning at the edges of everything, completely undisturbed.

Julian waited.

Nothing. No response.

Good, he thought.

He pressed further into the vacant space, filling it completely.

Julian held still for a moment.

Something shifted. The connection between his consciousness and Kraven’s body established itself fully, and when it did, it felt like nothing Julian had experienced before.

If someone had asked him to describe it he genuinely wouldn’t have known where to start.

But it was there.

Without wasting any time, he quickly tested the connection.

A simple thought — flex the fingers of right hand.

The hand responded.

There was maybe a half-second lag between the instruction and the execution, but it got there.

Kraven’s fingers curled, one by one, into a loose fist.

Julian looked at the hand with genuine interest.

He sent another instruction. The hand opened. Then closed again. Then the left hand, without any command — it worked but was slightly laggier than sending the command.

He could work with that.

He oriented himself fully and looked outward through Kraven’s eyes at the dim ceiling of the inn room.

His body was lying on the bed exactly where Julian had left it. Somewhere below, the inn had gone entirely quiet.