Otherworldly Desert Dust - Chapter 17 - 14: The Body Runs, the Soul Chases

Alzi had a promising future. At seventeen, the Goddesses blessed her with a life affinity—a rarity for commoners in a small village; a few days before the class-choosing ceremony, her Mother gets sick. After using her little mana to keep her alive, she runs to the capital to find a true healer. With no money, she sells herself into slavery for a decade. The decade is almost up, but she has been turned into a broodmare for the nobles and faces a sale to keep her enslavement going.

After losing his life in... an unfortunate incident, Ezra is rejected from the summoning by the First Light. He is instead banished from existence. There he meets a being, that claims to have been dreaming since before existence.He agrees to serve this Eldritch entity if he can let him live again. Ezra's soul is then stuck into the body of a young priest, Priest Izikel Vau-Leotard.In this new world, where gods exist and they bless their believers with Divine energy to perform miracles, Izikel is forced to navigate his new life, while serving a Chaos god.In his new life, Izikel vow to live the life of a hero, but what can he do when it seems like Fate itself scoffed at his words.This is Izikel's reality, one he barely has a grasp of, but one he is definitely going to conquer at all cost.CONTENT WARNING:This novel contains themes of suicide, cannibalism, and extreme brutality, along with other dark and potentially distressing topics. Reader discretion is advised..

“You need my help, Tesoro. You choose. A marriage with me or be torn apart by them” His voice was cool as though this wasn't a matter of life or death.I didn't want this life. My father had gambled a lot and left me with a lot of enemies and now I needed the help of Don Vincenzo LaRosa who was my high school bully and now the Don of the most powerful mafia family in Italy if I was going to survive it.It was just a marriage of convenience but I realized something. He wasn't helping me out of a good heart. I had been sold without my permission to him. I was the mafia's pawn.

Ernest Quelt, the alchemist renowned for his unparalleled mastery of alchemy, has perished.But his death wasn't a noble sacrifice in battle, nor the result of a failed expedition—it was a betrayal. The very comrades he trusted most turned on him, driven by envy of his growing power.Yet fate wasn’t entirely cruel. With his final breath, Ernest's gaze fell upon the tube that contained his greatest achievement: a perfect artificial being known as the Homunculus.More than just a vessel resembling a human, this creation harbored the power of a catastrophic beast—one that had once nearly brought the world to ruin.