'I miscalculated.' Badulf frowned as his health deteriorated rapidly. Strand by strand, the three thousand strands of his silky black hair quickly turned white. 'It's more than I expected.'

Arnard was powerless to help him. He, just like the Water Celestial, could only watch him grow older without being able to do a thing.

A few moments ago, Badulf looked like a man in his mid-twenties, but now with wrinkles around his eyes, hair as white as snow, a hunched back, and breaths as weak as an infant, he looked like an old man in his late eighties.

Arnard couldn't help but ask him, "How much did you exactly sacrifice to revive him?"

Hearing his words, Badulf chuckled. Even such a simple action was quite taxing for the current him, causing blood to rush up his throat.

A rusty smell filled his mouth.

His blood painted his white teeth red.historical

He didn't spew it out and instead forced it back down the hole it came up from, and he did it methodically as if he was used to it.

Only after swallowing it did he speak to Arnard.

"Even if I told you about it, what can you do?"

"Just say it." Arnard gave him a swift reply, demanding an answer from him stubbornly.

Raising his head with much difficulty, Badulf looked at Arnard with unwavering bloodshot eyes. At this moment, a smile hung on the edges of his blood-stained mouth, and his cape fluttered in the wind, making him look rather aloof. It was as if he couldn't feel it, or he just didn't bother to give it any attention. "Not much," he said to Arnard.

"Not much, my ass," Arnard grumbled.

It was quite clear that Badulf had paid a great price to revive his son.

As for exactly how much it was, that was something only he could tell.

Seeing how indecisive Badulf was being with Arnard, the Water Celestial took the matter into his own hands.

"This is a rather good time to talk about it." He seized up his son-in-law, looking at him with a rather sharp and piercing gaze. Arnard felt that he was going to face something bad when he saw a smile forming on his father-in-law's face. "As you already know, the special effect of your brother's class weapon, the Reality-Severing Sword, temporarily changed when I poured more than a hundred years of my Divine Power into it."

The Water Celestial said this to tell him that he had sacrificed a lot for Damien too.

He continued, "At first, it had the incredible power to remove any person or object that had been stabbed or slashed by it from reality, but after the change, it gained the ability to interfere with the fate of its target on a conceptual level.

Anyone or anything could be classified as its target as long as they were stabbed or injured by it. Badulf had used it to stab Damien for the exact same reason.

"Yet, whether it be before or after the change in its special effect, the cost of activating it remained the same. Do you get where I am going with that?" The Water Celestial asked him.

"Yes." Arnard nodded at him. "I do."

Badulf had kept it a secret from others so as not to worry them, but the cold, hard truth was that his class weapon took an immense amount of the Water Celestial's divine power and a ridiculous amount of his lifespan in order to erase the past in which Damien had died after destroying the Alliance of Evil. This, in turn, affected the present and led to Damien's revival!

The Water Celestial suddenly raised his head to look at the sky, but after finding nothing, he lowered it and spoke to Arnard once again.

"Your brother eliminated the timeline in which Damien had died. As a result, a new timeline where he never died from overprocessing and exhausting his divine power was created. Playing with the rules of reality is something even gods don't dare to do casually. Many simply don't have the ability to pull off such a stunt. Yet he did it and was punished for it."

Badulf was able to do it because he had the power of a God. Actually, anyone who had ever awakened had it. After all, while soul shards were actually the broken divinity of the Gods that had fallen in the ancient war, Class weapons were the biggest part of their power. And the Class he had obtained as a result of awakening was a power derived from a renowned Sword God of ancient times who was also known as the Timeless Venerable. If not for this power, he wouldn't have the power to make a miracle and would have died a long ago. But it was so great that he wasn't able to control it. It was like a slow-acting poison to him, and there was no denying that it had been eating away at his soul all this time.

Arnard saw the Water Celestial raising three fingers and heard him saying, "He lost around 300 years of his lifespan."

"No wonder why he has aged so much," Arnard muttered under his breath.

He knew that a normal Realm Lord could live for around 300 years, but they were the descendants of a Crimson Dragon, meaning their natural lifespan was double that of a human. In other words, Badulf had gained 600 years of lifespan when he became a Realm Lord, but this wasn't the first time he used the reality-severing sword.

After awakening, he had used it dozens of times to overcome the hurdles fate threw at him, and that number increased exponentially in the war. Although he created one miracle after another and became renowned as the Fierce Sword Count, the price he paid was too great, and now he used more than half his natural lifespan for Damien.

It was quite clear that he was running out of it.

At best, he would live for 20-40 years.

More importantly, the lifespan lost using the reality-severing sword couldn't be recovered by normal means.

The Water Celestial suddenly said to him, "You owe him a lot."