Sunny blinked a couple of times.
Mortal avatars… that he could wrap his head around. After all, he had avatars of his own, even if they were not exactly the same.
What surprised him more was that Eurys seemed to have no idea about how Sunny had come to be a Shadow Slave.
Well… it made sense, in hindsight. The talkative skeleton seemed like someone who knew so much as to almost seem omniscient, but reasonably, that knowledge only encompassed the past. If he had really spent thousands of years nailed to a tree in the Nightmare Desert, he would not know anything about what had happened after the final days of the Doom War.
To him, the Nightmare Spell was merely a fringe cult that a small group of believers was spreading secretly in the Mortal Realms. He would not know what Sunny and Nephis really were, or how they had come to be that way.
Sunny tilted his head a little, suddenly coming up with another question.
It was hard to collect his thoughts because there were too many things he wanted to ask, but that one was, perhaps, the most vital.
"...You are the first being from the ancient times I've met who is not entirely insane and consumed by Corruption. How come?"
Eurys stared at him with the black gaping holes of his empty eye sockets.
"Haven't you met that abominable girl, as well?"
Sunny scoffed.
"That's different! She's from the waking world, just like I am."
The skeleton let out a chuckle.
"The waking world? What's that?"
Sunny suppressed a sigh.
'He's clueless.'
After lingering for a few moments, Sunny tried to explain:
"The waking world… is the last of the Divine Realms. There are people still living there, free of Corruption. The rest of them, as well as all the Mortal Realms, have already been swallowed up by the Dream Realm, and are only populated by Nightmare Creatures — that's what we call the Corrupted Ones. However, our world is being consumed by the Dream Realm too, piece by piece."
Eurys sighed.
"Oh… then you and your people must be fighting against the Corruption with all your might, united against a common foe. What brilliant camaraderie! No wonder a divine shadow and an abominable nephilim can exchange words so freely."
Sunny coughed in embarrassment.
"Actually… currently, my people are at war. With each other. Have I mentioned that the last Divine Realm is the Realm of War God?"
Eurys remained silent for a long while, and then suddenly exploded with laughter.
This time, he laughed longer than usual, and his laughter seemed different from before.
It was tinged with mysterious darkness.
After a while, the white skull turned a little to stare at Sunny.
"War God? My, oh my! Such irony."
He paused for a moment, and then added:
"You asked who the Nine were? Well… to tell you the truth, child of War…"
His tone turned a little cold.
"Regardless of who we were, we hated War God and her children the most."