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The Malefic Bound Exorcist

Corrupt3D
7
chs / week
The average realized release rate over the past 30 days is 7 chs / week.
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Synopsis
The Exorcist Clans call them Malefics, curses born from humanity’s darkest emotions. Grey Furios was supposed to die the night one found him. Instead, it fused with him. Now he can see the fractures in reality. The emotional residue leaking from strangers. The monsters feeding on suppressed grief and buried rage. The Exorcists want him dead, to them, Grey isn’t a survivor. He’s a ticking time bomb. A walking anomaly. A mistake that should never have existed. Because he didn’t just survive a high-grade Malefic. He absorbed it. Dragged into the hidden world of Exorcist Clans, Grey must master Resonance — the art of weaponising emotion into power — while the entity inside him grows stronger with every crack in his composure.
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Chapter 1 - Ghost's Aren't Real

If you were to ask Grey Furio if he believed in ghosts, he would scoff. To him, the concept was worse than fiction—it was a waste of logic. Grey believed only in the practicalities of a bleak existence: the bone-deep ache of unpaid overtime and the dull, repetitive "beauty" of a life lived on repeat.

But ghosts? Never. Even though, he had recently been seeing things he just accrued that to a lack of sleep. Ghosts weren't real, they could never be.

The first time he saw the crack in the air, he blamed the exhaustion. He'd been awake for thirty-two hours, stumbling home from a double shift at the warehouse. The train carriage groaned as it hurtled through the underpass, the shriek of metal on metal echoing the ringing in his ears. Around him, the evening commuters were ghosts of a different sort—blank-faced and drained, their skin sallow under the harsh fluorescent glare.

Grey leaned his forehead against the cool window. His reflection was a ghost in the glass: eighteen years old, black hair falling into eyes that people called "neutral" on a good day and "dead" on a bad one.

How much longer can I do this? he wondered.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. Three missed calls from an unknown number. He stared at the screen but didn't unlock it. It was likely his boss—the man had a talent for finding new things to complain about even when Grey was off the clock.

Suddenly, the overhead lights surged. The incandescent glow flared into a blinding, white-hot strobe.

"What the—"

Grey instinctively turned to see how the other passengers were reacting, but the words died in his throat. The carriage was empty. The commuters, the bags, the noise—all gone. A heavy, suffocating silence rushed in to fill the vacuum.

He looked up. The ceiling panel wasn't just flickering anymore; it was warping. The metal rippled like a stone dropped into a dark pond, the air itself bending into a distorting vortex.

Then, with a violent jolt, the train stabilised.

The lights dimmed to their usual sickly yellow. The muttering of the crowd and the shuffle of feet returned instantly, as if they had never left. Grey looked around, heart hammering against his ribs. Sleep deprivation, he told himself, his hands shaking. Thirty-two hours. It's a hallucination. That's all.

He forced himself to move, disembarking at Shirotani Station. The platform was a chaotic hive of activity, even busier than usual. He watched the sea of people moving in every direction—thousands of lives intersecting in physical space, yet completely isolated within the cages of their own minds.

Human nature, he thought, taking a sharp breath of the station air. It was heavy with the smell of ozone and rain, but it felt more real than the stuffiness of the train.

His phone buzzed again. Two missed calls and a single text.

It was from his younger sister. Usually, her messages were an eyesore of glitter emojis and exclamation points. This one was different. It was plain and cold.

Don't come home yet.

Gemini said

Grey slipped his phone back into his pocket.

He started walking home anyway.

The alley shortcut behind the convenience store was faster, a narrow throat of concrete that smelled of damp cardboard and stale oil. Halfway through, he heard something drag.

Not behind him. Above him.

Grey stopped. He looked up, seeing nothing but rusted fire escapes and the hollow rectangles of dark windows. Then came a sound like fingernails scraping concrete—slow, deliberate, and heavy.

His heartbeat remained steady. That was the strange part. He wasn't scared; he felt detached, as if he were watching himself from a few steps away, a spectator to his own life.

The scraping grew louder. Closer.

He turned, and he saw it.

It was not fully there. At first, it looked like a glitch in the air, a human-shaped blur that hurt to look at. Then it stepped forward, and the world seemed to correct itself around the intruder.

It was tall—too tall. Its limbs hung slightly too long for its torso, and its head tilted at an angle that suggested something had snapped and never healed. Its face was a nightmare of ergonomics: no eyes, no nose, just a smooth surface of pale skin stretched tight over bone. Faint cracks ran down from where eyes should have been.

It twitched. The cracks widened, and a dark fluid seeped from the fissures.

Grey blinked. The alley lights flickered with a dying hum. The thing tilted its head further and spoke—not aloud, but as a vibration inside his skull.

You don't react.

Grey didn't move. He didn't run. He didn't scream. The thing leaned closer, the cracks on its face splitting into a seam—not a mouth, but a jagged opening. Something inside it smiled.

Most people would have fled. Most would have frozen. Grey stepped forward instead. Not out of bravery, but because standing still felt pointless.

The creature twitched violently, as if surprised.

You are hollow.

Its voice wasn't sound; it was a physical pressure behind his eyes. Grey stared back into the blankness of its face.

"If this is a dream," he said quietly, "I'd like to wake up."

The alley began to stretch. The walls elongated into infinity, and the sky darkened with unnatural speed. Shadows pooled at the creature's feet like spilled ink. It raised one elongated arm, and the air cracked like glass.

Grey felt something tear. Not skin, not muscle—something deeper.

Memories.

The sterile white of a hospital room. His mother's hand going limp in his. His father standing by the window, not crying. The crushing silence that followed. The way no one ever spoke about it again.

The creature stepped closer, each footfall leaving black fractures on the ground.

You buried it.

Grey's vision blurred. The alley melted away, replaced by that hospital room. The rhythmic, taunting beep of the machines. The coldness of those hands. He remembered standing there, feeling absolutely nothing while everyone else drowned in grief.

The creature's hand touched his chest. It was cold. It was wrong.

You suppress. You compress. You fracture.

Pain erupted behind his ribs. For the first time in years, Grey's heartbeat skipped. The cracks on the creature's face widened eagerly.

Something shifted inside him. Not fear, not grief, but a sudden, violent pressure pushing back.

The creature froze. Its head snapped.

…What is that?

Grey's vision snapped back to the alley. The creature was still touching his chest, but a thin thread of black light now connected his sternum to the creature's core. The thread pulsed.

The creature recoiled violently. The alley lights exploded, raining glass down like diamonds. The world seemed to scream. Grey collapsed to one knee as the thread tightened, his heart feeling as though it were being hauled out of his body.

The creature staggered, looking—for the first time—uncertain.

You are not empty.

The pressure inside Grey surged. Not outward, but inward. The thread snapped, but not cleanly; something jagged tore away from the creature and plunged into Grey's chest.

Silence.

The alley returned. The creature was gone. Grey lay on the concrete, staring at the patch of dark sky between the buildings. His chest burned, and his breath came in shallow stabs. He lifted a shaking hand and saw faint, dark cracks tracing along his forearm like fractures beneath the skin. They faded slowly, sinking back into his flesh.

Footsteps echoed at the mouth of the alley. Measured. Calm.

A figure stood there, silhouetted against the streetlights. They wore a long dark coat, their face obscured by a half-mask. They surveyed the wreckage of the alley before their gaze landed on Grey.

"…You're alive."

Grey didn't answer. The figure walked closer and knelt, examining him with a sharp, clinical intensity. They paused, their posture shifting subtly.

"Interesting."

Grey finally found his voice. "…Was that real?"

The masked figure looked at him for a long moment. "Yes. And you should be dead."

Grey tried to sit up, but his chest tightened again. Something inside him moved—not a muscle, but a presence, like a passenger adjusting its seat. The masked figure noticed; their eyes sharpened behind the mask.

"…You didn't just survive. You bonded."

Grey blinked, his mind reeling. "…Bonded with what?"

The figure straightened. Behind them, the shadows seemed denser, as if something were still lingering in the corners of the world.

"A Malefic."

The word felt heavy, layered with a wrongness that made Grey's skin crawl. His heart thudded once—hard—and for the first time, he heard a voice that was not his own. It was clear, calm, and terrifyingly close.

We are incomplete.

Grey's eyes widened.

"…It's already speaking to you," the masked figure noted. They reached into their coat slowly, pulling out a thin metallic object etched with faint, glowing symbols. The air began to vibrate.

Grey's vision darkened at the edges.