Chapter 1677: Bold steps
Lex spent several hours going over everything he had learned about the Go board in his mind, and placing pieces and everything else, yet he could find nothing to suggest that there was any correlation between it and It. In fact, his opponent hadn’t even placed a single bead on the board in a while.
But he could not shake the feeling that the sudden shift in how It behaved was not normal. It was suddenly a lot more active in trying to hunt him down, and was possibly even laying traps for him. After all, if the chimera really were as formidable as claimed, then their capture was way too easy.
Whatever the case, Abaddon was becoming increasingly dangerous for them, and the more time they spent here, the more dangerous it would become. With that said, Lex turned his attention towards his clone and began to study it.
He studied how he had been influenced by the ruins, the remnant energies on his body, the influence of time, and how the frequent use of those characters had affected it. Most important to Lex’s own research was studying the remnant auras still lingering on the clone’s body.
That, alongside the studies Lex had done through his clone on the ruins themselves, would help Lex better understand how Abaddon treats constants.
According to Lex’s theory, while Abaddon was in a constant flux, there were certain constant points within it. The jungle they had come from was one such point, and the ruins were examples of other such constant points.
Lex believed that the location of the chalice was yet another such constant point. Once Lex understood more about these points, finding them would become easier. All Lex would have to do then was figure out how to influence the ever changing landscape to those constant points. How hard could that be?
Very hard. Although Lex joked about these things, the way Abaddon operated and its underlying principles were far beyond what Lex could comprehend at his level. What he had to do was find patterns at the lowest level, which was a nigh impossible task since the very nature of Abaddon was chaos.
Time seemed to pass by quickly, the minutes and days melding into each other. As an Immortal, the passage of time had less meaning, and so it was easier to get lost in deep activities. Years did not mean nearly as much as significant events, so most Immortals did not measure the passage of time by years, but rather by events. Yet another reason why Lex was only 25 years old - because years literally stopped mattering after that.
The night was approaching an end, and It had slowed down the attack since the chimera were captured. As a result, there was a relative ease everyone felt. In fact, they started to prepare for their departure once the day came. It had been a while since the mercenaries searched Abaddon for their goal, and it was about time they resumed their search.
It was around this time, right before the break of dawn, that something finally changed for Lex. He was naturally using the state of Flow to help his study of the aura remnants on his clone, sifting through the traces of the laws, when he sensed something completely alien.