Chapter 270: Weight of immortality
The memories ceased to be coherent moments. They transformed into a terrifying, light-speed blur, a crushing, suffocating deluge of human existence forced through the narrow needle of Morgan’s mind.
"Aargh..."
It was too fast.
It was painful, blindingly so, and yet the pain served as a tether, anchoring him to himself, ensuring that he did not drown in the hellish deluge of millennia of past lives.
The scope of it all was too vast.
Morgan felt as though his head was going to split open under the sheer weight of centuries collapsing into seconds.
He saw civilizations rise like tides and recede into forgotten dust.
He saw the shift of continents, mountains flattening into broad plains, seas swallowing coastal cities, forests burning away to give birth to barren deserts, and those deserts eventually stone-carved into sprawling empires.
He saw the languages change.
The guttural, harsh tongues of the early eras giving way to the fluid, melodic dialects of middle kingdoms, which then fractured into the refined, rigid courtly speech of ancient Elaris.
He saw weapons evolve from crude stone axes to forged bronze, to cold steel, to weapons imbued with strange, crude iterations of magic.
And through every era, every culture, every forgotten epoch of human history, the man was there.
Sometimes he was a king sitting upon a throne of dark iron, wearing a crown forged from star-metal.
Sometimes he was a nameless wanderer, his boots worn through, walking the dusty roads of a province whose name had been lost to time.
Sometimes he was a father, carrying a sleeping child through a crowded market.
Sometimes he was a grieving husband, sitting alone on a stone bench in the pouring rain, staring at a fresh mound of earth until the grass grew over it.
Sometimes he was a monster, his hands soaked in the blood of an entire royal court as he dragged a corrupt empire down into the darkness, completely erasing it from the annals of history.
And other times, he was a saint, kneeling in the dirt to heal a sick child with a faint, flickering spark of golden light.
Morgan’s mind screamed.
"It’s impossible."
"It’s logically impossible..."
A human life was a spark, a brief, fragile flare of light.
A man lived, he loved, he fought, he aged, and he died. That was the absolute, unyielding law of reality.
And yet, this man had lived a thousand lives.
He had belonged to a hundreds of different families.
He had watched generations of children grow, age, and wither into dust while he remained entirely unchanged.
The light in his golden eyes never dimmed. The fundamental shape of his soul was never altered.
He had walked through the entirety of human existence, taking on new names, new roles, new loves, and new griefs, only to watch them all burn away on the altar of time.
Humanity was raw, primitive, and fragile.
Small tribes huddled around dying campfires in the mouths of damp caverns, terrified of the dark, terrified of the beasts that roamed the primeval forests.
There was no concept of Awakening.
There was no Umbralis.
There was no refined cultivation, no martial arts, no grand magical formations.
Yet the golden-eyed man walked among them.
Morgan watched as the man crouched beside a shivering child in a cold, rain-swept cave.
The child’s skin was dark with fever, its breath coming in shallow, desperate rattles and it’s lips blue from the unbearable cold.
The man placed a single, large hand upon the child’s small chest.
Beneath his skin, small tendrils of golden brilliance ignited, slowly flowing into the tiny body, rejuvenating it, flooding it with warmth rebuilding it and eventually restoring it.
The child gasped, its eyes snapping open, now healthy and bright.
"These...these are the abilities of the awakened."Morgan thought in awe.
The same abilities that made the awakened sought after even among the assassins.
In another fragment, Morgan saw the man standing atop a high, barren crag.
Below him, a group of primitive humans clad in animal furs knelt in the mud.
They didn’t pray to a god in the sky, instead, they bowed toward him, their hands pressed flat against the earth, chanting a single, crude word in a language that predated civilization itself.
He looked down at them, his expression devoid of pride or divine grandeur. He reached out a hand, telling them to rise.
Morgan saw an ancient, crumbling image, carved into the wall of a subterranean cavern—a depiction of two burning golden eyes surrounded by a halo of dark, coiled tendrils.
Below the carving, ancient glyphs named him.
The Oldest Blood.
The First Father.
The Curse.
Morgan’s breath caught in his throat as the terrible, mind-shattering truth pressed against his consciousness.
The man was not an Awakened warrior who had achieved immortality through cultivation. He was not a prince who had stumbled upon a divine treasure in the Vault beneath Elaris.
He existed before the concept of power had a name. He had walked the earth when humanity was nothing more than prey, carrying a light and a darkness that had eventually bled into the world, seeding the very concept of Awakening into the bloodlines of mankind.
The emotional weight of it hit Morgan like a physical blow.
In that moment, it wasn’t awe he felt.
It was a suffocating, crushing horror.
It was s crushing, titanic weight.
To live one life and lose a family was a tragedy that could break a man’s mind.
To live ten thousand lives... to hold a hundred dying wives in your arms... to bury a thousand children... to watch every city you ever called home turn to dust, every language you ever spoke become forgotten, every person who ever loved you fade into the cold oblivion of time...
Morgan could not fathom it and yet...this...man...
If he could be called that...had.
It wasn’t a gift. It was an eternal, tormenting execution.
As Morgan stared at him, he beheld it then.
The vast, infinite, lightless exhaustion of immortality.