The Weight of Legacy

Since Veit rudely left her hanging to go do his actual job, Malwine found herself a bit too eager to pout, alone in the room she shared with Adelheid.

Anything seemed preferable to processing the information that had been all but dumped on her.

She hadn’t even quite had the time to consider how she had, indeed, been right all the while back when she’d joked about whether the next stage after the silver one would have been gold—assuming that was the one Adelheid had witnessed, anyway, though Veit had practically confirmed it.

Early Esse. Mortal Esse. Core Integration. Formation of Tree Veins. Immortality. She was still missing a firsthand sighting of that last one’s color.

Only five stages sounded disappointing to her. Like, Abelard was seriously only one step behind people who could literally call themselves Immortal? Was the difference between one stage and the other really that steep?

Neither her grandfather nor any of the Mortal Esse people she’d seen had looked impressive. Not really. Maybe it was their lack of Affinities affecting how she perceived them—there were probably only so many flashy things they could do without them.

Malwine tried—aggressively so—not to think about what Veit had said on the topic of mortality. It seemed both too simple and daunting for the first rank-up. Recalling the widow’s childhood was… difficult. She’d been orphaned young, though the exact age slipped past Malwine’s fingers, the already old memories now fragmented.

Had there been a moment when she realized death existed? Probably? It wasn’t that she thought Veit was wrong about that part. She simply… wasn’t compatible with his views on it. She’d lived past the time she once thought she’d have, as the widow. There had been a time when that centenarian had been surprised to reach fifty.

Reliving that felt impossible. She had come to understand she would someday die, and that went away one day. As Malwine, the option had never felt real. She was in a cultivation world. It might have been a weird one, certainly, but Immortality existed. Was she really supposed to just, momentarily forget that in order to rank up?

She narrowed her eyes, summoning another of her harvested items from her inventory.