Chapter 246: KFC
Rory remained in the sky, waiting until the null light faded, his domain that had colored the sky fading away as sunlight began shining once again.
“Damn, I hurt,” Rory said with a sigh once the oblivion energies were entirely gone and he felt the sudden surge of ascension energy.
Hot damn.
A quick check of his interface confirmed a whopping ten percent increase in progress. Given he was expecting tier eight to take in the ballpark of three hundred years or so, that was a cool thirty-year boost.
“Sort of doubt I’ll be getting windfalls like that… well, maybe ever again, who knows.”
Dismissing a notification that they’d defeated the Bird’s faction –not exactly surprising to Rory, who’d been said Bird killer– Rory was about to flicker back down to the ground when a new notification caught his attention at the same time the air shimmered where the bird had previously been. Ignoring the notification for the time being –no point in spoilers— Rory waited with bated breath. Below, what seemed like hundreds, if not thousands, of brilliant specks of light shot upward, converging on the patch of shimmering air. If it wasn’t for the surge of ascension energy Rory had already received for slaying the Bird, he might have worried it was somehow regenerating and returning to life like a phoenix that it so badly wanted to be.
For what it was worth, Rory had a sense that was exactly what the brilliant sparks were meant to do, some last-ditch lifesaving trick the Bird had prepared. The problem was, the signal source wasn’t just damaged beyond repair –it was outright gone, total annihilation, thanks to the use of oblivion energy.
So, without a single trace of the ‘signal source,’ the specks of brilliant light instead converged into the next best thing, an approximation of their origin.
A single rainbow-hued feather.
Waiting until the excitement finished, Rory plucked the feather out of the air, noting just how dense it felt with significance.
| Feather from on High Grade: Unique Within all of existence, there have only existed eight Founders, the first Enlightened beings in all of creation. Yet such beings were far from invincible as a single monster rose on high, laying low two of the Founders and claiming a spark of Enlightenment for itself. As a reward, it claimed a seat at the table meant only for eight others. Believing itself the Chosen champion of the first Ascended World Spirit, it took it upon itself to become judge, jury, and executioner to those who would assert themselves as worthy. Yet for all its resplendent power and its foundation of reified dogma, its universe-shaping consequences were but a single blip of existence of a mere century. Slain, all that it was and all that it might ever be, has been reformed into the shape of a single feather representing the final remnants of its total significance and stigmata.
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