Chapter 153: Seclusion
This was the first time Evan had deliberately entered seclusion. He'd realized there was a great deal he needed to sit with quietly and work through. His magic came from Nicholas, but in the time since, he'd taken up knightly cultivation alongside it, unknowingly brushing up against the threshold of Great Knight rank. Then he'd stumbled onto the truth of fantasy-born creatures — his first genuine breakthrough in magical theory, published as a proper paper. Somewhere in that process, his confidence in elemental doctrine had started to crack; he'd never truly experienced an element directly, and the whole concept always felt to him like something half-real, wrapped in permanent fog. And now he'd brushed against something of divine cultivation too — he remembered what the goddess Avna had told him: the secret of divinity lies in understanding the boundlessness of the mind, that everything can be brought into being through consciousness alone.
All three of these paths shared one thing in common — in the end, each came down to work done within consciousness itself. A knight's inner cultivation involved visualizing a centaur, requiring no element at all. Magic, in its more widespread form, called for visualizing a guardian spirit to gather the elements — the most complex of the three in both its visualization and its casting. Divine cultivation he'd never truly experienced firsthand, though by Avna's account, it too seemed to work through consciousness.
And summoning in magic was, in the end, entirely illusory — which raised a question about its relationship to true names, the kind Xiaoshuang had once explained to him, the kind that let him summon the unicorn Xiaoling by name alone. Thoughts churned and tangled together in his mind, several possibilities weaving through each other, until gradually he forgot everything — name and reality both, even his own existence — sinking into a state of deep, unmoving stillness.
Xiaoshuang flew in through the window and settled into her own little nest, perched high, watching Evan's motionless form below.
Suddenly something felt wrong to her. Evan seemed to be growing insubstantial — not literally, just a feeling, since he clearly still sat there, visible to her eyes — and yet somehow he no longer seemed to exist within her awareness at all.
Evan found himself lit up from within, every muscle and bone in his body laid bare before his own perception, his cells like dead stars, only a scattered handful still glowing, the rest sunk in total stillness. By rights, they ought to have been withered entirely, and even if briefly filled with something, shouldn't have held that state for long.
And yet some strange energy seemed to flow endlessly, reshaping all of it. Those few glowing stars — that was where this energy seemed to have kindled a true core.
Understanding dawned on Evan. Those handful of glowing points were cells activated by the energy circulating through his organs — their nuclei genuinely alive now, no longer withered husks.
The other cells, though kept from total withering by this same strange energy, remained in a kind of false animation, cycling endlessly under its influence to maintain the appearance of life. But somewhere in the countless repetitions of that cycle, another cell had come alive too — different, somehow. Evan had never studied a truly normal person's living cells closely, but something told him this one no longer counted as ordinary at all.
Among the cells, another form of energy lingered too — a thin thread of green, flickering like a faint emerald flame. Evan sensed instinctively this was the goddess of life's own divine power, though something about it felt incomplete. He'd assumed it had already fused entirely with that strange energy within him — but now he saw that while it had grown more fundamental, somehow closer to the root of things than divine power itself, it remained tightly bound by that other energy, which stayed calm and even where divine power ran to extremes.
Evan observed all of this like a detached witness, coolly analyzing the phenomena unfolding within his own body. His bones no longer resembled ordinary bone at all, taking on something closer to jade, the marrow still mostly still and lifeless, though a small portion had begun to stir back to life. If the transformation continued, his skeleton would eventually become true jade bone.
He finally understood his own condition. He was still a lich — but not entirely one anymore. That nameless mantra of unknown origin, though showing no combat power of its own, seemed to be quietly waging a war against death itself. Ever since arriving at Hollingburton and working through a mountain of books, he'd carried one nagging question: why did his own condition never quite match what the texts described for a lich? Now he understood. This was the nameless mantra's doing — once it began running, it seemed incapable of ever stopping.
What Evan didn't realize was that he'd been sitting like this for a full day and night, his breathing nearly stopped entirely, quietly observing all this time. Nor did he know that his own path of cultivation had already diverged from anyone else's in this world. Others focused single-mindedly on visualizing a guardian spirit or something similar — none of them experienced anything remotely like what was happening to him now.
He hadn't noticed this himself, only sensing his awareness gradually beginning to extend beyond his own body. This world had no concept of spiritual sense as such — magical cultivation, though it involved visualization, still leaned heavily on external things, deliberate acts of will channeled through incantation and imagery to trigger a spell. In other words, a fundamentally outward-directed practice built through deliberate effort. This was why a mage's accumulated knowledge mattered so much — through extensive comparison and analysis, especially dissecting magical beasts to study sigils and arrays, and through visualizing those sigils, a mage built a kind of mental technique over time. Which meant a mage was necessarily a specialist in some field, a scholar of broad learning, cultivating essentially from the outside in — accumulating sigil-knowledge to draw on the power of heaven and earth, reshaping the self through that external channel. Which was exactly why a mage who never reached legendary rank wouldn't ordinarily outlive an ordinary person by much. Only at legendary rank did a real qualitative leap occur — legendary mages, by all accounts, could live seven or eight hundred years, some even past a thousand.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from NovelFire. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
Beyond his own body, Evan sensed a faint thread of faith-power — the first time he'd ever truly felt it directly. The instant he touched it, his body shuddered, and the life-aligned divine power woven through his cells — or rather, something more fundamental than divine power now — surged outward to meet it, merging with the faith beyond him in a single tremendous burst, as though some new world had been born in that instant. The two forces melted into one seamlessly. And yet Evan found himself entirely unmoved by it, as though this was simply how things were meant to unfold. In this state, something genuinely extraordinary had just occurred, and yet it felt utterly ordinary to him — as if some hidden observer stood behind his own awareness, untouched by any of it.
Xiaoshuang, still watching from above, felt a sudden dizzying shift, as though time and space themselves had come unmoored. She saw goblins kneeling below in great numbers, and found herself perched atop Evan's head, watching their worship unfold.
Evan felt nothing but ordinary calm at the sight, though understanding rose in him all the same — these were his followers. His gaze turned toward the goblins. Within their fortress, a statue of him glowed with a faint green light, and beside it, a statue of Xiaoshuang perched atop his head glowed too, the green radiance rippling outward like water. Among the goblins, those suffering from wound or sickness felt, in that instant, as though they'd been immersed in warm water — every ailment vanishing at once.
The goblins' new god had manifested, and a wave of fervor swept through the whole tribe. Evan understood — this wasn't truly his own divine power at work, only the goddess of life's power, purified through him, now mingled with their faith.
Still, observing all this from within stillness helped him understand something fundamental about divinity itself. A sphere of light seemed to hang in his mind, like a small green sun. A formless wind seemed to blow through it, and one side of the sphere dimmed — and in that fading, he caught the faintest glimpse of something. Information, perhaps — not language exactly, but some indescribable impression, something the goddess of life had left behind, a kind of confirmation. Before he could make sense of it, it dissolved on its own. Evan simply took it in and set it aside without dwelling on it, his state of mind almost machine-like in that moment. He knew, on some level, that he shouldn't have been able to perceive any of this at all — and yet he had. Something about this was distinctly abnormal.
Everything he did felt entirely natural, without a shred of conscious deliberation behind it. He sank once more into his mental sea, where a great tree seemed to shoot skyward, the Black Lotus fading away in the clear spring pooled at its roots.
For a moment he seemed to become the tree itself, and some vast, indescribable music rang out across heaven and earth — as though it rose from his own mind, and yet also as though it were the fundamental sound of the universe itself. Evan dissolved entirely into that sound.
He couldn't say how much time passed before he slowly opened his eyes, catching a flicker of swaying tree-shadows within them before it vanished.
He smiled at everything around him, all of it feeling suddenly intimate and familiar, as though the universe itself were whispering its secrets to him — though he still couldn't quite grasp them, only sensing their shape at the edges of understanding.
Evan had no idea that he now existed in a state of quiet exchange with everything around him — in the language of his old life, something like being at one with all things, a companion to heaven and earth alike.
He didn't realize this was an entirely different system of cultivation manifesting through him — a way of thought moving from within outward, where magic worked from without inward. Magic used meditation too, but its true concern lay in how to draw on external energy — what mages called the elements — building knowledge through extensive observation and experiment, converting that knowledge into wisdom. Even in studying the human body, magic looked mostly to outward observation rather than inward introspection. Neither approach was superior to the other; both aimed at the same ultimate destination.
Which was why, occasionally, a mage might stumble onto something like spiritual sense without ever recognizing it as such, learning instead through study of nature and living creatures, using magic in its place to perceive the world — hence the whole category of perception-based spells, like the Wraith Eye Evan himself used. Every school of mage had something similar, and spells like the Wraith Eye proved far easier to master than the elusive, hard-to-grasp nature of true spiritual sense.
He gradually withdrew from that state, looked up, and found Xiaoshuang still perched there. "Xiaoshuang, how long have I been in seclusion?"
"A long time. Let me count — one day, two days..." Xiaoshuang counted on her fingers. "Seven days total. And strange thing is, you haven't eaten in seven days and you're still fine. Oh, right — you're a lich. Eating or not doesn't matter to you."
Evan smiled. "Would you like to visit the Black Forest? That's your home, isn't it?"
"Are you coming?" Xiaoshuang asked.
"I'll stay behind. I have a kind of magic — or perhaps divine art, though a weak version of it — that can't project a large object across such a distance. But you'd be perfect for it. You'd maintain a connection with the projection, almost like a split self existing in two places at once. What would you call this state... it feels familiar somehow. Let's just call it synchronized projection," Evan said, tempting her with the idea.
He couldn't quite place where he'd heard of something like this before — if his memory had run to university physics rather than just high school, he'd have recognized it at once. What he was describing bore a real resemblance to the non-locality of subatomic particles — an electron existing probabilistically across orbital space outside the nucleus, a concept his high school physics had only briefly touched on. Familiar as it felt, the full memory of it eluded him.
"Really? A divine art like that? Show me, quick!" Xiaoshuang perked up at once, delighted.
Evan gathered his focus, reaching his mental power out to that layer of divine power beyond his own body — something he could now sense faintly, thanks to the goddess of life's power settling into him.
A green glow rose across Xiaoshuang's form as well, and a faint projection of her flickered into being before vanishing again.