Chapter 86: Divine-rank Spirit Technique: Halcyon Iridescent Verdict
Aidan found Beatrix and Solenne at the edge of the white basin, and he didn’t need to ask how it had gone.
Both of them were still on their feet, which was the entire test, and both wore the particular hollowed-out look of people who had spent hours carrying an invisible mountain on their shoulders. Around them, the basin was emptying of the thousands who hadn’t managed the same.
"One hundred and forty-three fell in the last hour alone," Solenne said, rolling a shoulder that clearly ached. "The artifact got creative near the end. It started pressing down in pulses."
"We stood," Beatrix said simply, and the way she planted her feet while saying it told the whole story.
"Wonderful, but then again, you built your foundation properly." Aidan grinned at both of them. "Congrats."
"The next round won’t care about foundation," Solenne said. "A hundred of us, and the numbers only get worse from here."
She wasn’t wrong, and Aidan didn’t insult her by pretending otherwise.
"Exactly. And so, we don’t waste the twelve hours," he said. "Pack up. We’re going camping and training."
...
The wilderness outside Kaelveth Prime’s tournament grounds was engineered the way everything on this planet was, but engineered wilderness was still wilderness, dense hills of silver-barked trees rolling out toward a horizon dotted with training parties who’d all had the same idea.
Aidan picked a valley far enough from the others that nobody would see anything they shouldn’t, and set the crew loose.
Beatrix threw herself at her Cerulean War Requiem, Jovan feeding her controlled strikes to stack her Requiem against, each blocked hit winding her power tighter. Solenne worked her fire and shadow through increasingly vicious combinations against Arthur, who treated getting attacked by starfire as a delightful game.
Aidan sat apart from all of it with a single scroll across his knees.
[Divine-rank Spirit Technique: Halcyon Iridescent Verdict.]
He’d been putting this off since the market, and the twelve-hour window was as good a time as any to stop.
His first instinct had been the obvious one. His Power Bond talent bonded with anything holding power, and a Divine-rank technique scroll held plenty.
But the interesting thing about the scroll was every time he reached toward it with the talent, the bond simply refused to form, sliding off the scroll like fingers off wet glass.
[Bonding target invalid.]
[Reason: The target is alive.]
’Alive.’ Aidan turned the scroll over slowly. ’A technique scroll. Alive.’
He had no free slots anyway, all five filled, and removing a mastered bond would gut his combat power for nothing. But that message sat wrong in his chest in a way that had nothing to do with slots.
Finn drifted out of the summoning space, and pressed one fin against the scroll’s surface.
[There is a spirit in there,] Finn said, with none of its usual playfulness. [A living one. Small. It has been alone for a very long time. I know what that feels like from the inside.]
Jovan folded out of the air beside them, and Arthur’s head swung over from his sparring, both drawn by the change in Finn’s voice.
[Jovan: The little fish is right. Something is breathing in that scroll. Faintly. Patiently.]
[Tom: I also senses a clear, living thread.]
[Arthur: I thought it smelled weird. Like a person, but folded up.]
Aidan looked down at the scroll for a long moment, and then made the only decision he was ever going to make.
"Watch my body," he said, and sent his consciousness in.
...
The inside of the scroll was a sky.
Not a painted one. A real, endless expanse of soft cloud and slanting golden light, and through it, trailing colors that had no business existing together in one creature, flew a phoenix.
Its feathers shifted as it moved, crimson bleeding into deep blue into bright, laughing yellow into colors Aidan had no names for, and when it banked toward him and landed on nothing at all, its eyes held the specific patience of something that had waited a very long time for company.
[You reach for this technique,] the phoenix said, voice layered like a chord. [Then hear its price. Halcyon Iridescent Verdict is not learned through practice. It is learned through comprehension of the five roots. Joy. Sadness. Fear. Anger. Disgust. Understand them. Control them. Or leave.]
"That’s the whole test?" Aidan asked. "Understand my own emotions?"
[Mortals spend lifetimes failing it,] the phoenix said. [Most who open this scroll cannot sit honestly with even one of the five. They flinch from their own fear. They drown in their own anger. They have never once looked at their own disgust and called it by name.]
Aidan sat down cross-legged on the cloud, and for the first time in a long while, he let himself remember on purpose.
Over a billion years. Uncountable lives, lived end to end inside the Darkness. He had felt joy in those lives, real joy, families and festivals and small stupid perfect afternoons, all of it built to be torn down. He had drowned in sadness so many times it had worn grooves in him. Fear had been his roommate for entire centuries. Disgust, at the Terroreign, at the things it made him watch, at himself in the worst years, was an old, familiar taste.
He didn’t flinch from any of them. He knew them the way a man knows the rooms of a house he has lived in forever.
The phoenix watched him sit with each one in turn, and its layered voice went quiet with something it hadn’t expected to feel.
[You are not comprehending them,] it said slowly. [You are greeting them.]
"We’re old acquaintances," Aidan said.
The technique unfolded for him then, the way techniques always did once the door stopped being locked, and its shape was beautiful and simple at once. Emotion, converted directly into energy. Not suppressed, not endured, but spent, channeled into any technique, any strike, any simple punch, each of the five roots lending its own nature to the enhancement.
Joy burned bright, a Fiery Spark that laced attacks with flame and swelled raw power. Sadness flowed heavy and slow, dragging at whatever it touched. Fear sharpened senses and speed to a razor’s edge. Disgust corroded, ate, refused. And Anger...
[Comprehension complete.]
[Divine-rank Spirit Technique acquired: Halcyon Iridescent Verdict.]
Anger, he did not touch. Not because he couldn’t. Because his was not a root. His was an ocean, and this technique was not the container for it.
’Four out of five spendable, and the fifth one stays in its vault.’ He exhaled slowly. ’That’s the right call and we both know it.’
The phoenix inclined its head, colors rippling down its neck, and then its form began to thin, duty discharged, and behind where it had been standing, someone much smaller was waiting.
A little girl.
She could not have been more than eight, small and thin in a plain white dress, dark hair cut unevenly as if by hurried hands, and she looked up at Aidan with the carefully still face of a child who had learned early that reactions could be dangerous.
And the scroll showed him the rest, whether he wanted it or not.
A village burning at the edges of his vision. A demonic sect’s black robes. A cage, and a captured phoenix screaming in a ring of chains beside it, and a ritual circle drawn in things ritual circles should never be drawn in. The technique’s five roots had needed a heart that had felt all five completely, and a child stripped of everything felt them completely indeed, and so the sect had fed her and the phoenix into the forging together and called the result a masterpiece.
The anger came up Aidan’s spine like a flood hitting a dam.
The cloud-sky around him darkened at its edges, golden light guttering, and he felt his ocean strain against its walls with a pressure that made the entire scroll-space groan.
’Easy.’ He breathed it down, slow, deliberate, one measured breath at a time, the way he had ten thousand times before. ’Not here. Not in front of her. Easy.’
The sky steadied. The gold came back. The little girl was still watching him, and she hadn’t moved an inch, but her carefully still face had cracked just slightly around the eyes.
"Sorry," Aidan said quietly. "That wasn’t for you."
[Player Aidan.] The system’s voice arrived without fanfare. [I added the technique into your pool of rewards as I thought you would take care of it better.]
"You can’t prevent such tragedies?"
[I can’t interfere in how people live, what they do. That is also your battlefield. But what I can do is what I just did. But you can resurrect her since her soul is alive. It is not possible in small realms, but once you ascend to one of the eight remaining big realms, you can.]
’Resurrect.’ Aidan looked at the small girl in the white dress, and something in his chest set itself like poured stone. ’Then that’s on the list now. Permanently.’
The girl’s spirit settled into his life nexus as the scroll-space gently folded itself away, a small, warm presence taking up residence somewhere near the center of him, and her voice, when it came, was shy and clear at once.
’Brother Aidan. You are too kind.’ A pause, and then, smaller: ’You look like a good person, so I am happy.’
’I’ll give you a new life, Miriem.’ Aidan smiled. ’From now on, you’re my little sister.’
His eyes stayed dry, and the smile stayed easy, and neither of those things made the memories quieter. He had watched sisters die in the Darkness more times than any mind should hold, little hands slipping out of his in a thousand engineered tragedies, and he had failed every single time because failing was the design. That damn Terroreign had held nothing back.
But that had all been fake.
This was reality. And in reality, he would do exactly as he pleased. He would save who he pleased. He would kill what he pleased. And he would hunt the Terroreign to whatever hole it called home.
His Digicard chimed.
[Jiran: Brother Garen, when are you coming to give ingredients? I am itching to cook Legendary stuff. I am on a cusp of comprehending a Spirit Technique and cooking will really help me in that. That’s my meditation.]
Aidan stared at the message for a second, and then laughed, loud and real, the last of the darkness in his chest scattering under it.
’Cooking as meditation.’ He stood, dusting himself off. ’That man is going to comprehend his way into being the strongest chef in the Alliance, and honestly, I respect the path.’
Aidan grinned. It was becoming a habit to eat that food, and he was only getting better with each batch.
[Aidan: Ready your spices. Buy more from here if you must. Just whip me up one hell of a feast that can last for ten days. I’m coming with tons of Legendary-rank meat.]
[Jiran: Hahaha, bring it on!]