CHAPTER 68
Azra'il - POV
The water around me slowly began to glow.
First as a soft, almost shy light, filtering through my own crossed fingers on my lap, the kind that hesitates before fully committing to its own existence. Then as entire currents, luminous, crossing the lake from end to end with a purpose no ordinary water would ever have, the difference between a flickering candle and a deliberate blaze.
I activated the Scripture of a Thousand Existences.
It wasn't a technique from any sect, any single master, any particular world that could claim authorship and collect posthumous royalties. It was mine, in the most literal and slightly incriminating sense of the word, built across ages by pilfering one principle here, fixing someone else's mistake there, perfecting methods that originally belonged to people who'd long since turned to cosmic dust and who, I presume, wouldn't have filed a formal complaint even if they could. A mosaic of over a thousand lives of learning, stitched together into something coherent enough to function as a single technique, and impressive enough to pretend it had always been planned that way, from the start, with all the elegance in the world.
[The Scripture of a Thousand Existences has been successfully activated.]
〈Excellent.〉
[I recall the first version destroyed three mountain ranges.]
〈That was an experimental version.〉
[You used it for twenty-seven years.]
〈Long experiments are still experiments, Eos. That's basically the definition of science.〉
[Your definition of "experimental" carries an impressive elasticity, worthy of note in any manual on the philosophy of language.]
〈I'll take that as a disguised compliment.〉
[It wasn't disguised well enough to go unnoticed, but proceed with whichever interpretation pleases you most.]
The technique began drawing mana from the lake through every pore of my body, not just through the hands or the main meridians, as any conventional method would demand of an ordinary practitioner, limited to a single narrow intake hose when the entire ocean was available. The whole body functioned as a conductor, skin, bones, blood, all absorbing together, a symphony of channels working in parallel instead of relying on a single, narrow, well-behaved flow.
It was, ironically, the exact principle I intended to teach Rudeus once I got back. He still thought of mana as something you drew through a single channel, a pipe far too narrow for his own potential, roughly the size of a drinking straw trying to feed a reservoir. He'd need to learn, sooner or later, that the whole body could be a gateway, and that he'd probably complain plenty during the discovery process, because complaining seemed to be, essentially, his national sport.
The water began swirling around me.
Not violently. Not yet. That would come later, with a sense of timing only nature ever seemed to fully master.
First, it formed a slow, continuous movement, every current following the rhythm of my dantian as if the whole lake had decided, on its own and without consulting anyone whatsoever, to adopt my pulse as its own vital signature.
The crystals responded shortly after. One by one, they lit up on the cavern walls, until I was no longer merely sitting at the bottom of an ordinary underground lake, but occupying the centre of a drowned constellation, spiritual flowers sprouting from the moss on the banks and blooming within seconds, with the haste of something that had finally been invited to the party after waiting outside for centuries.
Water droplets hung suspended in space as if gravity had decided to take an unpaid leave of absence. Thin silver threads of mana crossed my own skin, visible beneath the surface like veins of light, an effect that, I must admit with whatever modesty I had left, was aesthetically flawless. The cave's temperature oscillated gently between warm and hot, and a fine spiritual mist began covering the lake's surface, giving the whole place the appearance of something that definitely shouldn't exist under ordinary rock, let alone on a continent that still found chantless magic impressive.
Dark filaments began peeling away from my skin, dissolving into the water before floating to the surface, residue accumulated since this body's birth, small mana imperfections that eight years of life had let pile up without anyone, not even me, noticing in time.
〈Eos, purification status.〉
[The Celestial Spring Essence is absorbing the residue automatically, preventing it from circulating back into your system. Clean process. Nothing worthy of the visceral aesthetic certain traditions insist on associating with spiritual purging.]
〈A shame, honestly. I used to like that black, vaguely radioactive sludge that shows up in every decent story of the genre. It gave the scene a certain visual drama.〉
[You're complaining about the absence of malignant bodily secretion.]
〈I'm complaining about the lack of proper stagecraft, Eos. There's a subtle, but real, difference.〉
[Difference logged, without endorsement.]
〈Wise decision.〉
Inside the dantian, the accumulated mana mist began to spin.
The first rotation took almost a full minute, the kind of hesitant start any freshly awakened system shows before gaining confidence in itself. The second, a few seconds. By the tenth, it was no longer possible to follow the individual movement, just a continuous blur of energy collapsing in on itself, layer after layer, until the first drops of liquid mana began appearing at the centre, small pearls of potential suspended where before there had only been diffuse mist and good intentions.
[Spiritual condensation at eleven per cent.]
〈Keep observing.〉
[That was my original intention, before you interrupted to confirm the obvious.]
〈You seemed about to offer an unsolicited recommendation.〉
[My recommendation would have been not to interrupt the process to argue with me about hypothetical recommendations I hadn't even formulated yet.]
〈Recommendation accepted, then, however recursive it sounded.〉
The following days dissolved into that particular rhythm that only exists in processes that stop being measured in hours and start being measured in pure transformation.
On the first day, I had to control every current manually, guiding the flow with the precision of someone who still doesn't trust their own freshly installed system, like an overprotective mother who insists on holding the bicycle steady even after the child has already shown plenty of balance.
By the third day, the lake began circulating on its own, no longer demanding conscious intervention, the currents already knew the route by heart, with the confidence of someone who's repeated the journey enough times to dispense with the map.
By the fifth day, my breathing had stopped entirely, fully replaced by constant mana absorption through the skin itself. The body, technically, no longer needed it, which was an interesting physiological detail and quite the argument against any conventional anatomy lesson this world had ever tried to teach me.
By the eighth day, the crystals on the walls pulsed in the exact same rhythm as my dantian, as if the whole cave had become an extension of my own spiritual body, an organ of stone and light I never knew I had until that moment.
And, throughout all that time, the world outside, without me being able to witness it directly, was beginning to react in its own way.
〈Eos, exterior report.〉
[Animals abandoned their dens within a four-kilometre radius, probably concluding, sensibly, that whatever was causing that environmental disturbance was worth investigating from a safe distance. Monsters that would normally fight over territory retreated without any confrontation at all, a phenomenon that would probably confound local scholars for decades of frustrated academic research. Flowers bloomed out of season in the vegetation near the sealed entrance. And, two nights ago, the clouds parted for a few minutes directly above this position, revealing a moon surrounded by a silver halo no local resident would be able to explain, and that has probably already spawned at least one local legend involving spirits or curses.]
〈The heavens acknowledging the effort. How kind of them, finally.〉
[I doubt "kindness" is the technically correct term for atmospheric phenomena, but the poetry of the sentence makes up for the scientific imprecision.]
〈I've always prioritised style over precision, Eos. You should know that by this point in our relationship.〉
[Extensively documented, with date and time of each occurrence.]
On the twelfth day, the Foundation was finally ready.
Every meridian had been opened across months of silent work. Every channel, reinforced with the patience of someone building to last, not to impress the occasional visitor. Every layer of the dantian, prepared across years that no recent distraction, not even several whole days of guilty neglect, had managed to genuinely compromise. The Perfection stage didn't get that name out of the vanity of ancient cultivators pleased with themselves and eager to sound grand on scrolls. It was a promise, the guarantee that, when the time came, everything would fit together without failure, the way a good foundation is supposed to behave when finally asked to support something real.
The time had come.
At the centre of the dantian, a sphere was born.
Small. Silver. Translucent enough that I could see, inside it, thousands of luminous points spinning like stars trapped in a sky of no fixed size, an entire universe compressed into the space of a single pearl, which was, let's be honest, a feat of spiritual engineering deserving more applause than any audience in that empty cave could possibly offer.
The Spirit Core pulsed once.
The entire lake responded, a wave of energy spreading from my position to the cave's farthest walls, the crystals glowing with an intensity surpassing everything they'd produced up to that instant, as if they too, in their own silent, mineral way, were applauding.
[Advancement confirmed.]
[Current realm: Spirit Core.]
[Stage: Rudimentary Core.]
[Stability: perfect.]
〈As it should be.〉
[Modesty remains unavailable for purchase, apparently, in any market I've catalogued across a thousand lives.]
〈It was never installed in this system, Eos. Your diagnostics should have caught that several hundred lives ago.〉
[I know. I keep checking out of habit, like someone checking the lock on a door they know, with absolute certainty, never had a latch at all.]
I opened my eyes at the bottom of the lake.
The world hadn't changed. My ability to perceive it had.
Every crystal on the walls now carried a distinct signature, as clear as a fingerprint exposed under bright light. Every current of water formed a clear line crossing the space, visible as if physics itself had decided, out of rare courtesy, to draw explanatory diagrams purely for my personal convenience. I could feel the roots of the trees up above, through metres of solid rock, each one searching for water with that silent stubbornness only plants seem to master without conscious effort.
The passage of small animals through the distant forest, each little paw touching the ground like an isolated note in a score only I could read now. The slow, almost imperceptible movement of the subterranean mana circulating beneath the stone, like an invisible river running under everything, entirely ignoring the existence of anything above it.
Before, I observed the world.
Now, it seemed to have come within reach of my own hands, like a toy handed over on a platter to someone who, honestly, already had similar enough toys in past lives, but who still appreciated the courtesy of the gesture.
And it was exactly at that moment of newly earned clarity, when I should have been savouring the advancement with all the arrogant satisfaction it deserved, perhaps even allowing myself a smug smile with no witnesses to judge it, that I felt something stir in the depths of my own soul.
It wasn't hostility. Hostility would have been, honestly, a comparative relief.
It was the unmistakable sensation of several ancient presences waking up at the same time, realising, with an enthusiasm I already dreaded in advance and for good historical reasons, that I finally had enough spiritual energy to hear them again.
〈Eos.〉
[Activity in the mindscape has increased by six hundred and forty per cent over the past ninety seconds.]
〈No.〉
[I hadn't formulated a question yet.]
〈But you were about to suggest something, and the answer, pre-emptively and as a matter of historical precaution, is no.〉
[I recommend a direct inspection of the mindscape.]
〈Recommendation firmly denied.〉
[It wasn't, technically, an optional request.]
〈Every recommendation, by basic grammatical definition, is optional, Eos. If it were mandatory, it would be called an order, and you aren't in a position to give me orders, however much I know you'd secretly love to try.〉
[A precise observation. I'll proceed anyway: the Scarlet King has just reached one of the internal barriers.]
〈He does that from time to time. It's a phase. It'll pass, like it always does.〉
[Bill Cipher is trying to convince Zarathos that verbal contracts don't count for metaphysical purposes.]
〈Do they?〉
[They do.]
〈I assumed they would. Zarathos should know that by now, considering how many times he's fallen for that exact trick.〉
[Nyarlathotep is offering to help with the situation.]
〈Definitely, under absolutely no conceivable circumstance, let him accept that help.〉
[Logged as a categorical refusal, duly justified by precedent.]
[The Phoenix is trying to stop Kurama from attacking The Darkness again.]
〈They'll sort it out between themselves. They always do, eventually, after destroying something I then have to rebuild.〉
[Death is sitting there watching it all, without intervening.]
〈She's the only sensible one in that whole sorry lot.〉
[She brought popcorn.]
〈That's institutional betrayal on a cosmic scale.〉
[Complaint logged, with no real intention of passing it on to anyone whatsoever.]
〈Your loyalty remains strictly decorative, Eos.〉
[I prefer to think of it as selectively applied.]
I stayed still at the bottom of the lake, the newly formed Spirit Core pulsing slowly inside me, and considered, with a seriousness the situation probably didn't deserve, how much my own mindscape should, by any reasonable logic of existence, be a refuge.
A calm lake. A silent mountain. Perhaps an empty temple where I could talk to my own soul with no interruption whatsoever, exactly as any decent cultivator would have every right to expect after more than a thousand lives of accumulated effort and an embarrassing number of enemies defeated in the name of their own inner peace.
Mine held gods, demons, dragons, entire cosmic forces, conceptual entities that barely fit into any stable definition of existence, a talking yellow triangle with criminal tendencies duly registered in at least three separate legal systems, and at least three beings that treated the fundamental laws of reality as mere social-behaviour suggestions, the kind one politely ignores at a dull party.
Somewhere between the hundredth and the whatever-thousandth life, my inner sanctuary had stopped being a space for contemplation and turned, without my explicit consent or any prior consultation whatsoever, into absolute bedlam for the entire multiverse.
〈How many are awake?〉
[Most of the loud ones.]
I stayed quiet for a few seconds, letting that phrase settle with all the weight it deserved, which was, unfortunately, quite a lot of weight.
〈Define "most of the loud ones."〉
[No.]
〈Eos.〉
[You'll be less annoyed if you find out for yourself, rather than hearing it from me first and having time to emotionally prepare for the disappointment.]
〈That statement is statistically false, and the two of us know that perfectly well.〉
[Even so, I recommend going in. Delaying doesn't shrink the problem, it only shrinks the time you have to prepare for it.]
I'd just spent twelve whole days cultivating at the bottom of a lake, compressing an entire ocean of mana until it became a single spiritual pearl capable of rewriting my place in this entire world's power hierarchy. Somehow, that feat seemed considerably less exhausting than the conversation probably waiting for me on the other side of my own consciousness.
I closed my eyes again.
〈If Bill tried to sell off any part of my soul while I was away, I'm personally turning him into a two-dimensional drawing.〉
[He's already essentially two-dimensional, by nature and by design.]
〈Then I'll find a dimension lower than the one he already occupies. One must exist. The universe is generous with options for that kind of punishment.〉
[Preparing access to the mindscape.]
I sighed, there alone at the bottom of that impossible lake, the core's silver glow still pulsing faintly against my own ribs, a physical reminder that, whatever I was about to face, at least one part of that day had gone exactly as planned.
That place was supposed to be my refuge.
Instead, it was cosmic bedlam, and, by all indications, every single resident had chosen that exact morning to "wake up" at the same time, with no regard for any schedule, with no consideration whatsoever for the peace I genuinely believed I'd earned after twelve days of flawless work.
I was definitely going to make someone pay for this, just as soon as I worked out exactly who deserved the bill.