"There are far more issues than the trouble with the other divine faction. There is something big going on in the shadows," Solan continued while Nyssa looked as though she had been chewing on lemons for the last few hours.
"My dear Nyssa got more information from one of our temporary guests. There is something else happening after the third system event besides territories from Integrated Space being added to the new universe. The Oracle has called it the Convergence of the Great Four. This is huge, and even those with high Fate stats can feel the change. Something is coming, and we are currently in the worst position possible, with enemies on every side."
Thalion had absolutely no idea what the Convergence of the Great Four was supposed to be. It was time for him to ask the important question about Jakob's condition, which was why he had come here to talk with the gods in the first place.
"Okay... We have one more problem. Jakob, one of the four D grades we saved, has gone crazy from the constant torture. There must be a way to fix him, right?"
The question seemed to change the mood, and when Nyssa answered, she almost looked proud.
"Just send him through. I'll fix him in seconds. When torturing someone, it's very important to also be able to put the spirit back together after destroying it. Otherwise, the information gathering would be over. Why do you think you were even able to speak with the Echovore?"
Thalion didn't really know what to say to that. He had never been so happy and confused at the same time. Truly a rare combination.
"Okay. Good. I'll send him through immediately. When will the show start?"
Thalion hadn't received a system notification regarding the show, and there wasn't much time left until the third system event.
"You have two and a half weeks, and shortly after that it will be time for the third system event," Nyssa answered. The question about torture really seemed to have made her day, and Thalion quickly ended the increasingly ominous conversation to bring Jakob to the portal with the others. He still didn't trust the gods enough to enter their domain.
After Jakob was gone, they all came to the conclusion that a celebration was in order that evening. Time passed quickly while Thalion skimmed through Ankhet's records. He still couldn't believe his luck. To actually find a clue on how to get rid of the system's mark without having to win some impossible trial was beyond anything he had expected.
The only issue was that he still didn't have everything he needed, and it was a rather dangerous process, with one mistake being enough to end his life. Sadly, he didn't find anything that helped in that regard. Instead, he learned more about the structure of the soul body. It didn't make much difference to know which part of the soul body was especially sensitive to pain. For a mentalist, however, that knowledge was probably very useful, much like a boxer knowing exactly where to strike.
Time always passed quickly whenever Thalion focused on his soul and the system's mark. It was such an important subject and the final step of everything he had worked toward over the last few years. It was the reason he had postponed his evolution, and why he would postpone his D-grade evolution once again. Once he solved the mystery surrounding the system's mark, he could finally progress like everyone else.
While Thalion was racking his brain over the mystery surrounding the system's mark, Maike, Evelyn, Jack, Josh, Kargul, and even Vorlok were busy with something entirely different. They were organizing a huge celebration for that evening. The gods had already sent back a message that Jakob would return in five hours. By then, they had set themselves the goal of throwing the greatest "Welcome Back from Torture" celebration there had ever been.
Multiple bars delivered their beverages to them, while the rest came directly from the gods' domain. It was quite difficult to organize everything with the unbelievably happy Vorlok, who was completely unable to restrain himself even a little bit.
Mountains of roasted beef disappeared, but today everyone was so happy that, instead of getting annoyed, they simply laughed whenever a table they had just filled was empty a moment later. Sometimes even the whole table was gone, leaving behind nothing but a few wood chips.
Even through a few major setbacks caused by the gluttonous Sky Turtle, everything was ready when Jakob returned through the portal. They all stood on their side of the portal and blasted the sky with every kind of spell imaginable. Thalion fired a giant fireball into the sky that detonated brilliantly, while Kaldrek slashed upward with one of his blades.
They were right in the middle of shouting, "Welcome back—" when the rocket Lucan had launched exploded, violently shaking the entire city. Somewhere on the other side of the mountain, they could hear an avalanche rumbling down the slope. Everyone twitched as their hearing was completely wiped out for the next minute, until Evelyn healed them.
"Hi," Jakob said with a weak smile. "I'm so glad you all came to bust us out because I couldn't have held on for much longer."
Jakob with his body fully restored still wasn't looking good. His eyes still darted around, if looking for an ambush.
"Yeah, I know how it feels to get tortured. Well, welcome to the club," Jack said, clapping Jakob on the shoulder while handing him a beer with his other hand.
"Wait... you got your teeth broken out and your bones drilled open just so they could shove metal rods through them into your body. Oh, and don't even get me started on the insects they forced down your throat that eat you from the inside."
Jack's face grew paler with every word while his eyes widened.
"Hehe... you know what? You win," Jack admitted, his voice a mixture of disbelief and horror.
"WHAT?!" Josh exclaimed from a seat a few meters behind Jack and Jakob. He had already been in the middle of emptying his entire mug in one go when he heard what Jack had said. "All this time he keeps saying it was pure torture watching the Blue Robes cut off my fingers and toes, and now he admits that he infact was never tortured!? Jakob, just what have they done to you?"
"I forbid you from telling him. Josh is way too sensitive. Just hearing what they did to you will be enough to turn him into a leaking crybaby," Jack immediately interrupted.
"Sensitive? I demand another duel tomorrow at first light!" Josh exclaimed, slamming his fist onto the table and cracking it in multiple places.
"Pah, you're only confident because you won last time, but I've got a new trick," Jack huffed.
Everyone had followed the exchange with great interest, but after hearing about the duel, Kargul couldn't hold himself back any longer.
"Yes! Fight! Fight! Fight!" Kargul exclaimed from the large table in the middle of the chamber.
It didn't take much more for the party to completely descend into chaos. Kargul, Evelyn, Kaldrek, and Jakob challenged one another to drinking contests. Thalion, Annie, and Thalassan battled each other in the air, with Thalion using only blood skills while the other two fought exclusively with water skills.
Pikar constantly shared details about his newest insects and his future plans for the capital.
"I tell you, Lee, a mantis can turn its head over one hundred and eighty degrees. They have scotopic vision, which is very rare among insects. The females eat the males after mating, which is quite annoying when you want to breed them. With almost every other race, you can simply use a prize bull to produce high-grade offspring, but with mantises that's just not possible. By the way, did you know their front legs are called raptorial legs?"
"Please... I just punch things," Lee exclaimed, holding his head as though he had suffered a mental attack.
The only ones who didn't enjoy the celebration at all were the elves, who had chosen this night to honor their fallen. That proved rather difficult when the elite of their own faction was loudly celebrating only a short distance away. They had just buried the dead and were now sitting before the graves on the damp earth.
Normally, this was the time for the elves to say their final farewells to the fallen. However, almost every elf had to start their speech multiple times because they kept getting interrupted by loud shouts or the shockwaves from skills colliding in the distance. Kaldrek nearly caused another elven riot when, completely drunk, he stumbled into one of the graves and then accused the dead elf of stealing his beer. A heated discussion broke out over how that was even possible, while Kaldrek insisted that he had definitely been holding his beer just a second ago and that it couldn't simply disappear into thin air.
In the end, the conflict was solved by Vorlok, who casually ate both the empty beer bottle that had been lying in the grave the entire time and the corpse of the elf in one bite. The fact that Kargul immediately praised Vorlok as the most intelligent being he had ever met didn't exactly improve the elves' mood. Desperate to stop the madness, the elves begged Ricarda to do something.
To their disappointment, Ricarda was dealing with a crisis of her own. Before going through the portal to help Thalion and the others, she had left many of her plants behind so they could continue leveling. To Ricarda, plants were far more than mere tools—they were her friends. Now, more than half of them were gone, while many of the survivors had been half-eaten, with their leaves torn apart.
The fact that the elves had chosen that exact moment to ask for her help was truly unfortunate.
"Do you even know what plants are feeling? Oh yes, they can feel pain. Just look at my poor baby here. All her leaves have been chewed up by those gruesome pincers. She lost all of her brothers and sisters. To be honest, I'm not sure she'll ever recover from this shock."
To say that the poor elves, who had only wanted to bury their fallen, were perplexed would have been the understatement of the year. Fighting back tears, they returned to the graves to finally finish what they had started, only to discover that all the dead elves were gone. Instead, a fat Sky Turtle sat in the middle of the graveyard, loudly burping every thirty seconds. The ground now looked more like an excavated quarry, with trenches nearly three meters deep running through it.