Chapter 307: Ascent - where the World Ends
It took another three days for the Dream of Starvation to finish digesting the blood he’d fed it. The metal had been moving with more enthusiasm recently, reflective streaks threading through its abyssal steel. There was a faint red sheen to the thing now, and it smelled strongly of iron, even when Mercury wasn’t as close to it.
His once-little horrifying nightmare weapon was really growing up so fast…
When the chime for the finished evolution finally came, Mercury opened up its stat sheet and read.
[:
Grade: Bound A - Proficiency (0/1000) (evolved!)
Rank: 4 - Growth (0/1000) (evolved!)
Attributes: [Evolved!], , , , [New!], [New!]]
He tilted his head. had evolved? That was somewhat unexpected. Curiously, he pulled up its description.
[: In addition to being able to change shape, the Dream of Starvation will be able to compress its own mass into itself, increasing its strength at the cost of volume.]
That was incredibly useful! Mercury smiled happily at the notification. As the weapon had grown, it had simply gained more volume, which was fine, since he could do partial summons. Now, though, he could simply compress it down more easily, even enhance its strength.
A very useful upgrade for utility. He was glad that the system was so accommodating. The problem of size would have probably begun rearing its head after this evolution, so having it nipped in the bud was rather nifty.
Analysing that left and . Both of which certainly sounded… interesting.
[: The weapon has absorbed much through its interaction with its user. The bond between the two has tightened - now, the weapon has become a tool, too. Any Skill you channel through the Dream of Starvation will be enhanced. It may be used to channel magic or crafting Skills, in addition to offensive ones.]
Oh. That was rather peaceful, actually. He could use the Dream of Starvation as a smithing hammer or chisel, this way, or even as a wand if he wanted. Fun. It’d enhance those Skills, too, making it rather helpful. He was looking forward to testing that.
[: The Dream of Starvation now produces pseudo-spores, creating a strong smell of iron around it. These may infest living creatures, taking root within their body and consuming their blood and flesh to produce more liquid metal to fuel the weapon. Additionally, hosts of the Dream may spread this ailment to others.]
Aaaaand that’s what it had learnt from the Blood-Curse Mercury had fed it. Of course it did. His weapon was now a virus, ready to infect anyone and anything alive. He also didn’t need to think for very long about whether it would carry all the other effects of the Dream of Starvation.
Yes, he was very, very sure that this new infection-property would carry the nightmares and decay and anti-healing that the previous iterations had with it. What a terrifying thing to hold in his hands… or, well, around his legs. He was still using it as a pair of pants.
That did mean that he had to rather quickly get the whole infestation shtick under control. With a mental switch and a small command, he turned off the production of the metallic spores, and the smell of iron quickly disappeared. Mercury breathed a sigh of relief upon checking that no one had been infested in the few seconds that it had been active.
With this evolution, he had the opportunity to start a flesh-eating pandemic if he wanted to, feeding his weapon copious amounts of the blood of the innocent. Which he really didn’t want to. That was the absolute opposite of what he wanted, in fact!
Though he supposed it was a good option to have in case he ran into something like the sins again.
The Storm’s Raiment was getting close to evolving again, too, but he hadn’t fed it much of the stuff it needed to grow. Clouds, water, and lightning were its preferred food. The Dream of Starvation preferred to gorge itself on blood. The Stifled Silence had not yet evolved, nor was he sure it would ever. But it did feed his domain of , so he imagined it didn’t particularly need to, since it mostly acted as an enhancement to his Skills.
He imagined the Raiment would evolve after his little encounter with the sun. If it didn’t evaporate.
Sighing softly, Mercury rose from his chair. It was a comfortable chair, grown and carved by him. He had sanded and finished the wood himself, and made sure the backrests were nice and even. These days, he didn’t get back pain anymore. His spine was sturdier than steel, quite frankly.
But he still made sure to groan as he rose, and stretch for a long moment after. Old habits died hard, and it made him feel a little more human, even if every motion he went through was one of inhuman grace.
Even now, he was still burning alive. Barely a shell of himself. But that pain wasn’t worth complaining about - it wasn’t like bad knees or a bad back where it was the fun kind of nagging that people could share. This was an inflicted pain. A curse, laid on him by something or someone.
And now, Mercury intended to find out who.
He’d delayed that answer for a long while. Waited for the truth to find him, for a solution to swing by his place. He’d grown stronger, enhanced himself over and over, and pushed the continuous cellular degradation that infested him back. Bit by bit, he had fought for every inch of flesh.
It had been multiple seasons since the pain started, and he didn’t have a single day without his skin itching and burning away. Not one. His eye twitched at the thought.
Despite everything, he’d been patient and gentle with the world. He hadn’t lashed out at anyone, hadn’t let the pain bother him, simply kept up his meditation basically twenty-four hours a day. It wasn’t hard, but it was a slow, persistent effort, and he was starting to get a little annoyed at having to put it in.
Slowly, he breathed in, then out. He looked backwards, at the many stone buildings carved into the canyon walls, now adorned with new furniture. At the apprentices practicing in the courtyard, many of whom would still be in the infirmary if not for him. He’d learnt a lot from this place.
Their fire techniques had increased his resistance and understanding of the element. He was not yet a master, and that was fine. He didn’t need to fully master fire for this next step. It might help, but that’d take years, and while Mercury had a few pages, maybe seasons, even, he’d eventually burn to a crisp.
Even now, the cursed flames licked at his mind. So, no. He would not fully master fire. He would not hide away in a cave for a decade or three. He refused to go down weakly or pathetically. Right now, he felt angry and disgusted.
Mercury rose with all the complaints of a middle-aged man, and spread his wings.
The Storm’s Raiment flared. Bright white clouds flared outwards from his robes, the taking shapes in moments. Mercury fed it his qi, now, and the Raiment accepted it gleefully. A second pair of wings grew beneath the first one - both of them looking somewhat draconic, taking inspiration from Zyl or the draco the cloak had originally come from, he imagined. He could shift their shape, but he didn’t bother.
Instead, he flapped his wings once, and was instantly overcome by a bizarre sensation of weightlessness.
Rather than his usual flight, which involved stepping on platforms of his rijn, this instantly sent him upwards. Gravity released its hold on him, temporarily disabled by the magic. For a moment, Mercury lost his balance, tumbled and spun through the air, then right himself with a pail of laughter.
A single beat of his wing had sent him a hundred metres straight up. He hovered around the highest buildings of the monastery, his wings spread wide and holding him in place. Another flap sent him out over the canyon walls, the sunlight catching in the diffuse mist of his wings.
Despite the growing pain the light shot through him, Mercury couldn’t help but laugh. Flying simply never got old.
He beat his wings again, then another time mid motion, all four of them snapping to motion in sync. In moments he soared upwards, crossing dozens, hundreds of meters within heartbeats.
The heat against his skin grew and grew and became unbearable. His recently tempered flesh sloughed off his bones again, evaporating in the incredible brightness and heat. Mercury looked upwards and saw that the sun had grown so bright he couldn’t even see the sky anymore. There was not a hint of blue up there.
All that awaited him was an endless sheet of blinding white radiance. The kind that was ready to entirely vaporize him. It was sickening. And he didn’t even have sunscreen!
Laughing mentally at the silly joke, Mercury rose higher. His bones blackened. His wings turned thin and translucent as the water that composed the clouds evaporated away. His blood briefly leaked from his body, then turned into mist as well.
The ground beneath him continued to shrink as he rose higher and higher up into the air. His wings struggled and almost disappeared, but the Storm’s Raiment was still different from him, so the sun attacked it less harshly. The wings survived his ascent, fed by his mana all the way until he reached the beginnings of heaven.
By then, looking down, the Skyflame Monks were but tiny dots. Smaller even than ants as they went about their days, practicing, meditating. He could see far from all the way up here, where not even the tallest mountains reached. So far that if he really strained, he could see the peaks of the Cult of Infernal Flames in the distance.
It was beautiful. His hand still pressed upwards, his eyes drawing away from the scenery, from his promise to visit Daryel, and instead moved towards the boundary that separated heaven and earth.
Back when he was in the Reforged-Realm, it had been almost entirely solid. A harsh, violent thing that he couldn’t get through. Now, he was stronger. When his hand pressed against the surface of heaven, that scintillating, shimmering barrier of superiority, it sank in slightly.
Instantly, the pain intensified. The sunlight scoured even his bones, burning until nothing but ash was left of his marrow. Mercury’s body was left a hollow shell of itself, barely a few bits of calcium and carbon clinging to each other. But it was enough.
With brute force, he pushed further. Until his forearm sank in, then his elbow, then his shoulder. It burnt him badly, tore at him with the wrath of a divinity defiled, and he didn’t care. Mercury overdrove his regeneration with qi, and his bones hardened. They solidified at his mere thought, and even though it was exhausting, he kept himself together by force of will alone.
[ has levelled up! 4>]
His bones regrew, knitting themselves into existence from nothing at all. Threads of reality danced and rippled around Mercury, growing and being burnt back by the sun. It was damaging the very thoughts he was making himself from, but he was done running.
With a deep breath, Mercury plunged headfirst into heaven, breaking through the glowing barrier, and heading into the burning abyss.
Heaven was darker than he expected. It was thick, too, heavy with the weight of reality. Like being in the crushing depths of the oceans - there was an environmental pressure grinding away at him. Like this whole place hated his very guts.
Usually, apparently, the pressure was meant to be more neutral. Most cultivators didn’t get specifically targeted by it unless they entered a hostile zone of someone’s domain, or a natural treasure with strong repelling powers. But Mercury had apparently drawn the ire of this entire place, so he was constantly being subjected to some of its worst effects.
Which included the erosion of his fabric of reality. But that was fine. He just wove more, drew them forth from and anchored himself. He knew what his truth was, and had germinated his own ascension. There was no need for him to fear the heavens. They meant nothing to him.
Drawing in a deep breath of air that smelled like ozone, Mercury beat his wings again. They were thin, here, his movement a dozen times slower, but he still flew. Slowly and with great effort, he pushed through the environmental pressure, and ascended higher.
Usually, the heavens were meant to be many-coloured. A beautiful rainbow abyss, stretching as far as the eye could see. Unfortunately for Mercury, he had angered the sun, so all he got to see was a blinding white, everywhere. It was so bright it hurt just to look at, if Mercury had eyes, that was.
Of course, those had long since burned away. So, instead, Mercury was left probing the area with nothing but his qi to guide his way. Well, that and , and his dozens other senses. Really, he was far from blind, but the curse messed with most of what he saw, surrounding him in nothing but radiance.
Still, he soared higher. Slowly, meter by meter, he fought to go up further. He burned and burned more as he ascended, but he kept going nonetheless. It was by far the worst pain he’d ever felt - and it was also terribly meaningless.
His body absorbed, regrew, and withdrew stored matter. He had prepared for this, and tons of his regeneration had gone into preparing backup skeletons in the extradimensional space his Skill provided. Every time too much of him was incinerated, he simply withdrew more biomass, assimilated it into his form, and grew yet stronger.
With the heat of the sun, he was consistently reforging his body. Over and over again, he lost pieces and replaced them. There was some kind of Ship-Of-Theseus thing there, but Mercury didn’t particularly care for that dilemma. He was still himself, no matter what happened.
[ has levelled up! 4>]
His body grew tougher, weaving itself into existence and replacing all the lost bits as he ascended. Higher and higher and yet higher. He flapped his wings, ascending past the clouds that permeated this place, hungrily devoured by the Storm’s Raiment. He soared and soared and soared yet more.
The sky grew heavier on his back. Usually, air pressure should reduce if he rose high enough, but the thick barrier of Heaven only smothered him more. He felt his breathing grow laboured, then impossible. The surrounding air refused to enter his lungs, so Mercury made his own.
crashed into this hateful realm like a tornado. It brought air to Mercury’s lungs and tore into the suffocating domains that naturally suffused this place. Instead, the mopaaw’s very own extended self took control of the environment. The crushing pressure let up as winds began to blow, and raindrops fell.
Mercury stood in the center, his robes billowing like he stood in a spring breeze. He’d say the same about his fur if it hadn’t been burnt away.
[ has levelled up! 3>]
The pain receded a little with the level, and despite himself, Mercury laughed. He beat his wings again, diving further upwards. Air roared around his ears, the pressures slowly consuming his world. It was hard, almost painful to keep maintained, but he did it anyway, pressing against Heaven.
Breathing heavily, he ascended. Further and further up and up. The weight grew heavier on his back, threatening to pulverize his bones from the pressure. He felt like a submarine about to fold inward. Ambient shifts of wild force began piercing his , lances of pressurized reality that tore through his body like tissue paper, leaving perfectly circular holes in him.
It hurt like nothing before, stabbing through his mind as well as his body. His astral self was damaged by it in its entirety. But that was fine. So long as he lived, he could himself. At a thought, his reality rewove itself, cut and burnt threads growing back and making the tapestry that was him.
Mercury ached, slowing down to dodge the deadly beams that this environment created by simple happenstance. Like leaks in a submarine shooting pressurized water, he had to avoid getting killed with everything he had. And still, he smiled.
Another beam tore through the hole in his skull where an eye might have been, shooting out the other side. He lost half his brian, then regrew it a blink later. The radiance surrounding him had grown so bright it immolated his skeleton in moments, forcing him to draw on new ones.
But still, he flew.
Drawn along by the invisible trajectory provided by , there was very little that could stop Mercury. He smashed through barriers and obstacles, through an everlasting, grinding pressure. When it redoubled, threatened to crush him like a tin can, he activated , too, encasing himself in a shell of liquid metal that made him endure just a little longer.
Enough to take just one more step, one more flap of his wings - and he was through.
All at once, the pressure winked away in a blink. The heat was still there, just as immolating and brutal, but the light had disappeared. It didn’t suffuse the sky anymore. Mainly because there was nothing to suffuse.
No more air. No more substance, no more anything at all. Mercury found himself floating in absolute emptiness. A vacuum.
Not empty like the Void, though, not true . There was still space here. Distance, too. But nothing that the light could irradiate except him. In some ways that made it more bearable, in others, even more of that violence was now focused on him.
Mercury flapped his wings in the vacuum of space that awaited beyond Heaven. The cultivators called this one the “Empty Heaven”, the last place where people were meant to go. Beyond it lay Heaven’s Will, the thing that was above all mortal life, and that only those seeking to attain true immortality at the end of their cultivation would seek out.
Being in the Silver-Core realm, Mercury was anything but at the end of his cultivation journey. He had not even developed Bladesoul yet. But he was strong in other ways. Many other ways.
So, he let his in the empty space, creating a bubble of air around himself. His twin domains wrapped around him like a diving suit, and he headed further upwards, towards the bright abyss that was the sun.
He burned and regenerated dozens, hundreds, thousands of times over as the seconds ticked by. His wings eroded down to stubs, then regrew from new cloudmatter, fed by his rain. The Dream of Starvation was wrapped around his entire self, cloaking his skeleton in an inhuman shape of stygian black.
The empty heaven soon came to an end. It was a short stretch before Mercury encountered the last known true barrier. A plane of pure, blinding white. It was so bright that it stung even Mercury’s magical senses to look at it. The kind of bright that was simply not meant for mortal eyes.
It was the kind of bright Mercury thrived in.
Heaven may have hated him, and the sun may have been trying to burn him to a crisp, but if Mercury had had lips, they would’ve been carrying a manic smile. He stuck his hand up first, touching the white, and it instantly bubbled and boiled at his touch.
Frothing foam shot forth, encasing his limb, and eating into him. It was the strongest, most vile curse he had ever experienced. A dozen energies invaded his body in such a chaotic, dissonant, violent mess they threatened to break him apart instantly.
Shadows and light tore into his bones, fire burnt him, water choked him, and earth wrapped him in a crushing embrace. It was every element one could think of, every power imaginable. His dreams twisted into nightmares, the tapestry of fate turned against him, his luck forsaked him, his blood betrayed him, and his bones grew spikes to skewer him.
Even his mind was threatened, though less so than his body. Mind and dream magic were smaller categories, after all, so they impacted him less. It hurt, still, to be scoured so, to have something external grinding, burning, tearing at his memories and thoughts.
And his smile didn’t vanish.
This was what he thrived in. This chaotic maelstrom of everything and anything all at once. It was an absolute mess of dissonant powers that tore at each other as much as him. That’s why the surface of it was so volatile.
It could have turned him into a radiant statue within less than a nanosecond, had he been a normal person. But it didn’t. Mercury felt the foam cover his body, his wings flapping as he soared.
Rampant power turned his skeletons to dust faster than ever. Even the metal of the Dream of Starvation let out a screech, as its solidified form was twisted and torn into by torrential blasts of force. The entire ocean bore down on Mercury’s back. His spine shattered into dust. His metal armor crumbled around him, turning his entire body into a small sphere of jagged metal.
He expanded it again, summoned more bones to anchor himself to, and flew. The radiance clung to him like a heavy curtain, and finally, he triggered .
If he had eyes, he would have bled from them. His minds burned with exertion, the myriad of energies proving so varied it fried his brain in a heartbeat. For a moment, Mercury short-circuited and sputtered. His mind was too frail, too fragile to bear the strain.
The light that was his mind flickered, dimmed, then lit up again.
flickered through each of the powers in a single moment. It was a beautiful fusion of everything that underlined the world, everything supernatural that there was to be. He had used it to channel fire like water, like stone, and that was but the first step.
Mercury breathed in, then out. He flickered through his Skills, and triggered all of them. , to enhance his mind’s and body’s toughness. , to ensure he didn’t black out again. , to enhance the sorting of the energies, and automate a part of it. , to help him see through it all.
All the while, tore open a path further upwards, with and making sure he was even remotely suited to handling the insane load wearing him down.
He told himself it was easy, that he could do it, with the unreasonable confidence of a lunatic, just to trigger , the very thing that had helped guide him along the stages of cultivation. And finally, he cloaked himself from the energy behind his , making a part of them slide off, and then into them.
Tiny pieces of magic flaked away from the greater whole, the foam shell cracking slightly with each shaving. Those were what Mercury processed, and tore apart with his . He computed thousands, tens of thousands of combinations in each tiny drop of power.
Chaotic swirls of colour came together at entirely unpredictable angles - and Mercury saw them all. He resonated with the colours, the patterns, and shifted them slightly. Not enough to make them easy to comprehend, that was far beyond his means. Just enough to create something of a cascading failure. Nudging one colour a little to the left, blurring the edges here and there…
He altered the fabric of reality, just to fight back against the crushing magic around him. And then, one by one, he started pulling it apart at the cracks.
consumed these bits of magic. Once he resonated with them, all it took was picking out a tiny fragment. He shifted them with his , homogenized it, then made the artificially induced lattice fail.
It was like turning water into ice, then shattering it entirely. The bonds crashed against each other, violence turned on violence, and the foamy prison he was trapped in annihilated itself. For the first time in months, Mercury took a single deep, unburdened breath without any pain.
Then the light reached him.
Now, the domain of Heaven’s Will was broken around him. He had found the crack in the system, the flaw that he could exploit. His mind burned at the exertion, driven to its very limits just to sustain his existence here, but he could see through it. The brightness wasn’t overwhelming - it faded into noise to his senses, simply fraying. He a hole in Heaven.
And through that scar upon Heaven, he bore witness to the thing that cursed him.
First, he saw the things maintaining this bizarre ecosystem. Tiny organisms, each of them generating insane amounts of energy of such purity Mercury found himself almost envious. They were like bacteria, packed with enough power to flood cities or raise mountains. They fought over each other, spreading chaotic energies around, and seemed to sustain themselves off of… nothing? No. .
Like all of reality, they were anchored to the void, drawing from there. It was bizarre to see such a sophisticated siphoning mechanism, but they were simultaneously linking to the void… and keeping it at bay. The swirl of energies was so bright, violent and real that nothing beyond dared approach. This is why it was the last known barrier to mortals.
Heaven, Mercury realized then, wasn’t at all meant for people. It was a shield against the Void. Every layer of it meant to keep the leviathans that lurked in the depths out of the world, making sure they could not eat it up, not nibble at its edges like they had the fae realm.
This wasn’t the last barrier, either. Beyond it, Mercury saw one more - a paper thin layer of swirling colours, like a northern light. Streaks of green and blue that carved into the void in tessellating hexagons. That was the last barrier to keep the void out, maintained by world energy itself.
And just in front of that barrier stood the sun.
Mercury did not have other words for the person that stood in front of him. They were bright, and horribly painful to look at. A mess of coronas leapt from their body and back into it, roaring with the noise and heat of volcanoes. It was the most obvious, brightest display of dazzling power he had ever seen, the heat blinding enough to burn even through the chaotic mess of powers that filled the last Heaven.
Yet, Mercury looked anyway.
The man - which was generous, yet accurate - had his arms crossed. His hair was like liquid fire, popping with nuclear fusion, reaching just beyond his shoulders. His muscles were as though chiselled from marble, covered where flickering fire danced over them, blinding whites and yellows bleeding into dimmer oranges and even reds.
His eyes were set into his fair face like glowing orbs, all eight of them forming a full ring. He had no nose to speak of, and his mouth was nothing but a bright white line carved into the surface of the sun-sphere that was his head. Dozens of wings sprouted from his back, ringed by elegant filigree of metal, woven into pale cylinders that took the solar flares like lightning rods.
He stared at Mercury and his eyes narrowed.
The mopaaw grinned. Then he waved. “Hi,” Mercury said. He had no voice-box, but carried his qi through this space. The energy should have burnt it, but its path stayed
He knew that this man was the origin of his curse. He was the sun, after all. whispered their connection, and rang with the warning bells of death.
Despite that, the man simply squinted, his wings tensing, drifting forward with enough heat to instantly vaporize even tungsten, and pointed the tips of those wings at Mercury. “Insolent one,” he said with a voice that roared like a dying star, “you stand before Illuhm, the first Light. Kneel and pray for mercy, and I may make your end swift. Pathetic upstarts must know their place.”
Mercury smiled brightly, and scratched the back of his head. Illuhm. The proud god of light. Of course it would be that one that he pissed off. He did have a silver sun in his dreamscape, so… It made sense.
Unfortunately, though, he had been asked to kneel, and there was only ever one answer to that. “Sorry, mate. Kneeling isn’t really my thing.”
Illuhm’s arms uncrossed like a kaleidoscope, dozens upon dozens of digits unfolding from his body. He frowned, his mouth glowing with violence against his spherical head. “Then die like the dog you are.”
Ah, that was real rude, right? Mercury was quite close with a few dogs after all. Ah well, he thought.
All this burning to death did make his fingers itch with violence.