[Author Note: Sorry for the delay!]
Xavier appeared inside his house. The house he shared with Adranial, all the way back on Earth in his own universe. Adranial wasn’t home, but she would be soon. Standing in the entryway, he released a long sigh.
He walked through the main hall, into the living room, through the kitchen, and toward the library they’d built together. The tower library had grown significantly since the time when they’d built this place. It had gained several new floors. It always grew whenever his collection grew, and Xavier was always picking up new books as he travelled the multiverse.
He ran a finger along the spines of the books on the nearest shelf. There was no dust on the books, even though it had been at least a decade since the last time he’d set foot in the circular room. They had ways of making sure his collection would always remain in pristine condition, controlling the environment of the library—and the entire home—to perfection.
Xavier sighed again. He pulled one of the books from the shelf. Something he’d never gotten a chance to read back when he’d been a normal human, then placed it back on the shelf. He had all the time in the world with his time dilation fields, and yet he never really spent enough time here. Even when he was inside the time dilation fields, fields stronger than any other in his empire, he had trouble justifying the luxury of spending time that was only for himself.
He’d just returned from the large moon base in Universe 314. The Denizens there—all eight-hundred thousand of them—had accepted their mental construct and received further training from the Xaviers personally. They were well on their way to becoming something truly powerful.
Hell, they already were something truly powerful.
They might even now be strong enough to take on Jhanku.
The Xaviers hadn’t merely given them mental constructs and the ability to psychically link with one another, they’d also given them access to the energy they could gain from the shared, multiversal empire the Xaviers ruled. So they probably would now be strong enough to defeat Jhanku.
Xavier banished thoughts of the inter-universal army from his mind. At least, he tried to. He went about a ritual he’d gotten into a habit of performing over the years as he’d expanded his empire from two sectors to ten.
His wings flapped, taking him all the way to the highest shelves inside the tower library. He always kept the last ten shelves bare for this exact purpose. Xavier summoned a book from his inventory—The Dragon Queen of La’Draira—and slotted it onto the first bare shelf. Then, he pulled out another book—The Darkness Within—and placed it next to the first.
He did this with thousands of books. Twenty-thousand-five-hundred-and-sixty-five to be exact. As he got in the groove, summoning a book, reading the title, running his hand along the spine, then finally slotting it onto the shelf, he fell into a sort of meditative state.
When he reached the final shelf, another one was created right next to it. Above him, the tower library seemed to stretch, another set of shelves created as if from nowhere directly above the last highest shelves.
The tower grew higher and higher, every time he returned. Not for the first time, he wondered just how high it would get. Perhaps he would need to create another tower, lest this one reach far too high…
But today wasn’t the day he would need to do that.
When he’d placed the last book, he flew down to the bottom of the library and stared around at his collection for moment. Xavier wasn’t a terribly sentimental person—at least, he didn’t think of himself that way—except, he supposed, when it came to books.
Some of the books in this library were books that he’d read as a child. The exact copies, ones he’d thought he’d lost forever, had been tracked down and brought to him. To his left, he saw a weathered copy of Cirque Du Freak: A Living Nightmare. Others, were books he’d read in high school and later at university. He looked to his right and saw A Game of Thrones not far from The Way of Kings. Then, there were the books he’d picked up since he’d been integrated—he had a very large collection of He Who Fights With Beasts by Pantaloon, but not the complete collection, as that man had been writing for longer than Earth’s history.
I’d need several towers to fit the entire collection…
Xavier still hadn’t quite caught up to where that series had reached. That would have been quite the feat.
Other than the fiction he’d compiled, there were hundreds of thousands of different spell, skill, and technique manuals. Most of these things were moot for someone like him, but there was wisdom to be found from almost all sources, and just because he’d grown as powerful as he had didn’t mean he was going to ignore what others had learnt before him.
He pulled a book from one of the shelves, seemingly at random, and sat on one of the couches, lying down on it and propping the book open on his chest. As he lay there, he intended to read through the entire book, but he tried not to do it at speed. With his ability to speed read, he could have gotten through this book in less than a minute, but there was something special about slowing down for experiences like this. Something that helped him recapture a bit of the wonder he used to have when it came to reading books.
It was that wonder he wanted to capture now. He wanted to get lost in the fever dream that was a good read. He wanted to put everything—the other Xaviers, the threats that were the other top ten Denizens in this universe, the Interdimensional dragon—all of it, out of his mind.
At least for a little while. Long enough for him to feel like just himself again. Long enough for him to relax.
There was a faint knock. It came from behind him, at the doorway to the library. Adranial stood there, smiling. Xavier blinked, he must have just opened the book—
To his right, on the side table, sat a stack of twenty books. The first book he’d picked up was right at the bottom. Without even thinking, he’d read through the first and went back for more. He was roughly halfway through reading the book in his hand—Bag of Bones by Stephen King. Mike Noonan was learning about the ghosts haunting his lake house.
He shook his head, coming out of the exact daze he’d wanted to fall into, and sat up. “Adranial. How long have you been back?”
Standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame, her long hair down and flowing over one shoulder, Adranial looked as beautiful as ever. Suddenly, all the books he’d just read were forgotten.
“A few hours,” she replied. “I didn’t want to interrupt you. Figured you’d come out when you were ready. You deserve a little downtime.”
He nodded absently. A frown marred his face. There was something in her voice. And if she’d intended to wait until he came out… “Is something wrong?”
Her smile fell away. “I’m not sure.” She glanced behind her, looking down the hall toward the front of the house. “We… have a visitor.”
Xavier shot up. In the background of his mind, his Immortal Soul lens was constantly scanning the area for threats—the area being the entirety of the sector. The time dilation field around his house was massively stronger than anything else in his empire, so nothing had actually changed out there except for Adranial’s arrival. Her arrival, of course, hadn’t been a threat so his mind hadn’t alerted it to him.
But the problem was, he couldn’t actually sense this visitor. He used The All-Seeing Eye to look directly at the front of the house. No one was there. He swept the entire house with it, but he only found the two of them.
Who could be powerful enough to conceal themselves from my sight?
“Where are they?” The words came out in a growl.
This was highly unusual. He was on the brink of alerting the other Xaviers, but he didn’t want to chime a false alarm.
“The front door,” Adranial said. “So, you weren’t expecting anyone?”
“No.”
Xavier could have teleported to the door, but that didn’t feel like the right move. Whoever this was, they hadn’t harmed Adranial, and they hadn’t harmed him either. If Xavier couldn’t sense them through either his Immortal Soul lens or The All-Seeing Eye—and none of the house’s security measures were able to sense them either—then whoever it was could have slipped into the library and attacked him unawares easily enough.
Even so, he wasn’t going to treat whoever this was lightly.
He contracted the time dilation field, pulling it away from the front of the house until it was just around him and Adranial, hopefully freezing whoever this was outside of it. Though something told him that wouldn’t help.
The front door was closed. Xavier peered through the door using a spell pattern he manifested, but even this way he still couldn’t see whoever it was.
“Who were they?” he asked Xavier. “What did they say?”
Adranial opened her mouth. “I… don’t know.” She frowned. “I can’t remember. I can’t even remember what they said.”
He put a hand on her shoulder, glanced at the door. “Maybe you should leave. We don’t know what this is.”
Adranial shook her head.
“Adranial.”
She shut her eyes, sighed, and leant straight into him. “You’ll alert the others? You need to be safe too, Xavier.”
The other Xaviers.
He almost protested, but she was right. This was important. He shouldn’t wait until he knew he was in danger. But if he had a visitor, didn’t that mean that all the other versions of him in the nineteen-hundred-and-ninety-nine other universes they connected had a visitor as well?
Xavier used his linked inter-universal Communication Stone to contact the others.
Xavier 1: [I have a visitor at the house that I can’t sense. Adranial met them at the door, but she can’t remember who they are. Is anyone else experiencing this?]
He waited a second. No reply.
The reply should be almost instantaneous.
He waited ten more seconds. No reply.
What…?
Xavier used the technique he’d discovered with the other Xaviers to look at the string of energy that led out of his Communication Stone. The instant he did, he found something strange—it was cut off. Completely cut off. And not because it went out of phase.
His Communication Stone was blocked.
He should have felt it when it had happened. Should have gotten a System notification. He checked his memory—he couldn’t have been that stuck in the books he was reading—and found nothing.
A sneaking suspicion made him create a portal. But the portal wouldn’t appear. It was… stopped before it could. The energy that should have created it dissipated instead.
A Portal Lock.
He tried to teleport.
He couldn’t.
There was a visitor he couldn’t sense at his door. All his Communication Stones links were blocked. His portals, his teleports…
And he couldn’t even sense what was blocking them.
He and Adranial were stuck here.
“Xavier?” Adranial said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Your heart’s racing.”
He told her what he’d discovered.
The woman’s face hardened. “Do you know who this could be?”
Xavier had been trying to think just that, going through what he knew of the top ten most powerful beings in this universe. The nine who were still alive. But as far as he was aware, none of them would be able to do this.
Unless the Old Man was even more powerful than Xavier had imagined?
There were other ideas for who this might be. Beings from… outside his universe. That was a difficult avenue to entertain. He was about to ask Roln—the mental construct had been uncharacteristically silent—when he realised the Communication Stone links, portalling, and teleportation weren’t the only things blocked.
He couldn’t feel the dead Wanderer in his mind anymore.
That, more than anything else, put tremendous fear into Xavier.
Whoever was at the door… they’d somehow altered his mind, and he hadn’t even felt it.
Xavier swallowed. He started walking to the door. There really didn’t seem to be any other option. Thousands of spells manifested inside his body, ready to be cast, but it was just habit making him form them.
He didn’t imagine they would do him any good.
His fingers grasped the front door’s handle. He turned it and pulled.