A/N
2 chapters combined into a 3.5k ish chap for better readability, enjoy!
Chapter 784: The Missing Rank 8
Tomas was dead, the loop had restarted, and Kal had broken his promise.
The first explanation was the worst one, and I forced myself to consider it anyway, because pretending bad possibilities didn't exist had never once made them go away.
When the lich-like being had killed Kal at the end of the previous loop, it had done more than destroy his body, it had extracted his soul and his blood and absorbed both of them into itself, and I had watched it happen from the ground while the Eldest Tree kept me alive.
The time loop had activated upon Kal's death the same as it always did, and I had assumed, because I wanted to assume it, that the reset would restore Kal completely along with everything else.
But what if it hadn't?
The loop restored the world to its starting state, restored the dead villagers, restored Vayara's cultivation, restored every burned field and every broken barricade, but what if soul destruction at the level that the Lich-like being was able to inflict was one wound the loop couldn't heal?
If that was the case, then I was finished, and so was this world.
I wasn't being dramatic about it either.
There were two otherworldly beings tangled up in this world's fate now.
There was the vast entity outside the barriers, the one that had pressed against the closing gap with enough presence to make my soul want to crawl out of my body, and there was the lich, what I assume to be a mage from another world who had possessed Hiron.
Against either one of those, a Rank 4 dual cultivator was a slap away from death. The only reason I had ever believed this world could be saved was that a Rank 8 time stood on the same side as me, and if that Rank 8 no longer existed, then every plan I had brought was worth less than the rusted sword that Maya was about to thrust into my hand.
The second explanation wasn’t as bad.
Maybe the soul damage hadn't been enough to destroy Kal, maybe the loop had pulled him back together the same as it always did, but the extraction had left scars, and scars on a soul meant damaged memories.
A Kal who had forgotten the previous loop would have no idea who I was, and I would have to start the entire recruitment process from the beginning. That would be a hassle, weeks of careful trust-building all over again, but I would take it, because a forgetful Rank 8 was still a living Rank 8, and a living Rank 8 meant the world still had a chance.
Then there was the third explanation.
Someone could have interfered, someone could have intercepted Kal at the start of the loop, before he ever reached Porvale, and either captured him or kept him busy so that saving one village boy fell off his schedule.
The problem with that theory was the guest list, because the number of beings in this world capable of detaining Kal against his will was very short, and every name on it was terrifying.
Hiron could do it, the thing wearing Hiron could do it, the entity outside the barriers could do it if it had found some new crack to reach through. Elder Thorn might be able to do it, given that Kal himself had admitted he wasn't certain he could win a direct confrontation against whatever power lived inside that old man. And if it was none of those, if there was some fifth party I wasn’t aware of, then the situation would become more complicated than I could ever expect.
The final explanation was the simplest one, and it said more about Kal than it did about the loop.
Maybe nothing had gone wrong at all. Maybe Kal was alive and busy, just working through the early items of his checklist somewhere across the continent, and saving Tomas had slipped down his list of priorities until the window closed.
I didn't want to believe that, he had given me his word, and the respect in his expression when I asked him to save Tomas had looked genuine, but I also had to be honest about who Kal was. He wasn't me. He had lived through who knew how many loops, he had watched every person he ever cared about die and forget him and die again, countless times over, and that did things to a person.
I had seen what a few hundred loops had done to Du Yanze, how close they had pushed him to losing his humanity entirely, and Kal had endured far more for far longer. It wouldn't surprise me, it would sadden me, but it wouldn't surprise me, if somewhere across those centuries Kal's sense of the value of a single mortal life had eroded away.
So those were my four explanations, ranging from the apocalyptic to the merely disappointing, and the frustrating part was that I had no way of knowing which one was true without speaking to him.
What I did know was how I needed to behave until I found out.
If something out there had managed to harm a Rank 8, then that something could swat me without noticing the effort, which meant the loud entrance I had made last loop, suppressing Sun-Touched with my aura in front of the entire village and curing them with a touch, was off the table.
So, I needed to stay under the radar, gather information, and find out what had happened before anything in this world learned that a Rank 4 dual sun cultivator was walking around in a village boy's body.
"Tomas!" Maya's voice cut through my thoughts, and I realized she had been staring at me for several seconds while I stood there with an arrow buried in the post behind my head. "Are you listening to me? I asked how you moved that fast!"
"I'm sorry, Maya," I said, and I meant it more than she could know, because this girl had died protecting people in more loops than I could count, and she deserved far better than a stranger wearing her friend's face and brushing her off. "I can't explain right now."
"Can't explain? Tomas, you just…"
I was already moving. I turned away from her reaching hand and ran toward the southern lane between the houses, keeping my pace at something a frightened mortal could manage, my arms pumping, my breathing ragged, every part of my performance saying that here was a village boy whose nerve had finally broken.
"Tomas!" Henrik's voice boomed from somewhere near the barricade. "Where in the blue sun's name do you think you're going? We need every hand on the line, boy!"
I raised one hand over my shoulder in an apologetic wave without slowing down or looking back, which I'm sure looked cowardly to every defender who saw it, and I let them think that, because a coward fleeing a battle was forgettable, and forgettable was what I needed to be right now.
"Master," Azure said as I cut between a grain shed and a fence line, "are you going to leave them to die?"
"Of course not," I replied. "I just can't make a scene saving them the same as I did last time. If there's something out there strong enough to stop Kal, then the moment I light up this village with Lightweaver pressure, I'm announcing my position to it on a silver platter. We do this quietly."
I rounded the corner of the old grain storehouse at the village's southern edge, a squat building with a sagging thatched roof that I had passed a few times in the previous loops, and I pressed my back against its wall where the structure blocked the sightlines from the square completely.
"Azure," I said, "is anyone watching me? Your senses are better than mine for this."
"As far as I can tell, no one is watching, Master," Azure confirmed after a few seconds.
"Good."
I raised my right hand, extended my index finger, and channeled a thin stream of blue sun energy through my Cerulean Vein and out through the fingertip, where it gathered into a point of soft azure light.
Then I began to paint on the air.
The technique Kal had drilled into me over those weeks of training came back: energy as ink, the Vein as brush, the air as canvas.
I drew the deep barrel of the chest first, then the line of the spine flowing into powerful haunches, then the four legs, the broad skull, the ears, the tail, and finally the eyes.
I preferred to do always paint the eyes last, because the eyes were where the life went in.
Into the creation I embedded its purpose.
Protect every villager in Porvale. Disable every raider, every Sun-Touched, and the Skybound who descends from the sky. Cripple their cultivation and try not to kill them unless death is the only path to saving an innocent life. Remain until the village is secure, then dissolve. And beneath all of it, the gift I had learned to give every one of my creations, the calm understanding of its own temporary nature, so that when its time came, it would let go without fear.
The lines flared, the painting pulled itself off the air into three dimensions, and a wolf stood in front of me.
It was a big creature, its shoulder reaching my waist, its coat rendered in layered strokes of silver and blue that shifted as it breathed, and the aura rolling off its frame was suppressed Rank 3, a pressure that if released would flatten any Rank 1 entity it met and overpower a Rank 2.
I could have pushed further and created a Rank 4 being, but that would have drained a meaningful portion of my blue sun reserves for a task that didn't require it. That sounded like a bad idea if there really was an unknown player walking around, so Rank 3 it was, more than enough for this task.
Unlike the corrupted abomination I had painted in my inner world with the Blood Moon's interference, this wolf looked about as friendly as a predator could possibly look. It sat back on its haunches the moment it finished forming, let its tongue loll out the side of its mouth, and wagged its tail while gazing up at me with bright, eager eyes.
I crouched down and rubbed the top of its head.
"Who’s a good boy?" I whispered as the wolf leaned into my hand. "You’re going to save everyone, aren’t you? Yes, you are. Good boy!"
The wolf pulled back from my hand, wagged its tail, and then it turned and raced off around the storehouse toward the square, its paws making no sound at all against the ground, its body accelerating to a speed that no mortal eye in that village would be able to follow.
I stayed crouched there for a breath longer, and I allowed myself one moment of regret about what I couldn't do.
I couldn't cure them this time.
Last loop I had drawn the red sun corruption out of four Sun-Touched and stripped Vayara's cultivation entirely, and I had watched the girl below it, Eda, surface from underneath a monster.
But absorbing red sun energy in the open was the sort of impossible event that would shine out across this world to any being with the senses to perceive it, and if there really was something out there that had moved against Kal, then a miraculous purification in a border village was a signal flare with my name written on it.
I didn't stay to watch the outcome either.
I already knew what a Rank 3 would do to a Rank 2 and multiple Rank 1s.
It was a done deal, so instead, I ran.
I ran past the last fences, past the boundary stone that marked the edge of Porvale's land, and I kept running along the tree line until the village had shrunk behind me and the sounds of fighting had faded away.
Then I stopped, braced my hands on my knees, and gasped because Tomas's body was mortal without a single thread of cultivation running through it.
A mortal body that sprinted flat-out for the better part of a mile resulted in burning lungs, trembling thighs, and a heartbeat hammering against my ribs hard enough that I could count it without trying.
I had grown so accustomed to bodies that didn't tire, first Qi Condensation, not Elemental because I somehow skipped that realm entirely, now Stellar, that I kept forgetting what physical exhaustion felt from the inside.
What I was more used to was energy exhaustion which was a different breed of fatigue. I could have avoided experiencing that by using the Tri-Harmony Essence technique, but it was better that I be tired and look like a fleeing mortal rather than attract any unwanted attention.
I found a fallen log just inside the tree line, sat down on it, and decided that while the body recovered, the mind could work, and the first item on the mind's list was checking on my buddy.
I closed my eyes and followed the soul bond.
The connection stretched out from me across an enormous distance, and at the far end of it I found Yggy at the Red Sun Academy where the loop always reset him, and through his senses the world bloomed open around me.
I saw the walls of a cluttered laboratory, I smelt soil, chemicals and growing things, and heard the voice of an old man muttering to himself.
"...which would suggest the binding lattice degraded under the third infusion, except the lattice is intact, I checked it twice, no, I actually checked it three times, so the degradation hypothesis is dead, and a dead hypothesis means I'm back to the beginning again, wonderful, marvelous, centuries of work and I'm back at the beginning..."
Elder Molric shuffled into view of Yggy's perception.
He looked exactly as he always did, the wild hair that had never once encountered a comb and the robes stained with a chronological record of every experiment from the past month. Across multiple loops this man had been my teacher, and even though this version of him had never met me, watching him work felt the same as visiting home.
Yggy sat in his pot on the corner of the main workbench, tendrils curled in lazy satisfaction.
Molric set down the seedling tray, turned toward the bench, and paused.
His eyes narrowed and leaned in toward Yggy with a questioning look.
"Hm," he said. "Hmmm. You're different today."
Yggy's tendrils perked up.
"Don't give me that innocent posture." Molric circled the pot, peering at Yggy from one angle and then another, one finger tapping against his chin. "Your energy signature has changed. There's something underneath the surface that wasn't there yesterday, something layered under the red and the blue, and you're holding it the same as a child holds a frog behind his back. Well? Out with it. Show me what you're hiding, little one."
And Yggy, who had never once in his existence managed to resist an invitation to show off, proudly let the golden sun energy rise to his surface.
Elder Molric did not move for a long moment.
His mouth opened, closed, and opened again. The finger that had been tapping his chin hung frozen in the air. His eyes had gone very wide, and when he finally spoke, his voice came out cracked.
"Golden," he whispered. "It's... that's unified solar essence. That's both energies in harmonic synthesis, that's..." He grabbed the edge of the workbench with both hands and leaned in until his nose nearly touched Yggy's tendrils. "That's the original spectrum. For hundreds of years. For hundreds of years, I have been trying to produce exactly this and you're sitting in your pot glowing with it as though it's nothing!"
Then, abruptly, his head snapped up, and he looked at the laboratory door, and then at the window, and then at the door again, and the wonder on his face curdled into naked alarm.
"Stop. Stop stop stop, put it away, put it away right now." He flapped his hands at Yggy urgently until the golden light sank back beneath the surface, and then he hurried to the window and yanked the shutter closed, plunging half the laboratory into shadow, and stood with his back against it, breathing hard, one hand pressed flat against his chest. "Foolish old man, letting you flare that even in a warded room was stupid, Hiron could have... listen to me, little one, listen very carefully."
He came back to the bench, pulled up his stool, and sat down directly in front of Yggy with his hands cupped protectively around the pot, his voice dropping low.
"You must never show that energy to anyone. Never. Do you understand me? If the Order learns what you carry, if the academy learns, if anyone learns, they will take you. They will take you from this laboratory and from me, and they will cut you open to find out how you work, and there is nothing, nothing, this old man would be able to do to stop them." His thumb stroked along the rim of the pot. "You are the single most important discovery of my life, and the safest thing you can possibly be is a boring, unremarkable vine that nobody looks at twice. Can you do that for me? Can you be boring?"
Yggy pressed a tendril against the old man's wrist, and Molric exhaled, and some of the panic drained out of his shoulders.
For a while he just sat there, holding the pot, and then the frown crept back across his face.
"But why now," he muttered. "That's the part that's going to kill me, you understand. Six hundred and twelve recorded integration attempts. Six hundred and twelve failures, every lattice collapsed, every subject destabilized, every synthesis rejected, and then you, my one success, and I changed nothing. The methodology was identical to attempt five hundred. So what was different? What variable shifted? A success you cannot explain is worse than a failure, because a failure teaches you something and a success you can't replicate just sits there mocking you..." He rubbed his eyes. "What was the reason, hm? Why did the red and the blue agree to become gold in you, now, when they refused all those other times? What am I not seeing..."
I withdrew gently from the bond and opened my eyes, I was smiling, I couldn't help it.
Yggy was happy. My soul-bound companion rarely got the chance to see his creator, so it was nice to see the two of them getting on.
And underneath the smile, I felt for the old man, I really did, because he had just been handed one of the worst experiences a researcher can have. Succeeding without understanding why is its own torment.
A failure closes a door and points you somewhere else, but an unexplained success leaves every door open and tells you the answer is in the room while refusing to say where.
A man like Molric would probably drive himself half mad trying to replicate it, never knowing that the missing variable was a transmigrator with a Genesis Seed who had rebuilt Yggy's foundations across loops the elder couldn't remember.
Maybe one day I'd be able to tell him. He had more than earned the truth.
With the check in complete, I stood up from the log, brushed the bark from Tomas's trousers, and turned my mind to the only move on the board that made sense.
I needed to find Kal, and that meant paying a visit to Lord Kaeven's manor.
The schedule of the early loop was clear.
Around this point in every cycle, Kal traveled to the Rimaris estate, where he dealt with Lord Kaeven, the man who had ordered Lady Laelyn's assassination in loop after loop and who had, in the earliest cycles before Kal grew strong, been one of the two men who always found Kal and killed him.
So, if Kal was alive and free, the manor was where his path and mine could cross. And if Kal never showed, then that absence would tell me something just as important as a meeting would.
"Master," Azure said, "are you sure this is about finding Kal, and that you're not looking for an excuse to see the lady?"
I ignored that jab.
As nice as it would be to see Lady Laelyn again, even a version of her who would look at me with a stranger's eyes, that changed nothing about the priorities in front of me, because somewhere in this world a Rank 8 had either died, forgotten, been taken, or simply failed to keep his word, and every plan for saving this world hinged on which of those four it was.
The manor would give me my answer, or at least I hope it would.