A/N
Sorry for the late chap, I was only able to write 1 chap today, enjoy!
Chapter 788: Traces of a Forgotten Hero
There was no Rank 8 Kal.
Those words had been rattling around in my skull for the past few days, but as much as I trusted Lady Laelyn, I needed to verify that information was true, so I'd spent the three days doing what servants do best, which was listen.
The problem was that not many people were willing to talk to me at any length, and the ones who would talk tended to share the same information that was available to anyone who kept their ears open near the kitchens, which was gossip about food quality, which elder had embarrassed themselves in front of a candidate, and whether the eastern bathing hall smelled strange because of a blocked drain or something more metaphysical.
Getting anyone to talk about specific practitioners required more finesse than I'd needed to apply in a while.
I tried a young male initiate first, a boy with ink stains on three fingers who'd been assigned to replenish oil lamps in the same section of corridor I was cleaning one evening.
"You've been here longer than me," I said, keeping my voice casual as I focused on the cloth I was running along the wall sconce. "Is there a senior practitioner named Kal? I heard someone mention him and I wasn't sure if I'd gotten the name wrong."
The boy glanced over, assessing whether I was worth his time. Apparently servants asking about practitioners ranked somewhere just above conversations about drain odors on his list of interesting topics.
"There's someone called Kal," he said, sounding bored. "But he hasn't been seen around the Academy for months. Why?"
"I thought he might be the elder overseeing the new Saint," I said, which was a plausible thing for a servant attached to Lady Laelyn's household to wonder about.
The boy snorted. "Kal is Rank 3. Maybe Rank 4 at best, I doubt he’d be overseeing the Saint."
He didn’t wait for my response, he just refilled the lamp and moved on.
Rank 3, maybe Rank 4. That sounded around the level Kal was before the time loop began.
Which meant this could be him, but where was he right now?
I tried a different approach the next day, attaching myself to a group of older servants who were transporting supply crates to the ceremonial hall. The woman leading the group had been at the Academy for at least twenty years, and I hoped that was long enough for her to know the mid-level practitioners.
"Lady Laelyn asked me to send a message to Kal," I said, during a brief pause while we waited for a locked door to be opened from the other side. "But I haven't been able to find out much about him."
"Kal?" The woman looked at me sideways. “He’s not been seen for months. Good luck finding him. It’s normal for mid-rank disciples who don't have much talent to drift off, and nobody bothers to chase after them."
That was not what I had hoped to learn…
***
That night, I sat on my sleeping mat in the servant quarters and stared at the ceiling and did the thing I was dreading, which was think through all the possibilities with honesty instead of allowing hope to do the thinking for me.
The first possibility was that in the previous loop, the lich-like being had done more than simply kill Kal, having extracted his soul and absorbed his blood and his consciousness into itself before the time loop's trigger could fire.
A loop reset might restore the body, might restore the cultivation base at the original level, might reconstruct the physical architecture of a person, but there were injuries that could outlast a reset if they ran deep enough into the foundation.
Sure, Kal could be alive somewhere in this loop, carrying a body that did not perform as it should, experiencing gaps in himself that he could not name or locate, sitting in some remote location trying to understand why everything felt wrong without any memory of the loops to explain the reason.
A Rank 3 or 4 Lightweaver who should have been Rank 8, hurt and confused, waiting until he understood enough about his own condition before he returned to a place that would ask questions he could not yet answer.
The second possibility was that the entity inside the red sun actually managed to capture Kal's soul. The time loop reset and restored most of the world, but maybe it wasn't enough to recover a soul that had been extracted and absorbed. Maybe Kal was still trapped somewhere, locked away in a way that even the time loop couldn't undo.
The third possibility was the one I really did not want to consider.
If Kal's soul had been annihilated completely, if the lich had done something that even a loop reset could not reconstruct what had been destroyed, then everything he had endured over the thousands of loops was gone just like that.
Someone who had given that much to a world that would never know his name deserved better than that ending, and the fact that the world did not operate on the principle of people getting what they deserved was something I had always known but had struggled to make peace with.
And if that's what actually happened, then the entire world's fate is resting on my shoulders, and I didn’t think I was qualified to save it,
"Azure, I…I don’t think I can do this."
"Master, you saved the Realm of the Chosen without Kal's guidance, you can save this one too."
"I had Du Yanze and I had Fin," I replied, "and that realm had its own time loop as a safety net that meant any catastrophic failure could be reset until we found an approach that actually worked. This world might no longer offer that safety net. If Kal's loop is gone, this is the permanent timeline. Whatever happens here is what this world receives."
"Then you have to try regardless," Azure said, "because the Otherworldly Being is going to find its opening whether you consider yourself qualified to stop it or not, and someone should at least make the attempt."
He was right. I couldn’t just give up, but I also couldn’t continue with the original plan.
The original plan had been built around Kal as its foundation: find him, re-establish the working alliance we had built in the previous loop, and use his knowledge and power to disrupt both Otherwordly threats.
Without Kal, I didn’t have the firepower.
It was because of Kal’s presence that Aric had been sent to the Eldest Tree without an entourage, and it was Kal that had stopped Aric Leminov, which had given me the window I needed to reach the Eldest Tree first and push the Genesis Seed's connection through the bark before the Blue Sun realized what was happening.
Since I didn’t have the firepower, I would need to use my brains.
And the first step was to work with the Saint directly.
The good news was that it was Lady Laelyn that had become the Saint in this iteration because if Aric had won the Selection again, I would have been facing a problem with no obvious approach and none of the tools that had made the previous loop's solution possible, but Lady Laelyn was different.
Her grandmother had been a practitioner of what the Order called the undivided solar tradition, someone who had studied both solar energies together rather than treating one as a corruption to be eliminated and the other as the sole legitimate path forward.
That history had affected Laelyn, making her more open minded as she was someone who had grown up with a family legacy that the Academy considered heretical, which meant she already understood at some deep and personal level that the Academy's version of history was not the only available version.
But I could only say this for the normal version of herself.
As for the Saintess version, I wasn’t so sure.
After all, the Saint's Essence was the Blue Sun's mechanism for converting its chosen vessel from an autonomous person into a useful instrument. When someone accepted its power, they accepted an accelerant being embedded into the core of their cultivation, something that pushed their advancement to speeds that no practitioner could match unless they were a time looper like Kal.
The price for that was losing the ability to make their own choices.
But the situation wasn’t hopeless.
From what Kal had described, in the loops where Laelyn had occupied the Saint's position, she had fought this process harder than most. Her grandmother's knowledge giving her enough footing to push back in small ways, enough to leave signals that something was wrong even when she couldn't say exactly what those signals were pointing toward.
Kal had not understood those signals at the time, because he had not yet recognized that the Blue Sun had been the true enemy all along. I knew that though, which meant I might be able to save her from a fate of slavery.
A few days had passed since Laelyn had walked into the Cerulean Spire and come out the other side as the Saintess, and I had not seen her once during that time, which was both expected and frustrating.
Those days were exactly the period during which the Saint's Essence would have been doing its most aggressive work, establishing itself within her cultivation base while her spiritual foundations were still reorienting around the massive influx of blue sun energy from the Spire.
But now I had a chance to see her.
This morning I had been assigned a task, one of the routine household duties that came with serving a household attached to the Saintess's residence, and that task was going to put me in the same room as Laelyn Vareyn for the first time since everything had changed.
Whether she was still the person I knew, or whether the Saint's Essence had already done enough of its work to close the gaps where she might still listen to what I needed to tell her, I was about to find out.