A/N
Sorry everyone, just 1 chap today, I have food poisoning and spent most of the day in the bathroom, and will probably spend most of the evening there too :(
Anyways, enjoy!
Chapter 791: The Day the Veteran Became a Monster
The crushing pressure of Rank 7 bored down on us.
My eyes narrowed as I assessed Beric from across the chamber: the white light blazing out of his eyes, the aura expanding outward from his frame in waves that disturbed the dust on the stone floor and made the lantern flames bend away from him, and the tattoo beneath his ear still pulsing with qi.
My first thought was possession, which was a reasonable conclusion given that the body I was standing in wasn't my own either, and possession was something I understood from the inside out at this point in my cultivation career.
Something external taking up residence in Beric's body would explain the sudden violent shift in power.
My second thought came immediately after, because there were other explanations that fit the evidence just as well, and one of them was the concept of a sleeper avatar, which I had read about in cultivation novels back on Earth.
Powerful cultivators loved to leave behind a fragment of their cultivation sealed in things, whether that be a person, object, or formation. Usually, it stayed dormant and undetectable until a specific trigger activated it, at which point the fragment would bloom open and reveal itself.
A tattoo that had been there for years and only activated the moment I used qi to communicate with Beric fit the sleeper avatar model uncomfortably well. Which made me think of Li Tianyu since he was the only cultivator I know had definitely entered this world.
Also, the former sect master of Azure Peak had a pattern of affecting people without their awareness or consent.
The Realm of the Chosen, the corruption in Su Xuan, the Lithari, the ripple effects that I was still untangling months after encountering his shadow for the first time, all of it pointed toward a person who had walked through history leaving behind consequences he either didn't notice or didn't consider worth addressing.
It would not surprise me at all to discover that Li Tianyu had encountered a certain loyal soldier serving a noble household, or his long-deceased ancestor, and had for one reason or another had left something behind without explaining what it was or what would wake it.
That seemed like something the reckless world walker would do.
Whatever the explanation, I didn't have an answer yet, and standing there speculating while a pseudo Rank 7 looked like he wanted to kill me wasn’t productive, so I dropped into a battle stance, ready for whatever he was going to throw at me.
Instead of attacking, Beric looked down at himself, and what I saw in his face stopped me from making a move. The man’s hands were shaking with confusion, and the look in his eyes behind the white light was one of pure panic.
"What is this," he said, and his voice came out rough, "what did you do to me, boy?"
The pressure from his words caused the windows to crack and made Lady Laelyn step back half a pace.
There was real anger under the question, but there was also fear threading through it, and the fear was more interesting to me than the anger because it told me something important, which was that Beric hadn’t known this was coming.
That dismantled another theory that I had, which was that the old soldier was part of some secret society, and that the tattoo was the symbol of said society. That was a relief because I did not want to get dragged into the drama that groups like that bring.
"Master," Azure said, breaking me away from my thoughts, "maybe this is the Two Suns World acting directly."
That made sense because this world had already demonstrated that it behaved unusually compared to the inner worlds I had encountered before, pausing when I was absent, waiting for me specifically to return as though it had identified my presence as a necessary component of whatever outcome it was working toward.
Hell, I didn’t even know if this was some massive inner world or something greater than that.
Not to mention, without Kal, the balance of power in this loop was catastrophically skewed against us, because the time looper had been the pillar that every plan I had formed here rested on, and his absence left a gap that I, a Rank 4 dual cultivator, could not fill through cleverness alone when the opposition included a lich-like being that had extracted the soul of a Rank 8 as if it were an inconvenience.
If this world had any form of awareness, any surviving remnant of whatever spirit or intelligence had generated the time loop in the first place, then it would be aware that it was running out of options, and for some reason had chosen Beric to support me in this task.
The problem was that whatever power had been given to Beric was not anywhere near Kal's level.
Sure Rank 7 was impressive; it would make even elders step back and reassess, but a Rank 7 with no experience controlling that power was a different thing entirely from a Rank 8 who had spent centuries learning exactly how to use theirs.
Kal had fought the lich-like being and lost, so I didn’t think that a freshly powered Beric was going to do better, and there was no guarantee the power would even remain stable once the initial activation settled.
"Master, don’t be too quick to judge," Azure said. "He just needs some time to train, that's all."
"Before he gets time," I replied internally, "I need to stop his aura from bringing every elder down onto this building."
I raised both hands, palms out, like you would approach an animal that was startled.
"I didn’t do anything to you," I said through spiritual sense, "or at least, I didn't mean to, I think the world did it."
Beric stared at me, and the expression he wore was not softening yet, it was the expression of a man who had heard too many supernatural explanations in the past several days and had reached the limit of what his practical soldier's mind could absorb before resorting to the simpler explanation that the strange village boy had done something to him.
"The world…" he whispered.
"The same world that put Kal in a time loop," I said, "chose to give you something to work with because it needs help and you're someone who it trusts."
I didn’t know if that was exactly true, but it was the best theory I had at the moment.
"I'm an old soldier with bad knees, why would the world bother with me?" Beric's jaw tightened as a scowl appeared on his face. “You're playing tricks again, boy. You and your visions and your spiritual nonsense and your hands that do things they shouldn't." The pressure in the room ticked upward a fraction. "If this is some technique you planted in me without my knowledge I will not forget it."
"If I was your enemy," I said, "why would I make you stronger?"
That made him pause, so I decided to continue while I still had his attention.
"The world chose you because you’re someone it knows will stand between Lady Laelyn and what's coming," I said. “And that you would sacrifice your life if it meant saving hers.”
The white light in his eyes flickered, and his hands were still shaking, and the aura around him trembled as he tried to accept what had just happened.
"Beric." Lady Laelyn said, moving towards him, "calm down. Tomas isn’t our enemy."
"My lady, stand back," he said immediately, and his voice tightened with fear, "I don't know what this power is, I…I could hurt you."
"You will not hurt me," she said, and she kept walking toward him anyway, because she was Lady Laelyn and reasonable warnings from people who cared about her had never once been enough to stop her from doing what she thought was right, "you have never once hurt me in all the time we’ve known each other and I don’t think you’ll start now, even accidentally."
She placed her hand on his shoulder which caused Beric to let out a long breath.
"I don’t want to ever hurt you," he whispered.
"I know," she whispered back.
As he relaxed, the white light in his eyes faded, and the aura rolling off his body began to recede. The pressure against my ears released and the hairline cracks in the window glass stopped spreading.
I let out a sigh of relief.
If it had escalated into a battle, it would have not gone well for me.
It probably would have ended with me being killed with a slap by the guy that I was trying to recruit, and if this happened to be the final loop, then that would be a pathetic way to end things.
Fortunately for me, Lady Laelyn had been able to calm him down.
As for what was going on with Beric, I wasn’t completely certain yet.
On one hand, if the world had actually reached into Beric and given him something to fight with, that was a sign that we weren't alone in this loop, that there was some residual will or mechanism in this place that was still working toward survival and had recognized that the usual approach wasn't available.
On the other hand, if this was some other player I hadn't accounted for, some third party with interests I didn't understand and couldn't predict, then our already complicated board had just become more complicated, and complicated was the last thing we needed when the Otherworldly Being was trying to tear into this world and Hiron's formation was still being built.
I was really hoping that it was the first option.
Before I could relax, I felt it.
A Rank 7 aura heading directly toward the Cerulean Apex.
I looked at Lady Laelyn, and she was already looking at me, and then we both looked at Beric, and all three of us arrived at the same understanding at the same moment without needing to say a single word.
We all recognized that aura.
It was Elder Sorrin, and he was coming to find out why there was a foreign energy signature that rivalled Rank 7 near their beloved Saint.
A/N
Timeskip coming up tomo!