A/N
2 chapters combined into a 3k chap for better readability, enjoy!
Chapter 794: Before the World Ends
The plan had three moving pieces, and if any one of them failed, the whole thing collapsed. That was something I had accepted weeks ago, standing in Elder Thorn's sparse quarters while the old man knelt on his bare stone floor and submitted to me for the first time.
The first piece was the simplest one, though simple had never once meant easy in this world.
The Eldest Tree needed to be awakened, because without it, the barriers between this world and whatever pressed against them from outside would continue to weaken until the Otherworldly Being was able to cross over.
The problem was access.
The Vermilion Vale sat in Skybound territory, and under ordinary circumstances, the surveillance presence from both the Red Sun Order and the Blue Sun Academy on that stretch of land was substantial enough that a dust cloud moving through the wrong valley would attract attention before it had traveled a mile.
I needed those eyes elsewhere, which meant that I needed a war.
I didn’t like that because I knew that a war cost lives, and those lives belonged to people who had nothing to do with the entities pressing at the edges of their world or the schemes of a long-dead mage who had decided to make this world his personal territory.
They were practitioners who had trained for decades and believed that what they were fighting for was righteous, and now they were going to die for a conflict that had been engineered from above by forces they couldn't perceive.
That was difficult for me to accept and something that I had never fully made peace with across the weeks since I had asked Lady Laelyn to deliver the Blue Sun's vision to the elders.
She had done it exactly as I asked, sitting before Elder Sorrin and the assembled council with her hands folded and her expression composed, describing a vision of the Blue Sun's righteous march against the corruption of the Red Sun Academy, the elders had believed her completely, and the preparations for war had begun within hours because most of them had been a little too eager.
Headmaster Monroe had been the exception.
He had sat at the end of the council table with his hands flat on the surface and said that he would like to understand the strategic reasoning of the Blue Sun before committing his institution's resources to a military campaign, and several of the more aggressive elders had looked at him with a degree of contempt they were technically too disciplined to display openly.
I had respected him for it, but we couldn’t allow him to ruin the plan.
Monroe’s fate related to the second piece of the plan, this part was messier, and messier was a generous description.
Hiron's ritual was still the problem it had always been.
In the previous loop, Kal had spent months dismantling ritual sites across the continent, and even with all of that preparation, Hiron had somehow completed his ceremony. As for us, even with Elder Thorn's knowledge of the ritual sites supplemented by what I had memorized across the previous loop, we had identified and disrupted somewhere approaching sixty percent of the number of locations that Kal had been able to sabotage by himself, which meant we needed to find a different way to stop Hiron.
Since we had been busy awakening the Eldest Tree while the war between the two academies had been going on, Azure and I didn’t know for certain why Hiron was able to complete the formation in the previous loop despite Kal sabotaging the majority of them, and the only explanation we could think of was that he had used something else as a substitute for the vast number of mortal lives that the formation required, that something was likely the soul of a Rank 8 Lightweaver.
So Elder Thorn had decided to remove the headmaster from the equation, which was both the most reckless and most necessary thing that had happened in the few weeks since I had revealed my eyes to a Rank 7 cultivator in his own quarters.
I hadn’t been there to see it.
Elder Thorn had described it to me afterward, explaining that he had walked into Monroe’s quarters, and that he had produced the scroll he had prepared over three days of calligraphy using every fragment of Golden Sun energy he could compress into the binding, and that Monroe had been inside it before the older man had registered that something was wrong.
"A Rank 7 attempting a scroll binding on a Rank 8 would ordinarily result in the Rank 7 losing the use of their hands at a minimum," Elder Thorn had commented casually, but he had three advantages that calculation alone could not account for.
The first one was the element of surprise, the second one was bravery or recklessness, depending on how you saw it. No one would expect a person to just walk into the headmaster’s quarters and kidnap him, Monroe certainly hadn’t. And the third advantage was the golden sun energy, it allowed him to bridge the gap between what he was and what Monroe was.
So yeah, the Headmaster of the Blue Sun Academy was currently residing in a scroll tucked inside the elder's inner robe, but a short vacation was a lot better than having his soul devoured by some formation, so I didn’t feel too bad about it.
As for the Academy, it had been confused about his disappearance for about a day before the excitement of the impending war had largely displaced the concern. Elder Sorrin had taken on additional responsibilities, and the war efforts had continued on as normal.
***
As for how I spent the rest of my time during these couple of weeks, it could be split into two categories.
The first was learning what I could about Golden Sun cultivation from an elder who had spent centuries chasing fragments of a tradition that no longer existed in any complete form.
The approach I had taken was careful and, I will admit, somewhat manipulative: I had positioned myself as a mentor figure, someone who would listen to Elder Thorn and offer guidance, which had the effect of getting him to demonstrate and explain everything he knew while I absorbed it from the other side of the exchange.
I found that what I had learned was that my earlier intuition had been correct.
Elder Thorn had confirmed that the Golden Sun cultivation was built around the avatar, that massive projection of self-as-embodiment that I had accidentally manifested back in my cultivation world quarters when I first tried to channel the energy and reduced my pavilion to rubble in the process.
Every practitioner who had ever held the Golden Sun's energy had described the same fundamental experience: the power wanted to become a body, a second form that existed in parallel with the practitioner's physical self and could be projected outward to engage the world with a directness that Blue Sun or Red Sun cultivation couldn't match.
Unfortunately, most of the traditional methods had been lost in the centuries following the Sundering, but the elder had been able to figure out a few things on his own through research and experimentation.
The first stage, Elder Thorn explained, was what he called Impression, learning to project the avatar as an outline, a shape with no solidity, a visible intention that hadn't yet acquired the density to interact with the physical world, and the primary method for developing this was to hold the avatar's presence in mind during combat and allow the frustration of not being able to use it to generate pressure.
The second stage was Anchoring, when the avatar acquired enough coherence that portions of it could interact with the physical world for brief periods, typically the hands first, because hands were the part of the body that most cultivators associated with action and intent, and the Golden Sun followed intent with a responsiveness that Elder Thorn described as unnerving until you adjusted to it.
The third stage, Embodiment, was where the practitioner could project and maintain the full avatar externally, separate from their physical body, and operate it with the same facility they would their own limbs.
I would put myself between the second and third stage since I was able to fully manifest an avatar and I was learning to use cultivation techniques through it, but I was far from having it separate from my physical body and give it independence.
Elder Thorn had admitted frankly that he could barely put himself at the second stage, that the fragment of Golden Sun energy he carried was enough to form a hand and, with considerable effort, a forearm, but that the energy consumption at that level was significant and his recovery method was, in his own assessment, crude.
He had described that method to me with something close to embarrassment, explaining that he had developed a technique over decades of isolation that absorbed Blue Sun energy and Red Sun energy simultaneously in carefully balanced proportions and ran both through a conversion process that produced something analogous to Golden Sun energy in function if not in quality, and that this process took around three days to generate enough to power a single combat use of even the partial avatar he could currently maintain.
I had listened to that and realised just how much I had taken for granted. I had a Golden Sun rotating in my inner world, chasing bees and occasionally alarming the Ancient Oak, and it produced energy continuously simply by existing, but I couldn't tell him that.
The heir of the Golden Sun being a world walker from another world who maintained the source of his power in an inner world that shouldn't exist at his cultivation level was not information Elder Thorn needed in order to kneel and function, and giving him unnecessary information about my actual nature felt like the cultivation equivalent of handing someone a weapon and hoping they didn't point it in your direction.
So I had accepted his explanation and had offered what I called pointers, which was a word I used because Elder Thorn was old enough and proud enough that advice might have landed differently, and pointers sounded nicer, like refinements to an already sound foundation rather than corrections.
He had called me Saint the first time in that session, and I had told him he didn't have to do that, and he had looked at me and said that the Golden Sun's heir commanded his complete respect, and that his complete respect expressed itself through proper address.
I hadn’t expected that response, and from the zealous look in his eyes, I decided not to argue with him. If he wanted me to be the Saint of the Golden Sun, then I guess I’ll continue to play the role.
***
The second thing I had been doing with those weeks was more grounding, and a lot more entertaining, which was teaching Beric how to use his tattoo.
He had refused at first. Beric's approach to everything he didn't understand was to treat it as a potential threat and refuse to engage with it until he had gathered enough information to feel confident he wasn't walking into something designed to kill him, which was a reasonable policy and also very inconvenient when the thing he didn't understand was attached to his own neck.
What had changed his mind was a training session in the Academy courtyard where he had sparred with a disciple as a warm-up exercise and had accidentally activated the tattoo's defensive response when the disciple's practice technique came in faster than expected.
The shield had activated before Beric had even registered the attack was happening, and the energy that detonated outward from it had knocked the disciple across the courtyard and into a storage formation hard enough to crack both the formation and the disciple's composure.
After that Beric had come to find me.
"I need you to explain this," he had said grudgingly.
"I've been waiting for you to decide you needed help."
"I decided that three minutes ago," he had said. "Stop being pleased about it."
I hadn’t been able to entirely stop being pleased about it, but I had kept it off my face reasonably well.
What we had found, through careful testing over the following days, was that the power in the tattoo operated on principles different than cultivators in the Cultivation World despite them both relying on qi.
Cultivators developed their own power through whatever methods they had available to them. Sure, they used weapons, formations, talismans, and other ways to augment themselves, but at the end of the day, they had a power base, their cultivation, that didn’t rely on any external factors.
As for Beric, this wasn’t his power and it would probably never ever be his power, it was an external factor in the form of a rune on his neck. Which meant there was no hope in Beric ever having the other benefits of a true cultivator, whether that be extended lifespan, the chance to breakthrough to the next level, and many more benefits that we cultivators take for granted.
Beric had become a weapon, and like all weapons, he was severely limited in what he could do, in fact, the rune only had two functions.
The defensive function was the more reliable of the two. When Beric was attacked, the tattoo responded automatically, wrapping a shield around him that could absorb Rank 7 level strikes before requiring time to recover.
With the help of Elder Thorn, we had started the testing conservatively, and at the beginning of our sessions the shield could hold against around six significant strikes before the energy needed to rest. By the time we had been training for a few weeks, that number had climbed to twelve, which suggested that the mark's capacity expanded the more regularly it was exercised, even if the power itself wasn't Beric's to keep.
The offensive function was the opposite of the defensive one in almost every respect. It was precise and devastating and available only three times per engagement before the energy reserves dropped below the threshold for reliable activation. Each offensive strike carried genuine Rank 7 force, it expressed itself through Beric's existing sword instincts, which meant the force arrived through angles and with timing that a lifetime of actual combat experience had refined beyond anything that cultivation alone could replicate. At the start of our training, he had only been able to use the offensive function once before the power needed to recharge.
I found I couldn’t help but respect the honesty of that. There was no shortcut to real power, and the power in that tattoo was real whether it belonged to Beric or not, and every time he extended its available uses through consistent training, the work was genuine even if the source was borrowed.
"You keep smiling," Beric had said during one of our later sessions.
"I'm not smiling," I had said.
"Your face is doing something that isn't smiling in the same way that a soldier's face does something that isn't wincing when he takes a hit," he had said. "It means the same thing."
"I'm just thinking," I had said.
"And what are you thinking about?"
"About the fact that you argued with me for days about whether you needed to know how the mark worked," I had said, "and now you're asking it to give you the power of a fourth strike."
Beric had looked at me for a moment.
"Things change," he had said, and gone back to his drills.
***
The Academy felt different on the morning the march had finally emptied it. The training grounds that had been full of drilling formations for the past few weeks were quiet. The supply corridors that had been constantly moving with preparation activity stood still. Even the ambient sound of the place had changed, that background hum of hundreds of practitioners doing what practitioners did all day, had dropped to silence.
I walked through the outer corridors one last time.
I had lived in this Academy multiple times, and it had been different every time, and this version of it, the one where I had been a servant who hauled water and polished sconces and listened at kitchen doorways, was one I wouldn’t see again in quite this form.
I climbed the path to the Cerulean Apex for the last time, and I let myself appreciate the sight for a few seconds before I pushed the door open.
They were all there, waiting for me.
Lady Laelyn stood near the center of the chamber, in travelling robes rather than her Saintess ceremonial dress, and she was looking out the northern window at the mountain ridge beyond. She turned when she heard the door, and the smile that came to her face was warm, but I could see the nervousness behind it.
I didn’t blame her, her world’s future depended on what happened in the next few hours.
Beric stood to her left with his arms at his sides, he gave me a look that contained a week's worth of conversations compressed into a single expression, and I nodded at him, and that was all either of us needed.
Elder Thorn was standing near the altar, and when I entered he straightened and gave me a deep bow.
"Saint," he said.
I didn’t bother correcting him, instead I asked: "Are you ready?"
Lady Laelyn lifted her chin slightly and said yes without hesitation.
Beric said nothing, which was his version of the same answer.
Elder Thorn said, "I have been ready for too long."
I looked at all three of them, and I thought about every loop that brought me to a moment similar to this one, where I prepared for the journey to the Eldest Tree telling myself that it was time to save this world.
All those other times, I had the safety of a time loop, but this time I had no idea if without Kal’s presence there would be another loop, or if this was the permanent timeline. So yeah, I didn’t have a choice, I had to save this world, and I had to do it now.
A/N
I think this is a nice place to end for the weekend.
The next few chapters all have big cliffhangers so I'm glad we didn't end on one of them.
Next week will be intense and lots of fun!