A/N
2 chapters combined into a 3k chap for better readability, enjoy!
Chapter 795: The Unholy Communion
The Vermilion Vale sat in Skybound territory, which meant that every mile we covered on the backs of our mounts brought us deeper into land that had no reason to welcome us.
The sky overhead had shifted from the cool blue of Academy airspace into something warmer and more complicated, a gradient that moved through copper and amber toward the horizon where the Red Sun had recently descended, leaving behind an afterglow that painted the underside of every cloud in shades that felt vaguely hostile.
The mounts Kal had acquired for us in a previous loop were still in the Academy stables, and Elder Thorn had arranged for us to use them, which meant that all four of us were now seated on creatures that resembled horses, if horses had been created from condensed blue light and given wings that moved without sound.
Elder Thorn rode ahead of us at a slight distance, scanning the treelines and ridgelines below. Beric rode to Lady Laelyn's left, close enough that his mount's wing occasionally brushed hers during turns, and he had his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. Lady Laelyn rode between Beric and me, and she had been quiet for the last stretch of the journey, her eyes moving across the landscape below us.
"I have a bad feeling," Beric murmured.
Lady Laelyn glanced at him. "We've planned for this," she said. "We know what we're walking into, and we know what we're there to do. There’s no need to worry."
"Knowing what you're walking into doesn't stop the feeling," Beric said, and his hand tightened fractionally on his sword hilt. “And if your life is on the line, then all I can do is worry.”
I turned in my saddle and looked at Elder Thorn, who had angled his mount slightly at Beric's words, and was now performing a slow methodical scan of the airspace around us, his eyes moving in careful arcs that covered every angle from the horizon to directly above, his expression giving away nothing about what he was or wasn't detecting.
After a moment he said, without turning, "I didn’t sense anything."
I looked inward. "Azure, anything on your end?"
There was a brief pause before he replied.
"Nothing, Master," Azure said. "The airspace around us is clear."
The fact that Elder Thorn's centuries of paranoid vigilance and Azure's broader-than-average perception between them produced nothing wasn’t reassuring as it should be because I felt like we should trust Beric's instincts.
Beric had gone through enough situations where the difference between noticing something and not noticing it was the difference between someone else digging his grave and him digging theirs. After all, soldiers who survived long enough to get grey temples and bad knees developed accurate instincts or they didn't survive, but all we could do was stay on guard. There wasn't much else we could do.
The Vermilion Vale appeared as we crested the final ridge, and the descent toward it was gradual enough that I had time to take it in properly.
The Vale was enormous, a circular depression in the landscape that the surrounding mountains cupped in both hands, the forest that covered it was dense and old, and at the center of all of it, rising from the canopy was what we were here for, the Eldest Tree.
When Lady Laelyn saw it, she inhaled sharply.
"It's real," she whispered. “It’s actually real.”
I had an idea of what she was feeling. The sight of the Eldest Tree would fill anyone with awe. And even though I had seen it multiple times, I still couldn’t help but be impressed by it. As for Lady Laelyn, she had only caught a glimpse of it in the memories that I had shared with her, seeing it in real life was a completely different feeling, and also proof that her trust in me wasn’t unfounded.
"That tree," Beric said, staring down at it with an expression that was difficult to read, "I don't like it."
"It's on our side," I said.
"For now maybe, but I don't like things I can't measure," Beric said. "That thing has no measurable ceiling."
"It has been on this world's side for longer than your bloodline has existed," Elder Thorn said, from ahead of us, without turning around. "I would not worry about its loyalty."
Beric said nothing to that, which from him was a response in itself.
We touched down at the edge of the Sacred Ring, the open circle of short grass that surrounded the Eldest Tree's base.
As I dismounted, I looked at the tree, at the patterns in its bark that resembled written language in ways that were not accidental, at the roots that spread from its base and disappeared into the earth at distances that suggested the root system extended far beyond what was visible.
I couldn’t help but wonder, if the Eldest Tree was a Realm Stabilising Tree born from the World Tree Sutra user, then what level did that cultivator reach before they turned into something this majestic and powerful?
Shaking the thought from my head, I thought about what the tree had given me in the previous loop.
The Golden Sun energy that now lived in my inner world had come from here, pushed into the Genesis Seed by the Eldest Tree itself in the moment before the loop reset, a gift or a preparation or both.
The tree had done that despite the chaos of the lich-like figure in the sky, Kal's death, the barriers sealing, and everything else that had been happening simultaneously, which meant the tree had understood what mattered.
But this loop was different from that one, and the tree existed here as it always had, and whatever it had understood and done in that previous loop existed only in my memory, because the reset had cleared everything that was not protected by the loop's architecture, and the tree's awareness, whatever form it took, had been reset along with everything else, so it probably had no memory of giving me anything or who I even was.
"Stay here," I said to the three of them. "I'm going to approach the tree alone."
Lady Laelyn nodded, her eyes still on the Eldest Tree, with a look of awe on her face.
Elder Thorn gave a nod and immediately turned his attention outward, his gaze beginning to move across the treeline and the sky above in the same methodical scanning pattern he had been using during the flight.
Beric looked at me for a moment and then looked at Lady Laelyn and then back at the tree and then settled into a position that placed himself between her and the largest open expanse of the Sacred Ring, which was Beric's version of agreeing with a plan.
Taking deep slow breaths, I walked forward across the grass while thinking the next few steps simple.
Just like in the previous loop, all I had to do was place my palm against the bark, and after that, the Genesis Seed would do the rest. And with all the World Trees coming back to life, the barriers will strengthen, and the Otherworldly Being’s plan will fail.
As for Hiron, we could only hope that without enough sacrifices and Monroe to use as a substitute, he was not able to complete his ritual and release the lich-like being from the Red Sun.
When I was maybe ten meters from the base of the tree when I heard Elder Thorn call out, "Watch out."
I looked up and saw a hand descending from the sky above me, enormous and composed entirely of blue light, the fingers spreading as it fell, casting a moving shadow across the Sacred Ring that stretched across the grass in the millisecond before it reached me.
I had barely registered what I was seeing when I felt a grip close on my shoulder and the world lurched sideways and then I was standing a dozen meters to the left of where I had been standing, my heart beating rapidly.
The hand struck the ground where I had been.
The impact produced a sound that I felt through my feet before I heard it with my ears, a deep concussive pressure that traveled up through the soil and the grass and into my bones.
The ground where the hand landed cratered inward, the earth compressing and then splitting outward in radiating fractures, the grass blown flat in every direction from the point of impact, and a spray of soil and stone fragments scattered across the Sacred Ring in a wide arc that pattered against the distant treeline.
The Eldest Tree, at the center of all of this, didn’t move, it was left unharmed.
I turned to find Elder Thorn standing beside me, his hand already released from my shoulder.
"Thank you," I said.
"There’s no need to thank me. My life is for the Saint," he said, and then he looked up at the sky with his eyes narrowed.
I followed his gaze.
Three figures were suspended in the air above the Sacred Ring, floating in a loose triangle formation at maybe forty meters of altitude, their robes moving with the slight air currents at that height.
Even from this distance, I could see that their eyes were glowing, a deep ominous blue that made me feel uncomfortable.
Elder Sorrin was at the apex of the triangle, the two lightweavers flanking him were both Rank 7 elders that I recognised from the Academy’s upper hierarchy. And behind them, held back at a greater distance, were three figures I recognized from a loop that they didn't remember and I did.
Corwin, the Rank 6 Calligrapher, Bram, the Rank 5 Painter, and Isara, the Rank 5 Singer.
Unlike the three elders, their eyes were their natural color, and from the awkward but determined look on their faces, I could tell that they weren’t sure what exactly was going on but were ready to follow out whatever orders the elders gave them.
A frown appeared on my face. This wasn’t good. For them to all appear here at this exact time couldn’t be a coincidence. They had been following us, making sure to stay at a faraway enough distance that they weren’t detected by Elder Thorn.
This must have been what Beric’s instincts were warning him about.
"Elder Sorrin," Lady Laelyn said, stepping forward with her chin level, "what is the meaning of this?"
"The Saintess knows what this is," Sorrin said, and his voice had changed, it carried a resonance now that his voice had not carried when I had interacted with him before. "You have betrayed the Blue Sun. We are here to correct that."
"I have done no such thing," Lady Laelyn said.
Sorrin's glowing gaze moved from her to me. "Then explain why this servant," he spat out the word like it was an insult, "was approaching the blessed tree."
"I was just making sure it was safe," I said, "before the Saintess approached."
Sorrin looked at me for a long moment. "Had the Saint's Essence still resided within the Saintess," he said, "I might have found that believable, but it is gone, isn't it? Destroyed. And a servant with no cultivation and no rank somehow accomplished that." He tilted his head slightly. "So no. I don't think you were checking for safety."
We had been careful. We had spoken in spiritual sense to avoid the Blue Sun's ears. We had kept the disruption of the Saint's Essence quiet, framed it as nothing, given Elder Sorrin the story about the Blue Sun rewarding Beric, and for a time it had worked.
But the Blue Sun had not needed to hear our words to understand what had happened, because the Saint's Essence was its instrument, and when that instrument went silent the Blue Sun had felt the silence, and the silence had told it everything our careful words had not.
Lady Laelyn had no Genesis Seed to receive the Blue Sun's visions through, no mechanism to pretend the Essence was still operating, no channel the Blue Sun could reach through and find something that felt familiar, and so when the Essence was destroyed the connection had simply ended, the Blue Sun had acted to find out what had actually happened, which led to this.
Elder Thorn moved forward two steps, placing himself between them and me.
"Sorrin. Neira. Dayen." He named them one by one. "Look at yourselves. You do not seem like yourselves. Something is wrong with you."
"We have never been more ourselves," Sorrin said, and there was something almost peaceful in how he said it. "The Blue Sun offered communion. We accepted its blessing. Why would we refuse what we had spent our lives trying to approach?"
He said it as though the answer was so obvious that the question barely needed asking, and Elder Thorn's expression shifted by a fraction, a look of pity crossed his eyes.
"You should have refused," Elder Thorn said.
"You spent centuries refusing it," said the elder to Sorrin's right, sounding disgusted, "and look where it brought you. Alone and despised. Working against the very institution that sheltered you. We always knew something was wrong with you, Thorn. We simply chose not to act on it."
"You were too afraid to accept it," said the female elder, from Sorrin's left. “But we are not that weak.”
Elder Thorn shook his head at this.
As for me, I couldn’t believe our bad luck.
This type of communication with the elders wasn’t something the blue sun did often.
From everything I had learned at my time at the Academy, I knew that direct communion without a Saint's Essence as the intermediary required something significant from the blue sun itself, a real expenditure of something it didn't spend carelessly. The fact that it had done it anyway suggested how seriously it was taking this.
"Your punishment," Sorrin said, pointing at Elder Thorn, "for your centuries of disobedience, will be soul death. The Blue Sun has been generous in its patience. It will not extend that patience further."
Elder Thorn's expression didn’t change, the old man wasn’t fazed at all, instead he got ready for battle.
Then Sorrin's gaze moved to Lady Laelyn, and a cruel smile appeared on his face.
"House Vareyn," he said, "has harbored a heretic for generations. It tolerated her grandmother's corruption and passed it down the bloodline. For the Saintess's betrayal today, and for the stain her house has been carrying, every member of House Vareyn will be found and killed. The Blue Sun does not permit corruption to persist in its own chosen vessel's lineage."
Lady Laelyn's face went very still, and I watched her press one hand flat against her chest, trying to calm down her breathing.
I couldn’t blame her for panicking.
In her mind, we were one Rank 7 elder, one Pseudo-Rank, one mysterious village boy time looper, and a Saint who hadn’t reached her potential, surrounded by three Rank 7 elders and three elite disciples.
Simply speaking, the math wasn’t in our favor, and even I was wondering how we were going to survive this.
“If you want to get to the lady,” Beric growled, taking a step forward. "You'll have to get through me."
The three elders looked at him, and Elder Sorrin’s smile widened. "With pleasure," he whispered.
And then his gaze moved to me, and I didn’t like the way he was looking at me.
"But what we want more than any of this," he said, "is you.”
“Me?” I asked, wondering what they had found out about me.
“Yes, somebody wants to speak with you."
I held his gaze and kept my face composed and ran through the possibilities very quickly.
Someone wanting to speak with me could mean a lot of things, and almost none of them were good, and the specific certainty with which Sorrin had delivered that sentence suggested it wasn't a casual request from someone with nothing better to do with their afternoon.
Was it an actual person? Some cultivator or elder I hadn't accounted for, someone who had been watching from a distance and had questions? That felt like the optimistic reading.
Was it the Blue Sun itself, reaching through the communion it had established with the elders and wanting to communicate directly with whatever it had identified me as? That felt more likely and considerably less comfortable.
Or was it the Otherworldly Being, the entity that pressed against the barriers from outside, the thing in the darkness beyond the world that had been patient and careful and very, very interested in the people trying to stop it?
I didn't know. What I knew was that I had no interest in finding out, because every scenario in which an entity with the resources to establish emergency communion with multiple Rank 7 cultivators wanted to have a conversation with me was a scenario that ended with me considerably worse off than I currently was.
Elder Sorrin extended his hand toward me, fingers spread, palm out, and said, "Come to me."
The pulling sensation hit me before I had finished processing the words, something that wrapped around my spiritual foundation and hauled at it with a force that bypassed my physical body entirely and reached for whatever was underneath, and my feet actually slid an inch or two across the grass before I understood what was happening.
I pulled the Golden Sun energy up from my inner world and let it spread outward across my skin, wrapping around me like a cloak. The sensation of being dragged stopped immediately.
Elder Sorrin's hand was still extended, and his eyes had gone wide in shock.
“What…what are you?”