A/N
2 chapters combined into 3k chap, enjoy!
Chapter 805: The World Will Remember This Day
If Kal was alive and had gone to the trouble of actually saving Tomas, then where exactly was he right now and why was he not here dealing with any of this?
A Rank 8 like him could have resolved the entire Porvale situation without lifting a finger, because raiders and Sun-Touched were the sort of problem that a cultivator of his level solved by just existing in the general vicinity and allowing a fraction of his spiritual pressure to leak out of him.
Every bandit within a mile would have dropped their weapons and started reconsidering their life choices, and the Sun-Touched would have been pinned to the dirt before their transformations even finished.
The fact that the raid was still happening, that Maya was still crouching behind a barricade with her heart hammering loud enough that I could probably hear it if I tried to, and that an arrow was still sitting in the post right beside my head where it had landed half a second ago, told me everything I needed to know. Kal had saved Tomas and then simply left, and that whatever he was doing right now, he had decided it was more important than what was happening to this village, and it might be for him.
I didn't know what went on in the mind of a man who had lived through a thousand loops, and I had learned across my time in this world that trying to predict Kal was a fool's errand at the best of times. He would have his reasons, and those reasons would be layered on top of contingencies that were themselves stacked on other contingencies, and I would find out what they were when he decided I should.
What I needed to do was handle what was directly in front of me, and after that was taken care of, I could start thinking about how to find my missing master.
In every loop before this one, Porvale had been the place where I played it safe. I stayed low, I hid what I was, I slipped out through the chaos of the southern breach and let the village fend for itself, and every single time I had legitimate, carefully reasoned, thoroughly paranoid justifications for doing so. There were unknown enemies to consider, there were watchers I hadn't identified, there was a Rank 8 time looper whose plans I might disrupt, there was a Blue Sun whose attention I could not afford. Even the one exception, the loop where I cured Vayara and the Sun-Touched in front of everyone, had been a calculated risk taken with Kal standing invisibly in my corner.
But all of those reasons were gone now. I had confirmed who my enemies actually were, and there were two of them, both Otherworldly Beings, one pressing against the barriers from the darkness outside this world and one imprisoned inside the Red Sun and waiting for Hiron to complete his ritual. Neither of them was hiding in Porvale watching a village boy, and neither of them would learn anything from what I was about to do that they didn't already know. And this was the final loop.
That single fact changed everything about how I needed to operate, because in every previous cycle, the people who died in this raid would be restored when the world rewound itself, their deaths converted into memories that only I would carry. This time there would be no rewind. Every villager who took an arrow today would stay dead forever, every farmer dragged off by raiders would never come home, and the math that had let me walk past their suffering loop after loop no longer worked.
Which meant I no longer needed to hold back, and more than that, I no longer had permission to.
"Tomas!" Maya's voice cut through my thoughts, and I turned to find her still staring at the empty air where my skull had been half a second ago, her extended hand slowly lowering. "I don't know what's gotten into you today, but you need to get behind the barricade before the next volley comes, Henrik's calling everyone with a blade to the well, and if your mother sees you standing in the open like a startled goat, she's going to drag you home by the ear whether there's raiders or not, so move your…"
"Maya," I said, and something in my voice made her stop mid-sentence. "I'll deal with this."
Her mouth opened, but before whatever question she had could reach her lips, the voice inside my head erupted.
"MAYA! Maya, that's not me! It's not me, something's inside my body, it's a demon, a demon's taken my body and it's moving my arms and my mouth and I can't…Maya, run, tell my father, tell the elder, it's wearing my face…"
“I'm not a demon,” I replied mentally, keeping my tone as calm and level as I could manage because I could only imagine how strange the situation must be for Tomas to have suddenly lost control over his body.
"That's what a demon would say! You think I don't know the stories? Old Blister told us about the hollow men, the ones the red sun empties out and fills back up with something else, and you're…"
Whatever accusation Tomas was building toward died in his throat, because at that moment I stopped suppressing my Lightweaver cultivation and let the blue sun energy rise through his body and wrap around me in visible ribbons of soft cerulean light, and then I pushed gently against the ground and floated upward into the air above the village square.
I could feel Tomas's awe radiating through our shared space, his terror momentarily forgotten, because whatever stories Old Blister had told about hollow men, none of them had involved ascending into the sky while shrouded in the aura of the Blue Sun.
"By the light," someone breathed from behind the eastern barricade. "By the light, look at him, look at the boy!"
"That's blue sun light, that's holy light, I've seen it once before when the traveling priest came through Darrow's Crossing, I swear on my mother's grave that's the same light!"
"Tomas?" Henrik's voice carried over the others, and I looked down to find the broad old farmer standing frozen beside the well with a woodaxe hanging loose in his grip and his face tilted upward, his mouth working silently for a moment before the words found their footing. "Tomas, lad, is that... you've been a Lightweaver? All this time? You've been carrying holy light in you while helping me pull turnips?"
"I told you there was something different about that boy," an older man said but I had no doubt that he had not told anyone any such thing at any point in the past. "I always said it that there is something in his eyes."
"His mother never said nothing about no priest training," an older woman called from a doorway, clutching a shawl to her chest. "She never said one word, and I've known that woman forty years, we salt fish together every autumn!"
"Maybe she didn't know! Maybe the Blue Sun chose him in secret, they say it happens, they say the sun sees into every heart and picks the pure ones!"
"The Miller boy? Pure?" someone muttered. "He put a frog in my washing basin not two summers past."
I hovered there and let them talk, and I marveled once again at the reputation the Blue Sun Academy had built for itself among the mortal population of this world. I knew the truth about the Lightweavers, I knew what their sun actually was and what it had been doing to this world for thousands of years and what it planned to finish doing within the month, and yet I couldn’t deny that the centuries of healing the sick, blessing the harvests, and defending villages from Sun-Touched had purchased something valuable, which was trust. These people looked at blue light and felt safe. They looked at red light and felt terror. The propaganda was built on a mountain of lies, but right now, in this square, it made everything I needed to do easier, and I wasn’t too proud to be grateful for it.
I reached out with my spiritual pressure, and I pressed down on the raiders while leaving the villagers unscathed.
"What…what is this…" A scarred man in boiled leather collapsed to his knees in the middle of the square, his sword clattering out of his grip, his arms shaking as he tried and failed to push himself back up. "I can't…my legs won't…"
"It's the priest!" another one screamed from beside the granary, his face pressed into the dirt. "The boy's a priest, no one said nothing about a priest being here, Garri said this village was clean, he said it was clean!"
"Mercy!" a third one wailed, and I could hear the animal panic in it. "Mercy, holy one, we didn't know, we're just hungry men, the harvests failed in the south and we didn't know!"
Near the northern fence, the three transforming men had stopped mid-change, their reddened eyes rolling, their distorted joints locked in place by my pressure, low confused sounds leaking out of throats that were caught halfway between human voices and something else.
“What…what is going on?” Tomas asked.
“Tomas,” I said inwardly, “I promise I will explain everything to you very soon, but first I need to deal with a certain someone who is about to arrive.”
"Who? Deal with who? There's more coming?"
Instead of answering, I raised one hand and began to paint.
My finger moved through the air in practiced strokes, and blue light flowed out of the tip in lines that held their position, the wings first, broad and layered with individually rendered feathers, then the body, the hooked beak, the talons, and finally the eyes.
The lines connected, the light deepened, and the painting peeled itself off the air and expanded into three dimensions.
The eagle that came to life above the village square had a wingspan wider than Henrik's barn door, it beat its enormous wings twice and hung there in the air beside me, its intelligent eyes fixed on my face, waiting for me to command it.
"He created a bird," Maya whispered, loudly enough that I could hear it from thirty feet up. "He created a bird out of light. Tomas Miller created a bird out of light."
I reached over and ran my hand along the eagle's neck, feeling the warmth under my palm, and the great head leaned into the touch with pleasure.
"There's a Rank 2 Skybound probably trying to get as far away from here as possible," I told it. "Bring her to me, and don't hurt her more than you have to."
The eagle gave a single sharp cry that rattled the shutters around the square, and then it folded its wings and shot away to the northeast, vanishing over the treeline faster than any natural bird had ever flown.
The village waited while somewhere inside my head, Tomas was reciting what sounded like a fragment of a harvest prayer. The eagle returned in under thirty seconds, and gripped in its talons, thrashing with every scrap of strength her cultivation could provide, was Vayara.
"Release me!" Her voice was sharp and furious and threaded through with an edge of disbelief. "Release me, you feathered abomination, do you have any idea what I am? I am a disciple of the Red Sun Academy, I will freeze your wings and shatter them into powder, I will…"
She twisted in the grip and hammered an ice-wrapped fist against the talon holding her, and a spray of frost simply slid off without leaving a mark.
I saw the moment she understood the true size of the gap between herself and the thing carrying her, because her thrashing slowed, and her eyes tracked along the eagle's body, and then followed the direction of its flight to the figure floating above the village square, and the fury on her face curdled into something much closer to dread.
I understood her position perfectly, because I had once occupied the other side of it.
For a Rank 2 to face a Rank 4 was a death sentence in every meaningful sense, the same death sentence that she herself had delivered to me in loop after loop after loop, back when I was the one scrambling through burning streets with nothing except a rusted sword and a desperate plan.
The eagle drew up in front of me and held its position, and Vayara hung from its talons with her white-streaked hair whipping around her face, close enough now that I could see her calculating and discarding options at furious speed.
"Cultivation is a gift," I told her. "The red sun chose you out of every child in your village, it gave you power that most people in this world will never touch, and you took that gift and you spent it slaughtering farmers in their beds to feed your advancement. And because you have abused the gift, I'm going to take it away from you."
Her face went through several transformations in rapid succession.
"You don't have the authority!"
"I don't need authority. I have the power to do it."
"Power? You don't know who protects me," she hissed. "The Academy tracks every disciple, they will know, you’re only Rank 4, the elders will burn this village to glass and salt whatever's left, they'll hunt you across every…"
"The elders don't know where you are," I said. "You made certain of that yourself, because sanctioned disciples aren't permitted to massacre villages."
The threat collapsed, and she reached for bargaining next, her voice dropping, turning smooth and urgent. "I have information. I know things about the Academy, about the elder council, they're tracking mortal populations, counting them, there's a ritual, something enormous, I can tell you everything I've learned if you…"
"I already know about the ritual."
And then, at the end, when the threats and the bargains had both failed, what remained was the truth, and the truth came out of her in a voice that cracked apart in the middle. "Please. Please, I clawed my whole life to get this, you don't understand what it cost, I was nothing before this, I was nobody, don't send me back to being nobody, please, I'm begging you…"
"I know exactly what it cost," I said. "It cost countless innocents their lives."
I extended my open hand toward her.
The red sun energy answered my pull immediately, and I watched the resonance markings across her skin flare once in protest before the threads began unwinding, drawn out of her in glowing crimson streams that flowed across the open air and sank into my palm, where the Genesis Seed accepted them with its usual bottomless enthusiasm.
Vayara screamed, and beneath the fading power I could sense the thing I had found the last time I did this, the buried remnant of a teenage girl named Eda who had been carved away piece by piece to make room for the monster.
Then I turned the same pull toward the northern fence, and the corrupted red energy lifted out of every raider who was in the process of transforming or would transform later on, their bodies slumped against the fence posts, unconscious but still breathing.
Vayara's scream faded into silence, and she hung limp in the talons, a mortal woman now, nothing more.
"Gently," I told the eagle, and it descended with slow, careful wingbeats and laid her on the village square. I remained where I was, suspended in the air, and I looked down at the village looking up at me.
Henrik with his axe forgotten in his hand, Maya with both palms pressed over her mouth, Sara still on the rooftop with an arrow nocked and completely forgotten on her bowstring, old women in doorways, children peering between the legs of adults, every face in Porvale turned upward with the same expression of awe.
"He took the sickness out of them," someone whispered. "Just took it out of them like pulling a splinter."
I didn’t bother listening to the rest of the murmurs because I knew that none of this was as easy as it looked to them.
I could still remember the loops where I had fled through these same streets with Vayara's ice crackling behind me, the loops where I had died screaming, the loops where I had slipped away through the southern breach and left these people to their fate while promising myself through the guilt that someday, when I was strong enough, I would come back and save everyone.
Back then, that someday felt like a very long time away, an excuse that I offered myself while running like a coward, but now that day had finally come. I was hovering above them, having become the person I had promised them I would become.
Even if dozens of Vayaras had descended on Porvale today, it would have changed nothing about the outcome, that was how far I had come, and what amazed me was that I had barely stepped onto the path of cultivation, there was still a long journey ahead of me.
Maybe one day, I would be like Kal or Sect Master Yuan, a god-like being, able to make massive changes in whatever world that I was in. And maybe one day, I’d reach a level very few had a chance of reaching, a cultivation stage where Otherworldly Beings who wanted to devour worlds would be forced to kneel before me just like these raiders were now.
I didn’t want this because I wanted others to fear me or because I craved power for its own sake, but because I had seen what happened when people with overwhelming strength answered only to themselves. I didn’t want the responsibility, but if someone had to stand at the peak of cultivation, then I would rather it be someone who still remembered what it felt like to be powerless.