Chapter 635: Bad Omens (1/2)
Hekruv Vira sighed as he looked out at the remaining droplets of light that lit up the void like fireflies at the end of their flight. Another one had just winked out, no doubt because of the energy finally running out. They had built a hundred arks just in case, but now just three remained.
One could argue that the losses didn’t quite match up to the numbers, considering the remaining arks only survived did thanks to powerhouses infusing them with their power. But it could also be seen as an abject failure in the sense that their old, weak, and sometimes young, had all been sacrificed while the powerful saved themselves.
A shudder wracked the whole lifeboat, and the passengers didn’t dare breathe as they looked at the barriers keeping the void at bay. They had held again, but everyone knew it was just a matter of time. Hekruv glanced at the enormous sphere above the mountain before his eyes turned to the pulse that rippled out toward eternity.
One thing good about that shockingly powerful treasure awakening was that most of the Void Beasts were forced away or downright killed by the spatial fluctuations that grew more and more intense.
The downside was obviously that their arks were caught in this subdimension, unable to find any rifts in space to escape through. Those fluctuations had crushed them all, and Hekruv wouldn’t be surprised if the energy emanations would have great repercussions even on the surface dimensions.
But this was no time to worry about the outside world. They first needed to grasp their final shot at survival. Their vessels were meant to escape through the edges of the mystic realm, but now they had almost reached the core.
Just a little bit more.
“What is this interference?!” Voridis roared with fury as his Cosmic Vessel once more was thrown out from the hidden dimension, small cracks covering its hull.
He was so close that he could taste it. The swirls of fate suffused the whole region. A few more jumps and he would be able to pinpoint the planet.
“Master, the ship will not survive another jump according to the readings,” a wet, slightly gurgling voice said. ”The spatial fluctuations are too powerful.”
Voridis looked at the wretched state of his ‘disciple’ with a frown. It was extremely lucky that he reached Seed 7 before reaching the main target, the world inhabited by Zachary Atwood. Some things could only be discovered by experimentation, and there were clearly some issues with his original plan.
The fulcrum’s soul was supposed to be a conduit, but the forces ripped it apart much too quickly, quickly turning it all into a chaotic mix of discordant wills and Karma. It made the bridge between the fate of the world and Voridis too fragile, and he had only managed to get a taste of it before the connection was cut.
Voridis had barely managed to salvage a small piece of the rapidly dissipating energies as the world died, but that morsel was utterly insufficient to allow him to form a world of his own. He had instead used it to perform a series of tests with the help of his new little follower, Vasidas Medhin.
It was lucky that Voridis didn't follow his first instinct to extract his soul and discard him as he originally meant to when planning this whole undertaking. He had come to realize that such an action might have led to unexpected troubles. After all, his whole plan was only made possible by utilizing the Dao of Karma to form a master-disciple bond with his beacons.
Most things could be circumvented, but it was often easier to just follow the Dao. Killing his disciple would sever karma, but doing so might actually break his connections to his other beacons.
Luckily, the dynamics of discipleship was not something that was etched in stone. Wasn’t allowing your follower to enjoy the effects of your experiments a way to nurture your successor? If Vasidas happened to have some adverse reactions that showcased the faults of the experiments, wouldn’t that be the best for everyone involved so that the master could correct his wrongs?
A stroke-like shudder wracked Vasidas which brought Voridis out of his musings. The young man's demeanor had changed, and Vasidas hatefully stared at his master like he wanted nothing more than to rip him apart and eat his flesh.
It looked like the fulcrum's remnants had appeared again.
”Just how do you keep appearing?” Voridis muttered with a mix of curiosity and exasperation. ”You should have been annihilated by the storm of Fate.”
He waved his hand the next moment and suppressed the remnant soul, allowing his disciple to regain his mental faculties. Voridis didn't believe that such an issue would prove a problem for himself, considering the vast difference in power between himself and Zachary Atwood, but he had still perfected the filtering system to make sure too much remnant wills didn't enter his world.
Some corruption was bound to appear when subverting fate, but as long as he held the supreme will, it should be slowly salvageable. He would break through and immediately eat his prepared longevity medicine. The additional eons of lifespan would be enough to figure out his next step.
”Have the golems start repairs,” Voridis muttered. ”I'll take the opportunity to make some more calculations. I might be able to reach the planet in a single jump based on the accumulated Karma in this region. Hopefully, the spatial turbulence will calm down by the time I'm done. If not, we'll have to simply break through.”
”I'll arrange it,” Vasidas quickly said and shuffled toward the warehouse housing the repair golems.
Voridis took a deep breath as he gazed out in the beyond. The heavens were shifting, and he couldn't help but feel a strong sense of urgency.
Galau sighed as he put down the damaged piece of armor before making some notations in his ledger. What was it with pirates and fake inscriptions? Every fake rune he encountered felt like a loss of wealth, like he had been tricked somehow.
“Why so glum?” a laughing voice asked. “Being a junior quartermaster isn’t quite the same as becoming a merchant, but it should beat being tortured to death for information?”
Galau looked up to see his new friend of circumstance. His purple hair had been cut into a mohawk that was made into a thick braid that reached down to his neck. Galau couldn't understand why he had done something that weird. Not that it looked bad, but it was a very popular hairstyle among the pirates.
Was Average trying to get himself killed on the chaotic battlefields?
“I just thought about the unpredictability of fate. How different my life would be if I didn't sit down at that table,” Galau wryly smiled as he put down the ledger keeping track of the spoils of the Muscle Brigade.
This family and their shitty naming sense.