Ch231-End Of An Era (Patreon)

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Ch231-End Of An Era

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By the time Sylver was halfway down the mountain, the bloody rain had subsided to an almost gentle drizzle. The blood flowing on the ground had halted its descent and was slowly, but surely, moving upwards towards the peak Sylver had just left.

He could see the same was happening to the other remaining mountains, the blood was enveloping them like a swarm of red serpents. The ones that had already fallen were instead being rebuilt, albeit out of blood, as opposed to stone.

From his position, Sylver could vaguely make out sigils appearing on the forming blood obelisks, but because he wasn’t insane, he wasn’t going to investigate any further.

This was a dragon.

If anything, given what Sylver saw it doing, this was the Dragon. With a capital letter and everything that that entailed.

If it wanted to build some sort of blood-based contraption to completely eradicate this piece of land, there was fuck all Sylver could do about it.

The Dragon had a reason for doing what it did, and even if it didn’t, it didn’t matter, because, and not to make too fine a point of it, there was absolutely nothing Sylver could do about it.

Therefore, because he wasn’t insane, he wasn’t going to investigate, interfere, or involve himself in any way, shape, or form, with whatever the Dragon was up to.

Edmund was in Sylver’s hands, and the details were largely irrelevant.

“What did you do?” a barely audible voice asked from behind Sylver.

It spoke in almost a whisper, with the sort of mind rendering disbelief that most people reacted to with very loud screaming.

Sylver preferred the whispering types, the loud ones were a lot harder to talk to and tended to turn violent.

“Are you asking about the method or the motivation?” Sylver asked the old, and somewhat disheveled-looking, Owl.

Apparently, he was one of those people that aged whenever they saw something their minds couldn’t comprehend. Sylver didn’t feel sorry for him, seeing unbelievable shit, or in this case, feeling it, was a pretty big part of being a [Hero].

Even if he was just faking it.

“Both?” Owl asked.

Another reason Sylver liked the whispering types, is that by the time they came to their senses and started asking proper questions, Sylver was long gone.

Sylver turned around so he was standing face to face with Owl.

And Hound, and Lion, and way in the back, Aurick.

“Regarding the method, none of your business, and regarding the motivation, mind your business,” Sylver said with the sort of sunny smile that would have resulted in what could loosely be described as a massacre if someone told him to fuck off with such an expression on their face.

Roughly 10 seconds of total silence passed, during which everyone that wasn’t Sylver, was desperately trying to figure out why Sylver was acting like this.

The answer was that Sylver was so unbelievably overjoyed that he was currently experiencing a near brain-damaged level of optimism. He literally couldn’t bring himself to see the four men as a threat. And even if he recognized them to be threats, he couldn’t imagine losing to them.

Sylver had experienced hardships in his life. More than he cared to remember. More than he felt he deserved, although a large number of people may disagree.

But all of those were always softened by the existence of Nyx, and later, Aether. Regardless of how badly he fucked up, how irreversible the damage he caused, how unbearable the situation became, he always knew in the back of his head, that he could run home, and count on their help.

Even the 3 times he was banished, the banishment never really sunk in, he was too proud, or to be more honest, stupid, to even consider the idea that he wouldn’t eventually be allowed back.

The whiplash of losing everyone, and then finding someone, was a new experience for Sylver. He wasn’t sure how long this would last, but truth be told, this was an improvement to what had become the norm since he took over Ciege’s body.

It also helped that Sylver was carrying a mysterious box on his shoulder. Which made the smiling necromancer appear as if he was happy because he got his hands on an extra deadly weapon.

“If that will be all gents, I have things to do, and people to see. I hope we never meet again, but I have a feeling we will, so I’ll just say I hope we meet under better circumstances,” Sylver explained, in an uncharacteristically playful tone of voice.

He turned around, took 5 steps away from the group, and then turned around again.

“Actually… today is a day of celebration for me... in light of that, I’d like to offer you some help,” Sylver said.

They were all still in shock.

Aurick was the closest to being “fine,” but that was likely due to his inability to interact with the outside world. Owl had felt the dragon through his mana perception, and so did Hound and Lion, but all Aurick had to go of off was the reaction of the people around him.

“If you can find a couple of drops of the emperor’s blood, I might be able to cobble together a short-range tracker. It won’t be as good as the one the you-know-what gave you, but it will be better than nothing,” Sylver offered.

Aurick walked around his dazed companions, so he was standing in front of them.

“The emperor is still out there. Are you not coming with us to catch him?” Aurick asked, and Sylver shook his head.

“Nope, I’m leaving. I’ll very likely be out of here by the time the first sun rises tomorrow, so you have until then,” Sylver said, as he turned around, and left.

Aurick’s group didn’t follow him, and after about a minute, Owl teleported them away.

Sylver almost jumped when Ria spoke up.

“So, right now, we’re standing on a toroidal planet?” Ria asked.

“That’s what you want to talk about?” Sylver asked.

The question was so… unexpected, that he couldn’t think of a proper answer. He had been ready for her to ask about Aurick being a fake [Hero], or about the dragon, or about Edmund, or one of the many things Sylver would have been asking about, had their positions been reversed.

“I know the answer is going to be “magic,” but… how does… well, everything, work?” Ria asked, and Sylver had to stop walking to concentrate on what she was asking.

“I uh… As you said, the short answer is-”

“Magic, I understand that, sure, but how big is it?” Ria interrupted and caused Sylver to lose his train of thought.

“The uh… the distance between the major radius, and the minor radius, the “thickness” I guess you could call it, is 15 thousand something kilometers. That’s the estimated average at least, one of the drawbacks of living in a realm where distances aren’t exactly consistent,” Sylver explained, as Ria made a sort of clicking noise.

“I know the suns revolve around the planet, but is this planet rotating?” Ria asked.

Sylver started to walk again and adjusted his grip on the metal coffin he was carrying.

“It is. It’s spinning vertically, at a slight angle, 7.7 degrees if memory serves me right,” Sylver said, as he used the blood raining down around him, and created a model of Eira using [Dead Dominion].

Ria just stared at it for a long while.

“Alright…that makes sense… I mean… It makes sense, for a planet that’s shaped like a donut. Is it just empty space in the middle?” Ria asked.

“Not quite. There’s a big bubble of water floating in the middle, with inverted hurricanes coming out of it, pulling chunks of whatever happens to be close enough into the bubble,” Sylver explained, as he made the Eira-shaped blood model bigger, and did his best to convey the exceptionally weird shit he saw the one time he had to travel through the center.

“So, it’s not a donut, it’s a flat disc, with an ocean that goes all the way through the middle?” Ria asked as Sylver adjusted the floating model to better convey the sheer amount of empty space between the inner edges and the bubble of water.

Spring materialized next to Sylver.

“You’re going to give yourself a headache if you try to dig too deep into this. This whole planet is just the rotten scales of an impossibly large snake,” Spring explained.

About a minute of silence passed, as Ria tried to process what he had just said.

“What?” Ria asked.

“A giant snake devoured countless stars and planets, and because it was so ravenous, it ended up trying to eat its tail. It died, and its scales ended up forming everything we see around us,” Sylver said, while he vaguely gestured towards the horizon with his free hand.

“He’s not joking, by the way, that is literally what happened. Dragons are presumed to be as powerful as they are because they’re the descendants of this dead serpent and draw their power and knowledge from it. You can even sort of make out where the head meets the tail if you look at a world map,” Spring explained, as Sylver did his best to adjust the shape of his floating blood model to include the aforementioned swelling piece of land.

You had to squint a bit to see it, but it was hard to deny it once you saw it.

“So, if someone was to dig deep enough, at some point they would find rotting snake meat?” Ria asked.

“They would have to dig really deep, but yes. The deepest anyone has ever been roughly is 70 kilometers. Dwarves, obviously,” Sylver said, as he arrived at a strange sight.

The jade golems he had launched away, had all been melted and then molded into the shape of a 4-sided pyramid. They hadn’t been melted past the point of recognizability, it was the opposite, it was more like someone had glued them all together.

Sylver walked up to the pyramid and watched the man-shaped golem struggle to do anything other than move its eyes. Its face had been fused to the back of another golem, as were its legs, and hands, it couldn’t even open its mouth.

“Should we do something?” Ria asked, as Sylver reached out with his hand, and touched the golem on the shoulder.

[Kirth – Verra Dur’Shey– 1]
[HP: N/A – 100%]
[MP: 0 – 0%]
[Stamina: 0 – 0%]
[Corpse – Inferior]
[Soul – N/A]

“Huh…” Sylver said as he tried to figure out why the race and class sounded familiar.

“What?” Ria asked as Sylver removed his hand from the struggling golem.

“The Dragon got to them… I don’t know what Kirth means, but I’m pretty sure Verra is a slur for humans… The second word might be traitor, but I’m not 100% certain,” Sylver said, as he summoned his ax into his hand, and smashed the blunt end against the green golem’s head.

The piece of moving rock shattered as if it was made out of brittle glass. The golem’s body began to violently shake, the sort of shaking that most living creatures did when they were in great pain but were incapable of screaming. The golems surrounding him also began to shake, and in a matter of seconds, the whole pyramid was almost blurry from how many hands, feet, heads, and other body parts were moving back and forth.

Once the level of collective pain seemed to reach its apex, the pieces of jade scattered on the ground flew towards the spot they had been broken from, and in a matter of seconds, completely reformed the golem’s head.

“Been a while since I’ve seen one of these…” Sylver said, as he lazily swung his ax at the golem’s head again.

“How long are they going to be like this? You said you felt souls inside of them, are they just stuck like this?” Ria asked, as Sylver shook his head and turned to continue walking down the mountain.

“Considering this is a curse made by a Dragon, forever. Don’t worry about them too much, without something to act in place of a nervous system, they’ll lose all sense of self and pain in a couple of centuries,” Sylver explained.

A beam of sunlight forced its way through the dark clouds above and made the bright red blood almost glitter. Sylver wouldn’t go as far as to say that it looked like he was walking through a field of roses, but the blood had lost a fair amount of its sinisterness.

There was a reason Sylver preferred working under the cover of darkness.

Skeletons, zombies, shades, and even intangible types of undead worked better when the people they were attacking struggled to see them.

Not just in the tactical sense, in Sylver’s experience, if the opponents could see exactly what they were up against, and could count how many zombies were left, they tended to get increasingly confident with each defeated undead.

On the other hand, if they thought they were fighting against a possibly endless swarm of skeletons, every defeated opponent just made them realize that they got more and more tired while the undead just kept on coming.

“So… The whole snake eating its own tail thing… How certain are you?” Ria asked with a very odd note of uneasiness.

“I mean… As I’ve said, no one has been able to dig deep enough to see it, but it sort of makes sense,” Sylver said.

“A giant dead snake being the foundation for your whole planet makes sense to you?” Ria said.

“It would certainly explain all the alive ones floating through space,” Sylver said.

A good minute of almost silence passed, during the only source of sound was Ria’s constant clicking.

“You’re saying you’re certain this planet’s core is a giant dead serpent because enough living serpents are flying through space, that you’re sure that they aren’t anomalies?” Ria asked as Sylver nodded his head.

“Ours is the biggest though,” Sylver said.

Ria didn’t say much for the rest of the journey, mostly she asked a variation of “is there really a dead snake inside this donut-shaped planet,” and each time Sylver gave her the same answer.

Admittedly, Sylver had the same reaction when he learned that Earth was a hollow sphere and not a flat disc as he had been led to believe. Except even back then he wasn’t all that combative about it, he just accepted it and moved on with his day.

***

Sylver wasn’t sure what he had expected to see. He had thought the country would fall into utter chaos, once the barrier that protected them came down.

Instead, it was business as usual.

If you ignored the blood clogging up the streets that is.

A few houses had toppled over, due to the blood adding too much weight to the wood it had been absorbed into, but there were only a few, the vast majority were fine.

Not much of note happened for the next 4 hours or so.

By the time Sylver was done packing up, everyone was already halfway out the door. The cultivators Faust had trained didn’t own a whole lot; all of their possessions very comfortably fit in a small sack the elves helped make out of excess sleeping bags.

Speaking of elves, Tarragon and his lot had decided to leave, as soon as possible.

A terrorist organization called the Bucklers were using the chaos the blood rain had created to take over weakened sects and were currently in the process of working their way up to the emperor. The fact that most of the major sects’ heads were mysteriously missing made their revolution almost suspiciously easy.

The Red Ring might have been fine, but shit was going down in the Blue and Green Ring, which explained the giant pillars of smoke Sylver saw in the distance. Once he had reached the bottom of the mountain, he kept his head down and had somehow missed the active rebellion.

And he was more than happy to do as his sect did, and ignore it.

The people that weren’t cultivators, that Faust’s sect owned, or rented or something, had all been handled by Michael. From what Sylver understood, the vast majority had already left once they realized the cultivators were leaving, and the few that didn’t have anywhere to go were simply given enough green jade to go and live wherever they wished.

***

Sylver had been in the middle of looking through his status and his choice of perks, when Rosa quietly opened the door, walked inside, and closed it behind her.

“I need you to kidnap me,” Rosa said, as Sylver continued to quietly look at her.

“…”

“If the Council thinks I got kidnapped, they won’t do anything to my family,” Rosa explained, as Sylver gradually stood up from the floor.

He had been using Ed’s coffin as a seat. Since the moment he got his hands on the metal box, it hadn’t been further than a meter away from him, even when he needed both of his hands to do something, he simply had his robe hold it above his head.

As happy as he was, he knew he wouldn’t be able to handle it if the coffin was stolen from him.

“Let me think about it,” Sylver said as he closed his eyes for a few seconds, while Rosa ever so slightly loosened the top portion of her robe.

If Sylver had been looking at her, he would have noticed that he could see more of her shoulders and that she wasn’t wearing the tunic most mages tended to wear underneath their robes.

She didn’t walk towards Sylver, it was more of a sauntering movement, with a lot more hip swaying than necessary.

For starters, Rosa didn’t have the right body type for this sort of thing. It wasn’t that she wasn’t attractive, she had everything Sylver looked for in a woman, rock-hard abs, a predatory look in her eyes, a couple of battle scars littered on her neck and hands, and she was even wearing a proper mage’s robe.

Normally that wouldn’t matter, but Sylver had spent the last 2 months or so surrounded by people wearing clothes that looked like bathrobes to him, which meant that her loose mage robe got extra points due to Sylver’s homesickness.

“No. I’m worried kidnapping you would lead to the Council-controlled elves having a justified reason for starting a war with Arda. And the benefits of having you around aren’t worth the risk of making enemies of local nobles who have ties to the aforementioned elves,” Sylver calmly explained calmly, as he looked up and saw that Rosa’s robe was one good shrug away from complete falling off her.

“Are you sure you considered all the-”

She jumped as a shade materialized behind her, and pulled her robe closed.

“Is there anything else you wished to discuss?” Sylver asked without raising his voice or looking away from Rosa’s gradually reddening face.

He could see her struggle to not take the rejection personally.

But she would get over it.

Or she wouldn’t.

Either way, Sylver wasn’t going to sleep with her out of pity, and he most certainly wasn’t going to sleep with her in exchange for something. If she had been a bit vaguer with what she was offering and was about 3 heads taller, Sylver might have considered it.

Rosa stood there for a while, now uncomfortable in her almost nude state, and tried to find something Sylver would be interested in.

The two of them had a conversation with their eyes without saying anything, Rosa ended up offering to throw her two female companions into the mix, but Sylver respectfully declined.

“I’ll give you Tarragon,” Rosa said. She sounded so uncertain Sylver couldn’t decide if she was asking him or telling him.

Sylver made a showing of considering her offer.

“I don’t need him. Look, Rosa… The Council is next on my list. I’ve only got 1 thing to do first, and then they will have my full, undivided, attention. And I’ll say this now, even though I’m certain it doesn’t need to be said, but if you try to run away from your group, and make it look like I kidnapped you… I don’t really want to finish this sentence, but it’s nothing good, I can promise you that,” Sylver explained, as he smoothed the front of his robe with his hands, while he lowered himself onto Ed’s coffin.

Rosa’s face was twisted in an almost grimace, and then without any warning, she started to smirk.

“Your full undivided attention you say,” Rosa said with a coy smile on her face.

She was clearly imagining something, but Sylver wasn’t a mind reader and didn’t get the feeling she was thinking about him in that particular way.

He guessed that she had an idea as to just how much Sylver had managed to achieve in the 2 short months he’d spent here. And if his undivided attention was enough to do this, then surely it was more than good enough to do the thing Rosa was imagining.

Assuming Lola hadn’t already defeated them, once Edmund was back, the Council would have 2 of the Ibis’ most experienced arch mages working against them.

***

He didn’t look that upset, which initially threw Sylver off.

Owl just handed him the vial full of scabs, and silently followed Sylver to what was left of his workshop.

He started to speak while Sylver was waiting for the tracker to solidify.

“First dark elves, and now cultivators. Arda isn’t that big of a city, what are you going to do with them?” Owl asked.

Sylver didn’t react to the blind man’s attempt at provocation. But he did feel like smacking himself for not just telling them all to fuck off. Celebration or not, it was a very stupid move on his part.

“World domination, what else?” Sylver answered with a casual voice.

“He tricked you, didn’t he?” Owl asked.

“You’ll have to be specific,” Sylver said.

“The man who warned the emperor. You recognized him. He fooled you, somehow, that’s where you know him from,” Owl guessed.

Sylver was immune to most forms of lie detection spells and techniques, but one of the drawbacks of not being fully undead was that your body sometimes reacted without your permission. He was fairly sure Owl did not manage to read Sylver, but he could not rule out the blind man was more perceptive than he appeared.

“Hard to say. All living people look the same to me. The only reason I can tell you apart from the others, is because of how fat you are,” Sylver said, but Owl barely registered the insult.

“You’re more than welcome to come with us,” Owl said, as Sylver finished the tracker, and just short of threw it at Owl.

The large man caught the thing in one giant hand and carefully put it away into his pocket.

“I would just get in the way. It’s best to leave these sorts of things to professionals,” Sylver said with mock humility.

Owl didn’t frown, but Sylver felt his soul stiffen up.

Apparently, the man was touchy about his [Hero] being a fraud.

Owl walked over to the door, and he turned around after he opened it.

“If you end up in Urth, look for a man named Grigori. Tell him I sent you,” Owl said, as he stepped through the door, and closed it behind him.

“This is exactly the kind of bullshit I’ve been talking about! Everyone knows everything, and I’m the only one who doesn’t know shit!” Sylver said to Ed’s coffin, while he gestured at the door Owl had left through.

***

Getting out of the Schlagen mountains, or what was left of them, wasn’t hard. Everyone following Sylver was capable of jumping to great heights, and the few that weren’t were light enough for one of the older cultivators to carry them.

For whatever reason Tarragon went through the “official” exit and was currently standing in an awfully long queue. The shade Sylver had left with the druid to make sure he got out safely found Sylver almost 2 hours later and confirmed that Tarragon was on his way home.

The road Sylver’s group was walking on was sprinkled with blood, but by the time someone requested to stop for a bathroom break, the surroundings were perfectly clean.

Mora was playing around with Dog off in the distance since Aleri was currently preoccupied with scouting the road ahead.

“What’s Arda like?” Xalibur asked.

Sylver scratched his chin, as he watched Dog do a backflip over Mora. The little creature was a lot livelier, and more friendly-looking, than the disheveled mut Syvler had initially met.

“Very loud. And the smell takes getting used to. And I know I’m one to talk, but everyone has a very odd accent,” Sylver answered.

It was only now that he realized he hadn’t talked to Xalibur in a while. He’d been busy, and if he didn’t know any better, he would have thought Xalibur had been purposely avoiding him.

“If memory serves me right, we’re going to have to cross the Sinis sea at some point,” Xalibur said.

“Don’t worry about that. The rain was interfering with Chrys’ magic. Once we’re far enough away Lola’s mage will open a portal for us, and we’ll cover thousands of kilometers in a single step,” Sylver said and was surprised to see that Xalibur didn’t look happy at the news.

“I read that the water there is so dense that you can almost walk on it,” Xalibur said.

Sylver nodded.

“I forgot the word for it in Eirish, but there are spots like that. Ships over a certain size have to avoid them, but the smaller ones can slide around as if they’re on ice,” Sylver said, as, Michael started gathering everyone up again.

“Is Faust going to meet us in Arda?” Xalibur asked.

Something about his tone felt odd to Sylver, but he got distracted by Mora’s return before he could put the thought into action.

“That’s the plan, yes. I think we should be far enough away for Chrys to contact us in another hour or so,” Sylver said as he stood up, and helped Xalibur get up too.

As before, everyone formed into 4 neat lines, Michael did a headcount to make sure everyone was here, and with Sylver riding in the front on Mora’s back, the army of cultivators being led by a mage continued their march.

Sylver had Edmund’s coffin behind him, a wonderfully clear sky in front of him, and in a matter of hours, he would be home.

What could possibly go wrong?

NEXT CHAPTER 

(AN: Cocksucking power cuts. The funny thing is, it's not the daily 12 hours of no electricity that got me, it's the fact that I don't know when the power is going to go out. So even on the odd day where I have power for 24 hours, I'm so pissed off at the thought of randomly losing it, that I can't do anything other than sit around angry. On the bright side, I got a ton of reading done while sitting around without working light. I think they're over now though.)