Ch235-Leaving The Nest (Patreon)

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Ch235-Leaving The Nest

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“Can you talk?” Edmund asked.

The question was partially literal in this case since Sylver’s body was currently floating in a large glass vat filled with a glowing blue liquid. A large pipe was sticking out of his left shoulder blade, into which a shade was slowly feeding a paper-thin purple tinted thread.

8 days had passed since Sylver’s and Edmund’s return.

During those 8 days, Sylver introduced his lifelong best friend to his more recent friends. There was a great deal of eating, drinking, and sleeping, followed by even more eating, drinking, and sleeping.

By day 2, Edmund was sick of it.

Sylver wasn’t a person people would describe as “lazy,” but Edmund was a human who had to sleep every night to maintain peak mental acuity, and therefore not just every hour was important to him, but every minute.

The idea of “resting” more than absolutely necessary didn’t sit right with Ed. If Sylver hadn’t looked as exhausted as he did, he was fairly certain Edmund wouldn’t have waited anywhere near as long as he had.

That, and Edmund also needed time to catch up with what had happened during his nap. As he had predicted, history hadn’t remained consistent since he died, Edmund’s accomplishments were diluted, or downright removed, and chronologically shuffled around.

Since Edmund was just one man, his accomplishments created a path, a relatively straight path, and even if he wasn’t mentioned by name, it would be fairly easy to notice that events of great importance occurred in a straight line, one after the other.

Instead, according to the history books, Edmund was often at 2 places at once, and instead of moving in a straight line, he took the sort of path a drunken toddler would have taken.

Something was fucking around with Eira’s history.

Something, or someone, had erased Edmund the [Fire Bird] from history.

But that train of thought was dangerous to pursue, given the gradually increasing pressure Sylver felt being exerted onto his mind.

“Did you find everything you needed?” Sylver asked.

Edmund was dressed in a clean white shirt, with black trousers, and matching black boots. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, as they usually were, and his sword hung neatly over his left shoulder. It was almost as long as he was tall.

If you got rid of the overly large sword, between his neatly combed blond hair, and the way he was standing, he looked like he was a student at a military academy. All he was missing was a book bag.

“I did, Benny was very helpful,” Edmund said, as he walked over to the vat that Sylver was floating inside of.

“So what’s on your mind?” Sylver asked. His voice came from one of the shades standing on top of the vat.

“What’s our next move?” Edmund asked with an optimistic voice.

“Honest answer?” Sylver asked.

“That bad huh…” Edmund said.

Sylver had attempted to find damage on Edmund’s soul, but every single test he could think of came back… inconclusive. Sylver’s tools weren’t precise enough to give him an answer that would let him say Edmund had ever been dead with certainty.

“Do you know the closest thing I have to a “lead?” She’s sitting upstairs, having dinner,” Sylver said, and the shade he was speaking through lifted his hand and pointed it upwards, towards the dining room.

“Your current plan is dependent on a little girl riddled with night terrors, armed with an eyeball that she just barely understands, let alone controls?” Edmund asked.

“I wouldn’t phrase it like that, but yes. Even with all of that, she’s significantly better than what plan B was,” Sylver said, and made the 4 shades standing on top of the glowing vat shrug.

“What’s plan B?” Edmund asked.

“Plan B used to be finding Carr Da’Nerto, and having him reveal that someone from the Ibis sold him one of my grimoires,” Sylver said, as Edmund’s eyes opened a bit as he realize why Sylver spoke about this plan in the past tense.

“Ah… Except now that you know I’ve found our grimoires in dungeons, you no longer believe there’s any point tracking that man down… Do you have a plan C?” Edmund asked.

The shade through which Sylver was speaking gestured with its hand towards the small bookshelf in the corner, and made a small bundle of discolored paper float into Edmund’s hands. Edmund silently flipped through Sylver’s notes and ritual frameworks, and page by page, his eyes got wider and wider.

Meanwhile, the shades finished feeding the string into Sylver’s shoulder blade and were now gently twisting the metal pipe, as they pulled it out. Sylver opened his eyes and turned his head to look at the wound.

The circular hole remained as it was for a while, before a spiderweb of threads appeared inside of it, and forced the wound closed. Sylver touched the stitched tight circle and then checked that he hadn’t sewed his muscles together.

So far, as stupid as the initial idea had been, it seemed to have worked exactly as Sylver intended.

“Eighty thousand…” Edmund mumbled under his breath, as he continued reading through Sylver’s notebook.

“Don’t whisper it. And that was back then, with you to help, the figure is closer to 40, maybe even 35,” Sylver said.

The liquid Sylver was floating inside began to disappear in huge chunks, as he absorbed it into his [Bound Bones] storage.

“Thirty-five thousand lives... Where did you plan to get so many?” Edmund asked, without once looking up from the notes in his hands.

Sylver used [Fog Form] to turn into a formless gas, floated over to his robe, and materialized inside of it.

“I would start with pirates, that will get between 5 to 10 thousand, depending on weather, how spread out they are, and so on. Then bandits, the hard part with those will be physically moving them to Tuli. Don’t know how many I’ll be able to gather, but in the time frame I imagined, that’s another 10 thousand, possibly 15,” Sylver explained, as he adjusted his robe, and brushed his hair out of his face.

“That’s 25 thousand if you’re very lucky. Where are you going to get another 10 thousand?” Edmund asked.

“Slaves, mostly. But considering I don’t like using non-criminals, that’s what? 3 thousand? Maybe 5, if I push my definition of a crime. And the rest-”

“Invalids, cripples, incurable diseases, the usual list of people willing to sell their lives for a large sum of money,” Edmund continued, while perfectly mimicking Sylver’s speech pattern.

“More or less,” Sylver said.

Edmund flipped through more of the notebook until he reached the end, which had a very worrying figure.

“42%? All that, and your most optimistic probability of success is 42%?” Edmund asked.

“I wouldn’t go as far as to call them “optimistic,” but yes. Keep in mind, I made those calculations before I reached level 100, and-”

“Ballpark figure. We somehow gather 40 thousand living people, we have everything we need component-wise, how likely is it that we’ll be able to wake a demi-god up?” Edmund asked.

Sylver gave his question the seriousness it deserved, while he put his boots on, and drank down a flask filled with a glittering mess of metals and crystals.

“If I asked for it, would getting a demon core be on the table?” Sylver asked.

Anyone else would have gasped at the question. Edmund just shrugged his shoulders and considered the likely hood of winning against a demon that was strong enough to have a demon core.

“For the sake of argument, let's say yes,” Edmund offered.

“I wouldn’t go higher than 50%. There are too many unknown variables, not to mention she’s a demi-god, and I’m not, so there’s a not unlikely possibility the ritual might not even affect her,” Sylver explained, as Edmund flipped back to a page that caught his eye.

“Zesheti… That was…” Edmund’s voice trailed off as he recognized the name, but couldn’t remember who specifically it belonged to.

“Zesheti the tongue-twisting ghoul. He was the one with the giant meatball made out of skinned people, you distracted the meatball, while I handled Zesheti,” Sylver said, as Edmund nodded at him, and continued reading through the notes.

There were a few minutes of Edmund asking Sylver to remind him who each name belonged to, followed by Edmund asking Sylver to explain his reasoning behind using whichever framework he had chosen to use for that particular portion of the ritual.

“The thing is, I can’t think of an alternative. Fixing the runes on her shell is one thing, but kick-starting her heart is a whole other matter… Even if I was at my prime, and had a 10th-tier healer as backup, it would still…” Edmund’s voice trailed off as he went over Sylver’s calculations in his head, and converted them into numbers he was familiar with.

“The difficulty of it is kind of the reason it’s plan C, as opposed to plan A, or B. To be perfectly frank with you, if I had more plans, waking Tuli up would be further down the list. Then there’s the Council, and the Krists,” Sylver said.

“You said Lola is handling them?” Edmund asked.

“The council I’m not too worried about, they’re just high-elves with big ambitions, nothing we haven’t seen before. But the Krists… There’s something there… They’re a nuisance right now, but I’ve got the feeling they aren’t going to stay that way…” Sylver said, with the barest touch of worry in his otherwise relaxed and rested voice.

“Because of the two that stood over my coffin?” Edmund asked.

“Among other weird behavior. On the bright side of things, pun fully intended, we have a bit over 13 years until the real summer solstice starts. So at least we don’t have to worry about being vaporized for the time being,” Sylver said in a much cheerier tone of voice.

“The Sun Demon… On the topic of demons-”

“No,” Sylver said, with the kind of finality that would have taken the breath out of anyone who heard him.

Sadly, or luckily, Edmund was one of the few people who wasn’t, and couldn’t be, afraid of Sylver, regardless of his mood or appearance.

“You’re the expert…” Edmund said in a tone that could be misinterpreted as mocking, if not for the fact that he was completely sincere. Sylver was the expert, and if he said no, then the answer was no.

“I know-” Edmund coughed into his throat to clear it, and then took a moment to decide on the specific words he was going to use. “I know this is a touchy subject, but I would like to ask, just so I know it’s been considered,” Edmund said.

There were a very small handful of subjects that Edmund knew would cause Sylver to react negatively. And in the context of “demons,” only 1 made sense.

“I’m not going to ask the gods for help,” Sylver said.

“I just wanted to make sure we considered it,” Edmund said.

Sylver waited a few seconds before he answered him.

“It’s been considered,” Sylver said.

“So in terms of doing something, we’re limited to trying to wake up a comatose demi-god?” Edmund asked.

“Well…” Sylver couldn’t bring himself to meet Edmund’s eye.

It didn’t work, Edmund guessed what was on his mind anyway.

“The sister. Poppy. You promised not to mess with her, and yet you got involved with that Aurick boy. And now you have to talk to her, but don’t want to,” Edmund summarized.

“Don’t want to is an understatement. She’s a [Hero], clairvoyant, and sort of a god, as it stands, she is the last creature I want to see, let alone talk to,” Sylver said, as Edmund could do little but nod along.

A moment of silence passed.

“Do you want me to talk to her?” Edmund offered.

“Actually…” the desire to simply shove the responsibility onto Edmund was enticing.

But…

Ed wasn’t good with these sorts of things. Neither was Sylver, all things considered, but at the very least he knew when to bite his tongue and back off.

“No,” Sylver said, and saw that Edmund understood why he didn’t ask him to handle it for him. Edmund’s strengths were many, he surpassed Sylver in a great number of things, but dealing with slimy clairvoyant [Hero] gods, wasn’t one of them.

“If you tell me the smart thing to do right now is to sit still and wait, I will wait. But I need you to tell me there isn’t something better I could be doing. You’re worried about the Krists? Tell me where to fly, and you can consider them gone. The Council? I’ll personally bring you their leader on a silver platter. Just… let me do something,” Edmund said.

To Sylver, Edmund’s awakening was something he had been building up to for the last 2 years. It was the top of a hill he had been climbing.

To Edmund, his awakening was a sudden bump in his otherwise flat road of heroics. He was running around, hitting things, saving lives, and then all of a sudden, Sylver is falling down towards him.

Sylver gave himself a moment to think.

“You know what? Poppy’s home isn’t that far away from Tuli. And I am getting kind of worried about Faust,” Sylver said, as a shade began searching for a map.

The map floated into Sylver’s hands, and he spread it out on a nearby table. With a flick of his finger, he made 5 spots glow on it, and connected them to one another with a thin line.

“We teleport to this village, visit Torg, then we go east through the mountain range, so I can get a few wyvern shades, then we stop at Novva’s house to rest, have Melo teleport us over to where Poppy lives, then it’s just a 3 day trip to Tuli, where we meet up with Faust, and all together fly back to Arda,” Sylver explained, with a gesture towards the zig-zag path they would need to follow to hit all the destinations.

“Right, his wife is immune to magic, and can’t be teleported… Wouldn’t it be quicker to do this backward? Teleport directly to Tuli, meet up with Faust, then visit Poppy, and then make our way over to Novva, pass through the mountains, visit Torg, and fly back here?” Edmund asked as he traced the path they would take if they did as he suggested.

“Hmm… Once Anna is with us, we can’t teleport. If we start from Torg and end at Tuli, we’ll have to fly the longest distance to get back to Arda. If we start at Tuli, and end at Torg, then there will be less road to fly…” Sylver said.

“She’s indestructible, right? Doesn’t need air, heat and pressure aren’t a problem for her?” Edmund asked as Sylver nodded his head.

“Faust and I teleport to Arda, and since you’re only carrying her, you could cover the distance in under a day… Wait…” a 6th mark appeared on the map, near the Sinis Sea coastline.

“Laketula. What’s in Laketula?” Edmund asked.

“A small gift for Faust. He’s married now, so I’m not sure if he’ll even want to go there, but I wouldn’t have been able to find you without him,” Sylver explained, as Edmund tried to puzzle out what a cultivator could possibly want in a small port city.

“Ah, you’re planning on setting up a trade route to get him, and the cultivators here, a steady stream of Ki-infused jade, right? Is that the gift?” Edmund asked.

“That too,” Sylver said, as he made a mental note to do just that.

Edmund leaned a bit closer towards Sylver and looked him in the eye.

“It’s quite hot and sunny that far north, and going by that glint in your eye, I’m going to guess Laketula is one of those ports where the women sailors don’t bother covering their torso,” Edmund said, without so much as a hint of judgment in his voice.

“He’s never been. Or if he has, he doesn’t remember it. We can make a day out of it,” Sylver offered.

“That does sound nice… I can’t remember the last time I had good seafood,” Edmund said, as he rubbed his chin.

“Fresh seafood, imported liquor, and semi-nude women, the only way it could get any better, is if we had more people to share it with,” Sylver said, as Edmund nodded along.

Edmund almost dropped his sword as he realized something.

“Do you think there’s any chance they’ll have Atolonian brandy there? The Sinis sea connects to the Asberg, right?” Edmund asked while almost drooling onto his shirt, as Sylver made a face.

“It does…” Sylver answered with a worried tone, as he went back to drawing a path on the map.

“So when are we leaving?” Edmund asked, with the excitement Sylver would expect from an actual child, not from a grown man that only appeared to be a child.

“Since it’s just us two, we can leave tonight,” Sylver offered.

“You’re not taking Mora with you? Or the uh metal… Ria. I kind of assumed-”

“Mora is still recovering, and Ria… She needs some time away from me. And I need some time away from her. I’m sure she feels the same way,” Sylver said in a slightly muted voice.

“I know this is a rude thing to ask, but how exactly… I’m not saying she isn’t alive but is she like a shade? Is she-”

“You know as much about her as I do. I can’t tell if she’s going through a phase, or if there’s some kind of deeper problem, but she isn’t talking to me about it, so the best I can hope for is that she’ll talk to Chrys. She has this air of naivety about her, but it isn’t consistent,” Sylver explained, as he rolled up the map, and stored it away.

“I can see how that could be difficult… You said she’s from Earth, right?” Edmund asked.

“She is, but this doesn’t feel like the normal moral compass realignment, because, from what I can tell, she didn’t have a fully formed compass, to begin with. The thing is, as much as I want to help her, I don’t have it in me to raise another child. I somehow got it right with Oska, and she helped me with Helca, and those two basically raised Sonya without me,” Sylver explained, as he sent Spring away to give Ging a list of things to buy.

“Is she with Chrys right now?” Edmund asked.

“Probably. You think she’ll talk to you?” Sylver asked.

“I can certainly try… Anyway, let me know when you’re ready to leave,” Edmund said.

***

“Wait, tonight? How? Bravo is away for the next 3 days?” Lola asked, as Sylver lifted his hand, and tapped the area just below his shoulder blade. It was the spot where [Xander’s Waystone] was.

“I plan to find a group of bandits, at least 10, teleport us all inside, and then I’ll be able to teleport 5 people out. But since Anna is with us, we’ll have to travel by foot, or by air, to get back here,” Sylver explained, as Lola tensed up in her seat.

“How long will you be gone?” Lola asked.

“If there’s something urgent, Edmund should be able to fly me back within a day. If there’s anything you need help with, I’m in absolutely zero rush to leave. To be perfectly honest with you, I really don’t want to talk to Poppy. At all. But it’s either that or sitting around waiting for something to happen,” Sylver explained.

“What did Ria say?” Lola asked.

“She was happy for the time off. Interpret that how you will,” Sylver answered.

Lola didn’t move, or blink, for a while, and looked like she was holding her breath.

“What’s your end goal for Chrys? What do you intend to do with her?” Lola asked.

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

“If she… If I…” Lola leaned forward, and tried to use hand gestures to make her point clearer, “what if-”

“Lola,” Sylver said, in the sort of quiet voice that could make a room full of screaming adults pay attention. “Take a deep breath, and tell me what it is that you want.”

Lola did as the ancient lich suggested, and just to be safe, took a second deep breath.

“I want to retire…” Lola said.

Sylver let the silence linger because that was the easiest way to get the second part out of Lola.

“And I plan to have Chrys replace me,” Lola finished.

“I thought you were setting Tamay up for that?” Sylver asked.

“That’s the “business” side of things. The workshop, the various contracts, contacts, accounting, the politics, all the stuff I could theoretically hire someone to do for me. I want Chrys for the other work. Dealing with the assassin’s guild, keeping the Cats and the Cord in line, handling the real politics, all the dirty work that is necessary to keep the clean part moving,” Lola said.

The odd thing was that Lola didn’t look hurt. For anyone else, the focus point would have been how difficult her actions weighed on her conscious, but Lola just looked tired.

Tired the way a miner would be physically tired.

“Why Chrys?” Sylver asked.

If Lola had asked about one of the dark elves, Zelvash, Ruslana, or pretty much everyone apart from the children, his only worry would have been that they would take it too far.

“I don’t… I don’t want this kind of life. I’ll tolerate it if I have to, but Chrys actually wants this,” Lola said, as if she was surprised to hear the words coming out of her mouth.

“Because she’s afraid for her safety, and she wants the resources you control, to build herself a giant army to protect her,” Sylver said, processing what he was saying, as he said it.

“She described it more like a bunker, but yes. Not today, obviously, I’m not an idiot, and neither is she, but in the next 30 years or so, maybe more, we haven’t put a date to it, just that eventually, all that is mine, will be hers. She’s a natural at this. And with her clairvoyancy, and what she can do with her eye, I can’t imagine anything managing to win against her,” Lola explained.

Whatever tension had been in the air, had dissipated by now.

“What brought this on? Why are you telling me this now?” Sylver asked.

“Just… you know… in case your trip takes longer than you initially planned…” Lola explained, with an almost alarming amount of discomfort in her voice.

“Are you sure it wasn’t because she had a prophecy the day I left to wake Edmund up, and cried so hard she lost consciousness for almost an hour because of the sheer amount of stress it caused?” Sylver asked.

“Oh…”

It was the sort of “oh” people usually used when they were caught in a massive lie.

“Who uh… who told you?” Lola asked hesitantly.

“No one told me. It’s my house, I know everything that goes on inside of it. Did you think Edmund was spending so much time with her because he just loves clairvoyants?” Sylver asked.

“…”

“Well, he does. But that’s not why he’s been teaching her how to meditate and calm her heart. Or why Chloe has been following her around, to make sure she didn’t eat something that contained ingredients that mess with clairvoyants. Caffeine is a big one, as it turns out,” Sylver explained, as Lola leaned back in her seat, and just stared at him.

In genuine awe.

“She also had a zinc deficiency,” Sylver added.

“I see,” Lola said, with an odd relaxed smile on her face.

“This isn’t going to get fixed overnight. It might never get fixed. Edmund did all he could, for now, Bruno is handling the alchemical side of it, and Zelvash is going to help her with the meditation exercises and such. If Ed could do more, he would, but now it’s up to Chrys,” Sylver explained, as Lola nodded along with that almost annoying smile on her face.

“Be careful,” Lola said, as Sylver stood up from his seat, and began to walk towards the door.

“Who’s more careful than me?” Sylver asked.

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(AN: I'm using new software to write, please let me know if there are any problems with the text format, or the Epub file.)