DarkTechnomancer
patreon
Fates Parallel Chapter 573 - Cataclysm
🕑 Added 2024-10-14 16:21:34 +0000 UTCWith the summit arranged, Jiaguo left their captured prisoners in Sun Quan’s care and then the battle was over. Qin was still at war, but they had an uneasy truce, at least until then. Yoshika insisted that they expedite the process as much as possible, so Lin Xiulan actually left with the Qin elders in order to hurry back to her sect and make the necessary preparations.
Yue was no stranger to Yoshika’s frantic pace, but she seemed more pressed than usual. Before she could run off and start flipping metaphorical tables, Yue made Yoshika stop and take a moment to explain what was going on.
They sat within her soul realm, Heian snuggling up against Yue’s side while the moon spirit flowed around them both jealously. The fox-like spirit of unity was nowhere to be seen, which Yoshika explained was because it had fused with her.
“I see. Alright then, would you care to explain what’s going on? You said that we’re on the brink of an apocalypse?”
Yoshika nodded gravely, fidgeting with one of her many tails as she spoke.
“Do Hye and Misun were wrong about the danger. I should have known that Void was trying to show me more than just how to claw my way back into the world after dying.”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself. Last time you escaped the Void, only a tiny fragment of your soul made it back.”
“Only a tiny fragment of my soul ended up there in the first place. Death isn’t exactly a gentle process.”
Yue smiled sardonically. Only Yoshika could speak so blithely about having her soul torn to shreds. She regretted her own contribution to her best friend’s acclimation to spiritual damage, but while she would never forget what she’d done, those days were long behind her.
“No indeed. So it was easier to do it at full strength?”
“Not really. If I tried to make it back the way I did last time, I’d probably end up no better off than I did then. Also, I’d have forgotten what Void showed me—again.”
“You brought lessons back with you from the afterlife?”
Yoshika sighed wistfully.
“I should have. But I could only recall bits and pieces—fuzzy little fragments here and there. Returning there and seeing it for myself brought it all back.”
“What, exactly?”
They sat in silence for a moment as Yoshika gathered her thoughts, then to Yue’s surprise, the world around them shifted to take on the appearance of an endless dark void. Far above them, a single point of light appeared.
“This is how Void described it to me—sort of. I’ll spare you the brutality of how it shared this experience—stupid thing nearly killed me. Re-killed? Double—never mind!”
Yue covered up a small giggle. It was heartening to see that even as her power grew beyond mortal ken, Yoshika was still the union of awkward girls that she’d always been—and she was willing to share that part of herself with Yue.
Yoshika cleared her throat and pressed forward.
“Everything that exists came from a single font of creation. Almost everything. Void was here before, but it wasn’t alive until essence started pouring out of the font.”
“Where did the font come from?”
“The demiurges. Though, that’s a bit tautological, since demiurges are, by definition, whatever exists on the other side of the font of creation. They do exist, though, and they have...something resembling a will. Even Void finds them incomprehensible, though.”
Yue frowned. They’d discussed the matter of demiurges before—the ultimate beings which broke the Bloody Sovereign’s implacable will. The Sovereign’s Tear was said to be the lifeblood of a dead demiurge, but Chou himself claimed that demiurges were completely beyond life and death. Utterly timeless beings who saw the entire world, past, present, and future, as a single static block of reality. They were the source of all things, proof that fate was real, and it was the Bloody Sovereign’s sole ambition to slay them all in the hopes that he might free existence from the tyranny of predestination.
For reasons only truly understood by him, the man gave up, and his legacy had brought their world to the crisis it now faced. Yue eyed the innocuous red gemstone nestled above Yoshika’s chest.
“What is the Tear, then? Another font of creation? How did it come to be?”
Below them, another point of light appeared, a shimmering crimson red.
“I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows. It is at least...similar to the font of creation. It might be the same thing, but I’m not sure.”
She waved her hand, and the font of creation above them began to shed its limitless energy into the emptiness around it.
“Over time, the font created a world around it, and the life that emerged from that world began to shape it according to their will—the first gods.”
The world exploded into a great plane of alien landscapes. Yue saw stars without number, floating mountains, and rivers of pure light winding their way lazily through the land. Then it all suddenly collapsed into a single dark point—somehow darker than even the void around it, drinking in everything such that even light could not escape.
“This is what happens when a world collapses. Even the divine realm has its limits, and this has happened multiple times. To prevent it, the gods started spreading the power out—creating mortal realms.”
The emptiness around them was quickly replaced by thousands of different worlds, each one represented by a bubble—a tiny window into their realities. Young, old, vast, small, each world was completely unique, and Yue saw some with strange towering structures of glass and steel, others where magic had been twisted into an orderly system of laws and numbers. Some worlds were barren, while others thrived with life. Many had one or more gods presiding over them, tweaking and adjusting the rules to redefine what existence meant within their realms.
Yet, there were so many that they boggled the mind. More realms dotted the void than stars in the sky, and most were untouched—wild. They grew, developed, and died without anyone ever taking notice—some without even producing a civilization.
Yue realized that her own world was like them. Young and undeveloped, but quickly growing and poised to produce its own deities—until something interfered.
Here the tiny crimson star beneath them flashed, crashing into what she intuitively recognized as her own world and disrupting the balance. From above, the greatest sovereigns of the divine realm—each of them housing so many inner worlds that they had become akin to living divine realms themselves—descended to surround the aberrant world and the Bloody Sovereign’s Tear.
They erected a barrier around it—the divine seal—and cast it out into the void.
“This is quite beautiful, Yoshika—you’ve gotten better at controlling your soul realm. I dare say that even I can’t compete with your illusions anymore, but none of this is new, is it?”
“No, but this is where things change. The divine sovereigns hoped that being cut off from the font of creation would cause our world to wither and die.”
The bubble turned gray and dead, and the shimmering red star faded from view forever as it plunged into the dark eternity beyond. Then, it reappeared, as Yue knew it—full of life and thriving. Indeed, now that she had something to compare it to, her world’s development was accelerated by the sheer amount of power the Sovereign’s Tear provided.
“Instead, the Sovereign’s Tear kept us alive, but Do Hye foresaw a different problem.”
Over time, the limitless essence of the crimson star overwhelmed the divine seal, and the world exploded in a beautiful but terrifying display of raw power, creating a light so brilliant that even from deep within the void, it outshone the font of creation and cast its rays of power across the entire divine realm.
Then, the light died, and nothing remained.
Yue swallowed nervously. She had known about this for years, but seeing it before her eyes, and being told that it was immediately imminent shook her.
“And this is the fate we are to suffer?”
“No.”
Space shifted around them once more. The divine realm and its endless pockets of reality vanished, and Yue saw Yoshika and Yan De standing in the void before an infinite ocean of raw power.
Though it was just a visual representation, Yue could feel what Yoshika had felt—parts of it, at least. She understood in a moment the reason for Yoshika’s urgency.
“How is there so much? The sheer concentration of it—did anything like this exist even at the advent of creation?”
Yoshika shook her head.
“I don’t think so. The font of creation has always had somewhere for its essence to go, and even unrefined, it always began to develop into life on its own. But the Tear...”
If ever there was a reason to believe that the Sovereign’s Tear was the result of a dead demiurge, it was this—the incredible ocean of divine power that drew Yan De towards it like a moth to a flame was...inert. It had no will behind it, no intent. It just gathered and pooled endlessly, growing more and more dense until it reached a critical point.
The same one as the divine realms of old.
Yoshika sighed as she looked up at the illusion. Even the memory of that power terrified her.
“Chou’s realm was anchored to ours at the bottom of the ocean and the moon, where the concentration of essence couldn’t hurt anybody. Some of it went towards sustaining life on our world, and much of it was vented into space from the moon—even if some of that came back as the same power you based your cultivation on.”
The moon spirit embraced Yue happily at the mention of it. She returned the gesture—or the idea of it. How lonely must it have been, the only living thing out there for so long?
“The Bloody Sovereign is more considerate than I imagined. But if that’s true, then how did so much of it end up pooling against the seal? This is far too much—it’s completely beyond both Do Hye and Misun’s projections.”
“Despite Chou’s best efforts to contain and moderate the Tear’s power, he made a mistake. I thought he’d built his tomb into Void’s essence as an act of cruelty—a sort of petty power move against the one being he never quite managed to best. Now I think it was more practical. Void was meant to be a buffer to absorb the excess energy leaking from his disembodied soul realm.”
After Yoshika’s crash course in cosmology, Yue thought she understood the problem.
“Most of the Tear’s power leaked into the Void, but still failed to escape the seal. Of course the divine sovereigns would have recognized the power emanating from our world and taken steps to contain it.”
“Maybe Chou thought that Void would be able to refine the essence and transfer it out. The seal isn’t perfect, and Void is an entity that transcends space—that’s how Shen Yu and Longyan were able to get here, by traveling through Void’s soul realm. It’s how I got out.”
Yue’s eyes sharpened at that, and she looked askance at Yoshika.
“You can leave, can’t you? You aren’t trapped here like the rest of us.”
Yoshika averted her eyes.
“I’m not going to do that. I can’t. Everything I’ve done has been for the people here that I love. My parents, my sisters, my masters, Rika and Yun, you. You’re everything I have, and if I abandoned you to save myself...I’d lose myself in the process.”
Of course. Yue loved and hated that about her. There was no point in trying to talk her out of it—as much as Yue wanted to make Yoshika promise that if all else failed, she would save herself.
“And I suppose you’d be hunted down by the divine sovereigns anyway. Very well, what can we do about it?”
“I don’t know. But whatever it is, we’re going to need power. I’m not even strong enough to face Yan De right now, and while I’d love it if he did us all a favor and let himself get annihilated by trying to refine the divine ocean, it’s more likely that he’s meditating on my Voidbreak technique as we speak. He’ll be back.”
“Naturally, it was too much to ask to have that leech out of my hair forever. Very well, let’s convene with our allies and adjust our goals. If anyone can defy the odds, it will be you.”
Yoshika smiled and bowed.
“Only because I have you with me, Yue. Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“So you keep reminding me, yes. Well it’s a good thing you have me, then isn’t it?”
Yue had thoughts on how to consolidate Yoshika’s power as quickly as possible. She may have been willing to sacrifice herself to stop the fighting—willing to entrust all of her political power to Yue, so that she might focus on the more immediate dangers.
Typical of her, really. Yue had other plans, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to voice them just yet. Soon. Perhaps at the upcoming summit—wouldn’t that be ironic? She smiled to herself at that.
“And I assure you—you always will.”
Comments
Eric
I hear upcoming wedding bells 🔔
