Magical Soul Parade

Chapter 271: Revelations (II)

The first entropic decay. The first chaos breaches. And the emergence, into visibility, of the first Ossuarists: people whose soul density was sufficient to do something with the chaotic masses that were now appearing. Either by purging the entangled consciousness and releasing the mana back to its natural state, or taking the mass inward and using the power for themselves, bearing the soul debts and the fight against madness that came with it.

Althea had been born into a world where this process was already established, already old, already producing the second and third order consequences of its beginning. She had manifested as the Transcendent of Order. And around the same time, in a different part of the world, another Transcendent had manifested.

Arros.

Yes. There had been a real Arros. That was the thing she still had difficulty holding steadily in her mind without it destabilizing something. A real person. The Transcendent of Error. Their upbringings were polar opposites, and so were their worldviews.

He had been a street rat. A survivor, shaped by an environment that rewarded taking what you needed from whoever had it, and that early formation had not been overwritten by everything that came after — the training, the refinement, the genuine accumulation of knowledge and power that had made him one of the most formidable Transcendents in the world’s history.

The intelligence was always there. The capability was always there. But the fundamental orientation toward the world, toward other people, toward power, toward the question of what it was for, remained what it had been when he was a child stealing to survive.

They had fought each other across ages. Her faction and his, in the long oscillating war that was less a war than a recurring condition of their shared existence. One side would win, then the other, then a stalemate, then the cycle would restart. Neither side had the capacity to eliminate the other entirely. Or so she had believed for a very long time.

Althea’s attention snapped back to the present, as suddenly, the trembling deepened. The vibration through the floor was no longer faint now, it had become a constant rumble, and was growing in intensity by the minute. Whatever Finn was going through in that chamber had begun in earnest.

The God of Secrets’ eyes moved from the corridor entrance to the floor and back. His composure held but something behind it shifted.

Althea’s heartbeat thudded in her ears, anticipation building for what she knew was coming. Her eyes stayed on the God of Secrets, yet she continued to turn over the events that led up to this moment in her mind:

The defining moment was when Arros and the Chaos Bearer’s faction of Transcendents stumbled on Gods in one of their many delves into chaotic breaches — Unique beings that had authority over concepts of reality, just like Transcendents, except this power was driven by something else entirely...

Faith.

These Gods had matched them in power, and even surpassed many of them. Only the Transcendents with powerful concepts like Chaos, Error, and Space had been able to fight back and even slay a few Gods on their own. The other Transcendents fell, or fled back to their world, leaving the powerful to battle it out...

That was, until a Great One stepped in.

A single action from a Great One had killed many of the Transcendents present and sent the survivors back through the breach with nothing but their lives and a very clear understanding of exactly how far beneath the ceiling of power they actually were.

The shame had lasted a short while. The curiosity that followed had lasted much longer.

What was faith? How did a being cultivate it and what did it do to them when they had it? How was something so trivial able to create an entity so powerful that they could wipe out Transcendents as though they were less than flies?

Years of investigation followed, trying to get to the bottom of it. Espionage into planes where Gods existed. Attempts to replicate the mechanism in their own world. Every attempt failed — where faith should have taken root, mana was already there, and the laws of their universe did not accommodate both. No amount of bending those laws had produced anything that worked.

Althea had thought that would end it.

It hadn’t.

Because in the silence that followed — a silence so long and so complete that even she had eventually stopped watching Arros for the move she had known, on some level, was still coming — he had been working. Refining. Reaching the absolute ceiling of what mana could produce through Transcendent power, and then pressing against that ceiling with everything he had until he found something on the other side of it.

Without a doubt, if there was an undisputed title of the most powerful Transcendent to ever live, it would have been that version of Arros. He had begun to touch fate with his Error authority in those years. Had done things she still didn’t fully have the capability to evaluate. And most importantly... In those years, he had been in contact with his faction the entire time, coordinating what came next.

When he surfaced again, his attack was unlike every other war they had fought before. Previous wars had been fought with the understanding that both sides would survive them. This one was fought with the intention to eliminate. To actually end the other faction completely and permanently.

Many on her side had died.

She had come closer to dying herself than she had in all of the ages before that war combined. The only thing that had kept her alive was being more powerful than everyone the other faction sent at her, until Arros and the Chaos and Space Transcendents had converged on her personally — and even then she had made them work for it. But in the end she was crippled, her faction devastated, and the other side stood with free reign to themselves.

Then the Grafting plan began.

In his years of silence, when he was quietly building his power, Arros had noticed something across the many planes he had investigated. In every plane, regardless of the form power took — faith, mana, something weaker than mana, something entirely different — there were always individuals whose souls placed them above the rest. People who bore authority over concepts, wielded it through whatever mechanism their world provided. The concept of Space in some planes. The concept of Truth in others. Of Chaos. Order. And occasionally... Error.

The core concept was the same regardless of the power used to actualize it.

And after years of failed attempts to bring faith into their own world, he no longer approached the problem from the angle of replicating faith. He approached it from the angle of finding souls that already carried it.

Beings native to their world couldn’t cultivate faith, the laws of their world prevented it. But a soul from a plane where faith existed carried those laws within itself. Transplant that soul into their world before it fully actualized in its origin plane, and the restriction wouldn’t apply to it.

A graft. Hence the name.

The Space Transcendent had run the early experiments, pulling beings from other planes and placing them into controlled conditions in their own world. There were many failures. Horrors that probably still existed somewhere. Evidence of the inhumanity of those early tests. But throughout all those tests, the principle held every time — native laws didn’t bind foreign souls the same way.

What the plan needed, specifically, was a soul bearing Error authority.