Rivers of the Night

Chapter 783: Theron’s Hiatus (3)

Theron’s emotions had been mellowed out due to the addition of his Dark Mana. It had taken some time, but he no longer felt the same violent highs and low lows. On the one hand, that allowed him to be a more balanced man, but on the other, it had made it quite a while since the last time his father’s necklace had done much of anything.

Honestly, Theron didn’t originally know how to feel about this. Had he deviated so far from his Clan’s bloodline that the necklace was useless to him now?

One of the reasons he had been so against gaining Dark Mana to begin with was because he didn’t want to have to forget his origins. He wanted to represent the Galethunder, to be the man his parents hoped he would be.

But if his father’s necklace wasn’t reacting... then didn’t that mean it was already too late?

Theron was torn. He inwardly knew that his mind was more balanced like this. He couldn’t keep living life on the edge of a knife. He didn’t even feel like himself in that state.

While Theron felt that grieving could change a person, it could only change one so much. He had always been someone who preferred peace, he gravitated to books, to silence, to a calm seclusion.

Sure, he had also found out in the last year that he loved to use his mind, to outsmart his opponents with both his head and his fists. But that was still just part of who he was, not the entire picture.

Even so, of all the treasures Theron had, he spent the absolute most time on this one. He didn’t want to give up entirely even if he knew it was unhealthy.

Maybe that was still the part of him that wanted to be angry at everything, to treat every day like it was chasing him with a razor-thin knife and margin. But he did it nonetheless...

Until he began to feel his necklace changing... evolving.

That was when he learned that this necklace wasn’t what he thought it was.

Since his youth, he had worn it. His parents had probably put it on him since the moment he was born.

And since then, every time he had a chilled breath, it took it away... until the day he began to thrive in violence. In those moments, it took a heated breath.

Theron had assumed that this was just his bloodline in action, but was that the entire picture?

During that fourth month, Theron had been randomly studying the necklace, trying to see what could activate it, and what his Angel and Demon Doctrines could pick up from it, when he spontaneously broke through.

All he remembered of the time directly before was that he had an impossibly still moment of tranquility.

Alpha was fighting a beast nearby, the power of his second clone granting him amazing abilities. The wind was passing by overhead, carrying the sweet scent of flowers from a distance. And the weather... the weather was gorgeous.

A book lay on Theron’s lap and he fiddled around with the necklace, unconsciously and passively cultivating as his Water Mana jumped to Dark Mana, and then back again...

And that was when a strand of darkness left his lips.

It was like his father’s necklace realized that Theron had fully accepted the Dark Mana within him, and what barriers remained were broken through.

After that, Theron’s Dark Mana completely changed. It didn’t even function like normal Dark Mana anymore... a lot like how his Water Mana seemed to break so many rules of what Water Mana should be.

It was a change he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but it carried a scent he recognized.

Death.

That was when Theron put something together.

His Water Mana wasn’t Water Mana to begin with. It was Ice Mana.

The sudden leap came out of nowhere, and the deduction left Theron a bit floored. But the more he retraced his steps, the more he understood.

He didn’t come from a family of Water Mancers to begin with. He came from a family of Ice Mancers. His mother, his father, his little sister—they were all Ice Mancers. He was the only Water Mancer in the entire family.

Many years after he was born, he ran into Merchant Greycoat, and that ultimately led to him finding out that the Galethunders were a Clan of Water Mancers that eventually evolved beyond and became something different. So, he had always assumed that he had just reverted back to the original state of the Galethunders.

But was that true?

That world, everything about it, everything he had known... he was probably the only real entity within it. Everyone else was an incarnation, some reincarnated form of Goddess Sacharro, a version of a life she could have lived if she did go through the cycle.

So how real were the Galethunder really? And if Sadie was just 12 or 13 years old, then how far back could the history of that world possibly go?

These were thoughts that Theron had avoided in the past, thoughts that he ignored because he knew they might send him into a spiral.

But now he could face them calmly, staring into the maw.

He was an Ice Mancer. And this necklace, whatever it was, had fundamentally changed his Mancy Path into something else. Maybe it was even chasing whatever sort of special technique or method Goddess Sacharro had been trying to create all this time.

There were only two things that were very clear about this necklace.

First, it fed off emotion. And second, it changed Mancy Paths into something else—maybe something pre-programmed.

The first part connected to this moment for Theron clearly. The necklace had never reacted to his Dark Mana before because he had never had an emotional attachment to it... not until now.

As for the second part, it was even more obvious. Now that he had truly accepted his Dark Resonance to the depths of his soul...

The necklace was finally causing changes to it as well.