Read Novel Full Chapter 1704 Unmoored from Time
Chapter 1704 Unmoored from Time
"Not bad. Fine on the tongue. A World Dragon's less rank than I'd figured—not so gamy." Behind the words, Orion's head was full of the grim picture of Leonidas split open and his heart scooped out.
It was a cold joke that didn't quite land. Neither Commander nor Kaidric picked it up; they were more interested in the roasting, and they set to it themselves.
"That fabled Sovereign of the Boundless Expanse never showed. My guess is a Divine Mantle drops a sixth-stage apex into a deep sleep, and short of dire need they won't wake." Orion turned his spit with care, working the heat on the heart while he laid out the read he'd taken off the fight. "If that holds, we can pull in more allies and push our borders out as far as they'll go while the chance lasts."
"A Divine Mantle's a god-tier thing. No demigod controls one at all." Commander rummaged in his coat, came out with a jar of cumin, gave the heart a dusting, and passed it to Orion. "I've never held a Mantle, but I watched a war over one once, in a great world down in Hell. To take a Divine Mantle, you have to pin it down first, then try to refine it before it'll ever serve you." That was what Commander had seen and heard; the thing held a curiosity for him too.
With that, he looked to Kaidric, a flick of the eyes telling him to share what the Death-Soul Race knew of Divine Mantles.
"A Divine Mantle—how do I put it. It's a carrier, really. A medium." Kaidric snatched the cumin from Orion's hand and shook a generous helping over his own heart, plainly no stranger to the spice. "Take this tree for the comparison." He pointed at the Wishing Tree a little way off—he'd hauled back a heap of World Essence this round too, which bought him the right to go in and trade. "The fruit—cut off from the Wishing Tree, sooner or later it withers, turns to ash, gets eaten. In the end nothing's left." He hefted the heart in his hand, letting the fact carry the point. "And all of us, we're fruit—half-ripe or full-ripe. We want to stay on the tree, we need a stem or a calyx tying us to it." He pointed at himself, then at Commander and Orion. "Stem or calyx, the difference is slight—because that's what a Divine Mantle is."
There he let a thread of superiority show, plain enough. Lore like this wasn't open to just any race. A people with no god-tier being among them might never so much as hear the name Divine Mantle, never see it, never catch wind of it.
"Sharp as the two of you are, you've surely caught it—the fruit doesn't matter, the Divine Mantle doesn't matter. What matters is the tree." Kaidric raised a hand and turned it toward the Wishing Tree, more under the words than on them. "A sixth-stage apex, even once he holds a Divine Mantle, still has to find a tree and graft himself onto it. And that tree—in the common tongue we all share, everyone calls it a pantheon."
If what Kaidric had said before was rare lore, what he let slip now was the kind of thing no one short of a god was meant to know.
"Far as I know, only four worlds carry a great pantheon—the Abyss, Hell, the Divine Dominion, and Cloudmere Hollow. The first two you all know. The Divine Dominion's said to sit a dimension above us; what it actually looks like, I couldn't tell you. Cloudmere Hollow's a mystery—no one knows where it lies, but one thing's certain: it's an Ascendant Plane belonging to the Void." Kaidric narrowed his eyes. Every time he turned these things over, he felt his own smallness; set against powers of that god-tier rank, he doubted he'd survive a single exchange.
No one spoke. The moment Kaidric said the word pantheon, both Commander and Orion fell silent. One man's eyes blazed, brilliant; the other bowed his head, sunk in thought, something dawning in him.
Pantheon. Pantheon. Pantheon. I've heard that somewhere—where was it? That's it. The Deputy Commander. The Awakened. The sacrifice. The Survivor's Platform.
"The Ash Pantheon?" Orion's head snapped up. He looked at Commander, raw disbelief shaking through his eyes. Only when he caught Commander's near-imperceptible blink did he drop his gaze and sink back into thought.
So the Survivor's Platform we hold—at its root, it's a pantheon. And we Survivors, all of us, are seeds the Ash Pantheon scattered to grow itself.
Orion's frame swayed. A vast new strength welled up out of his spirit all at once, as though he stood on the verge of attaining buddhahood, of sloughing his flesh and ascending.
Hide from the will of heaven, run from the Weave of Fate, and every chain binds the true self. Bow to the will of heaven, take up the Weave of Fate, and only today do I see that I am I. The morning I grasp the Way I meet my true self—why fear the old chains then? The world's chains were ever a dream, formless, signless, and selfless too.
Orion hung in a strange state, no-self and true-self trading places, and without meaning to he spoke the lines from that other world that fit the moment best—and the whole of him, from temper to bearing, turned over and remade itself.
Since he'd been reborn a giant, it had been a long time since he'd seen his parents, and a loneliness had ridden in him, a sense of drifting unmoored. He'd always felt his parents had abandoned him and his sister. The feeling ran deep—and now he let it go. Let go of the past, the present, the future.
In the sanctum of his spirit, two Titans stood in the sky and looked down on the whole planet, shaped from the force of Orion's soul. Their faces were his mother's and father's. They smiled—an affirmation, an expectation, and a faint sorrow under it. Orion reached to touch his mother's arm, but a blaze of light swallowed it, and all of it crumbled into nothing and ash.
Then a shoreless sea opened across the sanctum. Over its waters the tides rose and fell, one swell of the tideline rolling in, another drawing away. Chains snaked out of the void and locked his limbs—wind and rain, thunder and lightning, earth-fire and storm, thunders and phantasms of every affinity crowding in. Life floated past like a dream; the stars wheeled; in the streaming light of the years, who could say how many ages slipped by in the dark.
Maybe a long handful of years, maybe several hundred turns of spring and autumn—and Orion, dazed, opened his eyes.
"I am simply me."
The words fell, and the thunder scattered, the phantasms guttered out, and the chains that bound him vanished like blown dust. Orion looked at the sea before him and gave a soft laugh.
A surge—
Something broke up out of the rolling river, threw off the water's hold, and stood high above it. He looked down on the river. He looked down on the shrimp of every kind thrashing in it. He looked down on the thrashing past, on the danger-thick present, on the unknowable years to come.