Read Novel Full Chapter 1705 Shattering the Mirage
Chapter 1705 Shattering the Mirage
On the peak, beneath the Wishing Tree, Orion opened his eyes—he'd shut them at some point no one had marked—and in a single glance saw across ten thousand years, saw through true and false, broke the illusion clean.
"So that's how it is."
A wind kicked up around him, gentle at first, then violent, tearing at everything near and dragging it inward. Orion sprang up and came to rest on the Wishing Tree, neither grieved nor glad.
Then he became a great sun—one that drank light and darkness in reverse. Beyond the walls, the monsters locked in slaughter with the dream-spiders and the Death-Soul war-thralls dissolved into vapor, rose toward the sky, and were swallowed whole. Far off, the fog-pall blanketing the Blackstone City region drained away; the monsters stopped spawning, every shadow devoured. All of it Orion took in a single swallow, fuel for his own strength.
The war stopped, and the Mirage Void showed its truest face.
The starscape of the Boundless Expanse—a brilliant sea of stars, bright and dim, gathering and scattering, massing into clouds, like a river, like an ocean. Wide as the starred cosmos, broad as a boundless canopy of sky. This was the Mirage Void as it truly was, the root of the Boundless Expanse's name. The sky-smothering fog and dark, the endless undying monsters—all of it false, the phantom shape of the fear in every heart. Only a power like Orion, who'd seen through to the true self and wouldn't be fooled by true or false or illusion, could tear the veil off the Mirage Void.
"The old you was for show. The you standing here now—once you've banked enough depth, I'll be looking forward to the day you come and challenge me. So—any interest in this seat of mine, Commander of the Champions Alliance?" A lift of the hand, and a world's worth of creatures had been wiped out. That was Orion now: a man stepped into the ranks of the apex.
"You're my Commander." Orion came back to the fire and took the roasted heart Commander held out. The man he was now needed no post and no title to dress himself up. He was himself. Strong was strong.
"He—he—you—you—" Kaidric was a little stunned, slow off the mark. He'd started looking at Commander and pointing at Orion—he. Then he was looking at Orion, and it shifted to you. The change in Orion struck Kaidric as too sudden, the kind of thing that couldn't happen under ordinary circumstances.
"You—just now, you finished a Terminus ascension of the spirit?" Kaidric still couldn't credit the miracle in front of him. The Orion he'd seen as bloated and unsettled a moment ago had drawn himself into a clean, concentrated whole in the space of a breath—and worked a terrible God-Devouring art that brought the grinding war to a stop.
"There's no Terminus ascension to it. I just stepped out of the river of time and came back with a new understanding." In truth, Orion's strength hadn't budged. What had changed was his depth, his thickness. If the road from zero to a hundred is the climb from ordinary man to god, then at the passing mark of sixty, and again at seventy, eighty, ninety, there are brutal gate-trials set in the way; an ordinary man has to grind his way up to fifty-nine, sixty-nine, seventy-nine, eighty-nine first, then haul himself over the barrier. The old Orion would have walked that road too. Not now. Now he'd cleared every gated trial in one pass, and all that was left was to let the number creep up with time—no walls left to stall on. And time, to an Orion stepped out of its river, was worth nothing—passing cloud, the air slipping by at his shoulder. To bank strength, he need only sleep.
That was exactly why Commander had pronounced Orion one of the strong, a being of his own order.
"Stepped out of the river of time. Heh. You make it sound easy. But who can truly break the heart's lock and pass the gate, and see through to the true self?" Knowing how much there was to know, knowing how hard it ran, was the very reason Kaidric came so unstrung, the reason it struck him as impossible.
"There—you've got one right in front of you, who thought a single thing all the way through and opened a hundred locks at once. Saw the true self." Commander laughed, well pleased—truly pleased. The Champions Alliance had finally gained a second of him, a second peerless power. Not a second him, to be exact. He was himself, and Orion was Orion.
"You—you—" Kaidric looked at Orion and found himself wordless, his composure cracked clean through. He was the peerless prodigy of the Death-Soul Race, and since making demigod he'd been working to pick the heart's lock and pass the gate, hoping to clear some of the obstacles out of the road ahead. And what came of it? He'd walked all the way to demigod sixth stage and never managed it. Meanwhile the Orion beside him ate a meal of roasted dragon heart, traded a few words of talk with them, and passed the gate, saw the true self?
"Son of a—" Kaidric switched tracks on a dime. "Master, your student bows to you—you've got to teach me how to break the heart's gate."
Crack composure where it would, but seize the chance where it came.
"This thing can't be handed over, can't be untangled for you. It's yours to do alone." Orion shook his head. A true self someone else points you toward—is that the true self? It isn't. That's just another illusion.
"You've got nothing of your own to offer? This line of yours—he fed me the same one, years back." Kaidric took a savage bite of the heart, smacked his lips, and turned the spear on Commander.
"Behind me are three doors. One opens on the past—it can rewrite your birth, your gift, the blood of your race. One opens on the present—it can make you unmatched in the age. One opens on the future—it can hand you the outcome you most want to see. Which door do you walk through?" Commander wore a not-quite-smile, and behind him three doors really did take shape, stained with the wash of time, each subtler than the last.
"I'm not going through." Kaidric had a moment's haze, then came clear fast. "Those are your doors, not mine." He shook his head hard, as though driving some demon out of his skull.
"See—you understand it too. What's mine is mine, what's yours is only yours. Everyone's different. How a man comes to his moment, what he comes to it through—nobody knows." Orion watched Commander with a curious eye. What the man had just said ran well past the chatter of ordinary friends. What kind of bond would have Commander pour himself in like this, working Kaidric toward it inch by patient inch?
"Am I just an idiot?" After a long while, Kaidric came out with that, breaking the mood and dragging the talk back to business.
"More or less."
"Middling."
The matched answers left Kaidric neither ashamed nor smug.
"I'll admit I never figured the Mirage Void's true face for that." Three or four bites and the heart was gone; Kaidric lay flat on the ground, face turned up to the sweep of stars. Nearest of them all hung a vast star whose surface churned with black whirlpools, slung there in the near void—catch it at the wrong glance and it seemed about to drop and slam into them. The thing was so big that its fall gave the illusion of everything before your eyes about to be shattered to pieces.
"The Void. What the heart imagines is what's real." Commander waved a hand, and the whole field of stars vanished; dark and fog rolled back in, and Blackstone City became what it had been.
"The truth tends to leave a man lost." Orion granted Commander that one. Because just now, the kinsmen who'd dreamed their way into Blackstone City had every one of them fallen into the haze when they looked up at the stars. That was Commander's reason for bringing back the dark and the fog—better than having them fight with the starred cosmos overhead. At least this way they wouldn't slip into the haze, lose themselves, lose consciousness, and die for it.