Chapter 365: The Boundary of Mortality

Mid Afternoon - Late Winter : The Nest

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- Elizabeth Valia ~

"E..li..beth... Eli..abeth... Elizabeth!"

I jolted as I was ripped out of my thoughts by Astren on the horse next to me.

"Are you okay?" It hadn't been more than few minutes since we met 'him' at that point, so we were all still rattled. "Ever since 'he' appeared, you've.. not been yourself..."

I gently nodded as my gaze turned away from her. "Y..yeah, I'm fine... I just have a lot on my mind..." My mind was an indescribable mess, with thoughts racing in every direction, to the point that I was beginning to not only question my memories and reincarnation, but my own identity as well.

"What did you guys even talk about? He seemed to recognize you... Have you met before?"

I quickly shook my head before looking up at the ceiling. "I never met him.. but he knew who I was..."

With wrinkled eyebrows and a look of worry, she quickly turned toward Michael, who hadn't said a word from the moment we left. "You seemed to know him, right? Who was he?"

Subtly looking up at him, I watched him tense with an expression similar to mine, except with guilt woven into it. "I don't know who he is.. but we did indeed meet many years ago..." There was a long pause as Arcana and Gale turned their ears to him. "We met back when in Kaelallan.. before it became an empire... At the time, he had the appearance of a child, and at first, I thought he was just some foreign noble. He and his 'father' were quite close with the royal family there, and until I saw him actually fighting, I assumed he was just an abnormal demihuman child..."

"H..how many years ago was that for you to mistake a fucking monster like that for a child..." Mag spoke up with a shaky voice, riding on the back of Michael's horse.

"T-That was only before I saw him fight... While I was there, applying to become a nation-rank adventurer, he thwarted an assassination attempt on the king that even I wouldn't have been able to stop right next to me... That event is what made me consider the path I was taking in life... " He hung is head as he paused. "But where I drew the line on him being a humanoid species was when.. a dragon appeared in the plaza..."

Arcana instantly twitched as if recognizing what he was talking about.

"He didn't just win against her.. he one-sidedly crushed her with the body of a demihuman child... It wasn't even a fight..."

"Her?" Astren's voice warped with confusion.

"A-Ah! S-Sorry." His words quickly became fervent. "I was referring to the dragon that appeared. You may have heard of the incident, but it didn't even end there... After he literally beat the dragon to the brink of death, he created these massive metallic bands to keep it from escaping. He even left it there alone for a while.. and if I remember right, there were rumors that he was not only able to talk with it, but was the one to.. dispose of it as well..."

Arcana, finally turning to look at Michael's oddly distraught expression, spoke calmly. "So he was the one behind that incident..."

Michael quickly nodded. "It wasn't just that.. the only reason Kaelallan was able to take so much land was thanks to him... After I left Kaelallan, I even heard rumors about how the Magic Tower in Decia, as well as thousands of upper government officials across the entire main continent, went missing in the span of a few days..." He paused as he recalled some bad memories. "At this point, I'd be pretty surprised if he wasn't also related to that Reverse Mana Wave or that field of glass they found near the Kingdom of Zan's old border..."

Arcana quickly chimed in with a mix of awe and curiosity in her voice. "Was the reverse mana wave not just a rumor? There was an institute in Voldukirk that claimed it was fabricated, saying it was just a really strong mana wave that was misunderstood."

But he immediately shook his head. "It was a very real event. It sucked mana out of not only artifacts but people. My friend, who is a blacksmith there, had mythril turn into junk iron during the event... The rumor that it made Kaelallan's capital a mana-rich area is true too. Every time I visit, somehow, the mana feels thicker than the last time I visited... It's like they have a mana fountain beneath the royal palace or something..."

"How fascinating..."

Finally pulling my gaze off him, the turmoil in my own mind quickly resumed. "I can at least say he'd certainly be capable of doing something like that..."

Turning to me, Arcana's curiosity started to show. "You mean creating a mana fountain?"

I nodded. "There is nothing I saw in our conversation that said he was anything less than omnipotent..." I anxiously bit my thumb as my mind raced to try and find a flaw within our conversation. A single notion that said he didn't already know everything.

But there was nothing.

Although he said he himself was a reincarnator from Earth, his response about his memories from there threw me off, and looking back on it, it felt like he was just saying that to try and get close to me. -He knew I was a reincarnator from the very beginning, and even offered to reveal the truth of my reincarnation to me...- Meaning he already knew the truth himself, likely before we even started speaking. "If he's a god.. what reason is there to place a limit on him?" There was a long pause before I silently mumbled. "To the likes of us, that kind of power may as well be limitless even if it isn't..."

Thinking about his offer again, my gaze fell toward my hands, tightly gripping the reigns of my horse as we raced through the huge tunnel.

No matter how I twisted it, the whole situation felt like a trap. The way he responded when I asked 'what would happen if I refused to become his apostle' after learning the truth was as if the thing I was going to learn would trap me into accepting his offer. -So, if I accept this.. the odds are, I'll have to become his apostle whether I want to or not...- I honestly didn't know what to think or believe. Whether he was acting, leading me into a trap, or whether he was being truthful, earnestly desiring my faith.

-But.. would being the apostle of such a god-like entity be such a bad thing?-

The moment I asked that to myself, however, my vision blurred, and an image appeared in my mind: the image of a tiny wooden cabin in the middle of the woods.

Nothing about it particularly stood out. I had certainly never seen it before, but somehow, it felt familiar.

Familiar enough for me to know exactly where it was.

Without even realizing it, I had subconsciously accepted the god's offer. -How horrifying...- But as I thought that, a smile came to my face.

I was afraid, but excited at the same time. Anxious about what was to come, but also curious.

I could instinctively feel that what was to come wouldn't be easy, but somehow, I yearned for it.. the answers to the questions that had dominated my mind for years.

However, as my mind raced just thinking about it, the entire mountain started to shutter. *rrrRrRRuUUUMMBLLEE* It was like an unfathomable earthquake, causing several horses to lose balance and fall over before coating us in dust and small debris that was shaken loose out of the ceiling.

It was unlike anything any of us had ever experienced, an earthquake that felt like the planet itself was quivering.

But while we all screamed, asking what the fuck happened.. deep down, we all had an idea...

A few hours later, after finally traveling the length of the tunnel, we arrived at the entrance, but instead of only having to push through the thick magic barriers to get outside, there appeared to be a huge boulder blocking the entrance, so I stepped up to break us out with magic.

However, the moment I broke through the opposite side of the rock, a wave of heat blasted over us, and the forest that was previously a beautiful white from being covered in a blanket of snow was nowhere to be seen, with the trees toppled, charred, and stripped of leaves as if an atom bomb had gone off right next to them.

"What the..." As we continued out, noticing the common angle of the toppled trees, I hopped on my horse and trotted out around the nearly two-hundred-meter-wide rock that blocked the entrance and looked up the mountain.

But the sight that met my eyes was not something I could do justice with words.

As I simply stared, frozen from awe, the others came to look as well, but they were all instantly entranced, just as I was.

The only one to speak was Mag, after several minutes of silence, and even he spoke at the volume of a whisper. "We.. really tried to fight that..."

Although no one else said another word, we all instinctively agreed.

'He' was a being not bound by the limits of something as fickle as mortality.

'He' was a creature beyond our comprehension.

'He' was a true god.

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- Vasilias Ragnarok ~

(Back a few hours)

*tap...* *tap...* *tap-CRUNCH* Gently poking the secretary's long-dead head as it laid on the ground, the skull shattered like glass the moment my claw pressed into it. -Geez...- She had less crystalline divinity than even the youngest of ancients from what I could tell.

Or at least, that's what it seemed like.

Gently opening her mouth with my aura, my eyes settled on her tongue and the three large black artifact-looking objects on it.

I recognized them instantly. -They're.. cells?- Similar to the god's cell I saw beneath the academy several years ago, they were made of pure, crystalline divinity and had at least at one point contained liquid divinity and likely the soul of a deceased god as well. -It looks like she used some of her own divinity to create pathways between them all and her reserve too...-

If my guess was right, when she began moving her own divinity, when her presence grew inexplicably exponentially, she also pulled the divinity out of those cells, absorbing the gods' souls in the process to let her make use of every drop of divinity she had. -I wonder if her absorbing those souls also affected her mind...-

It was a shame I couldn't keep her alive. Had she lived, she would have been the perfect specimen for me to use to study souls and how they affect the mind. -It's no wonder she neglected her own race so much... I wouldn't be surprised if those gods' souls contaminated her way of thinking in more ways than one...-

If my hypothesis was right, the gods she ate probably also harbored grudges against me, likely exponentially increasing her hatred toward me, and blurring her own sense of self and pride in her race.

Thanks to her, all that was left was a neglected population of chickens with a handful of powerful figures that she likely used to her own benefit wherever possible. -If they cultivated their race, she and Acanthis could have created a population that could rival the dragons again.- With the way Bahamut head completely lost its ability to grow demigods, the thunderbirds would have eventually caught up with time. -But beside the secretary, there wasn't anyone here strong enough to even lick Hera's paw...-

Of course, it worked out perfectly for me. All that was left was a nation laced with resentment toward their leader. The perfect population of subjects to conquer.

Looking over my shoulder, I looked out through the hole I made connecting the upper cavern to the sky outside and idly thought to myself. -I might not even need to use fear and strength to rally them under the dragons.-

The only issue was the upper cavern, the prideful nobles. -The ones in the lower cavern I can rally beneath me by simply showing them what was taken from them...- But the nobles, the ones who had the freedom to do everything they wished, couldn't be coerced by freedom.

-Though...- Looking into the cavern, I was immediately met with the gaze of thousands of thunderbirds, some flying while others were perched in tree canopies or standing on the ground. -Maybe fear will be enough...-

But there was no guarantee even that would work. -Maybe It'd be better to just kill the troublesome ones...-

However, as I looked over at Ilios, still proudly touting the superheated chunk of wood, my mind started to shift gears, turning back to face what I just experienced within my own mind. -Right...- Although I didn't have much time to think about it, and would have been better off leaving it for later and going to speak to Chrysi, I couldn't pull my mind off it.

It was a method of reading my aura that was on the eve of perfection, turning the environment around me into an infinite number of strings, without any of the fuzzy imperfections from electrons or space mana, while also translating things like particle energy states and stability to values my mind could more easily make use of.

The issue was.. I didn't know where it came from. It felt familiar, eerily similar to how I saw the world when in my soul form during dragon sleeps, but with some fundamental differences, and felt more like I had simply opened another eye rather than using some kind of technique.

But it felt too incomplete to be something instinctual, so at first, I simply assumed it was artificial.. something I pulled out of Nott's lingering memories...

But that was when I had a thought. -What if it isn't some special technique... What if the reason it feels incomplete isn't because it's artificial.. but because my mind would have really destroyed itself if it opened its eyes all the way...-

I paused before looking down at my paw. "What if I simply can't yet perceive the rest of it…"

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