Sacrifice Mage

Chapter 249 (B3: 76): Constellation

Time didn’t quite unfreeze at the sudden completion of my Path Evolution, but it certainly wavered.Energy, white and gold and burning red, cracked across my body. Through the peripherals of my immobile eyes, I noted the fractures spreading across my skin, bleeding virulent power.

The mana cores within me broke free from the shackles of entrapped time. Now, they didn’t just spin. They . I could feel them not just touching, but overlapping with each other, pushing past and each other. Right. Why would ethereal constructs like mana cores ever need to obey the limits of physical space-time?

My soul was now afire too. Growing, cracking, melting and reforming, annealing into a new form that radiated with no less intensity than the deformed part-god I had been seeking to Sacrifice.

It was a good thing time was frozen, then. I wanted to scream. I wanted to claw my fingers into every fissure popping up on my skin and close them with my bare fingers before I bled out all of my vitality. Obviously, I did nothing of the sort because I was forced into stillness by the true appearance of a god.

, the voice said..

If there had been any difficulty believing I was conversing with a god, that all evaporated when the effects of my little chat combined with the sensations of my Path Evolution. Despite time being frozen over, every syllable I understood from this otherworldly being was breaking a piece of me. Every word drove a burning spark that hollowed out my spirit and my body.

Every moment I remained in his presence, I could feel that same, panicky sensation again. The one that made me feel like my soul was about to blow up and blow of the body that caged it in.

And yet, I didn’t dare think about severing the connection.

I tried to moor myself into the present by recalling that there was another Sacrifice reward I hadn’t seen yet. Something about ranking up a new Aspect. So where was it?

Eventually, after the energy had run its course, I could manage to project my thoughts again. I desperately wanted to see—to properly —the effects of my new Path. But I’d have to wait, clearly.

. I couldn’t help but feel incredulous. If this was Arl, if this was the actual sun god I was speaking to and not some weird hallucination or trick…

I remained silent. The god was right. I did know why. The little outburst had been unbecomingly emotional. I couldn’t help it, even though I knew this ritual that the Vaunted had performed had created a link that nothing our little prayers and offerings could hope to match.

It was just weirdly frustrating. I was the cultist here. We had dedicated ourselves to Arl, the sun god, for as long as I could remember.

Sure, Arl wasn’t incorrect in calling me a disbelieving devotee. I really had never believed that a Banished God could be… un-banished. I had been sure that the Vaunted’s ritual, no matter how powerful and groundbreaking, would still fail in its ultimate goal. And it had.

Until now.

Arl said.

I swallowed. …

.

I wanted to say that I wasn’t emulating anyone. That I was on my own Path, which had been shaped by a combination of my efforts and my circumstances, and even if it appeared to lead to the same kind of existence as this god I was speaking with, then he was just mistaken. My destiny was mine to carve. No matter who or what I emulated them.

But still. I couldn’t just let this go. I was speaking with a literal god for crying out loud, probably the first person to do so in who knew how long. …

, the voice assured. .

I couldn’t help it. Since this was an opportunity I didn’t know if I’d ever get again, my thoughts just spilled out like upending a glass of water.

Damn god interrupted me before I was done.

Time was melting back into reality again, slowly starting to flow once more. It was like seeing everything stuck in cryostasis slowly come back to life. Including my own body.

… I really wanted to shake my head, then, but it didn’t happen. I wasn’t free yet..

…

I didn’t need to think. Faith was an integral part of my daily life. I had faith in myself, in my friends, in everything I had worked towards. …

Because I had suspected something like Path of the Prophet or something along those lines, maybe with an added modifier to make it special, like how Auric Hierophant was different from Hierophant.

But I had skipped that stage. I had gone from just another cultist, a follower of my god, to the literal incarnation of the deity in some sense.

It made me wonder about the consequences. Se-Vigilance had warned that I’d be facing trouble if I stuck to the Path I was on, if the hints of godhood I’d been receiving for months on end materialized into actual deification. That was exactly what had happened. I was a godly being incarnate, if I took my Path’s name literally.

Which was bad because there was a Paragon outside of this frozen time who clearly had a thing against any sort of divine manifestation, fake or otherwise. It fake any longer if I came out with my new Path. He’d start targeting me the instant he noticed the newfound power fountaining out of my spirit.

, Arl said. .

Beyond the Weave… I tried using my Ascension Charge on my evolved Path. I was supposed to be able to do that. Every new Weave-property I received was capable of being ascended, as I had discovered. But this time, my Path didn’t accept it. My Ascension Charge just wouldn’t work on a Path that had been influenced by a god directly.

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But Path with “Incarnation” in the title wasn’t without concerns, however.

I said.

Arl didn’t answer me immediately, which didn’t help my current concerns.

the god said.

Those were the last words I heard. Influence. I’d have to see what that resulted in. At the very least, it was reassuring to hear I could influence Arl back in turn. If it was true.

But true power did have a very nice ring to it. It just would have been nicer if I had received something more specific to go off of. As it was, as time flowed again like it was supposed to, the world slammed back into me.

I screamed, the pent-up agony that time had frozen now ricocheting through my mind, body, and soul all at once. Every single ability I had tried to help bear it. Reverence Everlife trying to instil a sense of calm, Mana Heal trying to find external mana to patch up my wounds, and so on.

But this wasn’t the pain of injuries. This wasn’t a torturous wound I needed to heal. This was a part of me now.

I now had a power burning like nothing else I had experienced before. There was a constant melding and overlapping of my cores that fed the strange divine wildfire that my new Path had given birth to within my spirit.

Through tear-blurred eyes, I managed to look down at myself only to see that the cracks and fissures from earlier were papering over slowly but surely. I was bloodied, but even the blood itself was vaporizing away. My body wasn’t broken so much as reforming and reintegrating to accept the new fundamentality of my transcending existence. Shit. I becoming a god for real?

I could feel the fountaining divinity frothing within me like something alive. Like it wanted of me, as though my body was still nothing more than a cage keeping it trapped.

There was something about my newfound divinity that I hadn’t fully grasped. A piece of my now boundless potential that I hadn’t yet actualized. . How would I even begin to be something like that? How could I direct the erupting power inside me in that direction?

The rest of the world soon called on my attention.

Time had frozen so everything that should have happened while I had been stuck… hadn’t. Instead, I was just in time to observe just how the Vaunted was stopping the Paragon.

Strangely enough, with the help of Paragon.

I could only stare as a warp deformed space itself to create a black, spatial rent. Shubratha stepped out from within its depths.

“You!” The first Paragon, the one with the twisting and contorting blue tattoos, seemed to be trembling. “Why are you associating with these Wait, no, don’t answer that. I should have known from the beginning you’d interfere. First, you summon that behind me. Now you’re directly helping these upstarts? Have you forgotten who you are?”

“Enough, Shik’shikan,” he said.

He almost sounded weary. Almost sounded like I could empathize with him, except for the very real fact that he had brought me to Ephemeroth against my will.

“Enough?” Shik’shikan said, shaking his head incredulously. “This is our . You can’t just quit after saying enough.”

“The children of this world need to be allowed to make of it what they will. I am tired and no longer willing to continue the work of those who’ve left us behind .”

Shik’shikan seemed to be literally shaking where he floated. When he spoke again, something changed, though I couldn’t pick up on it at first. “A thousand years. That’s how long we’ve worked to keep this. That’s how long we’ve maintained this world in the equilibrium it needs to hold. And now, you’re willing to throw it all away at a whim?”

“Allow me to ask you this—when is it appropriate for one to abandon a futile effort?”

“It isn’t futile! We have the power—”

“ have it, for now. How many of us have fallen by the wayside over the decades and centuries? How many have died, disappeared, Do you even know, Shik’shikan?”

The blue tattoos on his body looked like they were about to come alive and attack the other Paragon. “I don’t need to concern myself with . When you have power, you hold on to it. When you have power, you have responsibilities you shirk. Isn’t that right, godling?”

I stared at him. Why in the Pits was he asking “I agree that power begets responsibility—”

“See!”

“—but I’m with the gangster wizard here.”

Shubratha stared at me. “The now?”

“You cannot be serious, godling.” Shik’shikan turned his glare to me. “I’m literally letting you live despite you violating everything I’m sworn to stop. And you to take a stand against the truth this world has upheld for over a millennium?”

“The truth doesn’t have to be something set in stone. What was true once can become untrue pretty easily as things change. And things have changed. You’ve said it yourself—it’s been a years. Do you really think you can stop the flow of time forever?”

“”

I gritted my teeth. The other Paragon’s appearance had made the situation even more precarious.

But then, Shubratha floated forward. “Perhaps we would do well to discuss matters without prying ears and eyes.”

I thought he meant all of us for a second, but no, his eyes were fixed entirely on Shik’shikan. The tattooed Paragon had stiffened, now looking at his counterpart with growing wariness. I didn’t blame him one bit.

“What—”

Space warped. Monochrome mana spiralled faster than my eyes could properly see them, before my brain could realize that Shubratha was casting his Aspect. It humbled me a bit that even a fellow Paragon wasn’t fast enough to react to that. Unless Shik’shikan was it to happen.

But as the world twisted around the Paragons, as the Aspect I had seen Cerea use so often now manifested with far greater potency than I was aware of, I found myself just listening for a second.

“Don’t break the world,” Shubratha said. “Like we did.”

A strange silence descended on us now that the Paragons were just gone. The Vaunted and I floated in opposite ends of this broken, shattering realm that was a facsimile of the Beyond.

I couldn’t really pick out what I felt just then. Too many emotions were calling to me at once. The continuous surge of transforming power, the weirdness of not just seeing two all-powerful beings argue but to also feel tainted at how I had been brought to Ephemeroth by the same person who was supporting this mad Vaunted’s plan.

“You’re looking triumphant,” I said. “For someone whose god was just Sacrificed away.”

She shook her head in smirking denial. “You’re still under the assumption that what you’ve done has actually stopped this.”

“It has. And when I stop you for good, it’s going to end once and for all.”

“Ha! Stop me?” She raised her hand in a challenging gesture. “Then let us end this. The world crumbles around us. There exists nothing of significance beyond this… Beyond.”

I shook my head. “As if. You’ve been in a corner from the very beginning. Your plan is crackpot. Your whole schtick is performing some crazy ritual to summon a reflection of a god, nothing more. And when that failed, then what?”

“I would—”

“You would do . You’d be stopped before you could take your stupidity too far outside this little pocket dimension of yours. Zairgon is a lot stronger and more resilient than you give it credit. Whatever powers you’ve got, you think it’s enough to stop a Councillor? Don’t make me laugh. It’s not even enough to stop me!”

She had looked pissed off that I had interrupted her. Now, after telling her that she was no match for me, the Vaunted was positively apoplectic.

“When I kill you,” she said with vicious relish. “I’ll be sure to make you choke on every filthy sound your Pits-cursed mouth has made till now. You’re all talk and true power whatsoever. And I’ll prove it by crushing you to dust.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. My Path Evolution was still making my spirit go haywire. Now that I was back and time was flowing normally again, I found the skin of my arm turning into burning gold, the crackle of energy making me feel like I could reconstruct this whole other world I had just destroyed with Sacrifice.

But that wasn’t what this power was for. Divine Incarnation. If I had really talked with Arl, if a god had touched my soul to complete my Path Evolution somehow, then I knew that all I really needed to do was impose my will on the boundless energy I had been granted.

I needed to emulate the power I knew was growing within me, an endless engine of potential forcing out the eternity of a shining star.

I breathed in a hard mix of air and the collapsing energy of the Beyond. Constellation. Divine Incarnation. Gods and Ascendants and Paragons. It all built a very clear picture of what I needed from my newest Aspect. It gave me a very good idea of what it was capable of.

There was still an Ascension Charge left, but I wasn’t using it just yet. Even if I had gained an Aspect, there was one thing left. I still needed a proper Affix to control my newest Aspect.

Good thing I knew what it was I required.