Low-Fantasy Occultist

Chapter 388

Understanding was not always enough to solve a problem, but it remained a key part of the process. By reaching Binah, Nick was expanding his soul enough to broaden his inner conceptual space, and he could finally See what the Greater Ritual was doing without it burning his metaphysical sight.

It once might have been the structure fueling the healer’s ascension, but it was obviously corrupted from within. The knowledge he must have received from the god had to have been contaminated.

He felt stretched, as he had already pushed himself too far just by uncovering what was really happening, but that same knowledge told him he couldn’t stop. Not now, since he was finally aware of the shape of the trap.

Especially because the Guardian had become aware of his presence, and soon enough, Nick became the sole target of his wrath.

A crushing force pressed down on him. It was the demand of a higher being insisting that Nick cease to exist. It was the ocean telling the drop to dissolve and become one with the infinite.

Nick’s mental barriers quaked. The Tree of Life he had carefully nurtured trembled, its roots in Malkuth quaking as the foundation of his self began to crumble beneath the divine's gaze.

“He is drowning you in the Abyss," the voice of his grandfather murmured, sounding less like a memory and more like a presence standing at his shoulder, smelling of stale pipe smoke. “He attempts to force the infinite into the finite, as is the folly of the Black Brothers. They do not understand that to hoard the light is to burn.”

How do I stop it? Nick screamed internally, watching layers of his Self peel away like dead skin.

“You know what you need to do. It’s too late to turn back now. With Understanding comes Wisdom. Learn this lesson, boy. Study your enemy.”

Taking another Step so quickly was far from what was advised, and Nick struggled to even consider the possibility. But then again, his grandfather’s voice was right. He was in too deep; he needed to fully commit, or everything would be in vain.

“What is the lesson, boy? Look at the wolf. Why is he in pain?”

And so Nick looked and saw beyond the Guardian’s wrath. He saw the cracks spreading in his self, too deep to be hidden in the soul space, from where the divine was pouring into the flesh.

Considering that the Guardian was a Prestige being, he had much more resilience than Nick ever could and was far closer to gods than mere mortals. Still, it didn’t seem to be enough.

He’s trying to harness power to keep a part of himself as he becomes the God’s avatar, Nick realized. Maybe it’s what’s left of the healer, who refuses to fully submit, or maybe it’s just a flaw that all life shares, to fight against death and assimilation.

The outcome was unchanged. Just as the Guardian was welcoming its patron, it was resisting, and that would have to be enough for him.

“Precisely,” his grandfather hissed. “Do not fight the raging river. Be the bed in which it flows. Every man and every woman is a star, distinct and sovereign, and you happen to have something that will lend you the strength to withstand its passage. Let the World answer Him.”

Despite how insane and counterintuitive it was, Nick knew he couldn’t hold on much longer anyway, so he trusted the voice and let go.

He stopped reinforcing his shields and trying to hold onto his individuality against the overwhelming violet weight. Instead, he opened the floodgates of his soul and reached down, beyond his reserves and the dungeon, anchoring himself into the very ley lines of the planet.

As above, so is below!

If the Feral God was the Above, pushing down, Nick would become the conduit for the Below to push back.

Becoming one with the World’s power to fight back against an unnatural threat was a familiar feeling, something he’d cultivated over the past months to face demons, and the idea was the same here.

Where his first attempts had seen him struggle to contain the power, however, this time he experienced something different. The World had no intention of fighting his control, given how open his soul was to it, and with that came a level of cohesion between them that he couldn’t have imagined before.

Violet lightning, the Guardian’s wrath in physical form, struck him, but instead of destroying him, it grounded. It moved through him, along the structure of his Tree, and faded into the earth.

Chokmah, Nick thought as the gray sphere of Wisdom lit up on his internal diagram. Is this Wisdom, realizing I am not the source, but only the channel?

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The Guardian roared fiercely, even as confusion spread through its aura. It pushed harder, gathering enough power to destroy a city, but Nick was now part of the natural order. He was operating under different rules, and raw strength alone wouldn’t be enough to close the gap.

However, as it became clear that he was quickly adapting and becoming stronger thanks to the new step he was taking, the entity behind the Guardian noticed and turned its terrifying glare upon him.

The Mindscape vanished, and Nick was no longer in the Well or in the dungeon. He found himself in a sprawling, ancient forest of white ash under black skies.

A single, black wolf stood in front of him. It wasn’t particularly big, nor did it have threatening features that would set it apart from any other normal wolf, but Nick could tell it was anything but ordinary.

The shape it had chosen was simply what his brain could perceive it as. In truth, this being was an amalgam of concepts, ranging from the logic of the hunt to the iron smell of blood and the alien intelligence of a pack moving together as one.

It opened its maw, and a burst of impulses came out, bypassing Nick’s language centers to hit his lizard brain directly, flooding his mind with images.

He saw himself at the top of the Tower, with Archmage Tholm kneeling before him, his head bowed in supplication. He saw House Hone burning, the Archmage who had tormented him hanging from the ramparts, lifeless. He saw the nobles who had sneered at him, the clergymen who wanted to shackle him, all torn apart by his will.

“They play games with your life,” the presence whispered, a thousand growls harmonizing into a seductive hiss. “They would wield you like a pawn. But why be the piece when you can be the player who stands above them? Take the Well. Ascend. Rule.”

It was tempting. God, it was tempting. It resonated with every dark thought Nick had ever nursed in the lonely hours of the night. It offered the ultimate security: the power to never be hurt again and the chance to satisfy his curiosity about the secrets of the universe.

His resolve flickered, and the Tree of Life trembled, shaken more than they had been against the raw onslaught of power he’d endured before.

“I am numb

With the lonely lust of devildom.

Thrust the sword through the galling fetter,

All-devourer, all-begetter;

Give me the sign of the Open Eye,

And the token erect of thorny thigh,

And the word of madness and mystery!”

His grandfather’s voice boomed, crashing like thunder and overwhelming the growls. “Io Pan! Io Pan! Don’t focus on the shadows on the wall, Nicholas. Look at the Light!”

“The temptation is Kether’s shadow,” he warned. “To think you are the Crown is a trap. The true Crown is not dominion. It is the Light that shines from Nothing.”

Nick’s mind snapped out of its fugue as he felt the next step approaching. Kether, the Crown and the Point of Origin, was not something he could undertake without complete determination.

In the Kabbalah, Kether was the highest sephira, so close to the divine that it was called Ayin, the Nothing. It represented pure compassion because it contained everything, and therefore judged nothing. It was the dissolution of the Ego.

Taking God’s offer was to inflate the Ego until it burst. Achieving Kether was to completely reject the self for the sake of balance.

“I am not a King,” Nick whispered to the alien sky. “And yet I am not your pawn.”

Now that he was back in control, the images of power the God was showing him were no longer as tempting. Sure, he couldn’t deny a desire to ruin his enemies, but they came with heavy chains, and if there was one thing that defined Nicholas Crowley, it was that he was a free man, that he bowed to no one.

Rejecting the offer was the easiest thing he’d ever done. He chose the World. He chose the muddy, messy, painful reality of his friends fighting in the temple, of the imperfect system, of the struggle. He chose Humility.

A blinding white light burst forth from the core of Nick’s being. It wasn't the violet of the dungeon, nor the iridescence of the system. It was the colorless brilliance of the Ain Soph Aur, the Limitless Light, the self-contained contentment that God was said to have possessed before creation, which could only be achieved through true self-determination.

It shot upward, piercing the dark sky of the God’s domain. As the light connected the Crown to the Kingdom, a final path opened—one not on standard diagrams but a bridge across the Abyss separating the divine from the mortal.

Da’at, the Knowledge. The invisible Sephira, also called the shadow step, was often not depicted in the Kabbalah; it lingered in the roots, and only now did its time come.

Nick came full circle. He was just as mortal as before, still far from reaching Prestige, but he had been powerful enough to reject a God in its domain. He embodied the sanctity of the self and the limitless ambition of mortals simultaneously.

“The Rose,” his grandfather whispered, fading now, his work done. “Look upon the Cross.”

Nick did, feeling oddly like he already knew what he would find.

At the core of the Tree of Life that now filled much of his soul was a bone-white cross that had been drained of all its power, having fulfilled its purpose in fueling and guiding his growth during one of the greatest works of Thelemic magic.

It was, for all intents and purposes, dead, a simple piece of wood meant for decoration. Yet Nick could sense the symbolic meaning it held, even as his heart wept for what he was about to do.

He plucked it out of its resting nook, feeling the Tree give way easily, then turned back to the wolf god, whose presence had drifted farther since his growth, but still remained threatening enough to require action.

Without allowing himself any hesitation, Nick channeled the World through the Cross, feeling it creak under the strain, and threw it at the God.

The alien intelligence howled as the remnants of a world that now existed only in memory ignited, blossoming into a majestic flower that overwhelmed it, pushing it out of the liminal space they occupied.

It was the end of the last thing Nick had from his past life, the only symbol he’d been able to find that showed Earth had truly existed, but just as he’d learned to ignore temptation, he was now wise enough not to cling to such anchors of the past.

He would never know if its presence was just a cosmic coincidence, a result of someone else on Earth crossing into this world, or other, more far-fetched possibilities.

But the fact remained that holding onto it after it had fulfilled its duty would have been as foolish as believing the god’s promises.

FEAT ACCOMPLISHED!

Soul Crystallization has been achieved. The Tree of Life has grown to Maturity.

Your path has been altered.

+2,500,000 Exp

+5 to all base stats

Level up!

Nick blinked and found himself back in the real world. The Well was still releasing huge amounts of power into the air, though it was now inert, as the edges of the Greater Ritual crumbled apart.

The smell of blood was so strong it made him double-check he hadn’t been hit while his mind was elsewhere.

Fortunately, that didn’t seem to be the case, though the same couldn't be said for House Hone’s soldiers, who lay sprawled across the floor, torn apart by the Guardian’s claws.

“YoU!” A voice boomed, and Nick looked up, surprised to see that the werewolf was still alive.

Though that might have been an overstatement. The cracks he observed in the soul space had manifested in the material world, with violet light spilling from them, indicating that the wolf wasn’t long for this world.

Still, one last thing needed to be done before he could declare victory. The Greater Ritual had to be suppressed before it could collapse into a cascade failure.

“Me,” Nick said, grabbing the threads of the ritual, which were now tied to his own crystallized soul, and he pulled.