novelraw Chapter 279 - 272 - Boundaries
Chapter 279 - 272 - Boundaries
"Break."
The moment that word left Cira's mouth, a sound like grinding glass along with painful cracking echoed through the world of blood before a massive pillar of light the width of a house appeared. Like flipping a switch, this massive, blinding column simply existed.
Space began to warp and twist violently until a small tear appeared just in front of Cira. She stepped through onto a stone floor while blood surged past her as if she were truly stepping out of a hole in the ocean floor. That wasn't too far off when she thought about it.
To put it simply, Cira was pissed. She appreciated the lesson, as she had gained much through this experience, but that did not excuse the brief torment she went through in that realm. The utter defeat and grievous life-threatening wounds were all too real, so Cira had to pay the blood mage back in kind.
Prismagora was leading the way while her orichalcum staff appeared point-first into the real world.
"Few have trapped me, but all who—" Cira's voice died down sharply as she took in her surroundings upon taking a second step through the spatial tear.
This was the very same training hall in which she attended lessons with Emma, but now thirty some-odd youths ran screaming toward the door, fleeing the sudden tidal wave of blood. Meanwhile, Lilith was on the ground in two pieces, having been rent apart by the spatial tear's appearance.
Roman could be found cursing and frantically waving his staff toward that very same tear. He cast a look of disbelief between Cira and Lilith before settling on the Latter, "What have you done?"
Cira was glad to not be immediately blamed for this mishap and glanced down at Lilith who had already reformed her head on one side. Her eyes were full of shock, "Y-you weren't supposed to figure it out so soon."
In response, Cira only chuckled, "Well… I best be getting to the Archive now."
She was gone in a flash of black lightning.
As Roman was a proficient space mage, and Lilith seemed rather resilient, Cira had no trouble making this decision. Despite her thirst for vengeance, seeing Lilith's sorry state mostly satisfied that desire. More importantly, Cira really did not want to deal with Fitzgeralt or any of the other arbiters showing up, so it was nice to have justification here.
In the same moment as the void lightning cleared from the training hall, the same happened on a particular islet to reveal Cira. She now stood in front of an ominous looking door and placed her hand on it.
Within the blink of an eye, Cira was surrounded by books. She couldn't help but let a smile creep onto her face. She missed that smell of old pages and basked in it for a brief moment.
The first room she encountered was oddly reminiscent of the village, as if the Archive wanted to remind her that her place in this strange realm was deliberate. It was the same as the interior of one of the huts she used to meander in, floor to ceiling entirely covered in books.
Cira closed her eyes. Next, she snatched a dusty tome out of the ceiling with a short hop. Wearing a surprised grin, she inspected the cover.
The Sorcerer's Compendium, Volume One
"Ha! Fine then." Cira jumped back to sit on the bookcase dividing this room. Ignoring the various hallways leading deeper into the Archive, she laid back and picked up where she left off in the Village.
Chapter Two… How the Sky Defeated Me.
Cira read on through the morning or afternoon—whichever it was. Her father's second chapter spoke of the unexpected and foreign challenges he often encountered on his lonesome path through the sky after attaining freedom from his homeland.
In truth, it was a boy running away from home, and he found out shortly thereafter that the open sky was oppressing in other ways to such a weak and foolhardy individual.
The rest of the first volume was comprised of his various experiences throughout the first several decades of his life. His rise to moderate power and understanding of the world.
Having gained much experience since the last time she gave it a real good read, Cira saw this volume in a new light. Instead of reading through the tome like a collection of stories, Cira could truly put herself in her father's shoes. All the inner musings and delicate turmoil Gazen experienced through many years as a traveling sorcerer stirred her heart in a way it hadn't just a few years ago.
Cira knew now the weight of her actions, and had at least an inkling of the gravity of her own existence. There were forces in these skies greater than herself, and no matter how strong she thought she was after reforging her soul and receiving a piece of Io's mana inheritance, Cira was hardly more robust than a leaf in the wind.
If she let herself forget that, she could meet a terrible fate—an early fate.
Cira found new respect in her father's thoughts. She always thought he was a little eccentric, but it had made increasingly more sense why over the years.
Wait… I'm still mad at him for keeping all those secrets from me.
Cira finished the book and popped it right back into the ceiling with another hop. After taking note of how the surrounding passages had all shifted over the last while, Cira began to consider her next course of action.
It stood for reason she couldn't directly search for what she wanted to know. This was the Archive after all. It possessed power to lead her directly to what it wanted her to know, but that wasn't what she desired. That is, unless her destination aligned with the Archive's. It was an ambiguous being that she just couldn't figure out, however.
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As the wheels began to turn in her head, there was a strange tingling sensation coming from her aura, and it started to burn, as if trying to escape. Naturally that wasn't allowed, but Cira yielded a little until a small purple wisp of mana emerged from her chest before floating just in front of her. The wisp slowly bobbed up and down, leaving hazy afterimages in its wake.
This was none other than the Archive's mana which she had assimilated during the second trial.
"Now this is interesting…" It felt that this little tuft of mana wanted to pull her in a certain direction, but it couldn't stray too far. She eased her control on it just a little more and the wisp suddenly drifted to her right. With a slight chuckle, Cira decided to follow it straight through a doorway into a hall not so different from the last room of books.
This could indeed be the Archive leading her by the nose, but it was also a chance to glean its intentions. Depending on the next book she found, it might be worth playing along for a time.
On the other hand, it could be this new mana possessed the power to guide her to what she wanted to find within this strange realm. After all, the Archive could just shift the space around Cira at will until she reached a desired location.
Surprisingly, this hallway extended quite far, and Cira found herself walking for over three hours at a slight decline. Meanwhile, the books on the walls were beginning to grow sparse, and the ceiling was now bare stone.
Cira thought this would never end until she spotted a wall ahead. She was going to be supremely upset if she had to turn around after all this, but it appeared her little wisp had slowed down as well, contracting closer to her body as they approached the end. Ten feet before reaching that final bookcase, the wisp stopped and hovered around the top of the closest bookcase on her right.
There was only one book on the upper shelves, and it was bound in dark leather in a shade reminiscent of a woefully familiar sky.
Cira plucked it out and gave the cover a glance. In bold white letters it read, "The Primordial Genocide: A Gathering of Thruths from the Four Domains of Yon".
This left Cira both confused and mildly disappointed. Cira had already learned of the primordial genocide on a few different occasions, and also this was the first she had ever heard of the 'Four Domains' of Yon. Perhaps the kingdom that nameless second mark hailed from was in fact in charge of four domains, but she didn't know how that translated to skies.
Regardless, the Archive or perhaps her wisp alone had led her here, and that meant it was worth looking into.
At first Cira remained calm but her brow gradually furrowed as she continuously turned the brittle pages.
Much of what she found lined up with what she learned from Eliza. Kazali was certainly responsible, and he indeed wiped out most of all life in the skies, including other primordial demons like himself. This book went into a little further detail about what he actually did to cause all this death.
Cira knew that Kazali caused the leylines to swell and engulf a great deal of the sky, and thus acquired the power of primordial law from his kin, but the how and why had always evaded Cira.
It was the how which truly caused her blood to grow cold. Over countless years of preparation, Kazali enchanted the very aether itself. Cira shuddered as she read through the text. Moving islands from all over and installing them as formation cores at key points where leylines intersected, Kazali in effect cast his influence across this world's aether as a whole.
Yon scholars posited that despite the complexity and scale of his enchantments, both of these qualities paled in comparison to that of the actual aether. Thus, he was only able to manifest enough power for a single burst.
A single aetherial burst which nearly caused the total extinction of life.
Cira did not feel this was much of a silver lining, and neither did the scholars of Yon.
The primordial genocide was merely the first phase of Kazali's plan.
As a whole, these scholars couldn't settle on whether that demon wanted to simply control the skies as its new god or destroy it entirely, but they came up with a few working theories as to how he could accomplish either.
Primordial law was of course the crux of this effort. However, it was well known that no primordial demon, which the scholars of Yon referred to simply as "law spirits", could innately wield more than one law. It came as no question to anyone that he would attempt to do such a thing, but the methods were open to interpretation.
Cira sighed.
Unfortunately, this was where she came in.
By the Yon scholars' best estimates and even the opinions of a few surviving law spirits, Kazali's only course of action was to create an artificial law spirit comprised of the essence of many others.
This new being would no longer possess the power of those laws, which would naturally reform into their base stone-tablet forms to randomly appear in different places across the sky one day. If Kazali's disastrous gamble failed, that would be the end of it.
However, if he and the other law spirits in Yon were correct in their calculations, an altogether new law would be born, and this new being would possess the aptitude to assimilate any other primordial law in this world.
This all weighed quite heavily on Cira, and her frown only deepened upon reading the last passage.
"The completion of Kazali's vessel shall be marked by the conflagration of myriad fates."
Cira held out her palm and a brilliant burst of rainbow flames emerged. The radiant fire curled and shifted colors seemingly without notice but also without end. She had often referred to it as the myriad flame, or the all-flame as of late.
The conflagration of myriad fates, huh?
It certainly fit the bill, and with all the other clues building up, Cira felt she could confirm in her heart that her purpose in life truly was to serve as Kazali's vessel. Not only that, but the time was officially nigh.
She could only let out a derisive chuckle. She had basically pieced it together at this point, but it came as some small relief that not even the scholars of Yon could account for Gazen appearing out of the blue and snatching her away.
Those scholars were no slouches either. Not only did they have multiple law-spirit guest-scholars, but they employed mages skilled in divination to acquire all the knowledge and theories poured into this book. She could only imagine it was the most complete study of the primordial genocide out there, and the Archive clearly valued it given the long walk she had to take to get here and the state of disrepair this dead-end was in. This was blatantly a place the Archive kept people away from.
Just then, Cira noticed the little purple wisp oddly close to her myriad flame, and she quickly snuffed it out.
"Hey! Is that what this is?" Cira gave the wisp a disapproving glare, "You just want to see my curse, huh?"
In response, the wisp only looked at her, remaining completely still. In moments though, Cira could hear the fluttering of pages in the distance. It didn't take long before bookcases started to disappear to reveal a boundless darkness beyond, rapidly approaching her from down the hall.
"Tch." Cira held out a finger and enclosed the little wisp of mana in a small orb of light which she grasped in her palm, "I can expel all of this mana in my body right now if I wanted to."
Suddenly the ruffling stopped, and the remaining bookcases showed no signs of vanishing, leaving a few still left before the effect reached her. More importantly, that dark leather book still existed in her hand.
"Good." Cira released the wisp from her hand but did not dispel the barrier of light, "It appears we are going to have to set some boundaries sooner rather than later."