Spellheart 9: Chapter 55 (Patreon)

I fought hundreds of battles, opposing the Cult of the Unblinking Eye and their agents at every turn. But the more I fought, the more the pressure increased. That same pressure fueled my cultivation, just as it once did when I was flesh and blood.

But at the same time, it was more than I could manage. I had barely survived those early days, and if I pushed through them again, I might not survive, even with the unique abilities of the cellphone.

They knew I had it now. They must have had some unique item or ability to detect the items humans so often arrived with.

No wonder they’d sent Tim for me when I was as strong as Issac was. The only difference between him and me was that my last-ditch ploy to survive had worked. His hadn’t.

Well, that, and I’d been lucky enough that Sam and Dean had taken over the nearby region instead of the Cult of the Unblinking Eye. That made me a little further away and harder to make trouble for.

Looking back, it would have been easy to imagine myself as Issac. The settlement he’d died in hadn’t been much larger than Queenshold. That could have been me in that granary, bleeding and dying as my former allies were executed one by one.

I knew now they likely weren’t done. Not with me, not with my flesh and blood self either. The Cult of the Unblinking Eye could not be bargained or reasoned with. They could only be fought and destroyed.

They might lie and smile, hiding a knife behind their backs all the while. With just a bit of power and influence, they’d infiltrate places of power and leave the formerly independent rulers drooling piles of mush, happy to do whatever the cult ordered.

But they were happy to take a more aggressive approach when they had more resources. I’d seen their agents wipe out entire villagers or cull a city’s population when it suited them.

They would come for The Wanderer again, just like they’d come for Issac’s phone.

I was still considering whether I should go back to talk to my former self when my precious new settlement in the hidden valley was attacked by surprise.

I had been on a Merit Point mission, only to find myself returning to a smoldering ruin. I crushed the remaining attackers.

“Sir...” an elf approached me, eyes to the ground. “We evacuated everyone we could into the dungeon entrance you showed us. Should we rebuild? What if they come for us again?”

The elf looked nervous as she spoke to me. That was one sad loss about being made of metal instead of flesh and blood. The elves never truly warmed up to me like they had in my past life. They couldn’t get over my cold and metallic appearance.

“No,” I replied. I still hadn’t mastered creating a voice box yet, so brief replies were all I could manage. I’d been waiting for the right materials to show up in the Merit Points shop but hadn’t had luck with that yet. Perhaps when they did, these elves would finally warm up to me.

“W-what should we do then?” the nervous elf asked.

“Hide. Wait.” My eyes turned toward the horizon. The valley had reminded me a lot of the Hearthwood, which was why I’d chosen it.

But it was no substitute for the real thing. My flesh and blood half had an entire forest he wasn’t using in the form of the Pocket World known as the Devilbeast Wilds. Perhaps I could use that. And... it might even give me a chance to check in on the people I’d left behind. I was starting to miss them.

***

Weeks passed.

Meeting my original self was... oddly disappointing.

I had expected to find someone who’d fought to protect those he loved and cared about. Someone who’d bled and nearly died again and again.

I'd thought he'd have left me far behind in cultivation and power and would be in a position to help me crush the Cult of the Unblinking Eye once and for all.

Instead, I found a decadent lord grown comfortable on his throne. He held lavish banquets for his guests, accepted tribute from the realms he’d conquered with power earned and bled for long ago, and spent every waking moment basking in the carnal pleasures of the flesh.

I felt like I should have been envious about that last part. After all, I couldn't take part in such activities even if I found a willing partner. I could probably fashion tools for the job, and perhaps soften the intimidating features of my golem frame. But it just didn't seem that important to me anymore. In fact, the peculiar mating rituals of organic beings just seemed so... messy. Perhaps now I finally knew how Mac felt.

But worse than letting his cultivation languish, worse than holding decadent feasts, and worse than destroying bed frame after bed frame through excessive use, was the fact that he was engaged in diplomacy.

Foreign guests from realms who'd gone to war with us came and went freely form his premises. He even allowed them to take hard-won treasures from his personal vault, giving them out as rewards!

And worst of all, he'd gone to the Cult of the Unblinking Eye to negotiate a truce with his enemies. That was like walking into a den of vipers to convince a cobra not to bite. Satyrs, Cultists, all of them were the same. All of them were enemies.

My fury grew the more I thought of it.

I had been fighting all this time while he’d been playing politics! Negotiating with enemies would lead nowhere. You had to become strong enough to crush them underfoot. Only then could you protect what you cherished. Why didn't he understand this?

I ended up fighting him before cutting a hole into the Devilbeast Wilds.

There, I did what he’d never been bold enough to do. I extracted all the power of the beasts within it for raw zeal to fuel my cultivation. It was bloody work, but with the Quantum Cultivation Assistant’s tips and abilities guiding me, I channeled all their power to one goal. Reaching the Demigod realm.

The Devilbeast Wilds didn’t cooperate with my goals. But it didn’t matter. I tore through each monster and titan one after another, extracting raw materials and refining my adamantium form as instructed by the QCA.

It wouldn't have been possible without buying a special manual on artificing from the shop. Combined with what I'd learned when I'd purchased the Drafter's Study from The Wanderer, I was able to push my enchantment knowledge to greater heights than anyone on this continent. Perhaps this world.

I carved that power into my adamantium bones, then crafted plates of bronze to go over them. I shaped veins throughout my body and filled them with quicksilver. Before long enchanted metal flowed through me as blood once did.

The process was brutal, and the pain was excruciating, but I’d lost two homes already. I needed power. Otherwise, I would lose a third. No amount of pain was too much to avoid that fate.

I almost didn’t notice when I finally broke through. The Concept of Strength came first. I was so focused on gaining overwhelming strength, I didn’t realize when the concept became one with my very being.

Shortly after that, I reached the Demigod realm with my body and spirit cultivation, uniting both and reaching new power levels. The world around me bent to my will, and finally, I felt the fear hanging over me since those first conflicts ebbed. Even if the Cult of the Unblinking Eye came for me now, I would be ready.

And one member of the Cult of the Unblinking Eye was far too close to home for comfort...

***

I forced myself free of my doppelganger memories. I knew what happened after that. There were more details to be had, filled with details I'd missed. I would need to review them many more times to understand the full scope of his short life.

He’d fought hard. And he’d never truly stopped fighting since that battle where I’d been ambushed and he was created. First, those elementals, then the Cult of the Unblinking Eye, then the Devilbeast Wilds, and finally, the Satyrs that ended up killing him for good.

It was a bloody legacy to leave behind, but I would make sure it was remembered.

“Mac?” I called.

[Theo, I sense your cultivation has not yet stabilized. You should focus on yourself.]

“There’s something I need you to do first. Find someone to head west. You’ll find a small valley surrounded by four peaks. There are some people living in a dungeon there. I need you to make sure the people there are okay. I have a promise to keep.”

[A promise? I’m confident you’ve never even explored in that direction.]

I shook my head. “I’ll explain it all later.”

[Very well. Consider it done.]

I closed my eyes and focused on stabilizing my cultivation. I returned to how my doppelganger had gained it in the first place.

No, to how I had gained it. He was as much a part of me as his power was now.

The memories reclaimed me, and soon, I was back within my mind and in the Devilbeast Wilds.

The earth was stained crimson with blood in all directions. Everywhere, I sensed snapping jaws and hungry maws. But none as hungry as my own.

My Pulse Cannon shot rays of destructive force, and I followed it up with the unyielding might of my arms or attacks of Earth and Iron.

Power beyond strength flowed through me as I made the Strength concept my own. Monsters ten thousand times my weight suddenly stopped dead in their tracks against the palm of my hand. They were often as surprised as I was that something the size of a human could wrestle them to the ground with brute muscle.

It made it so much easier to tear them apart.

I was a furnace, and bloodshed was my fuel. I was building to a great conflagration, and in that conflagration, I would be reborn.

Beyond my memories, I turned my attention back to my flesh and blood body. My original body. My real body.

The World Titan Fiendbody within my metal body shook and trembled, shifting and changing shape. I focused on directing the energy even as I fought against the monsters attacking me in wave after wave.

I shifted them just as I’d practiced time and time again. The web of energy in the Diamond realm was an order of magnitude more complex than ever before. Had I seen such an array of power back when I started using the World Titan Fiendbody, I wouldn’t have even been able to perceive the countless billions of tiny pathways running through my metal chassis.

Outside my mind and in the real world, I copied the pattern onto my flesh and blood body. I had done this before. I could do it again. I had to. Otherwise, the energy within me would be too great for me to control.

My body cultivation crossed that last threshold from Gold Bones to Diamond Skin. When made of adamantium, this power had formed a dense array of energy pathways between my metal bones to create something akin to flesh made of magic coating them.

In my flesh and blood, these same pathways wound through my flesh, enhancing it far beyond what should have been possible for mundane matter. The zeal flowing through me was so thick and strong within my body that even reality itself bent before my will.

I stood, just as I had in my memories, risen as a Demigod once more.

Power coursed through me, and my Spirit Cultivation was pushing its upper limits. My doppelganger hadn’t only reached the Demigod realm with Body Cultivation, after all.

But that was a gift I wanted to share. Besides, there was something I wanted to do first.

Now that my body was strong enough to contain the energy rampaging inside of it, I rose and left the Cultivation Chamber.

Every step felt like I was standing on clouds. The weight of supporting myself was so minuscule relative to my immense strength that I hardly felt like I was standing on anything at all.

The castle was still little more than ruins, so I walked off the exposed chunk of stone and landed on the ground six stories below. The fall would have been nothing much to me before, but I still would have landed with a thud.

Now I felt like I was falling in slow motion, and I touched the ground so softly that not even a blade of grass bent at my arrival.

I cast my mind to my destination, and suddenly, I was there. Before, the barrier between thought and action had been worn thin. Now, it wasn’t there at all. As soon as I decided to take action, it was done.

I arrived beneath the twin where my other self had abandoned his old physical vessel. There was something of mine tucked away in there and hidden from view.

I reached into the metal skull, drawing something out from behind the upper jaws. The cellphone. This device had been no small part of why he’d grown so strong despite not having access to something like The Wanderer.

I was eager to get my hands on it. Or keep my hands on it, depending on how I thought of myself at any moment. Once the phone was in hand, I turned my attention to the body of my doppelganger. My body, once upon a time.

I’d put a lot of work into it. The enchanted adamantium it was made from was enough to buy a duchy in the Deanian Queendom. Or conquer several nations like it.

While my spirit cultivation couldn’t be retrieved, my body cultivation could be. That meant someone good at animating corpses, like a necromancer, might create a Demigod-level body cultivator to fight for them. That was enough to reshape the power dynamics of an entire world.

But I had nothing so crude in mind. I summoned my Jade Armor from the tattoo on my chest. The armor wasn’t too useful these days as it had fallen behind my body cultivation. But I suspected that was about to change.

“Absorb,” I commanded, and the jade armor washed over the adamantium skeleton like water, coating it entirely and then sucking it right back up into my arm. I sensed I could summon it back at a moment’s notice. I did so quickly as a test, feeling it activating but not seeing any armor over my skin. Then I turned my attention inward.

Ah, it had coated my bones instead of my skin. An interesting choice, but potentially a more useful one. I’d grown comfortable fighting without armor, and the channels my previous self carved in his frame remained active. That meant I had, in a single stroke, doubled the number of channels running through my body. In other words, I’d be twice as powerful as the average Diamond Skin World Titan Fiendbody body cultivator.

I left it as it was, then turned my attention to the device. The screen booted back to life at my touch and displayed the QCA interface.

Apparently, the QCA was as confused as I was at my touch, and it quickly cycled through a few new values before settling on a single prompt.

Welcome to Quantum Cultivation Assistant!

• Extensive changes to the user’s base form and stats identified! Now updating interface!
• Race: Human

Note: Due to your race change, certain dialogue options have been rendered obsolete. You now have access to the standard human interface.

I had expected the device to recognize me, and the changes weren’t out of the ordinary. Instead of displaying information about my durability and talking about repairs, the interface spoke of health points and wounds.

I hadn’t expected a notification from The Wanderer after activating the cellphone.

Compatible artifact detected!

This artifact, the QCA, is compatible with The Wanderer’s systems.

Combine the artifact with The Wanderer to enhance the abilities and features of both systems!

Add the QCA to The Wanderer? Yes/No

“Interesting... but no. I can’t risk losing something like this, and there’s no telling if combining it with The Wanderer will allow it to keep all its features...” I dismissed the prompt, only to have it reappear, this time with no option to select no.

Compatible artifact detected!

Add the QCA to The Wanderer? Yes/Yes

“Mac!” I yelled.