Chapter 367. Black Rock Avatar (Patreon)

Watching Ian at work was at once a bit terrifying and engrossing, especially since Maria could see vital energy after becoming a lich. Even if she couldn’t manipulate it herself, she could see how Ian imbued the mannequins with Death energy.

Ian had been a practitioner for over ten years now, from his relative perspective of time. That was a little less than a third of his life. Watching him, it was hard to imagine that he’d ever been anything but a master of Death.

The way he pored over the mannequins, freezing in unnaturally awkward positions sometimes for minutes or even hours at a time, was simply inhuman. People moved. They fidgeted. They breathed. They needed to take breaks.

Ian just... didn’t. He hadn’t needed to for a long time, not since achieving Death 99% affinity, though he had clung to those habits, slowly shedding them over the years. Even under the tutelage of Ancient Ash, he had held onto some human habits, mostly in his desire for downtime. With his budding Beginning affinity, it was increasingly unnecessary for him to take even mental breaks.

Maria had seen Ian’s loop footage, and she’d even experienced life with him in her own loop, during her last ditch effort to defend against his incursion into Selejo during the war and train up her nascent fire elementalism. She’d literally seen every part of Ian’s journey from powerless mortal to the man he was now.

She knew there had to be others who had experienced similarly remarkable metamorphoses. Eternity was nearly infinite, and across all ages... they had to exist.

That didn’t make Ian less extraordinary.

Maria walked over and peered over Ian’s shoulder. He was stone still as he sat next to the mannequin. He didn’t need to move when he was performing necromancy, not that she could see it. Only when she shared Ian’s vision could she see souls, for instance.

“Maria,” he suddenly said, his dark, chiseled face turning her way. He grabbed the Blade of Revelation from where he’s set it on the floor. “I think it’s time to start the final step.” With that, he stood and took a few steps back, beholding the twelve mannequins. Markings covered their exteriors, but Maria knew that most of what Ian had done wasn’t visible to the eye. He leaned on her, then pulled her to his chest.

“You haven’t been working for that long,” Maria observed. “I thought you needed a week to prepare for the assault? It’s been two days.”

Ian smirked. “It was easier than I anticipated to riff off Achemiss’s handiwork. Well, that, and the fact that I have you.”

Maria gave a dramatic sigh. “And let me guess—you need to use me again.” He’d asked her to transform into her regalia form six times over the past days, mostly so he could take advantage of the crown of embers, which allowed him to better visualize ethereal bodies and perform complex feats of necromancy.

He chuckled and pressed the dagger’s pommel into her hand. “Guilty.”

“I suppose I can do it one more time. It’s for the greater good, after all.” With a flourish, she dragged the blade across her chest, cutting deep.

Her vision faded as she manifested as the crown of embers, the burning cloak, and the silver vambraces, sliding onto Ian’s form. Through the lich bond, she could always share his vision, but she usually didn’t when she was embodied and had her own way of seeing the world. But as she gave herself over to Ian, she focused on seeing what he saw.

It wasn’t too different. She could see the world in color, not just shades of vitality, and she could no longer see End arrows.

She could, however, see the mass of souls tethered to a table in the corner. They almost looked like they would tear each other apart, from the way that they strained against each other, repelled by the proximity. Souls just fundamentally couldn’t overlap, so if tons of them were pushed into the same place, they strained to escape.

As they were now, they looked elongated, having been squeezed and contorted into irregular forms. They still seemed intact and healthy, for lack of a better word, but seeing the display made it clear how soul corruption might take effect. An Infinity Loop forced millions of souls into an incredibly small space, sucking them toward the nexus of its power to create its simulations.

Doing so tore the souls apart.

Ian strode forward and plucked six souls from the throng—one for each of the embers in the crown that danced over his head. He fed a soul to each ember as though making an offering to ancient deities, each ember changing color to match its given soul. When all were fed, the crown completed its final transformation, the embers merging.

In this final stage, Ian—and by extension, Maria—could see within the mannequins. Each wooden construct held a complex web of power invisible to any other form of perception. Maria couldn’t pretend to understand it—she was surprised Ian had been able to glean insights to create the formations from Achemiss’s almost-destroyed Dunai construct.

Do you see it? Ian asked her. Something is missing from all of them.

Maria scrutinized the mannequins, but didn’t see anything. Go closer.

He obliged, stopping before the mannequin in the center. Within its faceless head was a complex bundle of nodes that twisted together, plunging down the neck and into the chest cavity, where they branched out and expanded throughout the wood like a fractal.

She looked for anything that might be missing, but nothing jumped out at her. Then, the realization hit her. It’s missing you. These are supposed to be connected to you. It’s the only real vulnerability, in return for the unparalleled control they give you.

Yes. The final step requires me making a tether. I confess that I’m... nervous.

She considered for a moment. You’re worried your soul won’t take well to this.

He sighed. Essentially. It’s been doing much better since we’ve left Eternity, and while this shouldn’t hurt it—and I’ve put a ridiculous number of safeguards in place to ensure Achemiss won’t be able to critically injure me through the connection—it still concerns me.

Small steps, Maria told him. Start with one. See how it feels. Maybe bring in Soolemar to see if he finds any vulnerabilities you haven’t considered, if you’re still nervous.

Yeah, he said. One at a time. He frowned. Sorry—it’s just the Beginning talking. The little voice in the back of my head saying there’s a 59% chance that there’s something I’m not thinking of, some vulnerability I’m not seeing in my inexperience. It’s hard to ignore and it’s incessant. But it’s also not always right. My Beginning told me I needed a week to do this, for instance.

Whether there is a vulnerability or not is irrelevant, Maria pointed out. You’re not doing this alone. We have the Darkseers behind us and a slough of powerful peak practitioners. They aren’t ascendants–aside from the one ascendant they managed to recruit that we haven’t yet met–but they’re powerful enough to tangle with Achemiss’s minions. As for the man himself... Well, once we find him, we’ll end him, personally. These constructs are just for tracking him down.

I know. He breathed in deeply, then exhaled. Alright. Let’s do this. Suddenly, a strand of ethereal energy–cobalt blue and thin as a hair—poked out of Ian’s chest. Maria could see how it sourced straight from the largest pool of ethereal energy in Ian’s torso, where most of his soul was.

The strand snaked forward a foot until it was just before the construct. Then, it lunged forward like a viper, sinking into the mannequin’s center. It latched onto a strand of the web within it, one that appeared, at least to Maria, inexplicable. But at its touch, the whole nexus began to vibrate, as though from resonance. Ian’s blue ethereal energy surged through the pale, white lines of the necromantic construct, at odds with the dead, dark vitality of the wood.

Then, the web began to shift. It started almost... folding in on itself.

Remember back in Eternity, when we were at the black faction?

Of course. It hadn’t been that long ago, even if it felt far longer.

It was there that I had my first breakthrough on the nature of souls acting across long distances, he said. It’s when I began to realize that the soul was the true glue between our real bodies, trapped in the amber, and the avatars we actually controlled. My first test was investing a soul in the affinity-dampening black rock, to summon it from afar and form a potent defense. The more time I’ve had to think on this subject, however, the more possibilities I’ve come to imagine. Getting my hands on Achemiss’s construct only filled in the final piece of the puzzle, answering some questions I’ve been mulling over.

The web of ethereal energy within the construct pulsed. Ian pressed his hand onto the mannequin’s stomach. Souls are uniquely independent and incompatible with one another. But they are pliable, and can be individually controlled. That gives a necromancer flexibility. And it lets me do this.

Suddenly, the entire nexus fell apart, the center of the mannequin disappearing and destabilizing everything. Maria blinked in shock. What had Ian–

Then, a moment later, the web restored itself.

Ian chuckled softly. At the center of each mannequin is a piece of the mysterious black rock from Starbreak. Even if someone utterly destroys these mannequins, the rock should survive.

Why does that matter? Maria asked.

Consider Achemiss’s construct. If I destroy it, I will destroy the tether between him and the construct, causing him minor backlash. And if I don’t destroy it, theoretically there should be a way for me to use it to attack his soul directly. He’s put a ridiculous number of defenses around the tether to prevent that from happening, using techniques I can’t decipher. If I had to fully create that all from scratch, I would need years, not days.

But I’m not Achemiss, nor am I dependent on his designs. I created a solution of my own. What I’ve done is made a connection between my soul and the black rock shards. The indestructibility of the black rock, even to ascendant-empowered Dark affinity, will prevent it from being suddenly destroyed by attacks. More importantly... I’ve developed a way to treat the black rock like an ascendant avatar. I can retract the connection, cutting it off completely. Likewise, I can also restore it.

It sounded so simple, the way Ian said it. Why shouldn’t a necromancer be able to simply pull their soul away from a vessel it was attached to? It made sense on the surface. But Maria knew just how insane what Ian was saying truly was. When she considered her own End affinity, it was the equivalent to saying she could edit an array she’d drawn days ago on the other side of the world.

It was just... impossible. An array was set in stone, fixed in its logic. Said logic might be complex, accounting for numerous situations, but it was still immutable without the practitioner being present.

Some “geniuses” had tried methods where arrays edited themselves in highly controlled ways, but that never worked. The actual touch of an End practitioner was needed to modify the array without destroying or severely degrading it. The closest society–at least on their home world–had gotten to arrays that made other arrays were machines that manufactured glossware, but an End practitioner was still required in the process.

Perplexed, she asked the only question she could: How?

It’s simple, really, he responded. Beautiful simplicity. The black rock shards stay with me, and I simply manifest them within the mannequins when I want to control them, using the same technique I revealed in the duel where I defeated the black faction’s two ascendants and proved myself. When I want the constructs to function on their own...

The nexus of power winked out again, but the construct began to move all the same. Death energy consumed its bodice. Suddenly, Maria noticed two soul gems embedded into the creature’s body, one in the chest and one between the hips, visible only with Ian’s vital vision. They had always been there, but had been easily overlooked when the web of ethereal power took center stage. Now that she looked even closer, she realized that the mannequin was actually full of bones, almost as though it were a proper person with a skeleton. She hadn’t even noticed when Ian had done it. The bones were so hard to see, faint whispers of darkness on an already black backdrop, but Ian’s perception was refined enough to pick the subtle differences out.

Maria finally grasped the full picture. Most of the time, the mannequins could simply function like decemantic constructs and follow set commands. But when Ian chose, he could manifest the black rock within the mannequins and activate the necromantic network, allowing himself to take manual control whenever he wanted. And if any one mannequin were captured, he could abandon it completely without any concerns.

... You really think there’s a 59% chance you’re missing something?

Ian just shrugged. It almost seems too simple. Like, why hasn’t Achemiss done this? It’s not like the black rock itself is necessary as a reagent–it’s just the most defensive material I have on hand. Achemiss could do this with anything.

If Maria had a physical body at the moment, she’d be rubbing the bridge of her nose. Ian, I think... you’re underestimating yourself.

You think?

Stop fishing for flattery, she teased. Besides, I haven’t seen your manual control mode yet, using this so-called “too-simple” technique. Let’s see if it’s really as easy as you think.