Blessed Time: The Complete Series: (A LitRPG Adventure Box Set), page 140
He shrugged. “That’s me. My blessing has let me live and relive my life until I’ve corrected my mistakes. I might not have your skill or raw power, but you and I have talked. We seem to think that I have the balance that you lack. It’s just a matter of merging all of our past lives together until we are one cohesive whole, living in both the past and the present simultaneously.”
“So now, how do we join together?” Karin asked. “Do we fuck? Or do you summon some sort of flesh vortex where we merge together and turn into a monstrosity?”
The man choked, eyes practically bugging out his head.
“What?” The calm assurance in his voice was gone.
“Do you have a girlfriend or something?” she questioned, pressing further when he seemed to choke in response. “Maybe a boyfriend? Come on, it’s not like it will matter. We’re the same person after all. It isn’t even cheating. More like masturbation.”
He sputtered, and for the first time, Karin let a smile show on her face.
“Relax, ghost-me. I’m just messing with you. I think I understand what you’re describing. All that needs to happen is that I live out my life and die as I would ordinarily. Then you wake up and integrate all of the memories and experiences. You’ll remember everything I’ve done, including the ascension ritual, and as soon as you have enough raw power, you can try it on your own.
“After all,” Karin continued. “It took me almost two thousand human sacrifices to gather the ritual energy I would need to pierce through my human limitations. If you’re lower level than me, it will take much more than that for you.”
“Well, crap,” the man replied, breathing out a sigh of relief. “I’m in the middle of a war right now. There’s no way I’m going to be able to gather up that sort of power.”
“We’ll find a way,” Karin responded, turning and walking over to her notebook and shutting it. If the ritual was destined to fail, there was no reason to waste further time and effort on it. “Even if you aren’t smart enough to figure it out, I am.”
“Thanks, I guess,” he responded wryly. “But one thing before I go.”
He tapped his forehead and Dakkora reached up to touch her own, fingers brushing across the simple metal ring of her crown.
“Your crown and scepter are two of my most powerful artifacts,” he continued ruefully. “I found them in your laboratory tower after your death, but I can’t help but notice that you have both of them on you right now. If you could just-”
“Fine, fine,” she replied, reaching up to remove the band of metal. “I’ll send them away. Now leave me alone. I have to see how many of Luxos’ toadies I can kill before they manage to finish me off.”
THIRTY
CONSOLIDATION
They opened their eyes. The world swirled around them, the metallic tang of mana attacking their senses. They were on their back, cold stones digging into their shoulder-blades and spine.
“Micah!” A voice was calling a name. Both were familiar.
Click. They could hear the sound of their eyelids closed as they blinked. All of their senses were operating in overdrive, firing information into their brains so quickly that there was no way that they could even begin to process.
“Micah!” A woman had them by the shoulder and was shaking them.
They blinked again, staring at her face and tried to place her. Distantly, they remembered… Princess? Was she a princess? Then who were they?
Maybe they were a prince? No, that didn’t sound right. They were Andres, the son of a manor lord, a genius set to revitalize their-
Andres was dead. The rushing crash of a waterfall filled their ears, overwhelming their senses. So were Kylie and Karin. They were all dead. Had been for years and years.
He shook his head, trying to clear some static. The world was starting to stabilize. Objects felt more real, and he wasn’t being completely overwhelmed by sounds, sights and smells. Still, Micah didn’t know where or when he was.
Micah, that was his name. Born in Basil’s Cove, not Grene’s Corner or Jakint. He-
“Back away from him, Gwendolyn.” An unfamiliar female voice interrupted his wandering thoughts. “That isn’t Micah.”
He looked up, forehead wrinkling in confusion as he looked past the woman crouching next to him. There were two women in their twenties standing near the entrance to the room, each of them just outside the worn and abused ritual circle that filled most of its area.
“Grandmother,” the woman near him began, only to be cut off by a snap of the other woman’s fingers. She stood up and gave him an apologetic look before walking to the doorway where the other two women were waiting.
Micah cocked his head at the three of them. Of course he was Micah; he was just something more as well. He’d lived so many lives without realizing that he had been incomplete, like a bowl of soup with a crack in it that was slowly leaking its contents.
Now? He was finally whole. Mana flowed freely through the air around him, and Micah could see the very lines and curves of reality. The years of research on ritual magic as he tried to piece together the true nature of reality from context clues such as the positions of the stars; all of it clicked at once.
He was having an epiphany, but there was no end in sight. Micah was looking at a brand new world, and each moment of wonder spent contemplating it answered years of questions that had been building up.
“Who are you?” one of the women asked. She was pointing a finger at him, and Micah could see the aura of mana coating her limb as she prepared a combat spell. Curled around her shoulder was a strange creature. It looked like a snake, except for the wings sprouting from its sinuous back and the lizard-like head peering over her side.
Micah squinted at the creature for a second, barely even taking note of the woman’s words. It seemed both real and unreal. A creation of magic, but with no mana in it. The person next to her had a similar snake except it was larger and tinged with a deep violet. Even his friend Gwendolyn had one. The only difference was that hers was smaller, its wings underdeveloped and tucked against its sides.
He snapped his fingers, pointing at one of the snake creatures as the light went off in his head.
“They’re your blessings!” he remarked. “The creatures draped on your shoulders are blessings.”
The woman that had been addressing him sprang into action, lunging a step forward and thrusting her right palm toward him. The snake seemed to flow down her arm, wrapping its coils around it and spreading its wings wide as it opened its mouth and spat a ball of ethereal flame. An eyeblink later, the mana crackling in her fist exploded as well, coating the strange creature’s breath in more conventional magic.
Time slowed, air thickening until all movement was treacle slow as he stared at the oncoming cone of flames. It wasn’t Micah’s perception. He wished for it to happen and Karell responded.
He tried to reach for the fire, only to grow frustrated with his glacial movements. Instead, he touched it with his mind, analyzing and deconstructing the mana that made up the spell form.
The outer layer of fire winked out, and Micah dove deeper. The core of the ability was the blessing’s breath attack. It was a mix of soul magic and… Elsewhere?
Dakkora stared hungrily out from behind Micah’s eyes, guiding his mind as he poked and prodded the cluster of magical energy. Together they dissected the blessing, exploring its connection to the beyond even as they unraveled it into nothing more than a cloud of inert mist.
Reality snapped back into focus and time settled into its normal flow as the attack dissipated. It had only existed for a barest fraction of a second, but the ground in front of the three women was deformed and glowing a bright yellow, half molten from the flash of extreme heat brought about by the attack.
Distantly, Micah noted that his mana reserves had dropped by almost 2,000 points. He wasn’t sure if it was from the effort of slowing time or the act of disassembling the attack, but whatever he had just done had been expensive.
The three women’s eyes widened. Without a word, they dropped into a defensive stance, shoulder to shoulder as they clustered around the doorway to the ritual chamber. Mana gathered in the palms of their hands.
Micah smiled as he watched the energy gather. It was so simple now. He could literally see the mana as it curved and coiled itself in patterns along their skin. Runes. Modified versions of ritual magic tailored to Karell’s reality. That was what the spell forms were. Literally the same thing as ritual magic except that they were using ambient mana rather than a sacrifice to power them.
They launched their attacks together, their blessings spitting balls of daemon fire that were augmented by ordinary mana.
This time, he didn’t even need to slow time. It took Micah about 1,500 of his own mana to disrupt spells, but he stood his ground, unraveling the magic into nothing more than puffs of warm air before any of them managed to cross the halfway point in the room.
“Not who; what are you?” one of the women asked. “Micah Silver was a powerful blessed, but no human can see our blessing, let alone do… whatever that was. Frankly, it looked like the reality warping I’ve seen from powerful daemons such as luocas.
“I would ask if you’re possessed,” she continued, “but you seem confused, as if you’re testing something out. A luoca’s spirit would have already tried to rip our throats out by now, and a god would have shattered reality itself simply by trying to exist in this limited world, so once again, I ask, what are you?”
Micah thought for a moment before replying. Who and what he was. That was actually an interesting question. He was still Micah Silver. But he was also so much more than that. Andres, Kylie and Karin. All three of them were part of him, flawed facets of his personality that were destined to fall short if left to their own devices. The one commonality was him. It was like they were diamonds and he was the ring, on their own, they shone brightly but were easily lost, but when merged into him, they enhanced Micah to the point where he was barely human.
Mursa had given him time magic so that he could live out multiple lives and balance himself out. His suffering in Basil’s Cove, watching his friends and family suffer and die, being forced into slavery. All of it was part of a greater plan to even out the rough edges of his personality so that he could properly absorb his other selves.
He didn’t know how to feel about that. On one hand, Micah doubted he ever would have found a way to hone the flaws from himself without the suffering and time magic that the goddess had so graciously gifted him. Without the power coursing through his veins, fighting the Third Prince would have been about as fruitful as trying to stop a rockslide by throwing snowballs at it.
On the other, he remembered Trevor dying in his arms. No matter how many years passed, no matter how many lives he lived, Micah still woke up with his brother’s cooling weight in his arms and a lump in his throat.
It was hypocritical of him to blame them. He knew that now. The gods treated humans like pawns. They had uses, true, but if the time came to discard them for a greater good, there wasn’t any hesitation. Unfortunately, he had been guilty of the same. As he recycled through time, other people simply became less real to Micah. A shopkeeper dying was a shame, but a lot of shopkeepers died, and if the man were truly important, he would simply reboot time.
Except he didn’t. Micah let countless people die and stay dead simply because lives outside of his family and guild didn’t matter to him any more than a hare or chicken that he would have for supper.
The part of him that was Dakorra didn’t mind. The viewpoint was as natural to her as breathing or going for a morning walk, but Micah thought he had purged himself of it. That belief had not survived his awakening.
When he integrated his past lives, it wasn’t just their final moments. He remembered everything from their teen years up until the moment of their deaths, and the life of Kylie, the elderly priestess of Luxos, cut him to his core.
She lacked the drive and ambition needed to truly ascend, but she made up for that by truly caring for each and every human being in her parish. Micah hadn’t even thought of going back in time and saving the nobles that died in his fight with the greater daemon, but Kylie spent six months casting daily healing spells on an orphaned girl to slowly mend a birth defect that would have stopped her heart before her twelfth birthday. Dakkora despised the woman and thought her weak, but as Micah went over her life, it was all he could do to choke back a sob.
The worst part was that Kylie was there with him, and despite all of his failings, she didn’t doubt or judge him. Micah could feel her comforting presence in the back of his mind, as if she were gently resting a hand on his shoulder and assuring him that this next time he’d get it right.
“Are you possessed?” the woman who had been questioning him asked. “I swear you’ve been standing there silently and looking at us like we have three heads for the last five minutes. I’d almost prefer you to do something daemonic.”
“Are you all right?” Gwen pressed, shooting the other woman a worried look. “Grandma is a bit on edge, but you can’t really blame her. You aren’t acting anything like yourself right now.”
Micah shook his head to clear it. She was right. He was scaring them without any need.
“Sorry,” he replied. “I used the excess power from the rejuvenation ritual to change myself and the results were a bit startling.”
“Is that why you can see us?” the second woman, a younger version of the Empress, asked. “No one without royal blood should be able to see the imperial blessing, and even then, they should only be able to see their own.”
“Yes,” Micah said, drawing the word out as he tried to think of a way to explain his situation. “I have… unlocked all of my potential. I thought doing so would give me skills or levels, but it would appear to be a more fundamental change than that.
“It feels like I can see Karell for the first time,” he continued. “I can directly perceive magic, but that’s really the most surface-level description of what has changed. More than that, I can see and feel rules that I had taken for granted. Gravity, transparency, temporal energy, spirits, density. If I concentrate on anything, they’re hiding in the background like tiny vectors and switches. With enough mana, I could change anything that doesn’t have a soul. I… I think that this is how the Sixteen view things. I clearly don’t have the same raw power as a god, but-”
“You haven’t gone mad with power, have you?” Gwen inquired worriedly. “In the bard’s tales, this is the part where you declare yourself the second coming of Karin Dakkora and demand sacrifices piled to the heavens so that they can fulfill their depraved plans.”
Micah simply stared at her, debating whether or not to tell her that he truly was the second coming of Karin Dakkora. Well, more like the fourth coming, but he had numbers 2 and 3 along with him regardless.
“Is that how you defeated our dragon’s breath?” the first woman, the twenty-year-old version of Gwen’s grandmother, asked. “You somehow found a way to tear the world apart at its foundations?”
“Yes,” Micah replied, nodding slowly as he squinted at the creature on their shoulders. “Is that what it was? A dragon? I think I finally realized what makes your blessings unique. They have souls of their own. It was hard for me to figure that out at first because they felt so strange, strong yet unfocused, almost like a daemon-”
He caught himself, his thoughtful expression morphing into a frown.
“They are daemons, aren’t they. Somehow your blessing bound you to a sort of symbiotic daemon. I didn’t think that something like this was possible.”
“Anything is possible,” the Empress said warily. “Our blessings let us utilize the power of daemons and one of our relatives managed to find a way to draw one of the beasts into Karell and tame it. At first, the monster raged and tried to escape, but over time, it grew content feasting on the spoils of the mortal world and let us bind sections of itself to us. That is why Sandrovok is ruled by women. Only those following the direct matrilineal line of descent to the original summoner can have one of the Dragon’s seeds bound to us.”
“This is a state secret,” Gwen’s grandmother remarked flatly. “I don’t care if you’re almost a god. We’ll find a way to kill you if you try and leak it. The Dragon is a Duke of Elsewhere. Even if you can defeat its offspring that are bound to us or one of those greater daemons you fought out in the sands, it is an order of magnitude more powerful.”
Micah sighed, closing his eyes slightly and reaching out with his mind. Sure enough, now that he was looking for it, he found tethers entwined around the snakes. Some, made from gold soul material, linked them to the women standing before him, but there were other connections. Ropes of deep ruby linked them to a location deep beneath the palace.
He tasted them with this mind. They stank of Elsewhere, but not in the angry, almost incoherent way that a brensen or luoca fresh from a portal would. Instead, it was a deep and steady thrum, reminding him more of the snoring of an ox or some other large animal rather than an otherworldly threat.
Something stirred on the other end of the connection, and Micah felt a pair of eyes opening and focusing on him. A being that had hunted lesser daemons through the mists of Elsewhere before the first rock of Karell had been laid down stared at Micah.
He stared back, a relieved smile growing on his face. By the Sixteen, they might actually have a chance to pull this off.
“Well,” said Micah. “I suppose this explains your general antipathy toward the churches.”
“Quite,” the Empress replied tensely. It was clear that the monarch and her mother were preparing themselves to attack him in concert with the Dragon if Micah made an aggressive move. In all likelihood, that had been why they revealed their connection. To bait him into waking the beast that had served as Sandrovok’s royal guardian for centuries.
