BleedingTears
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Arcanist - Chapter 78
🕑 Added 2025-04-21 16:47:37 +0000 UTC“It really is a strange world, isn’t it?” Valens muttered when he opened his eyes in the room, the bed creaking as he pulled himself up, wincing to his feet. His body was stiff and sore from the effort, but peering out the windows by the side wall, it didn’t seem he spent too much time in that space.
He reached for a Lifesurge to wash this soreness off with a wave of lifemana, flinching slightly when a searing pain tore through his chest. A sudden warning from his mana pool, dried all too quickly now that he checked it, left the fleshy cage of his source a barren sight, drinking in the drops that dripped down from its roof.
Not without its price, then? I suppose a trip to the Spiritual World is nothing to scoff at.
He had no idea how the Spiritum worked, or how could anyone weave something so positively absurd, yet grand at the same time with frequencies. They told him it had been the Surgemasters of old who created that ethereal world, but the hows and whys of that particular undertaking were still a mystery for him.
The shining sphere he took out from the Vault welcomed him over the drawer, looking perfectly in shape, its frequencies pulsing across the Resonance with an almost inaudible rhythm.
He checked it.
[The Sphere of Veiled Fates: - Cursed Artifact
Grade: Divine
A cursed obsidian orb veined with silver mist, used as a medium to glimpse the fate of anyone who touches it. While even a Fool can see fragments of a person’s immediate path, only one bearing the legacy of the Veiled Mother can unlock its full vision.]
“I wonder what is the common way of dealing with these things?” Valens wondered as he felt the cold surface of the sphere. It was nearly weightless, and small enough that he could tuck it under the new leather coat he bought. “Not everyone is going about their days carrying Divine Cursed Artifacts, do they?”
He decided he would ask Garran about it without making it clear he had this thing on himself. Throughout the way he had been fairly comfortable with the Templar group, but the exchange with the Bishop showed him that the capital’s folk and the people here were different.
But I’m not alone anymore. I have an Order of people behind my back… or in my front?
Not necessarily a group of people at his command, but if Valens could play his cards right and pave a way for himself in the capital, then he could use the Midnight Assembly more to his favor rather than a meeting to learn certain things about the world.
It’s never enough, is it? Now, I can’t wait to see what is this thing.
The description of the sphere said that to use it to its full effect one had to carry the legacy of the Veiled Mother, but there was still hope for those who didn’t belong to the Wretched Mother’s court. So Valens poured what little mana he had left into the sphere, heart thumping in nervous expectation.
He heard the cry of the frequencies first. Underneath the obsidian surface, they churned with great disturbance and rolled, and wavered in the few seconds he kept the skin contact. The rhythms were all scattered, senseless, too broken to make much sense to him, but bit by bit they began to stitch themselves into a more comprehensible whole.
It’s like a Lifeward, but where do these frequencies come from?
The sphere sucked his mana in and poured it into the scattered frequencies. Slowly, it worked the broken rhythms and stitched them in quick fashion, establishing a clear Resonance that Valens could pry into.
Blinking, Valens opened his eyes to a strange sight. There was a room with old furniture lying about and dust sitting thickly on the corners, a bed that had seen great use, and a pair of windows that looked out at a dark alley of sorts. On the bed, a figure sat hunched with a lusterless sphere clutched in the palms of his hand.
Hold-- That’s me?
He was staring at himself from somewhere on the roof of the room, the scene distorting when he focused himself. His body remained still, eyes closed in concentration. When he tried to lift his chin without breaking his focus over the scene, the figure in the sphere followed the exact movement.
I might as well check myself from the top, eh?
Curious, he turned himself just enough to allow a more clear sight of his face, but the moment he did so, a tremor ran through the hall scene. Something crashed into the Resonance, a reflection of it appearing right over the figure in the sphere. A dark glob of shadow hovering right above his head.
Slowly, tendrils stretched out from inside of it, curled around the legs of the bed, spattered over the walls and the windows. Bit by bit they ate away the bricks, the tiles over the ground, the wool blanket hanging down the side of the bed. Bit by bit the shadow took control, until the only thing that remained in the room was a figure surrounded by a deep nothingness.
This…
Valens paused when the figure moved. He didn’t. He kept himself nailed to the bed even as the figure in the scene turned slowly to face him, eyes peering up at the ceiling, mouth stretched into a smile.
The Resonance splintered into pieces when they locked eyes, the frequencies shattering in quick succession, and forcing him to pull his mind away from the sphere. When he came to himself, the same old room welcomed him, the sphere’s Resonance dead silent.
“What the hell was that?” Valens muttered, shaken. “Was that me? But would I do that sick of a play to scare myself? Or… Was it something to do with me being an Ancient?”
Terrors and Divines had no authority upon his soul. Valens experienced that a few times even though he knew not the entirety of that matter. Still, the Sphere of Veiled Fates was a Divine Cursed Artifact, and if there was one thing he knew, it was that Ancient was above Divine on all grounds.
Still, he shivered. Apathy was there, waiting around his corner, a call away from his thoughts. Relief, it would bring him, but Valens refused as he sat with the sensation that scene left all over his arms.
I have to figure out what exactly I am, and what sorts of things I’m dealing with if I don’t want to be kept in the dark in these cases.
He shook himself off, heart thumping in his chest, as he reached for the diary he’d recently bought with a quill waiting at the ready for him to work his thoughts out. He’d scribbled some lines before, but this time, he opened a new page and wrote in clear instructions for himself.
Try the sphere on someone else to get an idea of its functions. And… Find out what the distinctions of the System mean. What is the difference between the Classes? What about the skills? How does the System measure one’s mastery over a certain skill?
The quill propped to his chin, he thought about the other questions he hadn’t had the time to seek answers for.
Right. Get a few manastones as well. A few big ones for practice, and experiments.
Having to rely on his mana pool when there was a world of mana outside, and different mana sources didn’t seem too clever to him. He wanted to get a healthy supply of an alternative mana source, so in times when his mana pool drained, which happened way too often for his liking, he could switch up to keep going.
And… I wonder if it’s too late? But I don’t want to sit in the house and do nothing. There’s too much stuff going on in this city. I should visit that Magi Guild when I have the chance.
“Right,” Valens nodded, putting the diary in place and tucking the sphere neatly in one of the checkers of the drawer. “Better to get a move on, then.”
…….
There was a tightness around his throat. The cheap shirt bit him in places he didn’t expect, in ways he hadn’t thought about, in such painful constancy that he pulled and yanked at the collars of his new fit as he bounded out through the building. There was a man waiting there, cuddled in a giant, loose leather coat with his head popping out from inside of it, a pair of curious eyes glued to the entrance of Valens and Selin’s new flat.
Measures of a paranoid mind. Guess I can’t blame them anymore.
Valens tipped his new hat at him. No need to make an enemy out of a man who braved the weight of the orders of his Masters. Surely he wouldn’t have chosen to stick himself in a narrow wedge across the dreary street like a scarecrow out for business if the choice had been his to begin with. There were other ways to make a day out of this heavy afternoon, but not for this poor man. He would be waiting there all night long. But then, such was the fate of any salaryman.
Out from the dark stretches of Redwick Street, into the wider streets of Belgrave’s poor-class ring, through the damp, and the mildew, and the heavy stench of sweat and sulfur, Valens bounded, one finger hooked into the collar of his shirt, constantly yanking at it to stretch the cloth just barely enough to make it just a mild inconvenience.
The squares in the poorer part of the city were always in a state of repair. That is, there was always something broken in the alleys or in the buildings, and people tending to them seemed to have a look on their faces that told Valens the work never ended here.
Children were out and about doing a thousand different things, mostly working as apprentices to figure a craft early in their lives, whilst others were chasing each other in the slithering pathways of the dark streets as the little scoundrels they were. Runny noses through all of it, with the occasional coughing fits that rattled the fun out of their chests.
Half of them are sick. A quarter of them wouldn’t live to see their twenties, I’m afraid.
So then, one might expect the Priests were out seeking the sick to relieve them of their fast-approaching fate, or the parents of these kids would be demanding care from the State’s Church as their right.
But the Churches sprinkled in between the alleys were already packed full of people stretched in disorderly lines. They left no room for the children, and the few of them who managed to find their way inside a Church to be granted a Priest’s healing seemed like a drop in a giant ocean.
A good business solves a problem in society, and it does not always demand that the price be paid in coin. Look at those faces. Such conviction that there’s no other cure for them.
A mad chorus of applause exploded in occasional fits, followed by blessed cries of women and children who were beyond impressed by the sight of the treated. A stonemason got a teary hug from a young woman with a few children in tow, who seemed mightily proud that he wouldn’t be dying soon. Ahead, the Priest who treated him might as well have been carrying the halo of his God by how sacred he appeared, and how the crowd of people nearly ran each other down to the ground to be the first one to touch that simple cassock.
Little Gods, are you? That sort of attention gets to your head. Makes even a good man think too highly of himself. Dangerous business indeed, but disturbingly fruitful, I have to admit.
Heeding Captain Edric’s initial warnings, Valens pulled himself away from such crowds with difficulty and made his way to the middle-class ring of the city. He gave a wistful glance at a carriage creaking along from a main street, packed with people with some of them hanging at it by the sides, but sighed as he steeled his resolve and continued his trudge with his chin held high.
He was painfully poor, as it appeared, especially after they’d been through that shopping fit with Selin. He might’ve exaggerated the importance of fashion against the daily necessities of living in a grand city.
That’s a lesson learned.
Still, there was something soothing about wearing a suit of all things in another world, and he was certainly in a much better state than he’d been through those two Rifts.
After laboring through the heavy fog of Belgrave, Valens finally arrived at the giant tower of the Magi Guild soaked in sweat. It was a tower of grand promises, layered in a purposeful fashion to add more intrigue to its appearance, painted in a fancy black color that glistened under the afternoon lights. Set inside the ground floor, the entrance was a giant door upon which a golden star with its six pointy ends sparkled like polished gems.
On a cursory glance, it seemed the Tower didn’t have the habit of entertaining crowds unlike the Churches, as in the short time since Valens decided to stare at it from a distance, that door had not once opened to any visitors. The same was also true for the giant square in which the Tower itself sat, which was as empty as it could be.
Initially, he’d thought that to be granted a space of its own in a place where the people were living crammed into tiny houses was a sign that magic was respected, but as time passed and not a single soul decided to steer into that big square, Valens presumed it was the opposite.
Guess I should’ve expected it. The Church doesn’t like magic, too, what a surprise.
Pulling the tails of his coat, Valens decided he had stared enough and made for the Tower’s entrance.
My fellow Mages, I can’t wait to meet with you!
…..
Comments
lenkite
Hope he will be eventually able to setup his Clinic. He can heal for free to avoid problems with the Church, but keep a [Donations] box open so that he doesn't need to pay for medication/bandages/rent.
Odd Thomas
The mages are gonna be disappointing
BlastYoBoots
(Minor correction: "Now, I can’t wait to see what is this thing." -> "what this thing is" or "what's in this thing".)
Stephen Pearson
Thanks for the chapter! :-)
