City of Sin

Book 7, 134

Lost Memories

The warship looked extremely similar to Richard, reminding him of something he had seen in the Doomsday Imprint. It wasn’t exactly the same, but the aura was quite similar. He tried to recall and extrapolate, but after a few moments of trying to analyse it, his head started to hurt before his vision went white!

Screaming soundlessly, Richard realised that this object was far too complicated for him to dissect even in the slightest. It was rather reminiscent of Sharon’s balance, which had left him in a similar situation. As the white slowly receded and the empty world returned, he realised he had missed something significant.

Forcing down the headache to look around, he suddenly went back. Far in the distance was a desolate stretch of land, where the sky was black and the earth cracked all over. Thorny bushes were all over the place, but they didn’t radiate an aura of vitality at all; the only thing one could feel from them was pain and suffering. This was an isolated, quiet world. There was no obvious source of light, but somehow one could see the surroundings.

There was only one sign of life in this land, a lone figure wrapped in a black cloak that seemed to be moving almost mechanically. There was no road under her feet, nor was there an obvious destination, but she moved steadily with no sign of weariness.

This figure froze Richard’s heart. He shouted as loudly as he could, but there was no body in here to carry that voice. He tried to fly over, but there was no way for him to move. A name that he had sealed in the depths of his very existence bubbled up to the top of his mind, violating the restrictions he had intentionally placed until he reached the legendary realm.

“Flow—” he woke up from the meditation, almost screaming a name before he muffled himself. Drenched in cold sweat, he barely kept himself up as a frightening sense of fatigue threatened to leave him unconscious. His body, mind, and even mana pool were completely exhausted, as though he had fought a bloody battle for days.

Richard was afraid that he would rush to become a legend if he so much as thought about Flowsand, jumping into the Darkness as quickly as he could. However, that legendary version of himself would not be optimal, and certainly wouldn’t be powerful enough to actually rescue her from her trials. He wanted to train extensively before getting there just so that he could unlock a powerful ability that increased his chances, somewhat akin to how Sharon’s combination of Manaforge and Master Summoning allowed her to overpower most other legends when she had just started out.

Even the edge of the Darkness could kill a legend easily. Richard had steeled himself and worked on the slow burn, expanding his military forces, runes, and personal strength to reach the top. Even without a true legend, the Archerons now fully deserved their position in the sixth tier of Faust’s islands, while Nasia’s existence allowed them to contend at the high end as well. He himself was now more powerful than a new legend with his runes, and as he used his strength as a soul hunter that power would only grow.

Now that he had powerful weapons too... He had to force the thought from his mind. He could perhaps survive the edge of the Darkness, but that was not enough. He had never known clearly just how important Flowsand was to his existence, but he did know that burying her deep in his heart was the only way to prevent himself from doing something stupid.

He had never expected to see her again while meditating, in this odd, empty void that his blessings were telling him was real. This was Flowsand, somewhere, sometime, and that fragment of existence had brushed across his own. Closing his eyes and resting for a while, he headed out to down some mana and energy potions in one go.

It took half an hour before Richard could even think again, but the moment he was able he completely ignored the million tiny wounds he had sustained from mana depletion to try and burn what he had just seen into his memory. He was still certain that he had seen something real, but he could not tell when nor where it was. Both the warship and Flowsand walking through that broken world might have occurred already, or they could be a vision of the future that would never come to be. He did not know yet, but he would find out eventually.

Thankfully, the injuries themselves were minor and would heal in a few days. Richard sighed and leaned back into his chair, muttering to himself that he would have to wait longer, but to anyone looking it would feel as though he had aged a decade. Hours later, he opened his eyes and activated his secondary minds, resuming his analysis of various laws; for now, these memories would be buried until he could act on them.

As Wisdom was activated, he found that some of the calculations he had found difficult to make suddenly grew a lot easier. He was startled for a moment, but it didn’t take long to realise that the blessing had grown sometime during this process and was now at grade 7. This upgrade only increased the speed of his thoughts, but while he would have needed a million days to analyse the laws of the Godnest at grade 5, that number was now quartered to 250,000. Even the new speed was still unacceptable, but he estimated that he would be ready to tackle the task after two more upgrades. Most legends focused on tiny fractions of a single world for their entire lives, but he would be able to comprehend and control much more.

The question of just why he had entered that dark void plagued Richard’s mind, but after some thought he could only conclude that it had something to do with the Doomsday Imprint. He took out the crystal and sent a tendril of mana within, but as the metal started warping frantically he felt the sliver of mental strength he had recovered fade away once more.

The Imprint was an odd thing. Every time he tried to study it, his minds were overloaded to the point that his head started to hurt. This was great practice for his blessing of wisdom, but it also ran the risk of leaving him too weak for a serious battle. He had considered sharing it with the broodmother at one point, but the thought had left him anxious and now that she was independent, he had even less of a reason to give it to her. There were far too many secrets within the crystal ball, and he couldn’t risk anyone else getting their hands on it.

All sorts of legends about the reapers flitted across his mind. He had once tried to verify some of them, but there were no first-hand sources to rely on. The most accurate accounts still came from mere fragmented prophecies, but for a race touted to be so powerful it was impossible for human diviners to predict things accurately. The only guarantee was that they would be powerful, and they would show themselves in Faelor at some point. However, that could be in a few years or centuries upon centuries.

Resting for a while, Richard eventually left the room and had Bluewater send over a shipment of the best mana and energy potions they could get their hands on. He couldn’t afford to rely on natural recovery if he wanted to progress as fast as possible, and even a hundred thousand gold a day was a cost that he could handle if it meant greater speed. The resource he lacked the most was time; there were far too many things he had to do, from preventing his visions to rescuing Flowsand to recovering Gaton. Now that he was a saint runemaster, the money was the least of his concerns.

Just as he asked the broodmother to convey the message, however, a rune knight suddenly rushed over to his residence, “Your Grace, the teleportation gate is fluctuating. We have already taken precautions, but Sir Tiramisu is asking you to come over and examine it whenever you can.”