abcnovels
Chapter 411 Foolish hope?
Chapter 411 Foolish hope?
'Is this really a good idea?'
'What if I'm wrong?'
'Juno fell into this trap much earlier than me, so what makes me think I can figure things out better than he does?'
Isera battled her own thoughts that continued to chip away at the meager amount of self-confidence she managed to gather.
'Am I doing the right thing? Or am I just arrogant?'
Isera was perfectly aware of how this devilish plain affected her thoughts, but it didn't make it any easier to discard those self-deprecating ideas. If anything, it only made it harder for the girl to discern what was the influence of the plain... And what was her lack of self-esteem born upon her encounter with the elites of the elites who were all stuck at the barrier for years if not decades…
Or if it was all just a cold and harshly practical analysis of her own position and situation.
In the end, though, no matter how many doubts she had, and how much she put her actions into question, Isera always fell back on the one principle and one understanding.
'It is always better to do something, even a stupid thing, than not do anything at all.'
A maxim long-used in the upper echelon of the patriarch's personal military. A belief born out of bloody experiences the soldiers went through during their near-eternal conflict with the empire.
After all, by not doing anything, one only ended up surrendering the initiative to the enemy. And even if doing something stupid had a chance of putting one in an even worse position than before, leaving the initiative to the enemy nearly assured whatever happened would bring about some negative development to oneself.
It didn't matter who the enemy was.
It could be one's own ignorance, a great enemy to the north, or something as simple as a love rival.
Not doing anything was pretty much the same as doing the enemy a favor, regardless of who the real enemy was.
And when it came to the idea that kept pushing Isera forward, it was even simpler.
'I have a task to fulfill. And wasting my life away in some stupid belief that I will be the first one in ages to crack the secret on how to pass through this damn barrier isn't getting me any closer to completing my objective!'
From the many, many hours Isera spent talking with all the others trapped by this devilish plain, she learned quite a lot of things.
Tricks to raising one's power, tricks that all of those powerhouses would never divulge in their old life but were more than happy to do it now, when all of one's power, status, wealth, and the like became meaningless. Secrets of effectively controlling one's own self.
Pitfalls that awaited all those who looked for shortcuts when it came to growing one's strength or even the influence of one's background on how one should train themselves.
The people gathered at the bottom of this devilish trap were a treasure trove of knowledge ranging from how to turn one's ascendancy into a smooth sailing towards the rank of a supreme, through the best possible ways of training as a supreme, all the way to insights of how to possibly advance to an even higher rank.
What else would one expect from a place that only supremes could reach but no supreme could ever leave? And, as depressing as it was, the knowledge of how to act upon reaching an even higher realm was just a hand-me-down from all those who crossed to the next realm…
Only to then wither away mere steps into the barrier when their newfound strength, something they often reached while already locked in this trap, proved insufficient to counter the effects of the barrier.
It wasn't all about one's personal strength either.
Sure, only a supreme or an extremely specialized promoted ascender could reach the bottom of the trap without losing their mind to the silvery light diffused throughout the plain… But Isera… no, even those who were trapped the longest would struggle to find anyone who only ever focused on growing stronger in their life.
And in a place where all hopes of ever escaping were lost, all their experiences were worth was for how long they could kill time by using it for a conversation's topic. Discover more stories at empire
'I've learned more in the past two, three years that I've spent trapped here than I learned in all of my years prior… But what is the worth of all of this knowledge if I'm never going to leave this place?!'
Forcefully sparing up some more motivation to grease the wheels of her mental fortitude, Isera gritted her teeth and continued to obstinately walk to commit harder and harder to what the people outside of the trap would call hope while all the fellow victims of this devilish trap would call foolishness and naivety.
'I guess, in Juno's eyes, I simply didn't get what it takes to lose oneself and adapt to this place,' Isera thought, gritting her teeth as she forced her legs to keep moving.
The girl couldn't even remember when did she left the gathering of the fellow victims, created by the lay of land funneling all those capable of passing through the plain to pretty much one of the few spots at the foot of the divine barrier.
With no day or night to discern the passing of time, she was as likely to have merely left the gathering as she was likely to be walking for months by now. If there was one, clear thing, though, was that she still had yet to…
'Why did I leave the gathering in the first place, though?'
After an unknown amount of time spent walking and only deities capable of telling how much distance the girl covered thus far, she suddenly stopped, petrified by the unexpected realization.
'What was it that made me leave?'
Standing down, Isera looked around, as if the answer could somehow materialize itself out of thin air.
In a moment of desperation, the girl looked over in the direction of the barrier, the direction she had long since learned not to look in order to avoid the foolish hope of ever crossing the divine demarcation line.
Yet, the moment she did, her eyes fell right upon the kind of oddity that instantly made all of her efforts, doubts, and mental struggles worth it. An oddity, that at the same time, was enough to make the girl fall into the very depths of despair.
It was a set of three shapes that could never appear in nature and all the less one by the other. Shapes that were too even, too perfect, too straight for a former hunter like Isera to look them over and consider them as just weird oddities of nature.
'What the hell are those? A controlling mechanism of this barrier, by any chance?' Isera thought, only for her face to contort as she suddenly had to fight off the desire to just scream out into infinity while walking right into the divine barrier to end things for herself.
Because even if those shapes truly were the place where she could lower this devilish yet divine barrier and free everyone trapped in its pull…
With those shapes standing tall on the other side of the barrier, they were as distant to her as the nostalgic streets of the patriarchate's capital!
'This…' Gritting her teeth to the point her jaws started to hurt, Isera fell down to the ground, deprived of all the mental strength she needed to keep going.
She couldn't remember what was it that made her set off from the gathering. And in all honesty, she couldn't even care less about the reason. But now that she saw hope and realized it was locked on the other side of the barrier, it all felt like a cruel trick played on her by whoever set this barrier up in the first place.
And then, as if to prove her theories, a divine chariot suddenly appeared in the sky, rapidly closing the distance to the barrier, only to slow down and come to a complete halt right around the small monument Isera noticed.
For a moment, it defied the natural tendency of everything but birds and prayers to fall down to the ground the moment there was nothing to support it from below.
And then, just like a man riding down some kind of an invisible rope, the divine chariot descended towards the ground in a stable, smooth manner, all the way to the point where it gently rested its bottom directly into the trap of the barrier.
'No, despairing right now… If anything, now it's a time to do something!'
Jumping up to her feet, Isera brought her arms up above her head and started to shake them around with all the might of her supreme flesh.
"HEY! HEY!" she screamed out, holding nothing back, "HEY!"
But it was all futile.
The deities emerged from the bellows of their roundish, divine chariot and paid her no attention whatsoever, too preoccupied with the monument she spotted to give a single damn about her.
Yet, rather than performing some sort of ritual or using great arcana to perform maintenance of this devilish trap… They somehow caused the monuments to open up for them… Only to end up carrying something out of the insides of the monument and back into the bellows of their divine chariot.
'No…' Isera, throughout the fog of all her desperation and confusion, somehow managed to retain her pragmatic and coldly logical mindset. 'Those are not deities…' she soon came to realize, when she finally strained her eyes enough to notice that what they were carrying between the monuments and their vehicle of some sort… were boxes.
Just like that, perfectly cubical boxes with edges as straight as a man frequenting the most expensive brothel in the patriarchate's capital.
'But if they are not deities…'
Despite all of her discoveries, all that she figured out, and all that she saw… It all mattered not if they didn't pay Isera even the slightest attention!
But, as if to feed off the girl's hopes, as soon as the monuments closed again and two out of three figures she could see moved back inside the bellows of their weird, round vehicle, the last of the figures stood at the entrance to its sky carriage and turned towards the barrier.
A mistake that would cost quite a lot of Isera's fellow trapped supremes their will to stay put and hope that one day, the barrier would somehow exhaust whatever fuel it was using to keep going and free them all. A mistake of looking right into the barrier.
What came next, though, proved Isera wrong.
'He isn't looking into the divine barrier…' she realized after a few moments when she noticed the figure… 'It's looking at me!'
And then, the figure started to move its arms, first pointing to its left, then up before making its hand paint up a half-circle in the air, only to then point to its right and then straight at her.