Chương 284: Chapter 283 - Blessed Are Your Favored

Alexander walked through the camp with his hands in his pockets and his throat raw. The Gathering had gone on for hours. Far longer than he'd expected, and far more exhausting. The questions had started off reasonable and gotten progressively more insane as the clan leaders ran out of serious topics and their people ran out of restraint. He'd explained superpowers, the System, Earth's technology, what little he knew about Nightmares, and the Empire's plan to flee their own world. But he'd gotten what he needed.

After the cultural exchange had finally wound down, they'd brought out the maps. They were, frankly, terrible. They'd do amazing in a museum. Hand-drawn on stretched hide, colored with pigments that had faded over decades of handling, each one a work of art that told the story of the people who'd made it. But when it came to actual cartography, they were the worst maps Alexander had ever seen. Nothing was drawn to scale. Distances were guesswork.

Two maps from the same clan disagreed on the names of mountain peaks that were visible from both locations. One map showed a coastline that ran north-south. Another, supposedly of the same coast, showed it running east-west. The plains they spent most of their lives traveling across were rendered as vague blobs labeled with names that didn't match across any two versions. Droney had copied every one of them and modeled the combined data into something usable.

The result placed the Gathering on the Great Steppe, east of the Black Sea, somewhere between Ukraine and Georgia. The Caucasus Mountains rose to the south. Harborhill had been a coastal city on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea. The world's geography was Earth's, but its history made absolutely no sense to him. It didn't matter. He was done trying to reconcile it. What did matter was how the clans approached strategy.

After they'd marked every known city and Empire fortress on the holographic map projected by Droney, they'd suggested he hit all the closest ones. Their selections had formed an almost perfect circle around the Gathering's location. Alexander had killed that idea on the spot. The look on their faces when he'd pointed out that the pattern would lead the Empire straight to their doorstep had almost made him laugh. Tresko had gone pale.

Geetra had squinted at the map for a long time, then grunted in what he chose to interpret as grudging respect. He had enough information to begin. The wands, staves, and spellbook were with Wargah's clan now, ready to be distributed once the negotiations settled. He'd explained that he would return whenever he had enough of a haul to make the trip worthwhile, and in exchange they'd shared where the clans intended to travel, so he could find them again.

They were heading north-east, into what he knew as Western Kazakhstan, then east, deeper into Kazakhstan, stopping around the Aktobe Region. A roughly eight hundred mile journey that none of them had so much as blinked at. But apparently the Empire had little in the way of presence out that way, and it was where the great clans mostly lived. But before he left, there was something he needed to see. The mental thread he'd sealed Harborhill inside had been running the entire time.

Through every hour of explanation, every absurd question, every round of negotiation, it had been there. Processing. Circling the same handful of facts. The Empire knew he'd taken the Marquess's staff. They'd found her body. They knew what he'd done. And they'd burned the city to the ground anyway. He couldn't keep the wall up forever. He wasn't sure he wanted to. Arryet's clan had encountered travelers on the steppe several days out of Harborhill.

Seven survivors with varying degrees of injuries, bewildered and half-starved, stumbling along the trade paths with no destination. Arryet's people had taken them in, which told him something about the kind of leader she was despite her age. Their Sky, the one who carried the gift of sight, had confirmed that the survivors' magical signatures were hidden somehow. Masked by something she couldn't identify.

She believed that was the only reason they had survived, because it was known that nobody survived a Stars' Cleansing. Alexander let his Will unfurl. The golden threads appeared in his awareness. Most of the connections that had formed while he'd hovered in the air above Harborhill, watching families reunite and freed prisoners stumble into the arms of strangers, were gone. Gone because the people on the other end were dead. He counted what remained.

Seven threads led to signatures nearby, gathered together among the tents of Arryet's camp. A handful of others stretched into the distance, thin lines pointing back toward Harborhill. Alexander ignored the looks the clanspeople were giving him and cut between tents, following the threads. He found the yurt near the edge of Arryet's camp. A man stood guard outside, arms folded, watching Alexander's approach with an expression that suggested he'd been warned this might happen.

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"Clan leader Arryet gave me permission to speak with the survivors," Alexander said. Droney translated. The guard nodded and stepped aside. Alexander pushed the flap open and stepped inside. Everyone turned to him. There were seven of them. Some sat cross-legged on the ground. Others lay on furs, bandaged and propped against rolled blankets. All were injured, burns and bruises and hastily splinted limbs, though even at a glance he could see they'd survive. The recognition was instant. Some of them tensed.

Eyes went wide. A woman near the back raised a hand to her mouth, and the man next to her reached out to hold her. Alexander made eye contact with each of them, one by one. Then he bowed his head.

"I'm sorry." Droney translated. The survivors shared looks with each other. Nobody spoke. Alexander continued.

"It's my fault that the Empire of Stars destroyed the city. I didn't think they would. I didn't think I'd given them any reason to." He paused.

"I guess I thought I understood the rules, and that even though I had stolen their staves and wands, they would assume those were with me." Silence met his words. Then one of them, an old man with a splinted arm, climbed to his feet unsteadily. He crossed the tent and placed his hand on Alexander's shoulder, right where flesh met metal.

"The Stars do not need you to take their blame, Exalted One. They are many and powerful, and that they might visit upon us the horrors of which I have heard my entire life was something we all lived with." Alexander met his gaze and shook his head.

"If I hadn't gone to Harborhill—""Then my daughter would still be missing," another survivor said. He was being helped to his feet by a younger woman, one who Alexander vaguely recognized. She was thin and pale. One of those he'd pulled from the pods in the Marquess's basement. They approached together, and the father reached out and placed his hand on Alexander's other shoulder.

"I will never forget that moment. Thank you." Others climbed to their feet and did the same. Hands found his arms, his back, his shoulders. An older woman pressed her forehead against the joint where the cybernetic arm met his skin. Another placed her palm flat against the chest armor over his heart. Alexander had no idea what was going on. So he stood there and let it happen. Two of the survivors hadn't moved. The woman near the back still had her hand over her mouth.

The man beside her held her arm, his eyes fixed on Alexander. There was no gratitude in that look. No forgiveness. But despite that, the golden threads remained. Alexander held his gaze for a moment. Because the two who remained at the back, who hadn't approached, were the ones he understood. Their anger made sense. Then he looked away.

"Your power protected us, Exalted," the older woman said, her voice muffled against his shoulder. Alexander turned to her with a frown.

"How?" The first man spoke again.

"He Who Whispers forced our friends and families to kill each other. Those of us who survived hid or ran, but their ships rained magic down on us. They cursed everyone they struck, boiling their blood, making it spill from their eyes and ears." Alexander closed his eyes.

"I'm sorry." The old man squeezed his shoulder.

"You misunderstand. Our blood refused to boil." He opened his eyes. The man pointed to a nasty burn that covered his leg from knee to ankle.

"I felt the curse hit me. Felt the heat climb through my body. But something pushed back. Something that came from you." Murmurs of agreement came from the others.

"We walked for days," the older woman said.

"Without food or water, too afraid to return to the city for fear they would find us." She looked up at him, eyes wet.

"I felt your gift, Exalted. It kept me going even when all I wanted was to crawl under a bush and sleep." The others nodded. They were all talking now, sharing fragments of the same story with the desperate need of people who had carried it alone for too long. Alexander listened quietly. None of it made sense. He could feel that they were all Tier 1, and yet the things they described should have killed them several times over.

One of them was missing a hand, and had somehow survived a dirty amputation, only to then be forced to march for days while fighting off infection and blood loss. People didn't survive things like that. Not with normal human attributes. But as they continued, an idea began forming in his second mental thread. They were describing events where their blood refused to bleed properly, refused to boil, refused infection.

And then when the attack was over and they fled for their lives, they were able to keep going, slowly and begrudgingly perhaps, but as though something deep inside refused to lay down and die. Once the idea had sparked, it ran through to its conclusion without concern for his feelings. Sovereign Blood and Eternal Spark. The two fragments of Divinity he'd taken from the Lost Prophet and the Eternal Flame.

Adapted into Cultivator's Core, which had now been merged, along with the rest of his powers, into a single power called Machine God. They were part of him now. Then there was his own Divinity, also simply called Machine God. He'd tested it. Annie had brought a drone back to life, though its battery cells were completely dead, just by holding it. The golden thread between them had powered it, somehow drawing neither on his reserves nor his intent. There were other, smaller indications, too.

Things he'd mostly ignored. But the answer was right there.

'You are the God of all that is Machine. Blessed are your favored by all machines.' And the Machine God himself was part machine.