Chương 214: Chapter 288 - Continuation

Cycle 309 Mirian awoke and immediately conjured her newly bound ring. Sure enough, the Vault enchantment had stayed. She closed her eyes. Even at this distance, she could feel Meu. The drain was noticeable, but well within her capabilities. She repaired the hole in the ceiling, more out of habit than anything else, said her goodbyes to Lily, and flew off. The first day was one of the most critical, and she had much to do.

Cycle 310"Alright, head count. Anyone missing?" Gabriel asked the dreaming Prophets. There was a moment as everyone looked around.

"Celen? Oh, no, he's in the corner again. So… no? Great, so it's not one of us. I guess Liuan was right." Above them, a third temporal anchor now glittered on the Ominian.

"We will see how much more time it gives us," Ibrahim said stoically.

"We still intend to try the regulator again?"

"That's the plan, unless anyone has objections?" Mirian said. There were no objections.

"Last time, we noticed critical holdups in Urubandar as the port was overwhelmed, with lost shipments as warehouses and record keepers lost track. There were riots and unrest in a number of cities, most prominently, Mercanton, which prevented a lot of artifice from making it to its final destination. I'm working on refining the latter," Liuan said. A psychic sigh.

"And I'll deal with the former," Gabriel said.

"I will assist in this," Zhuan added. Jherica piped up.

"I've worked out some more ways for us to mass-produce component parts in factories, reducing the amount of temporary shops that need to be set up at the destination." Xecatl's soul stepped forward. She looked weary, Mirian thought. It had begun to happen at the beginning of each cycle, but Xecatl was reticent about the matter.

"Research continues of the spirit constructs. I will send a small contingent east, but I need the most important contributors to stay behind to continue my research. Mirian, can you send Viridian and his team through the Gate?"

"Of course." Another hour of planning, and the Prophets departed. There would be no hope of success this cycle, but Mirian thought that Tlaxhuaco's nagual were nearing a breakthrough in crossing Persaman obsidian cacti with Tlaxhuacan mountain weed. That would provide a much needed component to the spirit construct that would be able to begin growth before they had soil to work with.

Cycle 314 Mirian was over Tupuharai Island, east of Baracuel, when she stopped midflight. Her detectors were creating a much more detailed map of the energy flows beneath the world and last cycle, she'd found an anomaly on the 3rd of Merisheth, just before a large realignment of the eastern Labyrinth. Her greatest hope had been to find another Elder Gate, but the readings she was seeing made that surpassingly unlikely.

Still, at this very moment, a large part of Labyrinth was moving beneath the world much faster than it normally did. She saw an entrance burst upward, splitting the soil and knocking over a tree. Mirian watched, fascinated. Over the next hour, there were no labyrinthine horrors emerging from the entrance. Instead, hundreds of myrvites were coming through.

When she went down to investigate, she was amazed to see that an econode matching the environment of Tupuharai had been lifted nearly to the surface and was disgorging its population. Fascinating. She'd heard plenty of folk wisdom about Labyrinth entrances being the source of myrvites, but seeing it for herself was something else. Her thoughts turned to the desolation of Akana Praediar. Perhaps when this is all over, those lands might recover faster and more completely than Viridian's models suggest.

That was a hopeful thought. Enteria was resilient. It had survived the Cataclysm. It would survive this.

Cycle 317 A new anchor glittered in the Ominian's flesh. Ichor still dripped from between the wings and eyes covering Their shoulder, but the luminous glow felt like a hearth in the frostlands. Once again, they were all accounted for.

"The fourth anchor's timing is well in line with our predictions. We believe it belonged to who the Luminate name Third Prophet," Ibrahim thought to the Council.

"The other possibility was it belonged to one of the Tlaxhuacan generals who led the Cassocian Rebellion, though we are not at all in agreement on whether or not they were a Chosen." He had assumed a formal tone in these meetings. Mirian suspected he was running into the same issue she'd had before. She hoped she was wrong. Xecatl sent the feeling of a nod. Discussion continued with Celen offering a report on efforts he was making, though his speech was short and half-hearted.

Celen was nearing status as archmage by now, having grown bored of only taking a role in propaganda and research. He had tried writing several books, but having to rewrite them every cycle had grown intolerable and he'd stopped. It was bad enough writing and rewriting the same articles over and over. Jherica began their presentation next. They were attempting to try some new methods with production and shipping. The tenor of the meetings had changed over the years.

They were getting old, even though Zhuan was the only one who looked it. Often, she felt a simmering resentment flowing through the meeting. They had done this all so many times. There was a feeling of madness that came from such repetition. The break cycles were more frequent. That gave time for Mirian to run experiments on how events flowed without a certain Prophet. She was thankful she still felt a passion for magic and research.

The loops weighed on her too, but she had been able to find and hold on to moments of joy. She'd felt that resentment once, but she'd been able to let it go. There was a strange peace in this life. She hoped the others would find it too.

"Next order of business," said a bored Gabriel when Jherica was done.

"Madinahr, 24th of Plenith. This one's a sunrise, and the way it mixes with the magical auroras is just perfect," Mirian said. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

"Good, a new one," Gabriel said.

"I have Florin City on the 12th of Nerevain. Sunset. Won't spoil it for you."

"Yacuil, Veoloom the 2nd, also a sunset," Xecatl added. Sensing confusion, she added,"That's the eastmost city in Tlaxhuaco." When they woke, Mirian dutifully recorded the sunrise and sunset times in a tiny section of the bound Holy Pages. The rest of the notebook was becoming unintelligible to anyone but her. All her notes were in her own shorthand, which now mixed Friian and Adamic with glyph and rune notation. On top of that, her spellcasting pages were full of thousands of glyphs and runes.

It was neat and organized, but there was just so much of it compacted on each page. Each page had been written using the precise scribing machinery of Torrian Tower so that it was difficult to even read without a lens spell. The spellbook portion was almost entirely utility now that she had Equinox for her most powerful spells or when she wanted to freecast by moving mana directly through her soul.

When she was done, she sighed, let her spellbook fade back into her soul, and looked out at the ocean from her room in Benanuo's Wongzho Palace. She was old now. Older than her parents. Another year and she'd be older than even Selkus Viridian. Nearly fifty-five years in the time loop—but she had no wrinkles, nor a single strand of gray hair. Zhuan came and joined her. She had been 59 before the loops started, which put her current age at well over a hundred. She came and leaned over the rail next to Mirian.

It would be sunset soon.

"The production numbers last cycle were good," Mirian said.

"I'm still working on talking to our oceanic friends about the fifth contingency. It'll be… tight. But I think it's possible." Zhuan nodded.

"I think so too. I just need to try some different tactics in east Zhighua. There's a number of factories there. I just have to deal with factionalism." They were silent for a few minutes. Then Mirian said, "I'm worried about Ibrahim. All of them, really, but him especially." The other Prophet let her gaze sweep across the city. The bustle of the streets echoed up to reach them, mixing with the salty air and the warm evening breeze.

"It's a strain on all of us. But I worry about Xecatl." Mirian grimaced. Xecatl no longer was available at the very start of a cycle. It now took several hours for all the memories to transfer from Ceiba Yan to her, and there were imperfections in the transfer. Mirian had dedicated several pages to the spirit constructs and myrvite hybrids they were working on and often reiterated it to her so the work wouldn't be lost. There was another danger of the loop going too long: eventually, Xecatl would hit a limit.

There would be too much to transfer. Ceiba Yan was not a temporal anchor, and while the old tree did his best, he was still a tree, not an unfathomable piece of Elder technology. The sun dipped towards the horizon. From this angle, the way the orange and violet light reflected off the flooded rice paddies was beautiful. A hundred fields, swirling like the frozen moment of the ocean studded with green from a painter's brush.

"Should we tell the others about this sunset?" Mirian asked.

"No," Zhuan said, clasping Mirian's hand.

"I want this one to be just for us."

Cycle 324 High up in Torrian Tower, Mirian at last dismissed her lens spells and removed the chthonic needle from her devices. It had come from the Vault below Torrviol, and she'd spent most of the cycle studying it. Her attempts to replicate it had, unsurprisingly, failed. As best she could tell, the device was using something similar to the crystalline structures that she'd seen inside the sealed temple on Luamin.

Multiple waves of arcane energy constantly moved back and forth in the device, the variance so subtle she'd had to design a special detector just to pick up on it. Her guess was the glyphs and runes used by the device were too small to be seen even by layering lensing spells. There was, however, one last thing she wanted to try. One that would be necessary for any of her contingency plans to work. Mirian glanced at a nearby clock, then set her stopwatch.

With the fourth temporal anchor returned, the world now ended on the 9th of Veoloom at around 6: 12pm. The exact time changed by around four minutes, depending on how many times she and the other Prophets had used the Elder Gates instead of keeping them in optimal alignment. Though she couldn't replicate a chthonic needle—or any aspect of it—she could take a great deal of data on how it functioned and interacted with a soul. Her father had also taught her all that he'd known.

A few cycles ago, she'd implanted this one in a bog lion, then done a great deal of experimentation. She had then done comparative studies with her own temporal anchor. It was dangerous, but she needed to understand what the difference between the two Elder artifacts were. Her greatest hope was that a chthonic needle might be able to be turned into a temporal anchor, but her research seemed to point towards that being impossible. Time magic wasn't like the other fundamental energies.

Though study and practice, Mirian had finally figured out how to use raw gravity magic—but time magic was different. It was like trying to invent a spell without being able to make or even read glyphs. She couldn't study Eyeball or Conductor, either, as the two of them knew if she attempted it and had made clear continued attempts would be a violation of the pact. However, she'd gotten enough results by comparing the two devices to see similarities.

If she was right, both devices fundamentally bound the soul to a physical body. The only difference was a chthonic needle only bound the soul in a single timeline. The temporal needle was just more flexible; it could move the soul to a new timeline, but it had to visit the device on Luamin first. With the help of Zhuan and another visit to Luamin, she'd discovered that the temporal anchors did indeed stay in the great machine at its core until the end of the cycle.

Theoretically, then, a chthonic needle could stabilize the Ominian's soul. Mirian blinked outside Torrian Tower and proceeded to Eyeball's chamber. I'm heading back to Divir, she said. Also, I have a joke for you: to get to the other side. Eyeball beamed at her. OH THAT'S A GOOD ONE. YOU'VE TURNED OUR USUAL INTERACTION ON ITS SKULL. I SURE HOPE YOU REMEMBER TO TELL ME THE JOKE'S SETUP 'LATER,' HAHA. BUT WHO CAN KNOW? Mirian headed back to the surface, then stepped through the Gate to Divir.

Redirecting the Gate this late in the cycle meant that the entropic field was already beginning to break down. If successful or unsuccessful, she might only influence the cycle by a few minutes. Not enough for the other Prophets to notice. Mirian flew down to the doors of the Mausoleum. They parted before her magic and she walked through the shifting halls. Her divination showed that the size of the tertiary field surrounding the Ominian had decreased slightly in radius.

The gales of energy swept into her barrier as she advanced. Her black shield darkened and cracked. Keeping her shield up wasn't just a matter of magical prowess. The Ominian's sorrow and pain whipped around the room just as powerfully as Their tempestuous field. Mirian stood resolute, then lifted the chthonic anchor up. She layered a half-dozen shields over it.

She'd designed this spell to lengthen as the needle was moved forward, with the threads of arcane energy fueling the shields and propulsion contained within the shield. By keeping her arcane energy tightly threaded through a central column and then having it expand outward into the ovoid, the tertiary field couldn't strip the spell until the shields were shattered. When the spell was complete, she threaded mana through the force glyphs, launching the needle towards the Ominian.

The needle moved through the field like it was stuck in molasses. Mirian's jaw clenched as she fed more and more mana into the force impulse, trying to get it to speed up. It took two seconds for the first shield to shatter. It took a fraction of a second for the remaining five to crack and dissipate as they neared the great being. To her surprise, though, as her spell was ripped apart and the needle exposed to the tertiary field—the needle continued on. Of course, she thought.

To her, the chthonic needle's artifice was impossible to understand, but to this Elder God, it might be as simple a tool as a worker's hammer. Mirian backed away from the Ominian and Their throne until maintaining her shield was bearable. She watched as the chthonic needle gradually floated towards the colossal figure. The tangle of wings and eyes that made up Their flesh stirred slightly, and then—the needle sank into one of the holes, sliding through the calcified ichor like it wasn't there.

When she looked at Their soul, a glow erupted around the wound, another spark of gold in a storm of violet shadows. It wasn't the same intensity as the true temporal anchors, but it was clearly having an effect. She backed away further, keeping her divination spells active, then pulled out her stopwatch. It took nearly an hour for the change to take place, but her spells measured the tertiary field shrinking a full fifteen centimeters.

Then, breakdown of the entropic shell around Divir began to interfere with readings. Three hours later, she felt the moon shift beneath her feet. The entropic field was dissolving, as it always did. She dismissed her spellbook and Equinox so they wouldn't be damaged and checked her stopwatch one last time. Mirian walked outside to watch as Divir entered the atmosphere. Six minutes less than a normal cycle, but that's with the Divir Gate still open. Accounting for that, it extended the cycle several minutes.

Relief flooded her. Her theoretical work had been validated. If a Prophet did betray them on the final cycle, she had a means to correct for it that didn't require her to hunt them down. That was good. It was a big world. Easy to hide in, as she'd demonstrated to Troytin. Her death this time was interesting. She'd never ridden Divir down to the surface before. I'll have to try it again sometime, she decided as her world was torn apart with scything fields of antimagic and blooming arcane fire.