Chapter 158: You See The City

Elias stepped through the Asylum’s massive gate, the great metal doors groaning shut behind him with a sound like a sleeping beast turning over. It was early in the morning, and so Cora and Fenwick would not be at their post; most likely, they would be resting after spending all night guarding the gate.

They had thought Elias the importance of always resting when the chance presented itself, and this was one of the few lessons he did not learn because he hardly needed rest.

As he stepped outside the gate and saw the city opening up for him, Elias could not help but gasp. For a moment, he simply stood there, breathing in the air of the city he had lived beneath for most of his life, and realizing, for the first time, that he had never truly seen it.

The road leading down from the Asylum’s cliff was paved with ancient stone, each block fitted with a precision that modern masons could only dream of; even though there were now small cracks on some of these blocks, they were mostly insignificant.

As a mortal, Elias had walked this path thousands of times, but his eyes were always fixed forward, his mind always calculating, always hunting. He had seen the road as a means to an end.

Elias remembered the pressure he had always been feeling as a mortal, although he was facing a much deadlier reality after touching Lumina; the only difference was that he now had the chance to fight for his place in this world.

This was the entire reason why the pressure on his shoulders was no longer pressing, not when he knew that he had the potential to reach the same height as his master, if he survived.

Looking at the road with new eyes, with Perception 207 and the Sight Awakening trait humming in his veins, he saw it as a map of history, and he could stand here for weeks just learning about a single block of stone.

When he pushed his sight to see beyond the physical, the stones underneath his feet began to show their hidden glow; it was with a soft, deep amber light that seemed to pulse from within.

Elias’ eyes brightened when he noted the color of this Lumina. From what he understood about the colors of Lumina, this was most likely the residual Lumina of the god-era craftsmen who had laid them, their power seeping into the very rock over countless millennia.

It was as if he were seeing the signature of the craftsman who made these roads, as each stone was slightly different, slightly alive, and together they told a story of patience and devotion that no book could capture.

Before he activated the Art of Stone, Elias believed he would have never truly noted this change, but his relationship with the ground was deepening, and new sights were opening up before him.

Elias knelt and touched one of the blocks. The warmth that met his fingers was not from the sun; it was from the stone itself, remembering the hands that had shaped it. He was literally touching history, and the Art of Stone sent waves of warmth through his fingers into the ground, and he could almost see the hands of the man who had slowly carved this brick from the mountains.

He stood and continued downward, almost wishing that he could walk barefoot, as he realized that he could gain unknown knowledge from touching the ground where gods should have walked in the past.

Elias’s eyes had always been pointed downward, and his heart was beating fast because he had not truly seen Stormfall, and there was a sense of pressure in his chest that he could not fully understand, and then after taking in several deep breath, he looked up and activated his sights to the limit, and Elias stood frozen at the scene that his mind was capturing.

He would never know that when his perception was pushed to the limits, his eyes transformed from green to a prismatic glow, resembling shattered glass reflecting different colors. It was both eerie and beautiful.

Dear fallen gods, he knew the city was beautiful, but he had never wanted to see this beauty, because he was forbidden from seeing it by the fragility of his immortality and the shortness of his mortal’s sight.

Even as a Fury Forge, Elias’s perception could be equal to that of a Mist Phantom, and unlike an average Mist Phantom whose bodies may have slight imperfection from the time they were mortals, Elias was an Ascedant Candidate, he had a hundred pools of infinity, and his body was forged with three legacies, and even if a Mist Phantom had the same stats as him, Elias’s would still be superior to them.

Elias had always thought that Stormfall was divided into two major district, but only now was he seeing that it was three districts, and the differences between these three parts of the city was so vast that it was almost as if three different cities had been stacked together, but they were not mixing, and he could guess that each city was a reflection of the social order that had grown like moss over the bones of the divine.

From his vantage point on the cliff road, Elias could see the upper district spread out before him like a jewel box. Here, the buildings were constructed with such scary perfection that it almost seemed as if they were grown.

Crystal spires twisted toward the sky in elegant spirals, their surfaces smooth as glass and alive with flowing Lumina that traced veins of blue and gold through translucent walls.

Floating platforms drifted lazily between the spires, carrying well-dressed Siphons in robes that shimmered with their own internal light. Some walked; others simply stepped from platform to platform, their Agility so high that distance had become a suggestion.

This was the first time Elias had seen Siphon society spread out before him in this manner, and it was shocking. They did not seem like men, but divinities, and without his enhanced vision, he would never have seen this part of the city, not unless he made it to the peak of the city.

Elias could feel his eyes beginning to hurt due to the strain of pushing his perception, but he was not afraid of permanently damaging his sight, so he did not stop looking.

His eyes kept sweeping through the high spires of the city, and he saw a woman tending a garden that floated in mid-air, her plants fed by tiny streams of water that defied gravity, looping in endless circuits around each bloom. Her talent must be related to controlling water, or it may be her Lumina Vein Art, and from the light around her body, she must be a Mist Phantom, maybe even stronger!

Elias pulled his eyes away from her to avoid being detected, and the next sight that drew his attention was a child who should be no older than twelve practicing with a small orb of light, his face scrunched in concentration as he tried to make it dance, and his mother watched from a balcony, pride and worry mingling in her expression.

He knew that there were special people who could awaken their Lumina early in life, and he had just seen one of them, and if his perception was correct, this child was a peak-level Wisp.

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