Chapter 193: You Are Willing To Pay The Price

As much as he hated to admit it, he did not understand the core of his abilities. Although he knew it was foolish for someone like him to even consider the complexities of Lumina and the Legacies inside of him, it still stung a bit.

Still, the one thing that Elias understood was the need for learning.

“The Tear is not like the others,” she continued. “You are broken, and so the Echo Stone will teach you to quiet the noise, the Heartwood will show you how to grow from pain, and the Tear will show you what it means to feel.”

Elias had listened to everything the voice had said, but her first words stuck with him… You are broken.

It was not the first time he had heard these words since he touched Lumina, and it was not the first time he had wondered about his life and all the strange things that were tied with it.

Elias would be a fool if he did not consider that it was not normal to be able to heal as a mortal, or the fact that he would decay if he did not kill.

At first, he wanted to believe that he did not take anything from his prey, since he was not touching Lumina, but what if it was more fundamental than that?

What if everyone he had killed, he had been taking their souls, and only now that he could touch Lumina could he see this happening?

If he was broken, then there were pieces missing inside of him, and for so long, he had been filling those holes with the souls of the damned.

In the dream that he had, the boy with the yellow eyes had reached inside of him and had been surprised to find nothing, and so many other small evidences along the way, from his missing childhood memories, to the fact that no matter how much he pretended, he could not truly fit in with those around him.

Elias was not surprised that his primary attribute was the void, and in his Lumina Space was a deep, infinite hole that represented the emptiness inside of him… an emptiness that he had learned to ignore for too long.

He had been looking for answers for so long, believing that becoming a Siphon would show him the truth about what he was missing, but instead, he had become swept up in a conspiracy that could shatter the world, and for a while, due to the scale of the entire thing, he had forgotten what he was looking for.

Remove all of his Talent and abilities, and what would be left was an eight-year-old boy who was slowly decaying in the streets and wondering why he could not live unless he tore out the throat of the smiling woman offering him bread, when he could hear the voices of dozens of men she had brutally killed in bed.

Elias knew that he should not, but he replied to the voice of the goddess.

“I feel,” he said. His voice was hoarse, barely a whisper, but the lake heard him, and all the voices immediately fell silent… waiting.

“You feel the Passenger’s hunger,” the goddess said. “You feel the rage of the dead, the weight of what you have done, what you have become. But do you feel sorrow? True sorrow, not the echo of someone else’s pain? Do you grieve for the ones you killed, the ones you could not save, the ones who died so you could live?”

Elias thought of Josef and the faces in his memory, the one hundred and fifteen trophies he had collected before his ascension, plus the hundreds more since.

He thought of the oasis and the tens of thousands dead, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, a hundred miles away from the city, and he would bet that except for Mira, no one else knew.

The beautiful forest that had taken six hundred years to grow was destroyed in a single night.

As always his mind returned to the boy with yellow eyes, the one who had shown him the so-called future, and who he had seen what he thought was the true face of evil, and with that thought his mind reached towards Liana, wife of Josef, whom he had last seen kneeling in her garden, mourning a monster she had never truly known.

Finally, he shook his head, and then he bowed his head, as if in thought.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what I feel.”

“Then you are ready.”

Elias gasped as a weight fell on his shoulder and the water closed over his head.

㉣

Elias sank into the lake, but he did not fight this sensation, because he no longer felt any rejection from the lake. The water took him willingly, and he let it. through the Crimson Vein Dominion, he could sense vast bodies of heat, swimming in the lake; he was not alone, but these creatures did not seem interested in him.

He sank deeper than a lake of that size should be able to hold. Minutes passed, and the pressure built, causing his ears to scream before they went silent.

The light from the surface faded, and he was left in the dark. The only thing left was the unrelenting pressure on his shoulders. Elias could not be sure, but he must have gone down for miles.

His lungs began to burn, then went numb. His chest ached, then went still. With his regeneration, he was drowning, yet he would not die; his attributes had grown too high for him to perish in this manner, and still he was being pulled deeper into the darkness.

Elias should be afraid, but he was not; his quest for answers was deeper than any fear that he could have of drowning inside this darkness.

“You are not supposed to be here,” a voice said.

A cold voice suddenly called out in the darkness around him, and it was not the goddess, but something else.

The voice was deep and had a sense of age, but Elias was becoming used to hearing voices from beings that were far from normal.

“You are not supposed to be here, little vessel. But you are, and now you must pay the price.”

Elias tried to speak, but how could he when he was drowning? He wanted to know who was speaking and what they could tell him of the past and the empty hole inside of him.

“Ah, little vessel, I can see the question in your heart; it burns like a star. Do you truly want this answer?”

Elias nodded. More than anything, he wanted to know what was happening inside of him.

“You were never meant to be whole, your mortality was to keep you safe, and now, you hunt for the parts of you that are taken, and soon you will begin to feel them, all those you carry with you… their memories, pain, sorrow. You are strong because your heart is gone, but the deeper you go, the more of it you shall find. This is the price of truth, are you willing to pay it?”

Elias knew that he did not fully understand the ramifications of accepting these terms, but he wanted the truth more than he feared the consequences.

“Then, the Tear of Sorrow is yours, and I pity you.”

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