Chapter 45: The Divinity Pillar

Even in death, Elias did not truly die. His mind… his will, refused to give up, and he had fought for every second to activate Commander Yseult’s drop of Lumina.

At the beginning, the darkness had slowly descended over him, until he had been inside the darkness, and it had been so… cold. The darkness was not soft or welcoming, not while he resisted it. It pressed against the last spark of him who remained, and Elias could only fight back the only way he could…by not giving it what it wanted.

As the hours turned to days, Elias came to realize that something in him was broken; his sheer need to control his fate did not seem natural, but he couldn’t question the reason he was the way he was. He could only learn to live with himself and the choices he made.

And what he had decided upon in this moment was that he was not going to die, especially not to a fragment of a goddess that had forgotten she was dead.

Elias respected the rules of the jungle, and he did not believe that anyone who could not protect what they had deserved to keep it. He had no pity for the dead goddess, with her position, falling to Asulon should not have been possible, but somewhere along the line, Elias guessed even gods could become complacent.

Feeling pity for the fallen was placing himself in the mindset of a prey, and Elias would not let himself become that

helpless. Only a prey would resign to death when the teeth of the predator sink into their throat… If he were prey, he would have allowed this Fragment of Divinity to kill him, but Elias was not prey, and he had weapons.

The detonation of the Commander’s Fragment was like soothing music to his heart, and when he heard the scream of the goddess in the grip of death, Elias would have laughed if he had been able to.

Slowly, the darkness began to flee with an almost reluctant sigh, and Elias senses that were dull slowly began to come to life, and then he sensed… pain, and he had never been so grateful in his life for this pain.

The pain radiated from every part of him, as if every cell in his body had been damaged, and Elias knew that this was not far from the truth. His body, after days with no life inside of it, would be on its way to decay, and for him to heal from a corpse to a living man required drastic changes in his body’s chemistry, and pain usually meant that things were going in the direction that he wanted.

His healing took hours, and when the pain began to fade, Elias almost missed it. Then his senses snapped back into place, and the first sensation he felt was weight; it was not gravity, but something heavier, as if something lived inside his ribcage and refused to let go.

Commander Yseult’s drop of blood was gone, but it had pierced into him and to a place that Elias knew led to the core of his power as a Siphon, and now he could feel that weight inside his chest, and it was heavy.

He opened his eyes, or he tried to, but they were crusted shut with dried blood. He blinked once, twice, felt the flakes crack and fall away as old paint, and faint white light greeted him.

For a long time, Elias never bothered with blood because the Green Swarm in his body consumed every single drop of it when they were active, and now he was beginning to find always being bloody an irritation.

Still, it was a small price to pay for being able to heal back from death, and it made Elias feel like an ungrateful noble lad who found fault for having fifty mansions, instead of fifty-one.

With his sight came awareness, and he immediately knew he was no longer in the cavern. Perhaps the detonation of the Commander’s blood had thrown him into another part of the city, but Elias still felt four spots of cold in his head, and one of them was blaring so brightly in his mind that he knew he had arrived at the destination that he had been going for.

He still maintained his connection with the Swarm, and he could feel them far above him, making Elias understand that somehow, he had been pushed deep into the earth, and from the distance, he could feel his Swarm. He was many miles deep in the ground.

Without the Commander’s power bringing him to this point, he knew he would have never made it, and Seeding his Lumina would have most likely taken him years before he could realistically reach this place.

“About time things began to go according to plan,” he groaned as the full senses from his body came online, and he saw that he was lying on his back, but the ground beneath him did not feel like stone, and it was warm… pulsing.

The only reason Elias knew he was not lying on a gigantic palm was because the ground beneath him felt incredibly smooth like polished ivory, but the more he pushed his senses around him, it almost felt like the ground was slowly breathing, as if this floor was skin stretched over muscle, and this was enough to freak him out that he struggled to come to his feet.

Why did he think that because he had arrived at the spot to seed his Lumina, he was safe?

As he surged to his feet, Elias stumbled back as he nearly slipped, but his Agility was enough that he only staggered a bit before he regained his footing. Three things had made him stagger as if he were drunk: the first was that the weight he could feel inside his chest had thrown off his balance, the nature of the floor that was too smooth to be natural, and the third was the structure in front of him.

He found out that he was in a massive cavern, countless times bigger than the one he had previously been in, and in front of him was a gigantic pillar that softly radiated starlight. Elias was used to seeing massive structures built by hands that defied mortals’ comprehension, but that had always been from a distance and not truly up close.

The pillar was no thicker than three men standing shoulder to shoulder, and it stretched upward into shadow, easily a hundred feet tall. It could have been taller, but something had sliced the pillar into pieces in the past, and what he was seeing here was only its base.

Its surface was not smooth, etched with countless spiraling runes that glowed the same pure white as the bead that had once lived inside his chest. It reminded him of the Commander’s power, and he realized that this was Divinity… what the Commander had placed inside him had been Divinity and not Lumina.

He wondered if she knew he would face the fragment of a dead goddess, but all of these speculations would be answered in time; for now, he needed to focus.

At its base, the pillar widened into a shallow, perfectly circular basin, filled with liquid light that moved like mercury yet gave off no heat. Without any indicator, Elias knew that the seed of his Lumina would be planted at the base of this pillar.

After a lot of twists and turns, he had finally arrived at the place to seed his Lumina.

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