Chapter 280: The Great Dao

That was the first thought that surfaced through the pain, arriving with a clarity that felt incongruous with the state of his mind in that moment.

The Great Dao. Absolutism itself…

The corrective force of existence that operated without intention, without malice, without any quality that could be appealed to or reasoned with. It simply was what it was and did what it did. And in the face of something that fundamental, the question of how much power one possessed became entirely beside the point.

He could only fight through the pain and trust that the process of returning he had already initiated would complete itself before the nullification killed him. That was the only rational thing to hold onto. That, and one other thing — the certainty that Arros was experiencing the exact same thing he was, right now, in whatever form his soul mass took.

The Great Dao didn’t discriminate. It was absolute and free of intention and it moved against incongruity wherever incongruity existed. Arros was half of this incongruity. The same force tearing through Finn was tearing through Arros with equal intensity and equal indifference to what Arros was or what he had been or what he had built over however many centuries he had existed.

Finn knew this for a fact. And it was that knowledge that gave him something to hold onto through the pain.

So it was perhaps no surprise that in that moment — despite the excruciating force dismantling his soul piece by piece, despite the part of him that understood clearly that his only sensible priority was to expedite his return before the nullification consumed him entirely — a thought crossed his mind that had no business being there given the circumstances… Or perhaps it had been sitting in the back of his mind for a long time, waiting for exactly this moment to surface. With Finn, one could never know for certain which of those two things was true.

This is it…

His pain-muddled mind produced the thought with a clarity that felt absurd against everything else he was experiencing.

I can end it all here and now…

If he could drag this process out, delay his return, hold the moment of separation open longer than it needed to be open, he could use the Great Dao itself as a weapon. The Great Dao was trying to nullify both of them until the incongruity resolved. That resolution could happen one of two ways:

If both of them were nullified entirely, or if one of them outlasted the other and became the sole remaining Error, the one the Great Dao recognized as the true claim to the authority.

All Finn needed to do was outlast Arros, and the Great Dao would do everything else.

If that happened, he wouldn’t need the plans he had already begun constructing in the deep recesses of his mind. The careful, patient plans for how to counterattack against Arros when he returned to his own timeline. Plans that accounted for the fact that in the future, Arros had grafted himself directly into his soul through the soul debt clause, which meant fighting Arros directly was functionally the same as destroying his own soul along with him.

Plans that had required him to think creatively and ruthlessly about what it would even mean to end something that had made itself integral to his own existence. Plans he had perhaps already begun to actualize in ways that would only become apparent later.

All of that would become unnecessary if he could outlast Arros here and let the Great Dao settle the matter with its absolute indiscriminate finality.

The thought was still taking shape in his mind when the pain spiked again, dramatically, shockingly, as his soul came under direct and total assault from the Great Dao without any buffer. If he could have screamed he would have. But he had no mouth, no body, no physical form of any kind through which to express it. He existed now purely as a congregation of his own consciousness, as a soul in transit, and the pain moved through every layer of what he was without anything to absorb or redirect it.

The prior thought — the plan, the possibility, the glee of it — felt like utter nonsense under such pain. How had he thought he could drag this out voluntarily? How had that seemed like something a person could simply choose to do? Every instinct that constituted him screamed to end this. To complete the return. To get out of this state before there was nothing left of him to return at all.

But before that instinct could take full hold and override everything else, he caught himself.

And from somewhere beneath the pain… from somewhere that the pain hadn’t reached yet, or couldn’t reach, or didn’t know to look, he found the rage. The channeled, controlled, specific rage of everything he had seen in that chamber. Of every memory he had recovered. Of watching, in full clarity and full detail, how completely and methodically someone had taken hold of his soul and treated it as a resource. Of how someone had manipulated him, the Errant, across worlds and time like a piece on a board. Of how someone had planted themselves inside him from the very beginning of this life, this timeline, this version of himself…

That rage fueled his will. And somehow he pushed through.

He suddenly felt the pain lessen, as if a buffer has been created between him and the full force of what was attacking him, and in that buffer his mind sharpened back into focus.

Clarity returned, and with it the ability to analyze what had actually happened to give him that reprieve.

His soul, in its transient state of moving across time, had already partially reconnected with his future body. His actual body. His body as Finn Slade, the Ossuarist body with its framework and its accumulated soul masses and everything that made it capable of being a container for what he was.

He could feel the familiar weight of it at the other end of the tether — the specific density of an Ossuarist’s body, the resonance of the soul masses arranged within it.

He could feel all twenty-one soul of them. The twenty-one that Arros had placed inside him at the very beginning, from before he had ever consciously participated in anything that happened to him. Eleven of which he had already unlocked and integrated into his conscious use…

Or rather…

Twelve.

The tenth soul mass — one of the ten he had not yet consciously unlocked, one of the ones that had been sitting dormant in his soul, bore the full brunt of the Great Dao’s nullification in the next instant.

Finn felt it clearly, the soul mass interposing itself between the Great Dao’s nullifying force and Finn’s actual soul, bearing the brunt of the attack.

It wasn’t even something he’d done consciously. This was simply the response of the soul mass to a threat to his soul…

Which meant… his soul masses could absorb the Great Dao’s nullification. They could serve as buffers for him, burning out of existence to prolong his time…

Immediately that realization dawned on him, a deadly calm filled him immediately…

This was the tenth soul mass that was dormant…

There were nine more to go… Nine more chances to prolong his time…

He could end Arros here and now.

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