Uriel stood in the cauldron, surrounded by unmoving hordes of monsters, alone and tiny.
His mind was still extrely foggy, and it would’ve been more accurate to say he was unconscious, driven forward by only the faintest sliver of clarity.
rely standing, he swayed with the wind, like a drunk man who’d lost all sense of balance, a discombobulated puppet steered chaotically from side to side, its controlling strings tangled and ssy.
He blinked. Then blinked a couple more tis.
With each blink, the creatures around him seed to grow less and less animated, their breaths shortening, heartbeats slowing, blood going cold.
Their bodies were shutting off.
Each of his blinks, like the Spirit’s steps, left echoes in the ambient fabric of aether, rippling outward and through everything around him.
It was strange. It made no sense.
Such power was an absolute anomaly within the hands of a re G ranker.
They began to fall and collapse, gently and without protest.
It began in the dozens, then rose in the hundreds, then the hundreds of thousands, and then—
Millions.
Hundreds of millions.
Billions.
An ocean of billions of corpses lay around Uriel.
His mind finally reached its limits and fell entirely into slumber, his body toppling over.
Yet rather than hitting hard against the tal, the ambient aether thickened, wrapping around him and cushioning his fall to such an extent that he seed weightless.
Like a feather.
Like that, he softly made contact with the tal, asleep.
His snores echoed.
"..."
[Death Advent has been cleared!]
[...calculating...]
—
[1. Uriel Ymir Loom — Perfect]
—
The bodies littering the endless expanse of tal began to unwind, reverting back into the strings of dark light they were ford from, the gigantic cauldron itself breaking down as the Advent ca to an end in the strangest way imaginable.
In the most bizarre and anticlimactic of ways.
Uriel’s body vanished, teleported away.
But his na, this ti, was rembered by all.
...
In a single day, the trajectory of Ithurial’s fate entirely shifted.
Every single human still alive received floods of rewards—three Diamond-grade rewards deed to be what they needed most, but also multiple Death-grade rewards.
The value of such a thing was beyond words, difficult to explain unless one understood the greater systems beyond the new and budding world Ithurial would beco.
It was a single event, yet it would define everything to co.
All defined by a single youth.
...
Sleep didn’t imdiately embrace Uriel.
He had fallen asleep in the cauldron, but the teleportation startled him awake.
PAH!
His vision cleared, and he found himself in a small yet cozy room, filled with wooden furniture and porcelain decorations—a bed, a small desk, and a mini library packed with old books and delicate vases.
’...’
Uriel swayed and stumbled, confused, staggering backward until his legs hit the bed and he fell onto it, collapsing into its tender softness.
’...’
He looked out the window embedded into the wall the bed rested against. It overlooked the busy, chaotic streets of the settlent below.
From mory alone, he could tell that whatever room he was in belonged to the Emporium, or at least a house close to it.
He was in Ayah’s house.
’...’
He closed his eyes, his mind so exhausted he couldn’t even properly form a single thought.
Still, fragnts surfaced. He mulled over everything that had happened.
The eting with Persephone.
Enoch suddenly throwing him into a deadly trial while knowing he was defenceless.
Lirik’s brutal torture.
His discussion with Thoryl.
Being thrown to his death.
The Advent.
And then...the strange, foggy mories of how he’d conquered it.
There were many things Uriel could take away from these events; many mistakes laid bare, many talents discovered, dozens of lessons hidden between the folds of each experience.
But there was one thing he rembered most clearly.
His heart.
He rembered the confusion he felt witnessing Enoch and Persephone’s interactions.
The shock, and the sharp tinge of betrayal, when Enoch triggered the trial.
The fear and hatred he felt when Lirik kidnapped and tortured him.
And the sorrow that followed when Thoryl told him the truth, that he was dispensable.
He rembered the sheer agony and helplessness of standing alone, surrounded by billions of monsters.
The sha of being unable to stop his tears.
The pathetic attempts to pray to gods who had never once answered him.
The echoes of his weak whimpers, almost begging the world itself for a miracle.
Helpless. Pathetic. Helpless.
That was all he could call himself.
’...’
He didn’t even notice when his vision blurred again. Or when his hands began to tremble. Or when his breaths grew shorter and shorter.
[Ti is a flat circle.]
Uriel slowly sat up, wiping the tears from his face. Then he tore his scholar’s robes open, exposing his chest.
’Never again.’
With his nails, loaded with as much aether as he could muster, using his spark to infuse the deepest, truest weight of his emotions into them, he carved a circle across his sternum.
Flesh split. Skin tore. Blood spilled.
His jaw clenched hard, the fact that such a small wound hurt so much only fanning the brutal flas burning within his heart.
[Ti is a flat circle.]
He completed the circle.
Then, across it, from north to south, he drew a line, straight and sharp.
The grueso mark engraved into his chest resonated with his core, but also with the aether of the world itself, becoming sothing unnatural.
A shocking creation, a sort of runic scar. Overflowing with the emotions he felt.
Emotions that would forever burn into his chest as an eternal reminder.
’Never again.’
He wanted to be stronger. No, more than that. Not wiser. Not more knowledgeable. Not even simply better.
He wanted sothing beyond all of it.
He wanted to be Greater.
So untouchable and beyond everything that odds would simply cease to matter. So far above it all that the cycles of the circle themselves would lose aning.
All odds had been stacked against him.
Dozens of regressors and entities far deeper into the steps of Ascendance than he was had used him, toyed with him, as if he were nothing more than a lamb bred for slaughter.
A pawn ant to be sacrificed. A tool ant to be used, then discarded.
["Be a good lamb, yes?"]
He didn’t want power. He didn’t want freedom. He didn’t want control, godhood, or transcendence.
Fate was unfair. But he didn’t want to break fate.
He wanted his fate to remain the sa. For the suffering to remain. But he wanted to make it aningless.
To humiliate fate, whatever it was that governed it.
He wanted to make all opposition aningless. For all opposition to end in humiliation.
And that, he swore.
’Never again.’
Making such a promise—so absolute, so devoid of nuance or restraint—while so young and so weak would inevitably lead to even greater suffering.
But Uriel didn’t seem to care. The rarely flaring naivety and impulsiveness of his age bared themselves without restraint.
The gory mark on his chest scarred over in an instant, his spark nding it directly.
His heart cald. The soul-numbing storm of rage and unrest condensed into the mark itself.
’...’
The whiplash from emotions his normally calm self had never experienced, back to unperturbed serenity, left a strange dissonance within him. It tugged at the limits of his exhaustion.
Crawling into the bed, he slowly and weakly slipped beneath its covers.
Then he fell asleep.
The tears were still warm on his young face.
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