This was a grim thought, and I let it sit with me for a while before I shook this thought out of my head because I know that no matter how high I could go, my power was not directed at those around me and my world, but to those who would destroy everything for their own benefit.
What this experience had shown me was that if I was going to be ascending to a higher level, then it was crucial that I did it far from anywhere that I wanted to protect.
I stood in the center of the crater, and the glass beneath my feet cracked, as my weight was enough to spider the surface. The fractures ran outward in golden lines, mirroring the channels beneath my skin.
Looking down, I noted that I was naked, and without any conscious thought, I gestured towards my waist, and threads emerged from my fingers and began to weave a loose pair of trousers around my legs.
I knew the configuration for weaving clothes with Threadwork, but at the Acolyte level, Threadwork was rather flimsy and drew so much Anima over time that it was not something you would want to learn. I had learned it anyway because I liked learning as many configurations for this spell as possible.
The trousers I made looked as if they were woven from silver threads, and even though I had lost Threadwork, I had gained something better. Focusing on this spell, the details came to me, and I froze for a moment.
[ The Loom of Lightning ]
[ Discipline — Epic — Broken-Celestial ]
[ Type: Field/ Sustained / Channeling ]
Effect: Projects a domain of lightning-threads; contacts with the thread are rendered structurally weak. Functions on solid matter, Essence, and Anima constructs.
Range: Extends with rank. Current maximum reaches approximately 900 metres.
Persistence: The web remains active after casting, with the weaver retaining a sensory link to anything the threads have touched.
Cost — Anima: High.
[ Consumed: Lightning Dominion, Threadwork ]
[ Absorbed: Storm Sense, Field Sustain, Directed Arcs, Voltage Modulation, Conductive Leash]
[ Integrated: Blessing — Anansi Web (Consumed)]
Lightning Dominion had been my first Adept Spell, this discipline had yielded one of the greatest feats of power I had as an Acolyte, and it was the direct evolution of my spell from Spark, to Arc Lightning to it, and I thought that I would use this spell for as long as I was an Adept, and there was no reason I could not use this spell if I ever became an Arcanist, but the loop had made me relive a single moment so much that even the most improbable events began to happen to me.
I knew that Dara was strange. The few times that I had observed her, some of her reactions were strange, but I could not have anticipated that she was a Blessed, one of the few people in the world who could serve as Avatars of a god.
Maybe it was time to talk about the gods and the divine. Take everything I say now with a grain of salt because I could not be sure of my story. As an Acolyte, I did not have access to all the information I needed to be assured of every fact I had gathered about the past, and it did not help that the Magus Academies suppressed details of the gods.
The hatred of the divine did not come from nowhere. In the past, before the rise of the Academies, this world was ruled by gods, and every race suffered under their tyranny.
Of all the gods, the strongest and the most vile was the Dragon God, and when he was defeated, the era of the gods came to an end. However, as much as every race in the world hated the gods, it was generally known that the system that gave us our status screen, which was grafted into the soul of every child at birth, had contributions from some of the gods.
I read that in the past, our status screen was different, as there were columns for divinities, miracles and other divine abilities added to it, but over the years, through unknown methods, the Academies on all seven continents had been slowly purging every soul of the influence of the gods, and in this present age, the only indicator that there were gods left was the Blessing tab on our status, and even that tab was almost useless because most people could no longer hold the blessings of the gods... it just drifts out of our bodies.
As I said before, this matter concerns the interests of those at the very top of this world, and most things I know may not be accurate. Nevertheless, if Dara was a Blessed, one of the rare people born with the ability to hold the blessing of a god, then she was in danger.
Why would she want to be a mage with the risk that she would suffer a grim fate if her status were discovered?
So many questions, and no matter how much I wanted to focus on that secret, I should deal with the changes that were happening to me. In the last loop, Dara had given me her blessing, and I think she did it because she thought I was a Blessed too, only this would explain the reason she had looked at me with hatred in that previous loop where I was fighting on my own, and in the other loops, she had protected me, even if it meant she died first.
Did Dara think she was protecting my secret in that manner?
I shook my head and brushed my hair from my face; it was longer now, and I didn’t know what this meant, because my relation to time was now seriously messed up.
She had given me her blessing, and I remembered that the blessing almost flowed out of my body, but my changed channels had grabbed hold of that blessing, and I did not gain the power of a god; I had consumed it, used it as the fuel to fuse my spell Lightning Dominion and Threadwork, now I had the Loom of Lightning.
It was a Field Spell that behaved like both a single-cast spell and a sustained spell, and I had never seen anything like this. This was just an Epic-ranked spell, but I have two new Legendary spells and a Legendary title!