I shivered, because I understood what the Jade Oracle had just said, when she dies, the last thing holding back the seals from being broken would no longer exist.
In the previous loop, where I had found my way into the pyramid, I had seen the body of Rex being slowly consumed, as his blood and his flesh floated upwards, and at that time, I did not understand what I was looking at.
As it turns out, this was just part of the Ascension Ritual where Orath and whoever was running this ritual in the background had been killing the Jade Oracle.
I had destroyed the camp, and so I had delayed the eruption by three hours, but Rex was hardly the only sacrificial lamb being used for this ritual, and not using him for this had just brought me this much time.
"Why would they do this?" I wondered aloud, and the Jade Oracle replied to me,
"The seals below are batteries. While my presence remained, the Pale Matron could not touch them. When I fade, the seals shall crack under the weight of her corruption, and the men get what they actually came for. They want the light. All the Celestial Energy inside the seals would be harvested. This is why your world would end, clockwork boy, the greed of men."
After she said this, she went silent, leaving me with my thoughts, and they were not good thoughts.
The blood of millions. Thirty-one families bred like livestock across ten thousand years, all to poison a guardian who could otherwise have held the dark out forever.
And the prize at the end of all that murder was not even the dark thing in the cell, but a column of stolen heaven to pour into a cup, so that a Sovereign already old enough to have killed the gods could become something more.
The Sovereign of the Stars would end the world just for the chance to grow stronger.
Where were the heavens? I had asked it on the stairs, and I asked it again, and the answer was what it had always been: nothing.
Heaven was a dead light in a ring of dead lights. It was a headless oracle on her knees among her own fallen feathers... Heaven is blind, and we shall suffer its apathy.
"No," I growled, "I refuse to accept this."
"No?" There was a flicker of the old wit in the voice of the Jade Oracle, and her voice softened, "You are young, and no is what a child says to the weather when they fear the coming storm."
I shook my head in denial. "I have watched too many die and given too much for me to find a way to stop this," I called out, "And I have spent a long time learning that the thing everyone agrees is impossible is usually just the thing nobody has been stubborn enough about yet." I made myself look at the dying disc, and I made myself think, "You are being poisoned; if I can stop the blood infusion, then you need not die."
The disc pulsed, and it looked slow and tired, the pale green light flickering at the edge of going out.
"There is no way, little clockwork boy. I am sorry, I know you climbed a great many stairs to hear otherwise, but we have no time left for it. The poison is in me to the root. In three hours, the last clean part of me stops, and there is nothing in this world that can pull ten thousand years of filth back out of me in such a short time."
"I killed Rex; he was one of the bloodline members that is poisoning you. Are there more like him in the Caelith? Tell me where they are, and I shall hunt them all down."
The voice of the Jade Oracle sighed, "The child you killed was simply a tip of the spear that delivered the poison directly to my heart. Twelve thousand miles west, there should be a cavern filled with thousands of children, and their blood has been flowing into my Caelith for the last hour. You brought me time, but that is all you can give me."
"Twelve thousand miles west," I muttered to myself, my mind crunching the numbers, and I realized that that should be near the edge of the next continent. I would need to cross an entire ocean to get to that place, and that was clearly impossible.
Could I move that fast? Lightning Incarnate made me fast, but crossing twelve thousand miles seemed to be a stretch for me, not because lightning could not cross that distance in a short period, but because of what it would cost me.
Lightning Incarnate could move as fast as lightning, but I had realized that my sense of time when I was using it was disjointed, and I perceived time much more rapidly in that state. So if one second passed outside, the time I experienced in my Incarnate form was longer, and that meant that I had to endure the cost of becoming lightning.
I am sure that I could use Lightning Incarnate for a longer time as an Adept, but even if I could cross the distance from the pyramid to the edge of the other continent in a few seconds, my soul would long be eradicated as I would be forced to process all the details of travelling through that impossible distance, and the total travel time in my perception may reach hours... I am not sure I could survive for a few minutes.
That was not even considering the fact that I was going to the home ground of the Sovereign of the Stars, and I am far from challenging him in any meaningful manner.
"No," I said again, even if it meant I had to cross the continent a million times and die a million times.
"I told you," she said, almost gently, "no is not an ..."
"There’s always a way." I spat, but I did not say it to argue with her; it was because it is the truest thing I know, the one law I have proven hundreds of times with my own corpse. "Every single person who ever told me a thing was impossible was telling me the truth about themselves. Tell me the impossible way that’s only too hard for anyone to actually do. I’ll decide for myself whether it’s too hard."
The Jade Oracle laughed, "You truly are a catastrophe. Very well. You want the impossible way? I will give it to you, and then perhaps you will understand that there is no more hope."