The darkness closed around my soul. This time, I could hear the engine turn, and in the darkness, I could feel two paths open before me. For a moment, I wanted to take the first, but there were too many questions I needed answers to in the second door, and so I took it.
I woke to the sound of my own heartbeat, gasping, my body whole but my mind still echoing with the memory of unmaking. The cold touch of death coming from behind me could barely shake me from the memory of being erased.
Raising my hand, I froze the knight behind me in the air; the tip of the knight’s blade was an inch from my neck. I glanced behind me to see the armor floating a few feet off the ground, held up by a dozen threads of lightning.
I looked at the spike I just pulled out of my head; it was a bit too large for Inscription work, and I threw it aside and picked up three spikes that were closer to the one I used in the last loop.
Calling up my status screen, there were barely any changes in it, except for Mortal Shell, but what I was focused on was Inscription.
Inscription: 39 → 43 (Acolyte)
Mortal Shell: 105 → 107 (Arcanist)
There was not much growth in my Inscription, but I was surprised at the amount of changes nonetheless, as I had just been verifying a small part of the knowledge in my head. If I were going to make quick progress in Inscription, I needed more materials to work with.
I looked at the knight held up in the air, and I held up my hands and began to control the threads holding it up, and I slowly peeled off the armor around the body of the undead knight.
"What are you doing?" the fox asked.
"Learning." I turned the knight over in the air as I worked the armour loose. "I’m growing fast, and I need more materials to work with. I want them before I do anything in this place."
The manner of forging this armor was remarkable, as there was no way for this armor to be removed normally, since whoever designed this armor did not intend it to be taken off, and every part of it was seamlessly welded in place.
My threads could cut through these seams, and in a few seconds, I had separated the undead knight from her armor, plate by plate, and sliced through her spine and arms, leaving her a vegetable and bringing the opened armor before me, revealing the clean Inscriptions inside it that connected all the armor parts.
The fastest method to grow my Inscription was to understand new Inscriptions and create something using the new Inscriptions I have discovered to master them properly.
I was becoming exposed to the layer of power beyond the Arcanist level, and it turned out that to really understand this layer, it required more than just talent or power, but knowledge.
Endurance was at the peak of the Arcanist Tier, but it would no longer budge. It did not mean I was not suffering from damage any longer, only that I was missing crucial knowledge to grow into Sovereign, and Inscription, the language of magic itself, was the road to take.
Looking at the spread-out armor before me, the tension from my last death had subsided, and so I called out to the Hollow Avatar, "What was that thing that killed me?"
"I cannot be sure, but that Inscription was made from demonic essence, but it is not the same essence you acquire from Demon Slayer, which is the purest essence of a demon harvested from their broken lives. Remember this, Elric: in the depths of the deepest darkness, you can find the purest of light."
I blinked. The Hollow Avatar sounded almost too human at this moment, but I was silent as I did not want to delay the answers it wanted to give me.
"The essence in that Inscription is energy you should not come into contact with for a long time, not unless you cross the Transcendental threshold, and that energy is Abyssal Essence, the true core of the demonic society. This essence’s fundamental nature is chaos."
"You said chaos cannot be controlled, and someone here has been able to do this."
"Yes, at the core of the conflict between the Celestials and the Abyssals is the struggle between Order and Chaos. Elric, everything about your world is strange, from the Caeliths descending upon this world to the Power Ranking system of your world being mismatched. I cannot contact the Stone Oracle, and so the Heavens are far from me, making answers impossible to find. You will have to search for these answers, Elric, for I fear that the seed of calamity beyond imagination is brewing on this small world."
I smiled, "Right, as if I don’t have enough on my plate at the moment, but sure, why not. I really should learn to keep my mouth shut and focus on things one at a time."
"You have the loop, Elric," the Hollow Avatar said. "You have time, and you are on the right path. Inscriptions are the language of order itself, and the better you are at understanding this magic, the easier it will become for you to understand the laws of lightning, which I believe should unlock the path to the Sovereign level for you. If you can become Sovereign, and in addition to the advantage of the loop, you could find the answers to everything."
I paused for a moment, and then I nodded... One thing at a time, one problem at a time, small victories will accumulate until it becomes big ones.
I looked down at the armor spread before me, the gauntlets, the pauldrons, the breastplate. I had laid them out on the floor, arranging them in the order I had removed them. Each piece was covered in Inscriptions.
I knelt beside the first piece and began to read.
The Inscriptions were not like the ones I had carved into the orb. They were older, more refined, their lines flowing together in patterns that seemed to shift as I looked at them.
They told a story of purpose. The armor was designed to protect the wearer, to channel the will of the dead mind beneath, and to keep the undead body moving long after it should have stopped.
Even though I hated the purpose, I could not deny the genius in every line that I read.
I traced the lines with my finger, following their curves, their loops, their intersections. The patterns were familiar, like the threads of the Loom, but denser, more deliberate. I could feel the power in them, the weight of centuries of refinement.
The fox padded closer, her nose twitching. "What do you see?"