Apollyon could feel the change in the World when the Lost became Found.
He was right after all. His hordes were hidden away instead of being destroyed. That was foolish of them, but for fools they had done well. Thousands of years had passed and this was the first time he knew for certain that his tools still existed.
He no longer needed them, but they would be helpful. They were also a risk; they had to be on that unfortunately insufficiently damned island. It should never have risen again; it should have been impossible.
Of course, the events of the past two years were impossible. He should have still been stuck in that cave, dreaming away the centuries, able to interact only with people who came to him in worship in exchange for minor gifts.
Apollyon did not mind impossible, not when he was no longer trapped.
He should reach out to some of those worshippers. None knew him for who he truly was, but they were all driven; even the ones who hadn’t been were now, since that was always one of his gifts. They asked for power so he gave them a way to obtain it; the fact that it meant he had a minion in a more important place was only a detail for them. He’d already tasked a few with investigating A’Atla; only the most dedicated knew it was to sink the island, because there was no reason to reveal his hand too early. An additional task shouldn’t be too difficult.
Perhaps he would achieve his goal after all. Sinking A’Atla the first time achieved the goal of killing most of his enemies; with luck, the rest would have succumbed to time the way Apollyon almost had.
He knew he wasn’t quite that lucky; one was definitely still left. He didn’t know how they’d found the curse, but breaking it was an obvious message. A painful one. He could only be grateful they were so petty as to warn him simply to cause pain, but that was common and was why he was going to win this time.
Apollyon grumbled when he felt his connection to one of his greatest weapons disappear. That was going to make it difficult to locate, and he definitely wanted to find it before he sent A’Atla back to where it belonged.
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Amani collapsed when she found out how long she was in the vault. It was information that, realistically, she already knew, but the hours she waited in the locked vault were not long enough to accept it. Serenity waited it out.
When she seemed together enough, he walked her through the process of choosing her first Path. Fortunately, the Voice gave her the same benefit it gave everyone who went through the Tutorial and allowed her to take a Tier One Path at Tier Zero.
Two days after that, Serenity found himself wondering if he’d imagined her reaction. He’d given Amani basic access to the maintenance section of A’Atla’s interface the night before and she was hard at work repairing things herself instead of waiting for the automated repair that couldn’t start until the mana levels were higher.
Serenity needed a second opinion, so he pulled Rissa aside, where Amani wouldn’t hear them talking. “Please tell me she wasn’t just fooling me yesterday.”
Rissa smiled at that. “She’s actively not thinking about what happened. Right now, everything seems dreamlike to her, I think she’s avoiding thinking about her time being long gone.”
“That won’t last,” Serenity answered. It never did. “But at least she’s not faking it. We can give her some time.” As he said that, he wondered how long he should give her. If she could fall apart at any time, perhaps it would be better if he asked her about his real problem sooner?
Rissa chuckled. “I can hear you thinking about bothering her. Give her all the work you want, but stay away from anything that will remind her of her past. I know, that’s hard when you don’t know much about her past, but try.”
Despite Rissa’s encouragement, Serenity didn’t interrupt Amani immediately. She was keeping herself busy; that was good enough. He headed up to the surface instead; there hadn’t been a fight since the one he broke up above the hole that led to Amani’s Vault, so he was overdue for one of “Tom Cooper’s” visits. One way or another, he needed to keep his visibility up.
Even if it did mean standing out by wearing clothes that were completely unlike what everyone else wore.
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“Tom!” Samantha waved him over as soon as she saw him. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” Samantha moved out of the way, revealing something that looked like a chunk of opalescent glass the size of a microwave oven. “It seems to collect magical energy.”
Serenity would have blanched if his skin weren’t already completely pale from his disguise; that looked exactly like crystal from Earth’s World Core. As it was, he missed a step. He recovered and made his way over to the scientist.
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“You know something about it, don’t you?” Samantha glared at Serenity.
There was no point in denying it. Serenity was terrible at lying anyway. “I do. It’s dangerous.”
Samantha frowned. “As far as I can tell, it’s basically inert. It’s mostly silica - every test we’ve done says it’s a type of opal, but no one’s ever found an opal like this before, certainly not just lying on the surface. Is it something else? What precautions do we need to take?”
“Don’t eat it and definitely don’t breathe the dust, but I’m pretty sure you weren’t planning on doing either of those.” Serenity tried to smile. “Now I want to test some opals and see if I can tell the differences between them magically, but that’s for the future. It’s not the danger to you I was talking about; where did you get this?”
As it happened, the chunk came from near the mountain that seemed to be made of World Core Crystal. Serenity wasn’t certain if that was good news or bad news; it meant there was a much higher chance that someone else would find out about the mountain but it also meant that the stuff was localized.
“Hey, Liam!” While Serenity checked the local topography of the area on the map, Samantha called Liam over to the table with the chunk of crystal. “Tom’s interested in that opal you found.”
Liam shrugged. “I just sat on it, that’s all. It caught the light when I stood up. I wasn’t expecting it to be opal.”
This find made opening the way for Gaia even more important. On the other hand, if he could do something with it, that would work too; it might even be better. There were several things he’d thought of since he found it that he could try; with luck, one of them would work.
“I’m going to try something,” Serenity informed the duo. “You probably don’t need to step back.”
Both Samantha and Liam actually stepped closer.
“Something? What are …” Samantha trailed off as she saw Serenity put his hand on the opal.
Serenity pushed a little mana out, as if the World Core were a monster core and he was trying to liquefy it to use as improvised ink for a rune. It felt softer, but it didn’t move, so he added some essence and twisted it the same way.
Serenity’s hand plunged into the crystal as if it were water. The surface didn’t move, but Serenity was fairly confident he could pull some of the “opal water” out and shape it as he pleased. Well, now he knew what to do if he wanted to make runes with it, but that didn’t solve the underlying problem.
The next test was to see if he could grab it and hold it with his aura. He suspected he wouldn’t be able to hold enough for it to matter even if he could, but magic didn’t always follow expectations.
Serenity moved his hand to the surface; a slight sheen stayed on it like he was wet. Serenity tried to shake it off and most of it went back into the crystal, but some stayed on his arm or spattered on the table like water droplets that then solidified. Serenity hadn’t expected that; it was interesting but not useful, at least not for what he was trying to do.
While holding the pair of magical twists that kept the crystal liquid but contained, Serenity stretched his aura out towards the liquefied crystal. It wasn’t hard to grab a bit and pull on it; it was essentially the same skill he used to carefully push a measured amount of material out of a monster core to write a rune. It took less energy if he kept it small, but he didn’t have an energy shortage right now.
Serenity pulled a long thread of it up in the air and twisted it into shapes. It moved easily, exactly following what he imagined. It didn’t show the tendency to break that liquefied monster core did; as long as he wanted it to stay together it did, even in very long strands. Merging it after he broke it was also easy. That was interesting and made him wonder if he could use it as ink for a rune.
The real question was what rune he should use. He could do something simple, like something that would light up when fed mana, but that was boring. He wanted to do something more interesting, but he definitely wanted to avoid all of his combat runic inscriptions; he wasn’t certain how strong it would be. That also meant that anything based on gravity or time was out of the picture.
Honestly, he’d like to use his strongest Affinity, his Incarnate. He didn’t want to kill people, which was the most likely outcome if he wasn’t careful, but that still left some options. He could use it as a disinfectant, killing anything that didn’t belong, but that was dangerous in unskilled hands. No, the opposite would probably be better; pull Death mana away from people.
It wouldn’t directly change anything but it should mean that they wouldn’t have to deal with the weight of the mana pushing them towards death. It wouldn’t matter too much for Earth humans, but Blaze and Its would be able to use it immediately; Raz and Kerr could use it when he got back to Aki’s dungeon. Actually, something like it might be important when more offworlders began spending long periods of time on Earth.
If he put in a collection point, he could also drain that later and make a snack of the gathered Death mana. It would probably be delicious.
Serenity didn’t want to admit, even to himself, how much of a difference that last point made. He knew he was being a little silly and even more self-indulgent, but really why shouldn’t he?
Once he decided on the runic inscription he wanted to make, Serenity had to tweak one of his old designs to do what he wanted it to. As it turned out, that was the long part of creating the inscription; once he had the design ready, he was able to simply float the liquefied World Core into the pattern. It took less than a minute to actually draw the runic inscription on the table’s surface.
This was the best material he’d ever worked with for creating runes!
With that, Serenity removed his hand from the opal block and scooted all of the liquid back inside, including the liquid on his hand, before he released the effect that made it liquid. It wasn’t until he straightened and took a deep breath that he realized neither Samantha nor Liam had said anything during the entire time he played with the liquefied opal. They still had wide eyes and neither seemed to know what to say.