The hero believed the Goddess and the Goddess believed that all deceased souls would travel to either Elyund to become an angel, or Kalganstrad to become a demon. Even as an artificial being, the hero had a soul, one granted personally by the Goddess to store his identity. Of course, he knew that he would become an angel, continuing to serve the Goddess.
He knew many angels as fellow servants, their divine halo and illuminating feathers, or perhaps a greater halo hanging behind their backs above the four wings. Those with jet-black wings were considered fallen, but it was not a disgrace. To serve the Goddess permanently stationed in the Plane of Existence was an important and honourable role. Angels came in many shapes and sizes, each a perfect creation of the Goddess.
There was a third option for his drifting soul to wander to, but before he could finish the thought, a magic sphere began to form around him. Though he could not see, the hero still felt the pressure of the spell, an otherwordly spell that managed to penetrate the Lesser Imaginary Space between the realms.
The sphere slowly began to close in, but the hero could not struggle or scream, but to feel his soul’s slow abduction through space.
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“Hmm, hm hm hm hmm…”
Reginn awoke to the sound of a woman’s voice, humming an unfamiliar verse. The rays of light warmly embraced the hero, welcoming him back to the world.
At first, his body did not respond and he could only use his six senses. The sight of the peaceful blue sky, and blazing sun. The scent of the forest. The sensation of the grass and soil beneath his body, wind on his face. The taste of blood and iron was no longer found in his mouth, replaced by a sweet taste of the air. The sound of summer critters and,
“Hm hm hm hmm…”
The familiar tune.
He focused on his second vision, his eyes turning sharp like a snake’s. The flow of mana in the area was fluid, full of life ventilating it. This was a magical forest, though overgrown as its side effect. The hero felt a small ripple nearby, perhaps the voice from before.
After a moment of struggle, he managed to lift himself off the ground, scaring a small group of birds nearby. He found his body with no injuries, though the scars remained. The moment after his death, the spell. He remembered everything now.
This must’ve been an elaborate resurrection spell, consisting of healing, spacetime distortion and the manipulation of the soul. Even the Goddess he knew wouldn’t be able to cast such a spell at such a perfection.
But how? And why? This couldn’t have been the answer to his prayer, but perhaps a different divine being answered his call.
However, now wasn’t the best time to ponder the mystery. He sat back down on the grass and carefully observed the lush and bountiful forest. Perhaps this was Elyund after all.
He recalled his war. The blood, the betrayal, the loss of control. The hero shivered in anger just thinking about it. However, it seemed that the spell had also healed the scars of the mind as he felt a strange sensation of acceptance in this peaceful forest.
Hopefully, the Caretaker was now an angel.
Hopefully, the Goddess could find him.
He closed his eyes.
The song of the birds.
The gentle wind.
The blanket of warmth.
The bed of grass.
The lullaby of the forest.
Zzz…
“Hm hm hmm…”
The hero opened his eyes again and pushed his elbow against the soft soil to alert for the source of the sound. This was no time for rest, he had to get up.
He strolled past the trees and woodland critters. Varying sizes of mushrooms were the colours of the spectrum. Red, blue, yellow, green. A thriving ecosystem of all kinds, reminded him a bit of the demon kingdom of Satana, though the forest was cleaner and more peaceful.
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“Hm hmm…”
The hero finally entered an open area, soft shadows scattered like leaves across the gentle grass. The shade of the trees creates a natural roof. A girl picking mushrooms on the side of said trees. She reminded him of the Caretaker. Though she had deep purple hair and dark eyes, she had a gentle aura reminiscent. Equipped with strange clothes as well as pieces of glass obscuring her eyes, she was like nothing he had seen before.
A wave of wind brushed over the grass, accompanied by a satisfying sound of the sea of grass. Only then did the girl notice the stranger overlooking,
At first, she was startled and fell back after losing balance, but noticed that he was a young man, perhaps around her age with a vibrant head of red she had never seen anywhere before — not even in magazines.
“W-who are you?”
However, this language was but a gibberish to the hero. He still needed more information about this location and attempted a crude hand communication with the human. First, he would introduce himself.
“Reginn,” said the hero while pointing at himself
“Reginn…?”
The girl soon realized the predicament, and waved away the butterfly on her backpack atop a rock, then pulled out a strange rectangular prism, fluttering into a million slices once opened. The white pages were dotted with black, for her it was the Avangardian Spells, Skills and Sciences Institution’s official guide on the exploration spells.
After a moment of wandering the pages, she finally found what she was looking for — ⌈Sixth Path Conversion⌋, a spell to share information between the minds. It was a tier 6 information-type spell, quite advanced for her age.
Reginn soon understood what was happening, a feint blue glow the sign of a Maginn -- a magical circle -- forming beneath their feet. This must’ve been an area-of-effect spell, and like counting the circles of a tree trunk, the complexity of the circle told him that it was the kind only the elders of his village could perform.
However, he stood confidently, knowing that nothing would happen.
The girl closed her eyes, focusing on the flow of mana within her body. From the dark nothingness, shaping the reality in her mind, then focusing on the streams of mana. Like a river, the magic left her body and approached the man.
“H-huh? Why isn’t it working?” questioned the girl as she read and re-read the passages
The circle had dissipated, fading into the soil.
Unbeknownst to her, Reginn closed the distance and yanked the book out of her hands.
“Hey!”
This must’ve contained the information about the spells. The elders usually read from a clay tablet, handed down from generation to generation, but this white thing must’ve retained hundreds of such encantations. A thousand sacred relic’s worth in the hands of a little girl. This was not the world he once knew.
Reginn scanned the book, but more than that, he felt the traces of mana within. He saw things no one else could, his snake-like pupils following the microscopic movements of mana invisible to most. He knew that the flow of the particles told a story. An emotion, a journey.
He landed on the page the young explorer was on, seeing the spell to exchange thoughts. Bingo.
The foreign spell was the likes of one he had never seen before. Instead of transforming mana into matter or energy, this required the conversion into information — a fundamental truth of reality. Nonetheless, he would still try it.
The girl watched on with the curiosity of a child as Reginn returned the book.
Mana. The father of the universe. Foreign, but intrinsic. Destructive. Creative. Omnipresent. Imaginary particles that illuminated from the boundaries of the universal sphere. All life would be naught if not for mana.
However, Reginn had none, actively pushing away and destroying any mana particles he came in contact with. This was the Goddess’s ultimate weapon. Isolation and destruction.
In a cruel twist of fate, he was born with extremely high levels of mana control, rivalling the capability of the Goddess, surpassing his other siblings. Perhaps if he had been born with a normal body, he could have been the most powerful mage in the entire universe.
And so, even without mana within his physical form, Reginn closed his eyes and focused outside of himself. A world full of life and mana. First, he would need to organize the chaos and wrestle the control away from nature. The flow of mana was disrupted, and then they began orbiting Reginn like moons. Never touching lest they disintegrate beyond the event horizon.
The mana was then transformed, and manipulated by Reginn’s spirit. His aura was large enough to touch the mana in another village, so mana supply was never a problem for him.
‘Perhaps the circle is too big,’ he thought
If the circle was too large, the focus of the spell would be lost. He began concentrating the mana closer to himself, but that had unintended side effects.
The girl began coughing, her body rejecting the overwhelming excess of mana around her. The level of mana in the air was beginning to become toxic. Reginn would need to clear the spell soon.
He concentrated the mana further, an invisible whirling sphere within his palm. He thought about adding every question he had into the spell but instead chose to input the entire divine language. No humans were allowed to learn such a tongue, but this was an emergency. If anything happened, he could always kill her later.
The explorer had never seen such a sight before, the complex Maginn regressing from the size of the forest into a small dot right beneath the man’s clasped hands. He then let go, the Maginn slowly drawing closer to her. She took a step back, unsure what was going to happen, but she had a strange feeling that this was not an attack. He even introduced himself after all.
The girl braced for impact as the Maginn approached her shadow, the invisible sphere entering her soul.