Twin gates opened simultaneously inside Sorin, simultaneously filling his body with life and death energy. His entire being became a warzone, a fact that neither the Wise One or Azrakul missed as time unfroze for them and ushered in the next phase of their conflict.
“What have you done!?” exclaimed the Wise One as she realized what had just happened. “There’s seeking outside help, and then there’s madness like this. Sorin, you’ve doomed us all!”
Azrakul shared her sentiment. “It may be too late to point this out, Sorin, but this isn’t the first time such an attempt has made. Based on the information I’ve collected over the better part of four centuries, 81 such attempts have been made since the Cataclysmic Emergence,” said Azrakul. “Each attempt lasted little more than thirty seconds due to the conflicting forces tearing the opener to shreds.”
“Then I guess you’d both better do your best to stabilize this leaky ship,” said Sorin. “At least until I’m done with the gates. Opening two gates is ultimately too taxing for a single individual; I’ll trouble you two with custody of my body for the time being.”
Normally, a gate opening would draw a portion of Sorin’s essence into a single gate along with most of his attention. In this case, however, Sorin needed his entire consciousness and every shred of energy at his disposal.
It was odd, manifesting in two completely different places at once. One version of himself appeared in a world bereft of life while another version appeared in a world teeming with it.
The world bereft of life was naturally the location of the Gate of Life and vice-versa. Only by opening these respective gates could one usher in their respective energies.
Sorin’s two incarnations simultaneously raised their fists and stuck the two doorways. The two gates, rumored to be the easiest gates to open, didn’t budge an inch.
“Of course, everything changes when both gates are summoned,” muttered Sorin as he spotted a link between the two doorframes. “Opening one naturally closes the other. This only reinforces my original guess.”
Having finished his probing, Sorin split Nemesis into two parts and poured his new and unnamed nine-thousand-poison. As before, the weapon easily accepted the poison and transformed itself to optimize its transfer.
The gates trembled as Sorin struck them with an infused fist and injected them with his corrupt poisons. Their essence transformed on a spot the size of a coin on each door, and from the infection point, the poison spread and propagated.
“Will you hurry up!?” shouted Azrakul from inside his main body. “It’s not easy holding this body together with the presence of the two gates. Really, would it have killed you to open them up one after another?”
“If I’d done so, I’d be giving up the opportunity for a complete shedding of these shackles,” replied Sorin. “That’s the nature of these divine locks, Azrakul— they’re traps within traps within traps. A single wrong move will forever lock out the possibility of breaking them.”
Both paused for a moment. The Wise one was the first to seek answers from Sorin. “Explain.”
“It’s simple, really,” said Sorin as he admired his poisons and their workings. “The first shackle I broke was the Governing Meridian. I broke it by embracing taboo and injecting my flawless body and foundation with corruption.
“The second shackle, I broke by assuming the seals on my bones were a hidden lock. By completely destroying the runes empowering me despite the perceived lack of payoff, I unlocked the original potential inside my bones.
“Then came Flesh-Sanctification. Shackle after shackle appeared. First was a shackle that was impossible to break unless one had undone the previous seals. Doing so was only possible by simultaneously cultivating divinity and corruption. I did so by directly destroying the Gate of Opening and removing the divine filter preventing humanity from passively receiving non-divine energy.
“Next came the Gate of Expanse, which could only be broken with a sufficiently powerful cultivation base and the limitless energy stores only available to those who broke open the Gate of Expanse. Not a single past step could be missing.
“Which led me to realize something.” Sorin watched on as his payload of poison crawled up the chains leading back to Mount Olympus and Pandora’s cursed sky. “Even God Seeds are not free of shackles. This is because the chains restraining them are empowered by the premature breaking of their previous shackles. Their chains are the chains that bind all of humanity.
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“I delayed opening the Gate of Life intentionally, strengthening my poisons beyond normal limits, with this option in mind. Since these two gates are the easiest to open, then surely, they are the most difficult to destroy.
“Because I have no interest in merely opening these gates. These chains, these shackles of the gods—I intend to destroy them once and for all.”
“This is madness,” Azrakul finally said. “Putting aside the sheer impossibility of doing what you say, your actions will open a path for all of humanity. There will be no end to the amount of competition you will see.”
Sorin chuckled as the Wise One, initially the most skeptical about his plan, finally seemed quite keen on its completion. “You more than anyone else must know that by then, it will be too late. Whoever wins out in our three-way battle will have my body and enough of a head start to do whatever they wish.
“Now if you’ll be so kind as to hold the fort and prevent my body and mindscape from collapsing, I have some precise surgery to perform. These final chains are much firmer than I originally expected.”
The chains reaching out across all of Olympia were now fully mapped out by Sorin, but that wasn’t enough. He needed all the chains that were part of the linked network.
To that end, he used the mapped chains as a conduit and expanded his poisons to the far reaches of Pandora. Delphi, Mattapan, and every other provincial capital owned by humanity lit up in Sorin’s mind. Every demigod and God Seed was also part of this network, though fortunately, no direct contact with these entities was needed to infect the connection.
After mapping out the human portion of Pandora, Sorin moved on to those portions occupied by the Seven Evils and their ilk, the Myths. Humans were a minority in these places, but their numbers were still frightening. They too bore the shackles of the gods, a tiny bit of their essence that ultimately led back to Mount Olympus.
It was during this realm-wide sweep that Sorin saw something: broken chains floating in the void. Are these… remnants? Old chains, cast aside and shed?
“Hope, you clever bastard,” muttered Sorin as he suddenly realized the fox’s devious plan. A plan he had no choice but to participate in.
Once all of humanity’s chains were fully mapped out, a second set of chains appeared in Sorin’s sphere of awareness. They were invisible chains that led back to a familiar temple located in the heart of Olympia, humanity’s seat of power.
There, Sorin saw a familiar individual: Madeline, a divine clanswoman who clearly hadn’t been devoured. She sat in the core of the Temple of Hope as though waiting for this exact moment. In fact, she shot him a smile through the void, as did the fox in the room.
The woman possessed by an ancient spirit sat beside a sleeping fox with tails for chains. Its tails were the chains leading back to the temple.
As for the circle, its usage was immediately obvious to Sorin. The two powerful entities intended not only to break their innate shackles but to merge with each other once the process was completed.
Relief washed over Sorin as he realized his original guess was incorrect. He’d originally thought Hope would steal his body once this ordeal was over. Instead, the fox simply wanted Sorin to shear his chains. Chains that were linked to all of humanity.
By mapping out the chains, I now have a much better idea of how this will all play out. Opening either the Gate of Life or the Gate of Death will strengthen the next one, and opening the final door will provoke a reaction from the chains above and enforce a nigh-unbreakable restriction. The same applies if I break the gates open.
The first thing he needed to do, then, was to shatter the network powering the gates and their link back to Olympia. In this case, the gates themselves were a trap. The two prior gates that required breaking were simply priming Sorin to assume the same process was necessary for the last two gates.
Sorin’s tow incarnations therefore made no attempt on the gates themselves and poured their powers into the chain network without reservation.
With this, humanity will finally be free.
There was no fanfare, no warning. There was no creaking and final breakage. Sorins poisons, entirely too potent given his restricted cultivation realm, dissolved the chains and devoured their energy, sending a massive current of fused energies back into Nemesis, strengthening the soul-bound treasure.
Having lost their support, the twin gates shattered. The floodgates opened, flooding Sorin’s body with wave upon wave of life and death energy.
Sorin immediately returned to his body and began to deal with the aftermath. Azrakul and the Wise One had no choice but to let him work, as they had neither had the awareness to deal with the situation or any level of competence with Sorin’s powers.
Cancerous tumors sprouted out of Sorin’s flesh. Malignant and redundant organs and limbs grew out of nowhere.
Simultaneously, these surprise masses of flesh died from Sorin’s careful guidance of the massive flow of death-aligned energies. He was walking on a tightrope, and a single mistake would result in in his doom.
As these two forces ravaged and purified his flesh, Sorin’s poisons worked their magic. They began the painstaking process of remaking him from the ground up. The foundation of sanctified flesh he’d made for himself was insufficient. He needed to completely re-sanctify himself with the 9,000 poison to bring his blood, body, and bones into alignment.
Sorin’s blood was already fully transformed, so he first focused on his bones. Their structure morphed and changed, experiencing tens of simultaneous forgings and temperings every second.
The resulting bone matter was increasingly opaque and brimming with strength. They would not be the bones of a mere Flesh-Sanctification cultivator, but the bones of a peak demigod!
While the invasive life and death energies were annoying, they provided the much-needed pressure Sorin needed for the ultimate re-forging. They left Sorin’s tarnished bones had no choice but to accept the new energies and transform.
The runes on Sorin’s bones transformed to match his new outlook on corruption. The nine forms of corruption and their use as poisons formed the basis of these runes, with micro-runes expanding unto infinity.
A pulse of energy filled the room as Sorin completed the first stage of his transformation. By now, his flesh was halfway melted; He looked like an old man with one foot in the grave.