Chapter 182 - Midra's Cage
Vern rolled off the bed and walked up to the table, a curious glint in his eyes. He was already used to seeing a few of those golden glyphs floating around the notepad, but this was different.
This time, a large cloud of glyphs overwhelmed the notepad. Standing by the table with all his possessions on it, Vern raised his eyebrows.
It wasn't like this last night. The only thing that's changed is…, he trailed off and picked up the notepad. Not bothering to open it just yet, he walked back—away from the table.
The moment he did so, the glyphs lost their radiance and fizzled away.
Hmmm, he narrowed his eyes and trotted right back, placing the notepad adjacent to the cage once again. Glowing symbols materialized out of nowhere as their golden radiance threatened to blind him.
He repeated this process a couple of times before he was satisfied.
That settled it. It has something to do with the cage. Which was interesting because, beyond the Insight Sphere, nothing had ever elicited such a response from the glyphs. And to his chagrin, he'd never managed to do anything about the prior reaction.
Insight Sphere also excited the glyphs, but no matter what he did, the symbols never budged. Neither before he understood them nor after.
Hopefully, this is different. It seemed like some kind of resonance with the cage, which shouldn't be on the level of an Insight Sphere.
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Well, it's not like I won't look into it. Shrugging, he donned his imaginary detective hat and grabbed himself a pen. Nestling the notepad as close as possible to the cage, he found an optimal position where the most glyphs populated his surroundings.
His idea was simple—observe them. That's what he did when he wanted to sense the Echoes of the past. This very much seemed like a similar case. Except, it's far too prominent to just be some random echo.
He strained his eyes, and his thought space, which was far more jubilant than last night, broke out in random patterns as he focused on the glyphs.
The more he concentrated, the more the runes began to converge. But as expected, they failed to actually coalesce into something readable, since he hadn't penned down a phrase to initiate the process.
He remembered that the echoes needed some kind of impetus to begin converging. Turning towards the iron-wrought cage that was now broken and tattered, he realized there was no need to complicate things.
So, he wrote, 'cage.'
The glyphs that surrounded him at all sides suddenly shot toward his pen like moths to light. They engraved themselves into the paper as sentences appeared before and after his single letter.
Vern raised his eyebrows. That's unusual. Typically, the echoes only showed him what came after his keyphrase, not before it. But well, this whole thing's not typical.
He quickly stopped bothering with the details as words registered in his mind. 'Archivist's Insights: Dear readers, I present to you the Midra's cage. One…'
Before Vern could read further, a sense of Deja vu struck him, and he paused. He stressed his memory hard on where he'd heard that name before, and soon, it struck him.
Isn't this… Holding his pen unmoving on the paper, he flipped the other half of his notepad by a dozen pages. Soon, he found the notes of the day he'd studied all the Observation Records available in Vigil.
There, he had written down the 'Archivist's Insights' for each of the records he'd perused. They contained useful asides about the sequence, the summary of the pathway, and its prospects.
Oh…? What does this mean? Vern furrowed his brows. Was this the same archivist as the one who wrote about those records? If so, then what was the connection? Did they write about this cage, too?
Unable to come to any useful conclusion right away, he shrugged. He was far more curious about the insights at hand rather than the story behind this Archivist right now.
His immediate curiosity sated, he flipped back to the page he was working with and observed the glyphs properly once more.
The next part read, '…Midra's cage. One of the only artifacts that survived the shattering of the Era of Compassion.'
Vern's breath hitched in his throat, and he almost couldn't believe what he was reading.
Shattering? Era of Compassion? Then, were there really many eras before this one? He knew Lady Sylphina or the Nexus didn't originate in this Era, whose calendar began 732 years ago, but it always felt…surreal.
Yet, now, here he was, reading the words of someone completely unrelated who corroborated the same idea. Heck, they even had a name for it. Just how many eras were there? And, more importantly, why?
Each word of this echo puzzled him further and further. Just how could this random cage have anything to do with shattering and a different era? Yes, it was a somewhat powerful artifact, but it was still just a third or fourth shade piece.
These two things weren't even on the same plane. How could an era's shattering be related to an artifact that was given to some captain who lost to Vern?
Somehow suppressing the urge to untangle all these puzzling aspects right away, he read on, 'It is said that the True Dreamer of Compassion met grief in this very cage. Unable to accept the truth of shattering, they entered the eternal slumber, becoming hallowed as Midra by those who came after.'
Vern's disbelief only grew as he internalized all this. There was no way this low-level artifact had anything to do with someone who had the moniker of 'True Dreamer.' He still wasn't sure what all of it even meant, but basic common sense told him that things weren't lining up.
Hmm, but the Shepherd captain was going on about the cage having captured the Hallowed angel or something something, too.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Can it really be true, then? Had the artifact just regressed to this state over time?
But that's when he realized that the glyphs had stopped converging by themselves. He frowned, I don't think this is all. After all, a lot of the golden symbols still floated around him, not turning into anything legible.
He wasn't really sure of the validity of what he was reading, but it'd be a lie to say he wasn't excited by the prospects. If these words were to be believed, he'd just learned about another shattering!
His heart rate quickened, and he swallowed. It can't be real, right? What if this is just someone writing fiction in their free time?
He couldn't reconcile with the idea that this cage could have anything to do with that level of being. If he was understanding it right, a True Dreamer was essentially someone like the First Observer, but for a prior era.
After minutes of baseless assumptions and crazy conjectures, he let out a sharp breath, Fuck this! Who cared if it was real or not? He wasn't going to miss out on whatever was left to be seen—not when the only cost was some mental energy.
He was already in the habit of eating headaches for breakfast.
So, he grabbed the chair and sat down, and his eyes shone brightly—almost as radiant as the glyphs around him.
His facial muscles twitched, and he groaned when a sharp pain shot through his head. Fortunately, it indeed pushed the glyphs a little closer to the page.
More.
His eyes narrowed in concentration as they worked harder and harder to collapse the random glyphs into a legible state.
It felt like he was compressing a gigantic space into a small box. And heck, who was to say that wasn't exactly the case? His understanding of these glyphs was cursory at best, and his eyes might as well be working overtime to compress this higher reality so he could observe it with his lesser viewpoint.
More!
Veins bulged around his eyes, making him appear vicious, but he gritted his teeth and pushed on because he had a realization. This has to be something big. There was no way some random third-shade artifact could force him to such a degree.
Whatever information hid in these glyphs was bound to be shocking. He knew such a thing came with its own risks, but he'd come to believe that these echoes were far greater of an opportunity than a danger to him. The balance was firmly tilted towards a more positive effect.
Because, after all, they were just echoes. A retelling of how Lady Sylphina's weft remembered these conversations to be, and not the real thing. Yet, they were a godsend to a low-shade observer like himself.
An observer's insights contributed greatly to their singularity, and what better way to become unique than learning secrets that were lost to the world? These secrets might not be a big deal to high-shade observers, but to him, they were more than enough.
The more he understood aspects of the world that others didn't, the farther removed he became from the world. More unique. More singular.
Typically, he couldn't even read five or six words with these echoes, but this strange resonance with the cage had triggered something special. So special that he'd gotten not just over two complete sentences—which were mind blowing on their own, but there was still more.
He just had to reach for it.
Every second that passed, the glyphs inched closer, but his eyes heated up in conjunction. Blood pumped in them so hard, he almost felt like they would pop from their very sockets any moment.
Ah, fuck this!
In a bid to not leave any stone unturned, he even linked himself to Axiom's fading singularity.
.
.
.
Nothing happened. The glyphs continued to crawl at their slow pace as his eyes felt like they were on fire.
Tch, he clicked his tongue and disengaged from his own prayer. He hadn't expected his alternate singularity to not be of any help at all. It almost suggested that the echoes of the past and whatever he was about to see were beyond his charlatan ways.
His nails dug into his palm as the pen in his grip threatened to shatter from the mere force. Not keen on letting such a minor miscalculation interrupt this arduous process, he instead channeled all his pain onto his other hand.
The wood of the table croaked under his grip as he used it as an outlet for his own pain. Right when his vision started to turn bloody, some of the glyphs found themselves close enough to be pulled onto the paper.
He held his breath, but his focus remained razor-sharp as he refused to give up at this point. He wasn't done yet. Just a bit more.
Come on! he screamed internally, pushing himself to the very limits.
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.
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Bang!
In a sudden explosion of light, everything disappeared from his sight, replaced by an infinite white.
A terrible pain wrecked his eyes, but as they adjusted to the light, his brain worked on overdrive, greedily feeding on the sight in front of him.
This…
This wasn't the cage he fought inside yesterday. At first glance, they felt similar, but there were huge differences. First of all, he was 'outside' the bars. Far, far in the distance, there were pillars. Not one or two, but hundreds upon hundreds that extended to infinity on either side of his vision.
Vern stood in one such pillar's looming shadow as all of them faded into the heavens, their base piercing the hazy fog that covered the skies of this realm. Inside the cage, from the very same sky, dropped down…lanterns?
No.
Cages.
They were cages.
Isn't that…
His heart skipped a beat as a shiver went down his spine.
Thousands upon thousands, if not millions of smaller cages hung from the sky, where their chains faded into white nothingness.
Some were larger than others. Some seemed to nestle into the fog, while others reached for the ground.
Isn't my cage just one of these things?
.
.
.
He was dumbfounded, too stunned to calculate or imagine. The artifact that had trapped him into a desperate situation was a mere decoration in here. Just what was this place?
He finally understood what the Archivist was referring to. They weren't talking about the cage Captain Akira had gifted him. No, their words pertained to this whole…space.
Was that why the resonance had occured between the convergence note and his cage. Because even if the Archivist wasn't talking about exactly his new posession, it was included in what they observed while writing?
In this stunned introspection, his gaze finally lowered, and his entire being halted.
Amidst this ensemble of cages that hung from the heavens like lanterns, a figure floated. A figure that easily overshadowed everything else around them.
It was so far from him, yet he was able to make out every detail for some reason. The floating figure was curled unto itself, wrapped in a cocoon of their own…wings?
White prismatic feathers of the wings hid their demure body, exposing nothing but half of their face and feet to the elements. The face was…out of this world. It seemed human, but…not?
The perfectly shaped eyebrows, the peacefully closed eyes, the blonde hair that fell over their wings.
While his eyes registered all this, his mind was panicking hard.
Because he'd observed something similar before.
He knew this feeling. It was—
Objectivity.
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"AGHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!" he screamed from every fiber of his being as his vision shattered, and a familiar pain threatened to split his brain.
He wanted to hold his head in his hands and crush it. To somehow stop the pain. Alas, his body didn't respect any of his decisions. Heck, even all his screams were imaginary because his throat wasn't working.
He felt like something pushed at the edges of his mind, stretching it at the seams—expanding it.
Time became unclear, and reality turned into nothingness as his mind fractured and combined one after the other.
There were no thoughts, no emotions, no sensibilities until…
"Hahh!" He suddenly jolted back upright on the chair as he took deep, ragged breaths. Blood trailed down his face as if he'd cried incessantly, but the source itself had long clotted up.
Hand on his heart, he watched the wall clock go from nine to eleven in a numbed daze as his faculties returned to him one by one.
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.
"Lady-above. What the fuck!?" he hissed once he finally felt human again.
To his utter surprise, the terrible headache that had been the promise and harbinger of it all was nowhere to be found. Instead, his head was clearer than ever.
Perplexed, he unleashed his perception, and the moment he did so, he was dumbstruck.