Mila

Mila made it to Earth, used the local teleportation network to travel to Boston, and then telekinetically flew as quickly as possible to the rooftop where Diana had fallen.

There, thankfully, just as Nana Xara had explained after she’d left Bellessia, Mila didn’t find the dead body of her friend.

Instead, she found the remaining materials needed for creating the array which could temporarily raise Earth to B rank randomly strewn about, which she quickly gathered into the several spatial storage devices she carried on her person.

“Aalam,” she then sent, her voice calm, “when you get to Earth, come to the Steel Swamp Blessed Land. And try to hurry.”

Aalam, still in the Forest Cauldron’s headquarters, quickened his pace, and Mila flew back to the teleportation platform, teleported herself to Zakynthos, and then hurried through the portal into the blessed land.

“Jeeves, start the process of closing off the blessed land and prepare to move to the coordinates I provided a few years ago!” Mila shouted as soon as she was inside.

Then, as the large wolf-like antlered beast AI showed up next to her, Mila started moving as fast as possible toward the blessed land’s former dungeons.

“Ms. Chamberlain,” the AI said politely, hovering next to her as she ran, “Lady Diana has been stabilized in her room, but some kind of curse is still eating away at her.

“I’ll move to follow your directions now.”

With that, the AI disappeared, and Mila quickly made her way to the bedroom Diana and Isaiah shared in the largest of the former dungeons of the Steel Swamp Blessed Land.

There she could see the movie posters from Diana’s collection from before the integration, the ones for The Princess Bride and The Avengers the most prominent, and even one for The Terminator in a place visible from the bed, which Mila’d never understood. On one wall was a bookshelf, filled with both novels and figurines of anime characters and classic movie villains. And on the other there was a TV connected to all the latest game systems, currently showing a paused play through of a new remake of the Star Wars game The Knights of the Old Republic.

Mila didn’t focus on any of this, however, as her eyes were immediately drawn to Diana lying on the room’s large king bed, looking incredibly pale with blood leaking out of almost every orifice.

Her eight spirits surrounded her, using their power to activate the set of three portable array disks Nana Xara had bought for Mila during the auction. The combined array had the ability to trap the soul of a being if set up before the being died, and it was only through this array, and Diana’s spirits quickly bringing her into the room where karmic bonds were sealed and thus the curse couldn’t reach, that Diana was still alive, albeit barely.

Nana Xara had reacted as soon as Bellessia had started the curse on Diana, almost instantly creating the quests she’d already designed long before the auction, ones they’d already met the completion requirements for, and Diana’s spirits, who were a part of her and shared her consciousness as if they were extra minds, accepted the quests and used one of the resulting rewards, the array disks, to delay Diana’s death long enough to get her into the Steel Swamp Blessed Land.

Given they’d already known the auction was coming up before their war with the Violet Mountain Sect, Nana Xara had delayed giving Mila and Diana most of the quests she could task them with during E rank so they could get subsets of Nana Xara’s purchases from the auction for immediate use by using quests like having a perfect victory in a war against a B rank force without receiving any outside help.

The reasoning had been practical, so they could maximize their rewards, not because they’d foreseen an immediate need for any of the resources, but this practicality had ended up saving Diana’s life, at least for now.

Seeing that Diana was still suffering, the curse still affecting her, Mila could tell Diana needed immediate intervention in order for her to not die like her child, but Mila also knew she wasn’t the one who could give such intervention, so she quickly left the room.

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There were things she could do before Aalam’s arrival, so she started doing them.

First, she went under the water off the beach and found the large dao guide statue of Nana Xara which Diana had been using and moved it with telekinesis into the blessed land. The statue was made of A rank materials, and could possibly stop the teleportation of Earth she was planning, but the blessed land would have no trouble moving with more treasures inside itself.

Then she placed all her spatial storage treasures holding the materials for the array to raise Earth to B rank inside the blessed land as well, as they could also possibly interfere.

With her power as the leader of the United Federation of Planets, she then communicated with the System and started a countdown for Earth’s teleportation, setting the time for the earliest moment the blessed land would be ready to leave.

Aalam, Isaiah, and Irena all then arrived, having moved together, and Mila messaged Aalam and Irena. “Diana is dying and the baby has already been lost. Aalam, get to the blessed land as soon as possible. I need a diagnosis immediately in case you need any external resources. Then you’ll be traveling alone with Diana for the next few months as we move Earth. Irena, keep Isaiah on Earth and watch him so he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

Her message moved at the speed of thought, much, much faster than it would take to speak it, but then it only took Aalam a few seconds to appear next to her, his face scowling and his manner showing anger. “Explain.”

Mila transferred her memories of the last few minutes over to Aalam, a process which only took a couple seconds, and his expression of anger turned into full on fury. “How much time do I have?”

“About thirty seconds.”

They both then moved into the blessed land and Aalam, the master of the divine dwelling, teleported them to Diana’s room.

Aalam, now definitely in the Id state, then looked at his sister for three seconds, nodded once, and sat down on the bed next to her. “I don’t need anything external, but we now need someone other than me to get into the top four of the C rank Universal Tournament while also doing what we already had planned or somehow find some other way to receive the same level of boon if we want her soul to awaken.”

Aalam then created another array to teleport Mila to the blessed land’s entrance and Mila quickly stepped back outside to Earth, waited about 17 seconds, and then watched the portal close, the Steel Swamp Blessed Land beginning to move.

There was then a shift on the planet, feeling almost exactly like teleporting through the System’s teleportation network, and the sky suddenly shifted from day to night, only the stars were all wrong. Earth was now in a completely different part of the Universe, and the Primordial Humans hopefully wouldn’t be able to find them.

Mila, after sending a brief message to President Davies so he could handle the fallout from the unplanned movement of Earth, then traveled to where Irena and Isaiah were and spent the next several hours consoling her friend about the loss of his child. Diana would get better. She and Aalam would see to that even if it sounded like Diana would have to be reincarnated into a new body. But their daughter? There was nothing they could have done.

* * *

Aalam

Were he not in the Id state, Aalam would have felt dirty as he slowly used his Genetic Thief bloodline to extract his sister’s power.

The curse their mother had used targeted everything they had inherited from her, and for Diana that meant her race and bloodline. The curse was too advanced and, even though it had been cut off from the source, there was nothing Aalam could do to stop it. He could only remove what it targeted from his sister’s soul. And the only way he had to do that was through his bloodline ability.

Elevated Soul Laboratory required the target to first be dead, so in this case it was useless. But taking in Diana’s power with his bloodline didn’t stop the curse. It just transferred it to Aalam.

He wasn’t committing suicide this time, however. Unlike Diana, he was prepared for the curse before it entered his soul and, cut off from the source, it was far weaker than what Diana had experienced.

More important, given his control over the blessed land, his bonds with his servants and his Territory were not blocked, so his Soul stat was almost double his sister’s, even with her uniqueness, and his race, while one grade lower, was far more resistant to curses, so he’d be able to fight with the curse and eventually beat it, though it would take months and the pain was not something he’d be able to deal with without Id.

After a couple days, however, when he’d fully extracted Diana’s power and integrated the portable arrays which had been keeping her alive with the built in arrays of the Steel Swamp Blessed Land, so they could maintain her soul at least semipermanently within her room, his ability to fight the curse suddenly increased.

At first, Aalam thought it was because the curse had somehow weakened, but then he realized that wasn’t the case. It was just that his soul had more than tripled in power.

The universe was not a place that rewarded good people, so stealing power from a sibling was generally far more efficient than from those unrelated, and Aalam had already benefitted from absorbing his sister’s power.

Like Diana had awakened to the Soul Queen uniqueness after absorbing the Stone of Primal Beginning, he’d awakened to the Soul King uniqueness by absorbing her power, and, at the same time, he could feel his affinity with primal energy slowly growing, so it seemed his Nascent Energy Constructor racial ability was taking on the traits of Diana’s Nascent/Primal Energy Converter as well.

He was growing in power at the expense of his own sister, and upon realizing this, even while in the Id state, Aalam started to cry.