“You may acquire the wrath of the gods if you cast this spell.” The emperor said as he brought me an old book in tatters. The antiquity was held together by sheer luck alone. “This isn’t magic as you know it, but something more nefarious, more primal. Of a time far gone.”

I received the tome with open hands, controlling my left arm so it may not burn down with arcane energies wandering my other arm. “Ellari don’t believe in gods.” I responded to him inspecting the spell. More like a chimera of ritual magic and runic inscription than a spell framework.

“Neither do draconids.” He responded with some hidden pride. “But we respect them as we know better than the godforsaken city.” It wasn’t intended as an insult, just an objective affirmation. It would seem that gods if existed, they had forgone the ellari.

“After seeing the latter events unfold, your words might hold truth.” I was currently disgusted with the politics of the ellari and their subterfuge. But I felt this went far before the current events.

“Yet you are still going to cast the spell.” The old draconid before his sleeping daughter on the ground caressing her head slowly. The man was tired out from my onslaught, in more ways than one. He was one step away from the grave even before I intruded. “What I present you is nothing but a slim chance. A double-edged sword that has more chances to end with your life than respring an expired one.”

“Yet I am still going to cast the spell.” I affirmed.

Whilst I was holding a conversation, I was focused on the workings of the ritual. Since my arm burned; my soul, mind, and body were working overtime, yet fluidly. An impossibility. Something was happening to my very self.

I looked up at my head to find a foreign yet painfully familiar object. The mana capacitator that was intended to explode the leyline had somehow linked with me, following me around like a stray puppy looking for shelter. I had only noticed now as my sanity barely held. I would worry about it if I didn’t have more pressing issues on my hand, even if it was a city-destroying weapon.

“Don’t you fear the gods?” Weird hearing it from the mightiest emperor of the continent, or what his glory used to be.

A sweet white image surrounded by black came to my mind. “Not really,” I responded in unnatural calmness. “I’m sure I can work out something.”

“Whatever you do, you will face the consequences alone.” Though it sounded coarse, I was the man who threatened his daughter, at the end of the day.

“I intended to do so.” The ritual wasn’t complex, but more like soul-taxing. It needed a powerful soul to work. Ritual magic already differed from common casting as much as spellcasting did with chanting. Rituals would always succeed if you executed the recipe correctly, unlike spellcasting which had more nuance. “Haven’t you lost something that you would do everything to get it back? Even facing the gods?”

The emperor’s face was complicated, he gave his unconscious daughter a sad look as he gritted his teeth with lacking strength. “I do. But my position as royalty impedes me to do so. One life isn’t worth a country.” Somehow, I could relate to his wisdom.

“But one life is worth another.” I replied back. “And if that’s the case, I will fulfill it.”

“Don’t you value your life?” The concept seemed foreign to the head of the Imperium.

“I do, just not as much as others. It also helps that my concept of death has been tainted, and heavily crippled.”

The draconid couldn’t get around my words, and it was better that way. Just because the afterlife had been kind to me, it hadn’t been for everyone else. Even then, death still scarred me. My soul wasn’t what once was. I had said that the old emperor had one foot on the grave, and whilst that was true, I was knee-deep on it. I was on overtime even on my borrowed time. My body could no longer be classified as alive. But a puppet of a metaphysical being.

“Right.” I said as I gave him back the book. The ritual itself wasn’t more complicated than my Astral Self, as opening a gate to the underworld was relatively easy. I indeed did that on almost a daily basis. Every soul has had, is having, and will have a connection with death. This spell took advantage of that.

“Where’s the body, though?” The mystic asked. “You need a recipient to channel the spell. Without the deceased connection to the soul, you can’t do it.”

“We are too late for that,” I explained. “She has died a few hours ago, and if I take the extra hours to get to the body, she may already have stepped into the river.” If the black sludge of the river touched her soul… I have to expect the worse.

“Stepped into the river, is that an ellari metaphor?” I had forgotten I was unconsciously talking draconid all this time. Now I didn’t regret learning it in tandem with human language in my free time during school, this conversation would have been a bit different otherwise. But it surprised me more he didn’t know about the River of the Damned. Maybe it was an unknown matter even amongst the wisest of the mystics. I doubted a lot of them had come back to life.

“Don’t worry about that.” I dismissed it. “What matters is that I have to make the ritual right now.”

“And what about the connection?” The draconid talked, though he looked distracted. He was pondering about the river, or so I felt as I looked upon his soul. So, he knew something. That prospect made more sense than being blind to the image of the afterlife when he had a spell as powerful as the one I was trying to conjure in his library.

“Not really needed if I understood the ritual correctly.” He gave me a weird look. “The Nethergate spell opens a portal to the underworld, the body serves to find the soul, but the portal is still there.”

“You intend on going to the underworld.” His face was mortified. “This spell was thought as a way for the dead to communicate and travel to the land of the living, not the other way around. You are going to definitely provoke the ire of the gods.” My soul gave me the smallest hint of information as if I knew of an identical situation. But the noise of forgotten memories was muffled down by my new ones by now.

“So may it be. It’s my only chance.” Everything for her. “Even then, I’m not going to physically enter, it’s my soul that’s going in. And I don’t know if you noticed, but I take pride in its power.”

“You are going to enter with your soul into the underworld, search manually for a soul across countless dead, and then come back.”

“That’s pretty much the idea.” I appreciated the briefing. “Worst case scenario, I’m trapped in the underworld. Best case scenario, my wish is fulfilled.”

“No.” The emperor’s voice was deep. “Worst case scenario, you’ll be in permanent torment unable to come back to the world of the living, yet not ever dying.”

I scoffed at his worries, finding that fate quite familiar. “Pretty protective for someone that has put your daughter’s life on the line.”

“I have seen you; I know your type of people.” He told. “You hate the High Arcanist, and your knowledge in the souls may eclipse that of my family. You are the best ally I could wish for.” And the worst enemy, his soul whispered to himself. Too weakened to even protect it against me.

“Well, at your current predicament, yes. I’m better off as an ally than an enemy.” I began swirling mana across my burned arm. “Truth be told I would like to raid your libraries. Knowledge of the soul is rare.”

“Likewise.” The emperor answered as he stood up. He extended his ebony wings free from his back. His straight figure was gigantic, more deign of the ruler of the greatest empire.

“Does it bother you if I inscribe the floor with the magic circle?” I asked him as I readied my arcane mana as a makeshift precision drill, modifying the Arcane Blade spell on the fly onto a more suitable shape.

“No worries, go on.” He gave me green light. “As a fellow mystic, I’m also interested in what will come out of this.”

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No words were needed further on as I started drilling the onyx stone beneath my feet with enough concentrated energy to replicate a miniature leyline. The stream intensity was constant, and my pulse was regulated by my soul to not make a slip. The magic circle had to be perfect in order to activate the ritual. Arcane mana would also help to activate the needed runes as Arcane was magic itself in its purest essence.

Half an hour of uninterrupted work to finish the structure of the spell. I couldn’t imagine what would’ve happened if I had made my way back to Ferilyn. My burned arm spasmed uncontrollably after flowing so much mana across it. I could not care. Not anymore.

“Could you infuse it with some soul mana,” I asked the draconid who had carefully observed my work, “this is going to need a lot of spiritual energy, and I rather keep my mana for a way back?”

“Sure.” He didn’t doubt. This wasn’t a ploy to kill him, he knew I could have done that before easily. Academic curiosity was guiding him. Mages in this world would literally forget their survival instincts if that meant getting a hold of more knowledge. And I wasn’t an exception to that rule.

Thanks to the draconid’s help, a portal the size and the shape of a cat’s iris opened in the middle of the two-meter diameter magic circle. It was small, but it certainly was a gate to the underworld. Frigid winds started to come out of the white and grey oval.

“Stay away,” I warned him. “The energies of the dead will rot your old body. I will be okay as I’m still young, but if you stay close, maybe the one who is going to die here is you.”

“You don’t need to tell me.” The old emperor took steps back, but not once he did lose line of sight with the otherworldly gate.

I started separating my soul from my body. This would be the first time in a long time that my soul didn't possess a physical entity. If I took more than five minutes, my physical body would truly die. Whether by the touch of the realm of the dead or brain death after blood stopped flowing. Even if my body did die, the emperor could heal it until it was suitable for life.

That was if he wanted me to live.

“Fare well in the land of the dead.” The mystic told me as I now became a soul once more. Yet he could still see me as I shifted on the spiritual plane.

Here I go.

No longer I possessed vocal cords, I communicated with my own soul. I didn’t know if it was magically or physically possible, but I sighed as I readied myself. The exhalation of my very self marked my way into the narrow portal.

Into the afterlife.

**********

Lightheadedness assaulted my being. Something fell off… Well… Everything fell off. It was a strange, yet familiar feeling. Emptiness. A truly out-of-body experience. Literally.

I looked at my surroundings to find absolute nothingness. Not even my body. The pitch-black existence enveloped me. Until it did not. It felt like blinking, even though, I had no body to speak off.

The monotonous black scenery became a cave. Except that the cave had a lack of ceiling, where instead an infinity obscurity took place. Deep fog surrounded me, the penumbra on top of me unaffected by it.

I found myself moving, this time, it was of my own volition. I ignored the unnatural force to move forward, and I centered myself on the beings of opaque fog surrounding me.

Souls.

Nothing had changed after these years. Souls colored with a grey spectrum populated the place. Some had white eyes, others black, but everyone had them. Me excluded.

I rushed to the stream of muddy waters. A first layer of crystalline water lay on top of a black sludge. Whereas hours had passed the first time I reached the River of the Damned, now I only needed a few seconds. The miracles of free will, eh.

The cacophony of the tormented tried to assault me, yet I dismissed it with ease. Such a pitiful attack. It didn’t affect me once I arrived here for the first time, and neither it would do now. With a pulse of soul mana, I stopped every nearby cry. The souls stopped approaching the river as my energy overruled the sludge’s force, instead they directed towards me.

“Powerful enough to delay death, huh?” I found myself surprised. “Who would have thought that the spiritual energy in the underworld is so plentiful that even a soul can speak.”

My normal soul communication was a soul-to-soul dialogue. There was no real speech. Yet the powerful energies of the river allowed me to talk. It may not seem as much, but like this, I was more akin to a poltergeist than a free soul at the moment. I could interact with both worlds.

“Well, let’s get down to business.” I had bypassed a huge part of the Nethergate ritual, and I had no way to find to track her soul in the underworld. I had only conjured the gate, not the tracking mechanism. Except there was one way to find her. Brute force.

Soul Sight was a spell intended to look upon the spiritual plane. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised that when I casted it, I saw my surroundings as I had done before as a common soul floating down the river. Soul Sight was quite literally the sight of the souls. But there was a difference. A small yet significant change.

Soul Sight wasn’t limited by bodily restrictions. I could see in all directions, and I could see as far as I wanted.

With one quick pulse I detected the souls closer to me, they were tens. As it had been the first time I was on the river, those souls were white, dark, and grey. Never a single color alone, or one beyond the grey spectrum. Another pulse detected hundreds, and further on, thousands. I had never pushed this hard on Soul Sight in my life. Not even when I had been using Mystic’s Dominion. I could feel my soul getting overloaded, a lot of information being processed simultaneously. Like a headache, only but worse, way worse.

Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, …millions. A small crack appeared in my soul. Such damage would have been negligible before. Now, not so much. The wounds from my previous exploits finally opened. I had already cheated death on the leyline, my body had died, and I had forced it back onto life. I was doing the same once more, but with my soul.

The way across the Nethergate hadn’t been an easy one either. I forced a soul connected to a living vessel to the land of the dead. This also caused quite a strain on my spirit.

I went further on, and more pulses of my soul explored the uncharted underworld as if trying to find a way to the limitless death. The rifts upon my very being started to expand upon the exertion of death itself. I wouldn’t stop until I found her.

The number of souls counted reached numbers impossible for this world to sustain, clearly the influx of other worlds’ dead. I had now looked upon billions of dead. Nothing new. My soul continued to be torn, yet I reciprocated and continued to ignore it. This was a race against the clock.

At some point, so much death was processed by me that the concept of souls had become dull and meaningless, like when repeating the same word aloud multiple times made them lose their meaning. How many dead had I witnessed? Inspected them? Trillions? Did I surpass the quadrillion mark? I couldn’t even comprehend how many worlds were tied to the River of the Damned.

My consciousness slowly wandered away. Yet the continuous pulses that emitted my soul in an almost automatic manner impeded me to do so. I would not become a powerless stray soul waiting for an end that did not exist once more.

Soul Sight showed me small orange-amber lights. Those weren’t souls, so I ignored them. The number of souls scanned by now had reached an uncountable mark.

After uncountable deceased, amongst sludge, fog, and torment. After uncountable realities, I looked upon a shining beacon.

I found her.

I lifted off the ground with great impulse, putting aside the ruptures on my soul, using all my available mana. The fog was incredibly dense, but that didn’t obstruct my pulses of mana. If I was traveling at supersonic speeds, she was moving at a snail’s pace. It was relative, of course.

I even doubted that space was a thing in the river. Reality itself distorted as I got closer, then I noticed that space wasn’t linear in the spiritual plane. I burned more mana.

Now that I had located her soul print, I wouldn’t lose her. I would not let the cosmos get me away from her. I could finally ignore the galaxy’s worth of dead below me. A single objective in my mind.

Space warped.

Cracks in reality materialized.

I noticed that while moving across the underworld at a such incomprehensible speed, my soul was being damaged, but I also regenerated obscene amounts of soul mana. It was as if the river was the spiritual version of a leyline.

I wasted every single drop of mana the river-line offered me. Most of the regained mana I used to speed up. I could sense she was close to the river. I had to be faster. I couldn’t even acknowledge how much mana I was consuming. I feared that not even all the arcane mana the artifact had absorbed from the leyline on Lan’el could be even compared to the amounts I consumed by the second.

Then I only reserved a miserable amount to refrain from the ever-increasing rifts in my soul to expand.

The scenery became homogenous, just pure black surrounded me. I didn’t waver. I may not see anything, but I could still feel the faint attraction of the river and its coldness, and most importantly, her.

I ignore the own destruction of the plane as I ignored my own. Reality wasn’t so fragile to be threatened by a single mage. I felt a colossal pressure drop on top of me. As if a whole mountain had attacked me. The river ordered me to stop, but I pushed myself harder.

The amber rifts cried as if they were the cacophony of the damned, but in this case, it was the cry of the river.

Thankfully for the realm of the dead, I slowed the pace once the pings became more frequent. I was getting closer. I approached the rocky ground once more. Needless to say, the place was identical to the rest of the river. A weird sense of ominous filled the whole underworld. No matter where you were, you still felt as if you were in the same place. As if the river was an infinite treadmill. A fractal of a dimension.

While the study of the afterlife was an interesting and uncharted field, I wasn’t here for that. That was a matter for later.

I got nearer; my steps resonated with the cave-like aspect of the underworld. A knot formed in my inexistent throat, an imaginary heartbeat, and a very real sob.

Less than a day had passed, yet it felt like an eternity without her. The white and grey soul with traces of light blue was unbeknownst to the environment, approaching the river was her only thought. She had so much resistance to spiritual damage that she had managed to retain her own colors. My spiritual legs faltered; she was in front of me when I had considered her lost.

As I began to step forward, I stopped once I heard a sound. The cacophonies of agony and torment were muffled by me, even the own river’s cries I had ignored. Yet now I heard the splash of water at my right. A constant, almost rhythmical, paddling.

In hindsight, it was expected. But now, an unnatural chill run across my being.

“Oh, look who it is~” A melodious voice that incarnated death sang. “But a once pure soul~”

The Lady of the River came from the waters in her gondola while accompanied by her rower.