On top of the Arcane Sanctum, a squadron of powerful mages looked down upon us.

“YOU DARE INTERRUPT OUR DUEL, SERGEANT MAJOR?” The violent screams of En’yen felt as if he had lost his senses and devolved into a beast, even if his words were coherent. An aura of wrongness gathered around him, thin veils of blue.

“Look what you are doing to the city, High Arcanist!” Amira Kalyd replicated, her voice reaching us hundreds of meters away with the help of some spells. “You are supposed to protect it!”

The sensible logic in Amira’s words only enraged the already unstable arcanist, prompting him to shoot a single singularity at her. Another Arcane Veil spawned before her, and as the smoke of the explosion dissipated, I was able to see that everyone was unscathed.

The Arcane Veil truly lived up to her name.

But the blocking of singularities had taken a toll on her. She appeared exhausted, and she had only protected herself against one singularity beyond the other two she had stopped before. Amira wouldn’t be able to hold many more. One, maybe two.

“Stop!” I told them both. “This duel is between En’yen Yagul and me!”

It was a death sentence, but neither of the mages waiting on the Arcane Sanctum could stop En’yen now that he was a thirteen-star arcanist. I doubted that I could, even after ascending to the twelfth star. He no longer felt like a mage. But...

Something else.

I looked at my surroundings in confusion. That had felt like my own thoughts, yet at the same time... it was like a foreign idea that had infiltrated my mind.

There was nothing in front of me, yet I could a light blue color swaying around. It wasn’t in the corporeal nor in spiritual planes, but the cognitive one.

A culmination of ideas that guided me into a better path. A set of images of precalculated probabilities.

The frontiers between the planes had been all but eroded by now, allowing me to interact with the entity. It had been summoned by the High Arcanist’s Arcane Records, but it was far more different from everything I had seen before.

It didn’t possess any soul, nor it was a magical construct.

It was different as if it followed... other rules.

The knowledge it granted me was instinctual, alike... no, exactly identical like how my true affinity guided me. But instead of magic, it possessed answers for everything.

I don’t know what En’yen had done with his thirteen-star spell, but the entity that he had brought to this world wasn’t Aligned with him, but it was neutral. It conceded its grace to him, but also to me.

My eyes shone in lavender; the next set of actions was clear to me now.

Yagul threw more singularities around without worrying about collateral damage or the depletion of his mana pool. He had unlimited reserves now. His only objective was to kill me.

Coincidently enough, that was also mine.

My physical vessel, which resembled more a soul than a corporeal entity by the second, triplicated. Two simultaneous casts of Astral Self would have been possible before but taxing. But as for my new status as a twelve-star mystic though? I could definitely do more.

But I didn’t.

The copies flew around En’yen, and I did the same. It was near-impossible telling us apart, I even had problems myself, because the previous soul constructs were now closer to my body in composition. In a way, they weren’t simulacrums, but other bodies I could latch unto. The limit was no longer the body, but the soul.

And that was a subject where I was second to none.

The three of me shot the High Arcanist with a myriad of Requiems. My previous theory about augmenting my mental faculties with Astral Self was correct. It did push my main mind, limiting what it could do, but the supporting minds of the projections more than compensated for the loss of computational power. Unfortunately, beyond three I would hit diminishing returns.

It was an unsettling feeling, I hadn’t tested it before, but I knew it would occur exactly that.

En’yen hit one of the Astral Selves with a lucky shot, instantly dispelling it. Even the increased resilience granted by my true affinity and Mystic’s Apotheosis were incapable of making a nine-star spell survive a mana singularity.

Yet the loss of a single avatar didn’t matter, because another one instantly spurted from nothingness to take its place.

The casting time of Astral Self, a nine-star spell, was in the realm of tenths of seconds.

That was phase one of my plan.

The High Arcanist would no longer perish from mana poisoning, and he absolutely wouldn’t run out of mana, the only way I had to end this duel was to kill him myself.

My strongest attack was Requiem, and whilst the ten-star spell would be certainly lethal even against mages of the eleventh star, that wouldn’t cut it against the first mage of the thirteenth star in the world.

I needed a new weapon. And fast.

Information infiltrated my brain, giving me ideas, and new pathways, yet all that suddenly ceased as a clear sound echoed in my mind.

Ding, dong.

The tolling of the bells of the River of the Damned distracted me, almost making me get hit by a singularity. It was that sound that made me aware of my surroundings.

Amira lay motionless on the shoulders of his father, apparently having used up all of her mana pool. There no longer was anyone protecting the city with barriers.

I turned my head, a wrong move as En’yen now knew who the real Edrie was, but the destruction forced me to stay looking for more than I wanted.

All the singularities my Astral Selves and I had dodged had been led astray, impacting all over Ferilyn, not only Sin’fal.

My blood boiled in anger, but also another feeling.

Shame.

It was me who had provoked this. If I didn’t declare the duel for patriarchship the coup d’état would still have happened and En’yen wouldn’t have ascended nor caused this destruction. There probably had been more deaths with my hotheadedness than there would have been with the coup d’état.

The bells continued to toll.

They were like a cascade as if the city had barely managed to survive until now. People began to die constantly, whether it was because building collapsed on top of them, fires burned them alive, or the ripples in the fabric of reality ended them.

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Yet across the metallic ringing, I found another sound. This was even worse. The familiarity pained my heart.

I could hear the cacophony of the dead. It reminded me of my stay on the River of the Damned, of those many centuries laying around in stagnation waiting for something or someone to free me.

Then... realization.

Cacophonies?

I looked around in bewilderment, En’yen tried to shoot more singularities at me, but even in my confusion, I managed to dodge them by leaping between planes. I couldn’t hear the cacophony of the damned, the river wasn’t situated in the spiritual plane, it was like a whole other dimension altogether. What I was hearing was...

...the souls of the recently deceased.

I laughed.

“Of course!” I couldn’t help but say it aloud, even when the High Arcanist was throwing everything he had at me. It all made sense now. Why could I, a random mystic, could even hear the tolling of the river since childhood?

En'yen probably was confused himself thinking how I even had mana to continue fighting.

But none of that mattered.

Souls gathered around me in a maelstrom. They were far away as if they were avoiding the many blasts of En’yen, a sliver of consciousness even after death. This only meant one thing.

As if I was a celestial body of greater gravitational magnitude, my soul overpowered the pull of the River of the Dammed.

Any other plan I had previously formulated was thrown out of the window. I had a new idea. I didn’t need a weapon, but the complete opposite.

For one to gain mastery over death, one must first have a firm grasp over the domain of life.

An unnatural stillness formed in my mind, the cacophony of the crying souls stopping at my command. More and more souls joined the maelstrom, meaning more ellari continued dying. I couldn’t afford to care about that now.

I let all the tools at my disposal guide me. My true affinity, Mystic’s Apotheosis, and the Information entity that En’yen had summoned.

The knowledge overload should have fried my brain, I saw too many things, I knew too many things, yet that didn’t happen. Time slowed down to a crawl as I started casting.

High-purity mana wasn’t that useful for fledgling mages. Early spells demanded quantity instead of quality. A novice couldn’t handle pure mana. Yet that slowly changed as the stars increased. The higher-tiered a spell was, the more effective it became at using purer mana.

That was partially the reason why I had been able to cast eleven-star and twelve-star spells so soon after reaching the tenth star. I was already born near the apex of the elemental ladder, but it wasn’t until I reached the higher-starred spells that I could tap into that uncharted power.

And now I tried to exploit that beyond any pre-established limit.

Following the laws of magic, the spell I was trying to create should be called Mass Resurrection, as I intended to apply Alatea’s original eleventh star spell on a wide area. Spell adjectives increased the difficulty of the spell, normally by a whole star. But I was going further than that. This wasn’t just about life, but also death.

The consistency of the fabric of reality worsened. The souls of the dead became visible, and the separation of the planes mostly vanished by now. The entire world was shaking.

We had truly overloaded reality. Not even Elisandre Stargaze had provoked such drastic changes to the planet when she altered the firmament.

More mana spurted out of the ground, multiple leylines being freed from the confines of the world and directed toward me at the High Arcanist’s orders. My Astral Selves constantly threw themselves at the streams of mana, either redirecting them or holding them back with sustained Requiem castings.

I opened my mouth, soul poured out of it.

Even with these many helping hands, it wasn’t enough. I guess it was obvious, I was brute forcing magic whilst Yagul had probably spent decades trying to make his spell. Centuries even.

And I intended to put an end to that in minutes.

True soul mana wasn’t even enough to fuel my spell. Magic needed two parts to function: computation and fuel. I certainly had the computation thanks to the otherworldly entity, but not even all the mana in the phylactery-capacitor would be enough to cast this monstrosity. So, I used my other source of fuel at my disposal.

I burned my soul.

After casting Mystic’s Apotheosis, my soul had condensed into a singularity, now I was using that singularity to fuel an even greater magic.

Yet it wasn’t enough.

That did not stop me. I wasn’t the only soul nearby. Hundreds, maybe thousands of deceased ellari gathered around me. I didn’t need to consume their souls in an act of necromancy, no, I just had to apply the knowledge I had since I was a child.

Soul mana pool normally lingered around ten percent of the physical mana pool for non-mystics. Novela had taught me this more than two decades ago. And whilst the inhabitants of the maelstrom had lost their corporeal vessels, they still had a lot of untapped, wasted mana on their souls.

I became empowered with countless death.

Draining the phylactery of all its mana, burning my soul to get more fuel, and finally, using the mana of the deceased, I had enough mana for my final act.

Words and knowledge guided my tongue. Xenoglossia, the words of power, wouldn’t be enough. Ellari language wouldn’t suffice, I needed a more sophisticated one.

My voice became inscribed with the might of the runic language. I tried speaking what should be a Mass Resurrection spell, yet my own tongue hijacked my words. Instead, this came out of my mouth.

“Defy Death!” Reality ruptured at the presence of a new thirteenth star spell.

A foreign voice nudged my mind, I instinctively knew that it was the entity of Information, but I couldn’t hear their words as the previously silent maelstrom sprung in a new cacophony. Yet instead of the screams of the damned, it was the elation of the saved.

For a brief instant, it was as if time rewound. The tears in the fabric of reality stopped growing, almost seemingly closing them as they healed, but then they picked up speed. If the world couldn’t hold two twelve-star mages, it certainly couldn’t withstand the presence of two thirteen-star mages. Or worse, something greater.

I gazed upon the flowing souls returning to their bodies, the effects of Defy Death quickly became apparent as the charred corpses of the first two victims of the High Arcanist regenerated into life.

That was the first component of the thirteen-star soul spell.

I released the hold on my soul.

I no longer needed to maintain the singularity in my soul to keep Mystic’s Apotheosis active, I had transcended that need. My soul grew to unprecedented size. Moving in the spiritual plane, the logic of space defied, it only took a blink for the entirety of Ferilyn to be covered in a shallow lavender mist. My influence was as widespread as the Violet Sky.

En’yen observed me in bemusement, and I peered into his eyes. I finally understood what he had become. My knowledge extended far wider than it had ever done.

"You have become Arcan- no.” I stopped and corrected myself. It was difficult adapting to my new senses. “You are Magic. And I am Soul."

We both had surpassed such basic concepts as the Starry Tier, we weren’t just thirteen-star mages anymore, but Incarnations of reality.

En’yen commanded the leylines, the very essence of the Arcane with his thoughts alone, as he had become Magic itself. Having noticed the danger I had become; he didn’t just throw the nearest leylines at me.

But all leylines in Ferilyn.

The streams of pure arcane moved at impossible speeds, and as space lost cohesion, travel time become more of a suggestion than a rule.

Yes, he was Magic.

But I was Soul.

With a sway of my hand, I displaced the entire spiritual plane.

The frontiers between planes existed no longer, and it showed, as when I moved the spiritual plane, the cognitive and corporeal followed.

All the leylines missed me.

“You should have truly killed me before,” I spoke at En’yen. Even now, I had difficulties seeing sparks of consciousness in his maddened mind. Could Kirielle or Alatea even save him from his degradation? I doubted it.

It was time for the second component of Defy Death.

Rule over Death itself.

My expanded soul spread all over the island gathered in tendrils, and those tendrils weaved themselves together into the recreation of my left hand. The previously scorched hand shone. After all this time it had finally healed. Now a lavender scar covered the whole arm.

It was the mark of a highborn.

En’yen didn’t have time to react before an Arcane Sanctum-sized hand grabbed him, composed of a single, yet vast soul.

I casted a spell.

A simple spell.

It was of the eighth star.

I had used it only once against a man.

That man was called Ikail Natas and had killed Marissa.

It was called Soul Shatter.

In a single blink, the entire existence of En’yen Yagul was erased from the corporeal, cognitive, and spiritual planes. Not even reincarnation would be allowed for him.

I felt all my strength leave my body as I dropped to the ground, the massive fall proving lethal to me as Resurrection instantly activated. I lay unmoving for minutes, yet I rejoiced myself as the Violet Sky, the twelve-star spell that had covered Ferilyn for exactly two decades now, disappeared to reveal a beautiful night sky as it no longer had a spellcaster to support it.

Did hours pass by?

I didn’t know, my consciousness was fleeting. My mind barely processed how the fractures in the fabric of reality fixed themselves. There was no longer an overwhelming pressure exhorted over the world.

I became vaguely aware of the gathering of people surrounding me. I looked at them by the corners of my eyes. Maybe they were hundreds if not thousands of ellari of all colors and ages. Most of them looked as if they were going to drop dead on their feet at any moment, their clothes rugged or burned, their skin covered with splutters of magenta blood. Yet they didn’t remove their gazes from me. Fire burning in their eyes, their souls ignited in devotion.

Only one person dared to approach me, though they descended from the heavens. The flying figure was totally unscathed, unlike the congregation.

The dark blue colored woman sat behind me and grabbed my head and put it on top of her thighs.

“You are a moron,” Marissa stated as she hardly managed to contain her tears. Fear of death and relief of life lingering in her soul. The former slowly diminished whilst the latter rapidly increased.

I didn’t feel my body, nor I could move it, yet with great difficulty I opened my mouth.

“You ever doubted it?”