It was difficult for Rieren to regain inner harmony. Her body was still feeling the aftereffects of the battle against the Avatar and all that Rieren had learned from the little exchange. But once she had settled down and channelled Essence for a few hours, things slowly began to reassert themselves into the pattern she had grown used to over the last week or so.

Kalvia was cultivating away nearby too. Rieren had moved far enough away from the heir to the Elderlands’ throne such that they wouldn’t interfere with each other while trying to draw in Essence.

She wondered how exactly the other woman was doing. Kalvia sounded like someone who was being supported well, especially considering the various pampering paraphernalia Rieren had seen. Kalvia couldn’t have bought books, tents, cooking pots, and the other similar nonsense by herself. She had likely obtained some good resources as well.

Though, her Essence didn’t indicate any specialty. It wasn’t being drawn faster than Rieren’s—in fact, Rieren could argue it was actually a bit slower—and the sense of power Rieren received from her companion wasn’t exactly awestriking.

She suspected the only reason Kalvia had killed the Avatar so easily was because Adjudicator had stopped herself from resisting in any way. At least she wasn’t bothering Rieren. As the hours turned into days, Rieren was left well alone to continue her cultivating in peace. She appreciated that.

Meanwhile, Rieren had sent off Batcat on a little hunt. Kalvia had seemed overly interested in learning who else they were sharing the Enlightenment Locale with.

As such, Rieren had asked Batcat to perform some discrete scouting. Only time would tell how stealthy the cat would be, but she had faith in the winged kitten. After all, Rieren had been gathering knowledge about the greater world through Batcat’s memories for a while now.

The little Spirit Beast’s mission included taking a tour of the chamber and spying on the others cultivating here as well. But that wasn’t all. Rieren had also requested the cat to get to the surface. She might have decided to rest her hopes of reaching the next Enlightenment Locale on Kalvia, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t benefit from understanding what else was occurring.

As Rieren continued cultivating through the days, gathering more and more of the world’s Vital Essence, her thoughts strayed to all that she would have liked to learn about.

There was Amalyse and Rollo. Kalvia had only been able to provide limited information about them, which only poured extra fuel onto the fire of Rieren’s curiosity. She was also desperately hoping to learn more about Mercion and Silomene. Where had they gone, and how were they doing?

A part of her had even wished she could contact Atelen back at Lionshard Sect. It would be a great boon to Rieren if she could see her father again. He was too distant, however, and she didn’t want the cat travelling so far without her.

Most of all, she was concerned about the Shatterlands itself. Were the monsters encroaching its borders and closing in on Falstrom? Were the people desperate and fearful? Or had they been able to eke out some victories, or at least, hold onto their own? Maybe she was worrying for no good reason and they were pushing the Abyssals back.

Rieren doubted that last one was the case. But either way, it was only the truth that Batcat would bring that would calm her overactive mind.

While her Spirit Beast was gone, Rieren got closer and closer to reaching the Late-Enlightened realm. New visions were busting into her mind, transporting even her senses to a time and place where she didn’t belong.

They weren’t surprising at all. More death. More destruction. More on scales that she hadn’t thought of at first, but made a good deal of sense.

No Abyss, though. Whatever Rieren had seen in her first vision, it didn’t repeat itself. She was left far too curious about the discoveries she had made on that inadvertent spiritual trip, and she didn’t feel like she could truly rest until she had plumbed all the Abyss’s secrets.

“Did you know that the Abyss is man-made?” Rieren asked casually when she and Kalvia had paused their cultivation to chat and enjoy each other’s company.

“That’s insane,” Kalvia said. “How do you even know such a thing?”

“One of my Enlightenment visions showed the Abyss. All the sand there is actually just covering up a dead, abandoned city.”

A gleam went off in her eyes. “Can you describe the architectural style?”

“Uh…”

“Anything specific worth noting that you remember? Column styles? Size of pavement stone blocks? Sewage systems or the like?”

“I was sadly not there long enough to note anything of the sort.”

Kalvia’s hands had twitched as though she had been preparing to take invisible notes, but she sighed and let them drop. “And you’re trusting a vision?”

“Well, I’ve been there.”

Kalvia didn’t immediately reply to that. She had likely heard of Rieren’s journey into the Abyss along with Amalyse, Folend, Avalien, and some of the other guards. They’d had quite the intriguing encounters there. She couldn’t tell if Kalvia was envious, relieved, or simply apathetic.

“I will take your word for it, then.” Kalvia nodded as though the matter was settled. “Did you know the head cook for the west wing of the imperial palace likes to boil frog legs in his free time?”

“What… sort of knowledge is that supposed to be?” Rieren asked.

Kalvia shrugged. “I thought we were sharing strange news that had no bearing whatsoever on our ongoing lives.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Rieren opened her mouth to argue, then snapped it close. She herself had said the exact same thing not so long ago. They chatted a bit idly for a while. Rieren heard strange tidbits about Kalvia she hadn’t really foreseen herself ever learning.

Apparently, she had been born in Vanharron but her first memory was of a small town farther east that was now completely gone thanks to the Abyssals. Another small thing was that she knew how to sew, actually enjoyed doing it. There were a lot of little children where she had grown up, and she’d had much practice stitching their ruined clothes back together.

In return, Rieren admitted some of the little things about her life as well. The fact that she could catch, scale, and cook fish quite well thanks to her father. That she had absolutely no idea how to actually take care of a cat and Batcat being self-sufficient was what kept it by her side all along.

They eventually parted to resume their cultivating though. Rieren was anxious to get going. Her Enlightenment wasn’t far now. She could feel it. The visions were coming in strong.

Their general theme hadn’t changed. Rieren was still inundated with images about the end of the world, about all the ways people, the things they made, and the places they inhabited, and all else about the natural world come to an end. But it was starting to become more and more… expansive and sparse at the same time.

Things were becoming somewhat conjoined, in a sense. For instance, the calamities Rieren was now viewing were all leveling the land so that nothing remained but a long stretch of uninhabited world.

A tidal wave washed away an entire shoreline. A storm uprooted not only the town on a mountainside, but also all the trees there, leaving one half of the whole mountain naked. A meteor fell from the heavens, turning an entire nation into a gigantic crater and vaporizing anything and everything there might have been within it.

Curiously, none of the calamities repeated. At least, not at the same scale. After the first volcanic eruption that blanketed a quarter of the world in an ashen cloud, there were no more eruptions to be seen. When an earthquake tore a rift across a whole continent, no more tectonic shifts occurred.

The scale shifted so that the devastations grew more and more enormous and all-encompassing. First it was individual people, which grew to villages and towns, then to entire countries and kingdoms. Empires fell, as did the continents they spanned. Then the whole world began to crumble under the onslaught of time.

At some point, Rieren was staring at the planet from the reaches of space. It felt for a moment that nothing could end the gargantuan hunk of rock floating in the cosmos that housed all life.

But then the sun itself was enraged.

Rieren only had to turn to see how it had expanded so much that several of the nearer planets had simply disappeared into its fiery exterior. Instead of a ball of burning gold, it was now red as inflamed blood. And it kept growing, and growing, and growing.

She realized it was rather ridiculous that she could see what was going on. In her normal life, she couldn’t stare at their nearest star in such a manner without getting her eyes blinded. Now, she was witness to its death. Especially when it finally grew too enormous to sustain itself any longer before exploding in a burst that was greater than anything Rieren had ever witnessed.

And she had witnessed a great deal indeed.

It was so bright, the whole cosmos turned white around her. She couldn’t even begin to fathom what she might have felt had she been here physically.

For a long while, there was nothing but pure white around her. Rieren wasn’t sure what this vision was trying to tell her. The Enlightenment wasn’t arriving. Nothing suddenly clicked in her mind. A strange phenomenon, considering how it had gone in her last life.

Previously, all Rieren had needed to understand was the end of all things. Somehow, that comprehension, that integral realization that at some point, no matter what she did or however high she climbed, the fact that she would end too was enough. And that was something she already knew now, something she had no trouble believing.

But then, was there something more that she had failed to glean back then? Something even deeper she hadn’t actualized, even if she had glimpsed it?

More importantly, if she couldn’t figure it out, how was she supposed to get back to her actual body? Maybe she could summon the cat to bite her out of whatever trance her cultivating had taken her into.

The white started changing. It was minute, at first. Tiny specks appeared in the distance, so small that Rieren wasn’t even sure if they existed or if she was imagining them. But then they grew in number. The specks started coagulating, joining together and growing every second.

At the same time, all the white began darkening. They grew grey, then quickly turned black as ink. Moments later, stars bloomed.

Rieren stared. The cosmos was… rebirthing. That dying star’s… supernovae—yes, that was what it was called—seemed to have caused everything else to explode as well, turning the whole cosmos devoid of any matter at all. Rieren didn’t understand how that was possible, but that understanding wasn’t the point here.

The realization arrived like a lightning bolt striking her right on her head. The point was that everything wasn’t gone.

Everything was coming back. Returning. Circling back to the beginning.

The little specks kept joining together until the clumps turned to rocks floating in the void. These combined together to form the first planets, misshapen at first until their combined gravity squeezed them into something resembling a sphere.

Meanwhile, the gases existing in separate blobs now found each other and compressed together to form new stars. Their fitful power soon turned bright enough to shade the new planets with burning glows, then pull the planetary bodies into their gravitational field. In other words, starting the first orbits.

It didn’t take long for comets to flash by, for asteroid belts to form, and for the start to stabilize. As it did so, one of the planets found itself at just the right distance to harbour life.

Rieren’s world.

A world to which she was pulled again, where she saw time flashing by with such pace, her mind couldn’t even boggle at it. Instead, she simply took in how the world changed, how entire aeons passed by in blinks.

Land and seas formed and separated. The first life took the first steps onshore. Creatures grew in size and power until gigantic beasts roamed the lands. Calamities occurred with wild abandon, but these were not on a cosmic scale. Life found a way to survive, adhering to one form or another.

In the end, humanity arrived. Civilization grew. Before long, the world began to resemble the one Rieren had come from, with all the mortals burdened under a system and an ongoing apocalypse of monsters.

A world where Rieren belonged.

She found herself back in the gigantic underground chamber where she had been channeling Essence for over a month now. Where she had finally broken through to the Late-Enlightened realm.

In the end, it hadn’t been death that this Enlightenment Locale had represented. Not really. Rieren already knew that, and for someone who didn’t have that inherent understanding of things, it might truly be enough of an understanding to achieve the enlightenment. But for her, what truly counted was what happened after death.

People died, yes, but there were others to take their place. Nations rose and fell like leaves on a tree, falling and rebirthing with the seasons. Mountains were weathered down, but tectonic shifts made new ones rise in time. Planets, stars, even the entire cosmos could be destroyed. But even they would all grow back up again.

That was the truth to be learned here. The understanding that all things were part of a cycle. That even if Rieren fell, even if she failed, the world would go on. Change would occur.

Power flooded her. A quick look with her eyes revealed how her elixir field was now well beyond the limits of her body, stretching out quite far.

It wouldn’t be long before she had the power to channel the amount of Essence needed for such techniques like Heaven’s Arc and Heaven’s Cleave. Rieren couldn’t wait.