Ple- spar- You- Young master, please spare us! We had no idea the this wolf was yours! If we knew someone as powerful as yourself owned the wolf we wouldn't have even dreamed of touching a single hair! If you spare us we can all join you and form a new faction, becoming invincible in this layer for outer disciples! Plea-“
The young mans pleas for mercy were cut short as Naath raised a palm and released a massive sonic blast. Naath couldn’t use the sound element for delicate or subtle things yet, but he could still use it to cause some damage. With this one blast of sound energy Naath had sent all of these disciples flying backwards dozens of feet. When they finally landed on the ground again all of them were vomiting blood and on their way to meet Yama. Naath shook his head and turned around to Brutus and said.
“See, it’s okay with me here buddy. I wont let other cultivators hurt you without killing me first. Your family bud.”
Brutus’ wagged his tail hearing this and let out a low, happy howl. Naath smiled seeing this and then turned to look at the unconscious disciples he had just finished beating. He picked them up and brought them inside of his little house and tied them all together with some spare rope he had after building the place. After this he sat down on his bed nearby and closed his eyes going in to his soul sea to try and talk to King. It didn’t go smoothly as King had been knocked unconscious by a soul energy backlash. This meant that his very soul had received a shock from a large amount energy and he was like a comatose patient. After trying a few different things Naath had an idea and began to infuse some of his own soul energy into the unconscious rune.
To his surprise, King immediately woke up and if he had a body probably would have jumped up as he yelled.
“What happened?! Where am I?! When… Ah, right, soul sea, Naath. Ah, Naath, what the hell was that?! Ive never seen a breakthrough of the body cause soul energy to be produced! Is this another special trait of your True Void Arts maybe? Ah! That gives me an idea!!! Young master I might have solved your soul cultivation problem but…”
King seemed hesitant to finish his sentence so Naath encouraged him to continue. With this gentle nudge king said solemnly.
“Naath, If I were to go through with this idea we would be permanently linked. I would not be able to go far from your soul sea at all or I’d quickly run out of energy and my runic body would die. With that the last traces of my central soul would vanish with the wind and be gone forever. Until you reach a certain level of soul cultivation I will be entirely bound to you. Not simply to your soul sea, I would be bound to your central soul itself and only able to exist within the range that your soul has influence on the world.
To put it another way, I can only explore as far as your soul sense can go. If I do this then we live and die together. Well, that’s not quite right either, If you die I will absolutely follow suit. However, if I die you will very much so live. This is a master and slave contract of the highest order. I wouldn’t even consider it normally, but you made that damned sneaky move in the soul contract trapping me here. But if I stay here I will get in the way of your soul cultivation, at least normally. But, if I were to absorb your soul energy and attune myself completely to your soul sea and bind myself to your central soul as if I was a part of you then I would be able to take on the aspects of void… at least, in theory
I would be forced to be your slave until the end of time, until you die, or until your soul cultivation reaches a level to undo the binding. I’m torn here, I don’t want to impede your soul cultivation as you may well be the last hope of my entire people to ever rise again. At the same time this is the rest of my existence potentially…”
“Old rune, is that all? Don’t get me wrong I’m not making light of the fact that you would be bound to me and not be able to leave the scope of my perceptions. Just, if you take on the aspects of void then many, many new doors will open up to you that you didn’t even know were doors. I promise you it is more profound and powerful than you can possibly imagine. Not only that but if you could learn to take on the aspects on your own you could defend yourself and attack others with ease. I’m sure doing this will also give me a few of your memories and the heavens will target me, blah blah blah. Whatever, let them target me, I need some lighting energy anyway.
I can see the downsides here, don’t get me wrong, but if I make all of your people void touched and bring them into my soul sea I can promise you one thing. I will, without any doubt, revive every last one of your people when I reach the ninth stage of the True Void Arts. Not only that, but I will guide you all on cultivating them yourselves, you all will become envoys of the void and my protectors, my family. How does that sound, King?”
"That, Nat- No young master, that sounds… amazing, after a few billion years of being totally alone without any family… Fine, Young master Naath I accept! I ask the absolute ruler of the runic race accept your terms on behalf of all of us! With hea- no. With the Void Mother as my witness may this oath bind my very essence to young master’s soul. I willingly accept this slave contract only to be broken by the young masters will!”
As soon as King finished his words a small spatial tear appeared above Naath’s head and he felt an intimate connection to the True void at this moment. They tear grew and seemed to take the form of an eye. The pupil was made of absolute nothing, the iris was a pure white the eye itself was completely black, and the veins were all a fuzzy gray. Then a baptism of True Void energy descended onto Naath. Under this energy Naath shuddered and left his soul sea. On seeing this eye Naath felt a sense of enlightenment and immediately began to condense True Void membranes. One, two, five, twelve. The eye lasted for only a minute yet in this time Naath condensed a full twelve True Void membranes! Not only this but the energy went into Naath’s soul sea too.
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Inside of his soul sea the energy immediately honed in on King and forced its way into his runic body. At first it didn’t hurt, surprising king, he thought changing his runic body to void energy would hurt, a lot. Just when he relaxed though the energy of nothing turned to creation and flooded through his runic body, turning him completely white. This process burned like the fire born at the beginning of all things was refining his body! King quickly put up a sound canceling barrier around himself so he wouldn’t disturb Naath while he let out screams of complete agony. The worst however, was yet to come. After creation came attraction and a massive amount of soul energy from Naath’s soul sea pured towards King!
This massive influx of energy left King feeling like his body was going to completely explode! His screams became more and more terrible as time went by and he thought to himself. ‘Fuck!!! Is this what young master goes through and went through with every breakthrough with the True Void Arts?!?! Monster! My new young master is an absolute monster!!!’ Despite the bitter agony, King was in he still felt like laughing knowing that he had chosen the most reliable person possible to revive his race, and that he made the absolute correct choice.
Even more so he realized that using the Void Mother in his oath caused something much, much grander then he had intended! King saw the True Void eye that tore open not just space but the very fabric of reality itself to look down upon them and bear witness! After thinking to this point though King’s thoughts stopped completely. The energy had switched to destruction. The pain was simply indescribable. Evey single atom of his runic body was being completely broken down into nothing! Worse yet every particle that constitutes his body seemed to become part of him entirely he could feel almost every individual molecule as it decayed and tore itself apart piece by piece.
It was a level of pain and utter agony to the point where King couldn't even scream! It was paralyzing, he couldn’t think, move, scream or do anything except let the energy take over! Naath was in a similar level of pain but for a very different reason, he felt his core soul being invaded by many, many invisible strands of nothingness to unknown places. Through every single one of these little threads he could see thousands of different runes, including king. Through each one he saw the exact same thing, the runes being baptized by True Void energy and completely transformed! He was seeing thousands of scenes but all at the same time and somehow managed to keep individual focus on all of them.
All of this was happening while Naath was unconsciously still focusing on condensing True Void membranes. He realized he was looking through thousands of eyes of True Void that had torn open reality all over this universe to observe! So this was what it meant to make an oath on the Void Mother herself? It was absolutely insane! This was on a scale Naath simply could not touch yet! In fact the level of this event sent this entire universe into a panic! Most of these runes were captured and being held somewhere, some with great powers that ruled entire star systems. Other by powers that were starting to rise using information taken from or tortured out of the runes.
Each of these powers bore witness to the eyes tearing apart reality to observe the runes and then change in the runes themselves. Countless powers mobilized into action, ancient ancestors came out of hibernation. Massive waves were caused as many powers tried to find the source of this anomaly! These eyes lasted only a minute but in that time many powerful people who could destroy entire stars with a wave of there hands had their souls completely and utterly annihilated upon looking deeply at the eyes. It ground their very souls into nothing and seemed to absorb all of this energy, removing it from this world forever!
Once a minute had passed, the destruction energy had finished destroying the runes original bodies and they were all reformed into bodies of True Void. They were completely invisible in this form and would need to learn to shift on their own into other elements. This was a major even that signaled a change in the very power structure of the universe. When the void eyes all closed, Naath’s eyes opened and the event ended. Upon opening his eyes Naath panted heavily for breath and quickly organized his memories carefully noting everything he had just seen. After he finished that he checked on King first. He saw the rune with it’s new body of absolute nothing and smiled. King was completely unconscious, clearly not ready for that level of pain.
But Naath knew he would wake up soon enough and they could begin talking a bit. He would have to teach King how to properly use True void energy after all. After deciding this Naath felt all of the connections to his core soul. He counted them out and found that there were 9,999 connections exactly! One of them was King and Naath felt a headache coming on, he had to rescue 9,998 runes! After finding this out he turned his attention away from these connections and focused on his own body.
When he saw that he now had 16 True Void membranes he actually screamed out loud.
“Holy shit!!!”
This was an insane harvest for Naath, especially considering the energy requirements for each consecutive membrane to form! To test it out he circulated the True Void Arts and the energy he was able to draw in was completely insane! Comparing it to before it was like he was pulling in drops of water, now he was chugging it by the gallon! The biggest surprise though was that now his bones seemed to not even be phased by this much energy. It was as if his bones had turned into bottomless pits capable of storing entire worlds! These True Void Membranes seemed to have completely transformed his body. If this was the case, what would happen when he got all 257? He was excited to find out.
Finally after he was done checking the condition of his body he got up and turned his attention to the disciples he had tied up once more.