Chapter 107: Chapter 107

Back at the cult, everyone was happy to see me back. I had only been gone for a few hours and it wasn’t even evening properly yet, but they still acted like I had left for days, and it was such a relief to have me back in the flesh. I just humoured the silly lot of them.

Nothing had really arisen that I needed to take care of. Just daily prayers that the other cultists were able to lead, some cult business Aqrea was able to handle, and a few Rituals here and there.

Honestly, I was blessed to have been left a functioning cult by Elder Escinca. Sure, I had some hand in how things were run now, but he was the one who had laid the foundations for it.

I wasn’t ever going to stop being grateful for it.

Tired though I was after the day’s exertions, I couldn’t pull my mind away from the fact that I had gotten another Affix for Flare. Finally. Well, I supposed it had been a while since I had gained one for Illumination too, though I still wasn’t totally sure about it just yet. What I was sure of, though, was that I wanted to play around with Capacity.

Such an odd name. What was wrong with something like Storage or Gathering? Hmm, the thing with the Weave was that the terms it used to define powers were, well, defining.

Much as I wanted to test it out some more, the first thing I did was make good use of Sacrifice.

I found a secluded spot at the temple before pulling out the little souvenir of battle Khagnio had gifted me with. The thin finger covered in grey scales was still bleeding at one end. That was the magical property of dimensional storages. Stored things didn’t experience decay.

In fact, from what Cerea said, they didn’t experience time at all.

It made me wonder if one could essentially remain immortal within a dimensional storage bag. Just camp out there, come out occasionally for silly little needs like food and the toilet, and then return. Although, if time wasn’t experienced, then wouldn’t people be frozen entirely?

I pushed the thoughts out of my head. Those were distractions for another time. Right now, it was time to see if our efforts had borne any real fruit.

Holding out the finger, I channelled Sacrifice. “I don’t know what you want with Ring Four, Roaring Claws, but you’re not getting anything here. Not on my watch.”

The little muttered promise was enough of a switch for my sizzling white mana to emerge and burn away the finger. As it did so, I focused on the moment I had done the same thing with Glonek, on the fervent wish to make sense of the actions of a person.

You have Sacrificed 1 [Minor] Part of a Silver-ranked Bladereaver Rogue. Windfall bonus activated.

Reward: Soul Sight activated ]

Just as had happened with Glonek, my surroundings disappeared. Instead, I was submerged in a vision. I did my best to anchor myself into some semblance of a consciousness, trying to make it feel like a vision for real and not some kind of dream where I became someone else. It was difficult, but I focused on my will, on my sense of self.

This was my vision. I needed to be in control.

The important thing was that I had no wish to peruse through some random Scalekin’s entire life. With Glonek, it had been different. I had wondered what kind of life could have led someone to make the kinds of heinous decisions that he had made.

In a morbid way, I had been fascinated with his life, his upbringing, his experiences, because it was a twisted mirror of something I myself had gone through in some respect. The constant belittling, the endless feeling of being looked down on. I wanted a perspective that would stop me from becoming bitter, jaded, and downright evil like Glonek had become.

Not so now. With this little vision, I was simply hunting for a specific answer. Screw off with the whole life documentary. ᴛhis chapter is ᴜpdated by N0v3l.Fiɾe.net

I blessed the fact that I could exert some level of control over what I saw. At least, I could control the rate of the visions, like I had access to fast-forward buttons.

Scenes of the Scalekin’s life zoomed past me. I saw him swaddled as a tiny lizard among a group of other little Scalekin. I watched as he struggled to make a life within darkness. It was a bit shocking to see that his whole life had been in the undercity, down in the caverns of Ring Zero.

Eventually, he managed to get into the gangs. The system of induction started from a young age, where directionless youths were given seemingly simple tasks in return for a sense of belonging, alongside things like money, food, and shelter.

So, our intrepid Scalekin had been swept up in the gangs under Zairgon with little to no difficulty.

I tried to fast-forward through his adolescent years and all that. No, I really didn’t need to see his first loves and all that crap.

Although, I did pause when someone familiar shocked me.

I was watching a young Khagnio from the perspective of Desjarlith, the Scalekin who had attacked me. There was no mistake. I’d recognize those storm-grey scales, that gait, that sneering look. Even back then, probably a decade or two ago, Khagnio was built like a rogue who was as ready to stab someone as he was to chat with them pleasantly.

Khagnio didn’t linger in the Scalekin’s visions for very long. Clearly, while they had known each other, it was only as bare acquaintances because they had worked in the same gang. They weren’t friends. Not really.

Which probably explained why Khagnio hadn’t felt any compunctions about cutting off Desjarlith’s finger.

Several scenes later, I finally arrived at the moment I was looking for. I didn’t know how much I had to wade through to arrive at it, but by that point, I was definitely zoning out. It was only the familiarity of seeing Shagor again that re-hooked my attention.

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The frustrating thing was that there was still a lot of muck to wade through. Desjarlith was turning out to be one of the more accomplished members of the Claw, which led to him interacting with Shagor regarding all kinds of crap I didn’t care about. At least until I finally reached the moment where I heard something interesting.

“A Ring Four job?” Desjarlith asked within the tiny, cramped room that Shagor apparently used as an office. I had picked up that it was inside the building I had infiltrated.

“What’s bothering you?” Shagor asked. “That it’s overcity or that it’s Ring Four?”

“There’s nothing in Ring Four.”

Shagor tutted. “You haven’t been paying attention, have you? Recent business has it trying to… rise. Can’t have that, now can we?”

“Who’s it from, boss?”

Shagor tutted again. “None of your business, Des. Job’s a job. You good for it or not?”

Desjarlith straightened, slightly chagrined. “Of course I am.”

The meeting ended. I wasn’t surprised that my attacker didn’t have the full breadth of knowledge of why he was attacking me. A part of me had expected he wouldn’t have been told the full story. There was always the chance he could have been caught and forced to spill the beans afterwards.

What was worse was that Desjarlith was conscientious about it too. He knew he was a potential liability, so he went out of his way to not dig up things he wasn’t supposed to know. Annoying.

That said, he did possess one little pearl of information that I was going to cherish. Apparently, Shagor went off to meet someone on Ring Two, near the north end of it.

As I went through more of Desjarlith’s life, I found nothing new. I was briefly fascinated when it finally reached the point where he was invading Ring Four, using—just as I had suspected—his harassment of a Ring Four worker as a cover to get to me. Frustrating that he had no real curiosity to determine why, but whatever.

I concentrated on ending the vision and found myself back where I belonged.

“Alright,” I muttered as I tried to centre myself. The vision had left me a bit disoriented. I couldn’t recall if I had felt the same with Glonek, or if it was more intense this time somehow. Wouldn’t be surprising if that was the case. After all, some of my other Sacrifice types got more intense as I did more of them too.

Like Emulation. A little too intense, that one. I still needed to find a way to overcome its harsh fallout…

With my bearings centred again, I found my way to the office and sent off a quick message to Hamsik. His reply came quick too. He said he’d look into the Ring Two matter and see if it was related.

All the while, I had to put some effort into concentrating against distractions. Desjarlith’s life was still replaying over and over in my head.

These visions weren’t totally reliable. I had been forced to sit through someone else’s entire life. There were so many details to sift through, especially when I was seeking just one little scene. I didn’t care about all the relationships, had no wish to see him sleeping or eating or worse, found all the minutiae to be mind-numbing so much that I had nearly made myself exit early.

Then there were all the feelings too. The anguish, the heartbreak, the terror. There were some good stuff strewn about here and there. The camaraderie with the other Claws, the satisfaction of a job successfully completed, the relief of having some place to return to…

Some of those were so eerily relatable, I again had to struggle to regain focus. Empathy wasn’t bad. It was also decidedly not what I had been seeking.

The harshness of growing up in the undercity… in a gang that didn’t mind sacrificing its youngest and weakest members… the fear of being the next and the pain…

I sat up straighter in my seat, pushing away my contemplating mood. I had considered Sacrificing the vision, which should have worked, since I would have offered up the vision itself and not the Weave-stated reward, right? But maybe the Weave wasn’t going to be so lenient. It didn’t matter. I had a different idea now.

Deciding against alarming anyone else, I crept my way through the temple until I found a knife. Bless the outing with Khagnio to improve my natural sneakiness.

Then I quickly barricaded myself in my room. This was going to look extremely questionable, so best to avoid any audiences whatsoever.

The shallow cut on my arm I intended to leave didn’t arrive as easily as I was expecting it to. I blinked. It took some actual effort before a light sting stabbed through my arm, a short gash seeping out blood at the same time. Huh. My Vitality had grown enough that even I had to actively use my Power to injure myself. Neat!

But that wasn’t what I wanted to focus on just then. Instead, I held out my hand as the blood welled.

This pain was my pain. Something I had delivered to myself, something I owned.

“Something I should be able to Sacrifice,” I said.

That worked as the right switch. Blistering white mana threads drove through my body to congregate at my wound, covering up my forearm so that it looked like a glowing cast.

You have Sacrificed 1 [Minor] Instance of Pain. Windfall bonus activated.

Reward: Pain Sense Control: Modifiable threshold of pain sense by up to 3.5x for 3 hours and 40 minutes ]

I slowly grinned. There. My little idea had worked. Pain was an experience, so with Experientiality, I had no trouble Sacrificing it away.

When I focused on my reward, it felt like a tiny tug on the side of my head. All I had to do was will my pain to reduce, and the sting disappeared entirely. It didn’t heal the wound. With the Sacrifice threads disappearing, I had no trouble seeing the small cut still leaking blood. But I felt nothing at all from it.

I nodded with satisfaction. This was a double-edged sword I’d need to be careful about.

Pain was actually good. It was a signal from the body that something was wrong and needed immediate attention. Completely removing that functionality would potentially put me in an even more dangerous state than the original cause of the pain.

For instance, if I just ignored a big enough wound, I’d eventually exsanguinate myself as all my blood freely flowed out while I was distracted.

But this could be tremendously useful when I needed to push past pain.

As I lay in bed that night, I tried creating more and more of those heat pockets. More and more of the little blobs of energy just floating and waiting to be used. I found they couldn’t move with me just yet. Maybe there was another Affix that helped that. Instead, their shapes were very malleable.

Changing the shape of the heat storage created using Capacity helped me control Flare’s directionality. Within the created “capacitor”, as I was starting to think of them, the Concentrated heat didn’t disperse. Not until I flicked a mental switch, until I focused my will on allowing it to Flare.

Or until a timer of approximately sixteen minutes had passed. That was the storage duration limit of Capacity.

A strangely specific number, but I figured it was related to my Flare Aspect’s rank.

What I really tested was the maximum distance I could create those heat pockets with Capacity. My thought process was that if I could create a series of the little storages, then I could fly through the whole series pretty smoothly, instead of the stop-start stuttering motion I had adopted in the undercity.

Again, not exactly true flight. The lengths I had to go to replicate Manifestation. At the same time though, these new Affixes were giving me a wider range of utilizations. Manifestation wouldn’t have allowed me to store heat remotely to activate the Flare later.

Enrico blinked at me from the other end of the room where it was ensconced in its little nook.

“Yes, yes, I know,” I muttered. “I should go get some sleep. But tomorrow…”

Tomorrow, I had plans on practicing some other stuff. I was aiming for another Affix. This time, with Gravity.