Chapter 56: Light Mana

Jaxir shook his head slowly at the notification hanging in the air.

"You know, you had three beautiful wives that loved you so much they betrayed their own sister, and somehow you’re still this petty." He looked up toward the ceiling as though there were any chance of getting a response. "Don’t you feel a little pathetic?"

He let that sit for a second, then shrugged and let it go when the temple remained predictably silent. When he actually stopped to count the damage, it wasn’t as bad as the notification wanted him to think it was.

He’d walked into Twinkle Village with a Bad Alignment burning over his head, visible to every citizen and every patrol inside the walls courtesy of a grace granted by the village lord. Aidylan had drawn up a guild writ with his face on it and put out a bounty that half the region had apparently read, while Jaxir had reached the point where his mere presence was startling old women badly enough that one of them was probably going to faint or have a heart attack sooner or later.

He hadn’t exactly been enjoying the run of the place anyway.

"Not much changes," Jaxir decided.

Except for Luxy.

That was a shame, and Jaxir frowned when he realized he still had no idea how he was supposed to hand in her quest now. Technically, it should have finished right along with his Ire quest, but he hadn’t gotten a notification for it.

What he did get, though, was arguably much more interesting.

―

Name: Light Blessing

Grade: Epic

Level: N/A

[Grant mana Light characteristic]

Recommended Paths: N/A

―

Jaxir grinned the moment he saw the grade, then his eyes drifted to the final line and the expression slowly changed. Every Blessing he had encountered until now had listed at least one recommended Path, which made sense when every form of mana had its own quirks and certain ways it naturally wanted to be used.

The Twinkle Blessing had listed four Paths and meant every one of them.

Hex worked well with it since Twinkle Mana excelled at seizing a battlefield and controlling ground, while Trap worked for many of the same reasons. Speed was obvious when turning gravity down beneath your own feet could make almost anyone fast, while Aggro made sense for tanks who lived and died on their ability to hold a line and drag enemies into it.

Mana could definitely be stretched beyond the Paths it was given, and Jaxir could think of plenty of ways Twinkle Mana might help several others as well. Still, its unique quirks made those four clearly better than the rest.

But Light Blessing had nothing.

Jaxir stood there with his ribs still aching as the answer slowly formed in his mind.

’It doesn’t have a Path of choice because she never finished her ascent... I see.’

There had never been a Path of Light since the woman who should have defined one had spent the centuries kneeling in a basin and crying into her own fountain. Jaxir turned that over in his mind, and somewhat to his own surprise, he found that he liked it.

’No recommended Paths means I can turn it into whatever I want, no?’

A small smile returned.

’How interesting... a Hexer with Light Mana instead of Dark Mana.’

It felt strange on the surface, almost like he was forcing two ideas together that were never meant to fit, but that only made Jaxir like it more. If he could make it work, he’d have mana carrying the weight of a God’s Path and a version of Hex that nobody else understood well enough to prepare against.

Nobody would have a meta for this and that was exactly what he needed.

There was just one problem, and it arrived less than a second after all the enthusiasm did.

Jaxir looked down at his hands.

’...What happens to my Twinkle Mana?’

He had put so much time, effort and money into actually learning Twinkle Mana that the thought of abandoning it now left a sour taste in his mouth. He’d already accomplished more with it than most people probably ever would, and from everything he could tell, he had been getting frighteningly close to understanding some of its deepest principles.

’If this Blessing just paved over all of that...’

Jaxir’s lips pursed somewhere between disappointment and confusion as he reached inward to check.

Then he stopped cold.

His Twinkle Mana wasn’t gone. In fact, it felt expanded.

The familiar gravity-laced mana was still there, but it had somehow evolved and become folded into the Light Mana in a way Jaxir didn’t fully understand. He could still feel Twinkle Mana’s pull and distortion, only now it seemed to exist inside something larger, almost as though Light had taken those characteristics and given them more room to breathe.

’Is that because they’re sisters?’

Were their Paths related to the Goddess of Light the same way Twinkle Mana seemed to carry aspects of Gravity? Jaxir couldn’t tell whether Twinkle Mana had survived inside the Light, or whether the Light was slowly consuming it in a way too subtle for him to notice yet.

He was still trying to find the edge between the two when another notification cut across his vision.

―

[Trial Complete]

―

[The Goddess of Light offers you Her Reflection]

―

Jaxir raised an eyebrow.

"One reward?"

After everything that had happened, one reward felt almost insulting, but then the details unfolded and he understood why there was only one.

―

Name: Reflection of the Light (Dormant)

Grade: ―

Level: ―

Contents: Crown of the Light (Dormant); Robes of the Light (Dormant); Staff of the Light (Dormant)

[This Set exists in a Dormant state and confers no attributes.]

[To awaken this Set, the three ancestral inheritances of the Sparkle, Glimmer, and Twinkle Villages must be offered in their entirety.]

―

Jaxir read the last line twice, then felt his lip twitch.

He had literally just fought three Demi-Goddesses to get here, and apparently he couldn’t even get the courtesy of receiving a nice set afterward. Instead, Divinity handed him three dead pieces of equipment and told him to go labor for them.

Did this Goddess of Light understand how hard it was to get your hands on those inheritances?

Three complete sets.

For Feathery Touch, he had the first and the third, Common and Epic, which meant he was missing only the second, Uncommon piece. For Twinkle, he had only the Epic item, which was definitely better than nothing when it should have been the hardest one to acquire in the first place.

Glamor was the real problem.

Jaxir had exactly nothing from that set, which meant farming the entire thing from the beginning. Those pieces weren’t items people casually dumped onto the open market, and even if somebody did, he had another very obvious problem.

Would any of those auctions have anything to do with him anymore?

Jaxir had just been banned from every city under the jurisdiction of the Minor God of Gravity, and those cities were probably the only places where these sets appeared with any consistency. Settlements under other Gods would have their own inheritances, their own rewards, and very little reason to keep piles of Sparkle, Glimmer or Twinkle equipment lying around for him.

Jaxir started laughing. His ribs hurt, so he stopped.

Then he started again anyway.

"Well, isn’t this some shit?"

The three items belonging to the Goddess of Light’s set faded into existence above the basin regardless, hanging weightlessly in the still air as though waiting for him to appreciate how useless they currently were.

The crown came first, plain and thin with no stones set into it and not even the smallest glimmer across its surface. It was only a white-gold band, almost disappointingly simple compared to everything else he had seen from divine equipment.

The robes followed, made from white and old gold fabric that hung without a single crease. They looked heavy and expensive, almost leathery in their weight and appearance, yet moved with the slightest current of air as though they weighed no more than a feather.

Then came the staff.

It was pure white from base to tip, with nothing carved into it, nothing set into it and seemingly no weight to it at all. All three pieces should have looked radiant, but there was a darker tint to them, something hollow and unfinished that made the dormancy impossible to miss.

Jaxir reached out and wrapped his hand around the staff.

Nothing answered. No mana stirred, no attributes appeared, and not even the slightest sensation ran through his fingers.

Jaxir stared at it for a few seconds, then sighed.

"Okay. I guess I’m gonna have to figure this out, then." His eyes moved over the crown and robes one more time before narrowing slightly. "This set better be bad ass."