Chapter 80: The Unraveling

Alice watched the three powerful practitioners with growing suspicion, still unaware of why their quiet journey had suddenly become dangerous.

Alaric thought about his idea, then glanced at the writing case beside Alice and remembered what he had learned from their simulated battles.

Short sentences gave her Divine Ability more freedom to produce the desired result.

Their pursuer lost them.

Four words. If he could persuade Alice to write them without explaining how he knew what she could do, the idea might actually work.

Alaric crossed the cabin and stopped beside her. “Use your writing.”

Alice’s head snapped toward him as her controlled expression broke. “How do you know about that?”

“I’ll explain later. Write this first: Their pursuer lost them.” Alaric pointed toward her case as the pressure inside the vessel continued increasing. “We are already escaping. Caelen is controlling the vessel, Rowena and Orwin are protecting us, and the sea concealment is almost established. You don’t need to create an impossible result from nothing. You only need to ensure the last part succeeds.”

Alice stared at him, unwilling to ignore how thoroughly he had exposed her greatest secret.

However, Caelen’s expression and the mana gathering around both Paragons proved that this wasn’t the time to demand answers.

Alaric gave her some information to convince her and watched her fall in thought.

Alice glanced around and contemplated what Young Lord was asking her to do.

Caelen was a Dominion, Rowena and Orwin were Paragons, while the person searching for them possessed enough power to notice a vessel concealed by the Meridian Court.

Her current existence was too weak to decide the fate of such monstrous beings.

Fortunately, her writing didn’t need to control everything they did.

Caelen’s skill, the vessel’s capabilities and the actions taken by both Paragons were already directed toward escape.

Every passenger had boarded willingly and now shared the same destination, so their separate futures had temporarily converged into one path.

The writing only needed to push that existing path toward completion.

The burden to compel this fate wasn’t strong enough to kill her but it also wasn’t weak, but she decided to do it nonetheless.

She opened a narrow notebook upon her lap, focused upon the outcome Alaric had given her and wrote four words across the empty page.

Their pursuer lost them.

The ink began shining before the letter was complete.

An invisible connection spread from the page and caught all eleven people aboard the vessel inside the same developing conclusion.

Even with all of those advantages reducing the burden, Alice nearly died.

Blood spilled from her mouth and struck the glowing page.

Veins darkened beneath her skin, her breathing stopped for several seconds and something inside her body began tearing beneath pressure it had never been built to endure.

Alaric caught her before she fell from the seat, but she refused to release the notebook while the sentence remained unfulfilled.

Far behind the vessel, Alastair stood within folded space above the coastline.

His body remained concealed while his awareness followed the disturbance he had sensed leaving the continent.

He had almost located its source.

Another moment would allow his probing sense to penetrate the final layer of concealment and determine exactly who was fleeing aboard the artifact.

Inside the vessel, Rowena activated the Veil of Broken Echoes across their current position.

Its fixed suppression could not follow the craft, but it reinforced the concealment for the few seconds they still needed.

At that precise moment, Alastair’s probing sense caught a faint presence within the relic.

Vharaketh.

The presence was old and incomplete, yet Alastair recognized Vharaketh within it.

The same caution which had stopped him from acting recklessly twenty years ago returned at once.

Was the existence Alastair remembered now waiting inside the concealed craft, deliberately allowing a trace of his presence to escape so that anyone approaching would expose themselves?

Alastair had watched Rowena fight for her life instead of intervening partly because he feared that Vharaketh might have left something capable of reacting to a stronger threat.

That fear had never disappeared, and he still knew far too little about the being whose exhausted avatar had slaughtered nearly one hundred Paragons.

His probing sense stopped for a fraction of a moment, and Alice’s writing seized that genuine hesitation.

It didn’t create fear inside Alastair or overpower his will.

It merely allowed the consequences of his own caution to arrive at the exact moment when a delay would matter most.

“Now,” Caelen said as the vessel crossed beyond the coast and its second concealment awakened.

Spatial disturbances from the Divine Sea folded around the silver hull, its presence vanished from Alastair’s remaining perception and the final thread connecting it to the Southern Continent broke.

All eleven passengers had escaped safely, fulfilling the sentence upon Alice’s page.

Power surged back through the connection and entered her collapsing body.

Her muscles, organs and every other tissue strengthened in rapid succession while complete mana channels formed throughout her body along with a mana core.

Within moments, she crossed the entire remaining distance and entered the Knight and Mage realm.

The advancement prevented her condition from worsening, but it didn’t erase the damage caused by forcing such an enormous outcome.

Alice remained barely conscious, blood still covered her lips and her mental strength had fallen so low that she couldn’t lift her head.

Orwin reached her and began stabilizing the damage with a spell before carefully feeding her a potion.

He looked increasingly confused as he examined the newly formed channels. “She advanced with that injury? What exactly did she do?”

Alaric ignored the question for now.

He could feel the pressure belonging to a new Knight and also a Mage surrounding Alice, which meant her terrifying gamble had somehow produced an equally terrifying gain.

He crouched in front of her and smiled. “Want to grow stronger quickly? Follow me.”

Alice stared at him through half closed eyes. Her wariness had only intensified. Alaric knew about her writing, had brought her aboard a vessel with two Paragons and a Dominion, and had hidden whatever danger forced all of them to flee the Southern Continent.

Now he was offering rapid strength immediately after watching her advance through a power she had never shown him.

Before she could answer, something far greater than her recent writing began collapsing.

The old narrative had survived every previous deviation because its remaining structure was anchored to Evan’s role upon the Southern Continent.

Individual events could change while people, locations and conflicts required by later sections remained available.

Evan could still become the protagonist, Alaric could still occupy the role of his intended villain, and Rowena could still disappear from the stage.

That possibility ended when Alice personally completed a competing plot which carried all three of them away together.

Evan, Alaric and Rowena had safely left the Southern Continent, removing the story’s central figure, its intended enemy and one of its most important unresolved pieces from the land where the old narrative required them.

Within Alice’s perception, radiant laws appeared across the continent behind them.

Immense threads of written possibility stretched between people, ruins, kingdoms and events which hadn’t yet occurred.

Cracks travelled through every thread connected to the abandoned story before the entire structure began unravelling.

The remaining power recoiled toward its origin and entered Alice, but her newly advanced body couldn’t contain it in an active state.

Most of the power sealed itself somewhere beyond her reach, leaving only the smallest accessible fragment behind.

The future knowledge imposed upon her by the old arrangement vanished along with memories unrelated to the life she had actually lived as Alice.

She remembered serving Alaric, travelling with him, meeting Zephyr and everything else she had personally experienced.

She remembered making choices based upon knowledge of future events, but the events themselves were gone. Every preparation she had built around that future had become useless.

Alice looked at Alaric again.

Whatever she had intended before no longer offered a path forward, while the frightening young man before her had somehow recognized her secret, trusted her with their escape and offered the one thing she now needed.

“I’ll follow you,” she said weakly. “But you owe me a lot of answers.”

The System responded before Alaric could speak.

[The loyalty condition for Special Entity Alice has been satisfied in her present state.]

[Authority detected — Author]

[Forced Narrative is a manifestation of Authority — Author. It is not a Divine Ability.]

[The greater portion of Authority — Author has been sealed and will become accessible as Alice grows stronger.]

[The original condition for Quest Creation was damaged by the unraveling of the Special Entity’s former arrangement.]

[Quest Creation has been partially unlocked.]

[Complete unlock condition: Gain the loyalty of Alice while Authority — Author is fully unsealed.]

[Quest Creation — Partial]

[The host may maintain one personally created quest at a time.]

[A personally created quest may only be assigned to a Genius already connected to the System.]

[The System will evaluate the proposed objective and determine an appropriate reward.]

[The connected Genius must personally complete the assigned objective to receive quest completion.]

Alaric read every notification twice.

He couldn’t choose the reward, create several quests at once or hand power to someone without making them earn it. Even limited in those ways, the new function was fucking incredible.

His gaze moved from Alice to Evan, Mira, Zephyr and Sophia.

He could now write quests for them, arrange objectives suited to the paths he wanted them to follow and reward their success through the System.

In doing so, he would shape pieces of their lives much like someone writing the lives of characters.

A pleased smile slowly appeared upon his face. “Perhaps… I am an author now too?”

This is the end of this book. As this book didn’t perform well in stats, I have decided to end it. Of course, that doesn’t mean the story ends here.

If I feel like it, I might continue it someday as a start with some other novel with other title but I am sure you will recognise it through the synopsis I’ll put. When? I don’t know. For now, good bye. I had fun writing this, but perhaps my readers didn’t like this as much. No worries, we’ll come back stronger next time. Cya!