Chapter 139: Elder Rishin’s Dive

Nobody in the garden moved after the voice left.

Smoke from Winsmoke’s kitchen kept drifting over the far wall. One of the neighbors had dropped a plate on the other side of it, and nobody went to see about that either.

Logan kept his hand on Vina’s head. She was warm under his palm and completely unbothered, and she had started to fidget because every grown-up around her had gone strange at the same moment.

"Big brother." She tugged at his sleeve. "Who was talking?"

"The Tower."

"It sounded like a lady."

"It does sometimes," Logan said.

’The people you care for will also forcefully enter alongside you.’ The panel was gone, but he read the line again anyway. ’It did not say players. It said people.’

Alice came across the grass and crouched down on Vina’s other side.

She did not look at Logan at first. She looked at Vina, and Logan watched her work through the same problem he had just worked through and arrive at the same place.

’She cannot awaken yet,’ Alice thought. ’The pill will not work on her and there is no skill book that fixes being too young. The Tower does not care about any of that.’

’If Logan goes in, she goes in with him. If I go in, she might come with me too, because she has never once hidden how much she loves me.’

"Alice," Vina said, delighted to have both of them at her level. "Your face is doing a weird thing."

"Is it?" Alice made it stop. "Sorry. I was thinking."

"About the lady?"

"About the lady," Alice agreed, and reached over to fix the collar of Vina’s shirt so her hands had something to do.

Helen understood it next. Logan saw it land on her, because she had been a player for less time than it took to eat a meal and the first thing the world had told her was this.

"Then nobody goes," she said. "It said you can enter. It did not say you have to."

"It did not," Daniel agreed slowly.

Nobody else said anything, and Logan knew why.

He was thinking about a mountain on another planet and an old man sitting on the surface of a pond. He was thinking about a voice that had stayed level while it said the worst sentence Logan had ever heard spoken calmly.

’That is how I lost my own world.’

Rishin had called it something else on that mountain. He had called it the Advent of Abyss, and he had said it was a wonderful adventure and an utterly heartless one. Curses and blessings, hand in hand, all the way down.

Garen was the one who moved first.

He had taken a flat grey stone out of his storage ring and was holding it in his palm, and he was looking at it the way people look at a letter they have been dreading.

"Father?" Alice said.

"I made a promise." Garen did not look up from the stone. "A long time ago, before any of this. He made us both swear it."

Isolde had gone very still beside him.

"He asked us to call him the moment Floor Ten opened on Earth," she said quietly. "No matter where he was or what he was doing. We never asked him why."

"You never ask Senior Rishin why," Garen said. "You would not get an answer."

He closed his hand around the stone, and it cracked with a sound like thin ice.

Logan had expected to wait.

Rishin lived on a planet that had taken a Tier-9 spaceship to reach, and even an old man who could vanish from a pond and reappear at his hut in the same breath had to cross that distance somehow.

He did not have to wait at all.

The air above the lawn folded inward like cloth being pinched between two fingers. Then Elder Rishin was standing on the grass in the same plain robe Logan remembered, with his long hair loose and his beard stirring in a wind nobody else could feel.

His bare feet had not disturbed a single blade of grass.

Billy stopped rolling. Terry lowered himself half a step without being told. Xairon, who had spent the entire homecoming insisting the house was too small, drifted back behind the herb beds and stopped talking entirely.

’Tier-11,’ Logan thought. ’I sat across a bowl of tea from him and I still did not understand what that meant.’

"Grandpa Rishin!"

Vina was off the grass and running before Logan could catch her. She stopped a meter short of the old man, suddenly shy about it, and Rishin looked down at her.

It lasted a moment too long.

Logan had seen that look before, at the hut over a meal, when Rishin had let her pester him through the entire meal without once losing patience. He had been seeing somebody else in her then, and he was seeing them again now.

"Little one." Rishin’s voice was calm and low, and it still sounded as though he were standing right beside each of them. "You have grown."

"I got taller," she informed him. "Mom measured."

"So you did."

He put one hand briefly on top of her head, exactly where Logan’s hand had been. Then he lifted his eyes to the rest of them.

"You called," he said to Garen. "Thank you for keeping your word."

"You arrived before the stone finished breaking," Garen said. "You were waiting."

"I have been waiting a very long time."

Isolde stepped forward. She was the ninth-ranked player on Earth and she had faced things that would have emptied Logan’s bones, but she approached Rishin the way a student approaches a teacher.

"Senior," she said. "We did what you asked, and we have always done it without questions. I am asking one now."

Rishin waited.

"Why did you want us to call you for this?" Isolde glanced at Vina and then back at him.

"You know what Floor Ten is better than anyone alive. You told Logan yourself what it did to your world. So why did you need to be here the moment it opened?"

Rishin did not answer straight away. He looked across the garden at the house and the neighbors peering over the wall, and at two families who had only just finished crying with relief.

"Because I want to enter," he said.

Nobody spoke.

Garen was the one who finally said it, because somebody had to.

"You cannot," he said. "The announcement said Tier-1 to Tier-10. You are Tier-11, Senior. The Abysslon will not take you."

"No," Rishin agreed. "It will not take me as I am."

He raised his left hand and a crystal appeared in his palm.

It was about the size of a walnut and so dark it was almost black. Deep inside it there was a faint light moving slowly downward, as if something far beneath the surface were sinking and never reaching the bottom.

Logan’s Sword Intent opened on its own when he looked at it. He saw no threads running out of it at all. It was the only object in the garden that was not connected to anything.

’That is wrong,’ he thought. ’Everything is tied to something. That thing is tied to nothing.’

"Senior." Isolde had taken another step. "What is that?"

Rishin put the crystal in his mouth and bit down.

It broke with a sound like ice cracking on a frozen lake, and he swallowed it.

For one second nothing happened. Then Logan saw the threads.

Rishin had always been connected to everything around him.

On the mountain he had been tied to the pond and the stone and the whole peak, thousands of threads running out of him into the world like roots. Logan had spent three days learning to see a tenth of them.

They were coming loose now. They did not break in a cut, and they did not fade. They unhooked one at a time, as though somebody were patiently undoing every knot Rishin had tied since the day he stopped being ordinary.

The pressure that had settled over the garden since he arrived went with them.

Billy made a small confused noise. Terry straightened up. Alice’s hand closed on Logan’s arm, because she could feel it leaving too, and neither of them had words for a presence that size simply draining away.

[ Crystal consumed. ] [ Tier: 11 → 1 ] [ Player Level reset to 1. ] [ All stats reset. ] [ All power gained since ascension relinquished. ] [ Class retained. ] [ All Talents retained. ] [ All Skills retained. ]

Rishin’s knees bent.

He did not fall, but he sat down on the grass the way any old man would after standing too long. He was breathing hard, and it was the first time Logan had ever seen his chest move while he breathed.

His hands were trembling on his knees. There were beads of sweat along his hairline.

Isolde was at his side before anyone else moved. Garen was only a step behind her.

"What did you do?" Isolde’s voice had lost every trace of the student. "Senior, what did you just do?"

"I set it down." Rishin wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist, and he looked at the wet shine on his skin as if he had forgotten what that felt like. "Everything I carried out. All of it."

"You were Tier-11."

"I was." He almost smiled. "Now I am Tier-1 with an old man’s knees and everything I ever learned to do with them."

Garen stared at him. "Your class. Your talents."

"And every skill I earned as a player," Rishin said. "Those are mine and they stay mine. The strength is what I returned, and every level that came with it."

Vina had crept closer again. She squatted down in front of him with her hands on her knees and studied his face very seriously.

"Are you sick, Grandpa Rishin?"

"No, little one." Rishin looked at her, and his voice came out rough. "I am just tired. It has been a very long walk to get back here."

’Back,’ Logan thought, and the word caught in him like a hook. ’Not here to Earth. Back to the start.’

Alice’s fingers were still tight on his arm. When he glanced at her he found that she had caught it too.

"Senior," Logan said carefully. "You said you want to enter."

"I did."

"You have already been inside one."

Rishin raised his eyes and held Logan’s gaze for a long moment. The calm was still there, but underneath it, Logan could finally see grief. It was old and patient, and the pressure had been hiding it the whole time.

"Yes," Rishin said. "And I am going down again. I have to. I want to. I can’t continue living otherwise."