Chapter 73: Soul

Chapter 73 -073: Soul

The wilderness was green, enormous, and indifferent, visibly in the way that things that had been here long after whatever they had been named stopped mattering.

On stepping into it, Mikael had noticed that it was so much thicker and denser than the Greenwood. The overhead canopy was so dense, light from the moon only came in tiny fragments here and there. Like the forest had decided visibility was a privilege lost in its long history.

The undergrowth was as dense as the canopy of leaves and branches overhead, growing in whatever direction suited it. From how dense it was, it was clear it had been years since any deliberate blade or spell had touched it. The roots of the massive trees erupted from the earth in an irregular fashion, thicker than even Mikael’s torso and draped in moss, while the air itself was heavy with the smell of green and wet earth.

The other thing Mikael had noticed was that the wilderness was no quiet place. Birdsongs and the distant crash of something large moving through the undergrowth, clearly not bothering to avoid the roots and the like.

The resonant calls of beasts, probably those Ravagers he’d heard about, marking their territories. Enormous, untamed magic beasts that had never been hunted enough for them to fear creatures that walked upright.

—

Mikael had been here for days. He barely moved.

He sat cross-legged against the base of an ancient tree, previously the nest of a Ravager he blew away before claiming it as his own.

Before him, Ragnarok was stabbed into the ground, its disturbing aura effectively keeping the predators away from the now completely mortal Mikael, who had just enough celestial essence to keep his very soul alive!

During those days, he ate nothing, nor did he drink any. His body complained and fussed in the background in protest; a dull, persistent signal he’d long learned to ignore entirely.

He did not sleep, not even for once. He watched the light shift through the canopy above twice as the sun crossed above it. He had watched the forest lighten and darken, and the diurnal things taking over and being replaced by nocturnal ones. He watched and saw, for the second time, Ravagers, which moved slowly and spared him the barest of glances, clearly not acknowledging his presence. Or perhaps too unsettled by the weapon before him.

He had known, since the incident at the academy, that he would sometime need to make the decision in order to achieve his goal. Even before then, he had considered it.

However, he had been unwilling to acknowledge it as his very own decision rather than something inevitable. After all, inevitabilities happened to you, whether you willed it or not. Decisions were what you made happen to you, of your own will. And he was not ready to bear the weight of this one.

The trap at the academy had not frightened him, not in the slightest. He had been expecting it.

The celestial that had been sent to possibly re-seal him had been low-tier, a messenger, and Ragnarok, even not fully unlocked, could hold it and did handle it well before the situation could deteriorate.

His true unnerving moment was the moment before that. The moment divine energy had manifested, and his body had trembled in recognition and longing. Something in him responded to that energy the way this world’s compass needle responds to North. The something responded to the feeling of home, called home!

He was made of and from her. That was a fact he had known. He just had never felt it as vividly as then, with his most innate nature straining to return to what it came from, no matter how hard he fought it.

That was the problem he had been sitting with for days on end.

He could not simply stop using divine power. He was divine power. Aurora’s essence did not run through him as blood ran in the veins of the body he was wearing, no.

It was the very substance of his being. Heck, his soul was literally made of Her essence, woven into the very existence of the being called Mikael. So foundational that alienating it from him would have been, to any other being, indistinguishable from the concept of death itself.

Yes, severing it from himself, from the Goddess’ divinity, would be the same as being dead! And that truly caused him fear—non-existence.

Death.

Oblivion.

The possibility of success.

And that had been the cause of uncertainty over the weeks.

That was where Ragnarok came into the equation.

He had been looking at it, on and off, cataloguing whatever he could remember about it.

He tried to remember how the organic hunger of the scythe felt, taking into itself the energy of the divine and the sensation of the absorbed energy changing into something entirely different from the divine energy he knew, and flowing into his soul. And that sensation was akin to only one—the only thing that seemed to predate even the Goddess’ current cosmic order.

The Old God’s Domain!

The sensation Ragnarok’s energy gave him was more or less what he remembered feeling over there! And this energy he received had always moved to the core of his being, to his soul!

“The scythe doesn’t just launder the energy,” Mikael had thought, somewhere around the late hours of the fourth night, when the forest had gone entirely dark, save for the light of a few bioluminescent shrubs and insects, and the sounds of the now familiar Ravagers had settled into the background as rhythm, and the damp and cold of the undergrowth had seeped deep into his bones so completely he registered the sensation barely, as discomfort.

“It actually separates, taking what’s hers and changing it entirely,” he thought aloud. “Like it’s some kind of divine energy predator.”

Having calmed down from the rhythmic, peaceful lull of the noise of the forest and its inhabitants, he had reached a conclusive decision, and it was not pleasant, not in the slightest.

By the time the sun was rising on the fifth day, he had completely examined the decision, checking its viability from every angle he thought possible, having learned that the difference between a solution and a trap was usually a question you hadn’t thought to ask—and this he did all through the night, since his opponents were omniscient beings and he, just a bit above the average awakened mortal.

And so, by morning, he had asked all questions, and none of the answers had been deal-breakers.

The process was quite simple in theory; however, its practice was as painful as it was dangerous and ruinous, as a single flaw or mistake would most probably mean he ceased to exist.

And it wasn’t that Mikael feared perishing like most mortals did, in pursuit of his goal. He simply feared dying without achieving that goal.

Perishing meaninglessly was the only thing he feared.

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