Chapter 75: Transmutation

Chapter 75 -075: Transmutation

Mikael had pushed down and deep into his being. Past the noise of the forest, past the heartbeat in his ears, past the dull ache of the mortal flesh that housed him, until there was nothing left around him but stillness. He had found his soul.

He had managed to touch it.

He had decided which part of the whole to begin with, and that part was the edge.

As soon as he reached out for that edge with his will, it came up in a strand! He had braced himself for a long search, for hours of probing at something with no seam and no end. Instead, the edge simply offered itself. His previous fear of not knowing where to start was assuaged, and all he had to do was pull.

And that he did. He pulled it towards the surface.

To Ragnarok!

However, he was in for a very unpleasant surprise.

The resulting pain that hit him was immediate and total!

Ever since he’d awakened in this mortal form, he had felt pain across such a span of time that pain had ceased to be a feeling that was interesting or discomforting to him anymore. Through the countless backlashes he had undergone to use celestial essence, he had been able to note the mechanisms of pain, to catalogue and categorize them. Even in his calculations and thoughts before this moment, he had factored the concept of pain in, and he was prepared for it.

But for this, he had no preparation.

This wasn’t mere physical or biological pain.

No!

This was the pain of something being undone and stripped of its very own nature. The Goddess’ essence in him resisted the conversion. The thread fought vehemently, refusing to be changed! Every pull cost him more of his comfort, and the resistance grew harder as his own soul pushed against his own will.

His back slammed into the tree behind him, a choice his mortal flesh had made without even deigning to consult him first, finding the solid bark of the massive tree a physical anchor to mitigate the effects of the battle going on several layers of reality above the physical realm. The rough bark bit through his clothes. He felt it only distantly, the way one notices rain on a window while reading.

It was all for his benefit, so Mikael let the body do whatever it wanted.

His hands stayed on Ragnarok, and he continued pulling, precise and utterly relentless, as the very first strand of his Aurora-filled soul drew closer to the blade!

The scythe recognized it before it even fully arrived. The feeling was the same as that time at the academy, but now patient and without malice. A mere, keen, sentient hunger to do what its creator wanted it to do, without destroying its creator.

He let it take the strand.

The moment of transfer was the most blissful yet empty he had ever felt, even during his years in Heaven as a Sovereign.

It was the sensation of something made to leave, leaving. Something so important and fundamental that its absence left him hollow, a vacancy. A space where something had been and was now simply not anymore.

He waited for Ragnarok to do its thing.

It didn’t take as long as he had thought it would. The scythe stripped the divinity from the strand and converted it into something else entirely.

The transmuted strand came rushing back from the scythe, as if desperate to return to whence it had come. Mikael absorbed it the way his void mechanism worked, but much deeper, inward. As soon as it settled, the hollow sensation slowly ceased.

But something was different. There was no divinity!

The strand was still of the same substance, the one that made him a celestial and not a mortal, but with no trace of the Auroranean order. And it was silent!

The Aurora essence in his soul had this constant, foundational hum, one he had never taken much note of.

But the transmuted strand was silent, still. No vibration. No humming. Only now, in its absence, did he understand how loud the rest of him had been all along.

He reached out for the next strand and drew it up!

He lost count after the first couple of days.

Not of the strands—those he had counted with the precision of someone who knew the slightest slip meant a potential fatality.

What he lost count of was how many times the body had tried to tell him that it was dying. The signals came in waves, and the alarms depleted in a hierarchy as he went deeper into his soul’s structure, where the essence was much denser and the resistance grew with every strand he converted.

Time stopped being measured in hours and became measured in strands. Pull, transfer, hollow, return. Each cycle had the same four beats, and each beat was a little worse than the one before it. Between cycles, he allowed himself a single breath, no more, because breath was all the rest he could afford.

His hands had already become cold and numb. His muscles had cramped so badly that he no longer noticed it. Whenever he opened his eyes to reassess and take in his surroundings, his vision had narrowed, a sacrifice of the body to redirect resources to whatever part it deemed more important for maintaining vitality.

The ringing in his ears had become a sort of lullaby as he drifted between sleep and being awake. And he was very sure the only thing protecting him from the megabeasts all around was Ragnarok’s cold, suffocating, death-like aura, which slowly warned the senses of most Ravagers to keep away.

The pain in his soul changed, or rather, gained character, the deeper he went. The initial resistance was now joined by a sensation Mikael associated with what mortals called grief!

While the essence had no conscious will, it somehow felt that change was happening beyond it, a transmutation it had no say in, and so it clenched down firmly and resisted the metanoia of its nature. It was almost insulting, he thought, that a thing without thought could mourn so convincingly. Yet the grief was real in the only way that mattered: it hurt, and it did not stop hurting.

Every strand extracted cost more than the last. That was within calculation. What he had not anticipated was just how much harder each successful conversion would make the next. Mikael noted this and tried to recalibrate by sheer force of will. He slowed his breathing, narrowed his focus to the single strand in front of him, and pulled again.

The number of cycles it would take to free himself from what was, at its root, Aurora, her entire cosmic order, and this entire reality was not something anyone could achieve in a single go. He knew that. Not discouraged, and knowing fully well that his goal and possibly his life depended on this process, he willed himself to continue!

Whenever there is a plan to threaten the security of the Heavens, one must believe there will be a reaction, direct or indirect interference. He kept that in mind with every strand.

On the fourth day, or the sixth, possibly, Mikael’s vision had become so unreliable that he couldn’t see much light or even tell how many times the light had passed. Ragnarok had communicated something to him.

Not in words, but in the way it trembled more, in its unstable aura, and in the feeling of it pushing itself to the limit. He slowed the conversion rate. He forced his eyes open and gazed at the weapon with the same clarity he had been directing into his soul.

The blade was dull where it should have been sharp, the edges of its aura fraying like cloth held too long over a flame.

It had never complained; it only trembled. He understood then that Ragnarok would keep going until it broke, because that was what its creator had asked of it. The thought was not comforting. A weapon that would shatter itself on command was only as wise as the hand holding it, and his hand, at the moment, was numb.

Ragnarok was nowhere near its peak capacity; he hadn’t even unlocked it yet. He didn’t remember how it had been locked in the first place, but he had guessed as much. However, he had failed to moderate and calculate correctly. Days spent in the wilderness with his soul in partially disassembled parts had revealed the precise gap between the weapon’s current capacity and the capacity required for this specific, heavy-duty, reality-defying task.

He ran the numbers quickly, using whatever data he could think of, and the answers were not pleasant in any way, but nonetheless important!

If he continued at the current rate, he had a few hours before Ragnarok’s conversion mechanism completely destabilized. If it destabilized during the process, with parts of his soul externalized, a failed conversion would be the least of his problems.

The other option was to stop now and use Ragnarok’s current capacity to work more regularly at stabilizing his soul and itself.

A temporary measure, as he now needed to find the same relics he had used to forge the scythe in order to unlock it. Not to mention an energy source to boost the scythe’s powers: mana-rich areas.

Neither choice was clean. To continue was to gamble his soul on a blade that was already shaking. To stop was to leave himself partially undone in the wilderness, at the mercy of both the Ravagers already circling and the Heavens, if they were watching, with all the time they needed.

Since nothing of Aurora’s divinity could unlock it, it made sense that only the source material would.

And that in itself was another major obstacle!

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