Chapter 401: The Poison From The Stars

"Oi... Are you the whelp of a goblin who broke my mountain?!"

The voice was old and rough, like stone grinding against stone. It came from somewhere below me, and I turned to see a figure standing on a ledge about fifty feet down the slope.

He was short, barely reaching my chest, with a beard that hung past his belt and a face that looked like it had been carved from the mountain itself... literally.

His skin was the color of granite, and his eyes were the pale grey of winter clouds. I found them to be strikingly beautiful in a face that was carved out of stone.

He was holding a hammer. It was a very large hammer. And he was pointing it at me with what seemed like anger, but in his eyes, I could only see curiosity and amusement.

I stared at him. He stared at me. The wind blew between us. In my mind was sheer disbelief at the presence of this unknown being, and at the fact that our languages, across all that time, were nearly identical apart from small tonal shifts.

Although he seemed to be carved out of rock, I could clearly see that he was male, and he was old. Some things could accurately translate over, even across species boundaries.

"Well?" he said slowly, drawing it out as if he thought I might be mentally impaired.

"Did you," I said slowly, "just call me a goblin’s whelp?"

The old man’s eyes narrowed, and a bit of the amusement inside them began to fade. "I called you a whelp of a goblin. There is a difference. If you are going to break my mountain, at least have the courtesy to listen properly."

I blinked. I had been thrown into the past, lost most of my powers, and discovered that my entire existence might be a cosmic joke. I was standing on the broken remains of a mountain I had cratered on impact, and an old man made from rocks was yelling at me about grammar.

I started laughing because nothing was making sense anymore; I mean, there was a limit to the madness I could take. Transcendent Demon gods were one thing; being grammar-checked in the past was something else, and apparently I had a limit to the absurdities I could take before I cracked.

The old man watched me laugh, his expression shifting from anger to confusion to something that might have been concern.

"You are not well," he said softly, looking at me with pity. "Such a shame. You must have accepted the Soul Contract and become one of the chained. Ah, your god must have failed you, and now you are broken."

I stopped laughing and cocked my head to the side. The old man had not said much, but what he said fed the suspicions I was already carrying, and the thirst for knowledge broke across my soul.

He had said Soul Contract, and the only thing I know was attached to the soul of everyone from the moment of our birth, was the system. Wait a moment, could I have been taken much farther into the past, even farther than ten thousand years, to the birth of the System?

A thousand questions were in my heart, but I knew that a hurried mind would be prone to errors, so I decided to take it slow and ask the question that may not have been so obvious.

"How do you know I’m broken?"

The old man snorted. "I have been alive for two thousand years, boy. I know broken when I see it. You have the smell of the void on you, and that can only come from the evil from the stars." He gestured with his hammer, pointing at the sky. "Also, you are standing on the remains of my mountain, and you have no clothes. That is not the behavior of a well man."

I looked down at myself. I was indeed still naked. The wind was cold, and I had been so focused on the sky and the moon that I had forgotten to do anything about it.

However, the present state of my nakedness was the last thing I had in mind. Did the old man just confirm to me that the System did not emerge from our world but outside of it? Grr... I had so many questions, but I had to play it cool and not jump to an early conclusion. So where had our conversation got to? Ah, yes. My lack of clothes."

’"I forgot,’ I shrugged."

"Forgot." The old man shook his head. "You forgot you were naked. That is not a good sign. You must have fled from your broken god, pitiful child. It must not be easy to have that poison in your soul."

I bit my tongue to stop myself from spilling any information, for all I knew this might all be a test, and if I said something out of turn, it may lead to an unknown outcome. I decided to see where this conversation would naturally lead me, so I shrugged again. "I’ve had a long few months."

The old man studied me for a long moment, and I wondered if in my desire to not ruffle any feathers, I had just made a mistake. Then he sighed, a sound that seemed to come from the very depths of the mountain itself.

"Come down. I have a spare robe. And food. You look like you have not eaten anything solid in months. The armies of the fallen gods are coming, and war is coming for us; there may no longer be time for basic hospitality in the days to come. Follow me, child, or don’t. But if you stay here, the sky will eat you. It does that in this time, before the wards are set."

He turned around, resting the massive head of his hammer on his right shoulder, and I hesitated for a moment before I followed him. I found it a bit strange that he no longer mentioned the broken mountain behind us, or if I was the one who broke it; something about this man was strange, but I think I may have appeared even stranger in his eyes.

I sighed. This was the age where gods walked the earth, and it seemed that once again I had landed in the midst of a war. Fortunately for me, this old man seemed to be buying my present ignorance, which was not much of a lie, since I did not know anything that was happening around me.

Looking inside my soul, I decided to place one of my new Temporal Anchors at this moment. I did not know what was waiting for me ahead, and if there was any time I should have a fallback plan, it was now.

As we walked down the mountain, the old man glanced back at me, "I hope you have not transcended the need for food. You have the look of a demigod, but that should not stop you from eating."

"I haven’t," I replied slowly. "I love to eat."

He nodded sagely, bringing one hand to stroke his long beard. "The body does not need to sometimes, but the soul does. I don’t need to see yours to know that it is hungry."