Chapter 1051: Accustomed to Eternity (Patreon)

“…and that was when the Reaper accepted my humble petition,” Jason said, wrapping up his explanation. He looked around at a room full of people looking back in various states of confusion, surprise, disbelief and, in Farrah’s case, pointed scepticism.

“Humble petition?” she asked.

“Yep,” Jason said shamelessly.

They were in the observation lounge of Jason’s space station, the planet below dominating the view through the glass wall. Along with Farrah, Raythe, Thadwick and Melissa were four disembodied souls, Lalia, Baloc, Aeora and Yujin.

“The Reaper hates resurrecting people,” Raythe said.

“Really?” Jason asked. “He brought Farrah back.”

“And worked with the Pallimustan goddess Death to make resurrection magic weaker across the entire universe,” Raythe pointed out. “You have no idea how wide the impact of the things you do is. Earth and Pallimustus are just singular planets in vast universes, yet the ramifications of events there have affected whole galaxies you will never see. Planets that will never know why disaster struck.”

“I’d love to meet aliens.”

“You’ve met numerous species from across multiple dimensions,” Farrah pointed out.

“Dimensional aliens are great, don’t get me wrong, but aliens from space? There’s something special there, you have to admit.”

“I really don’t.”

While Jason, Farrah and Raythe bickered, the translucent souls in the room were processing the bargain Jason had struck.

“We can come back to life?” Lalia asked, still not believing it.

“If you like,” Jason said, his amusement at prodding Farrah shifting to a sincere smile. “It’s not a decision to be made quickly or lightly. There’s no going back to the life you had before. You lived billions of years ago. Only Raythe here might know how many. Whatever world you lived on is almost certainly gone. Maybe your whole universe. If your society still exists, it will probably be unrecognisable to you. If you do choose to come back, you’ll need to start over from scratch. You’ve earned your eternal reward, and that was taken from you. Honestly, going back to it is probably the best choice.”

“I still don’t see why the Reaper would even offer this,” Yujin said. “It seems antithetical to its purpose.”

“Its purpose got more than a little lost,” Jason told him. “The Reaper was at least partly responsible for the sundering of the throne and the corruption of an afterlife that should have been its first responsibility. I doubt yours was the only one to go wrong. You could see this as a form of penance.”

“The idea of penance would not even occur to a great astral being,” Raythe said.

“I’m a great astral being,” Jason pointed out, the amusement gone from his voice. “It plays on my mind a lot.”

“That is the thinking of a mortal mind. Even when acting through a vessel, penance is not a concept that would even enter the Reaper’s conception.”

“Agreed,” Farrah said. “It’s more like the thinking of someone with a grudge and more power than sense, forcing the Reaper to do the thing it hates most.”

“How would anyone force the Reaper to do anything?” Yujin asked. “Is it not the embodiment of death itself?”

“That’s more gods of death,” Jason said. “The Reaper is more about post-death aftercare, but you make a solid point. You can’t just make the Reaper do things.”

“What did you do, Jason?” Farrah asked. “Threaten to overthrow the whole cosmic order if the Reaper didn’t do as it was told?”

“Of course not. Didn’t you hear the bit about the humble beseeching? What even is the cosmic order, and how would I even go about overthrowing it? I probably haven’t thought about it at all.”

“Did you just say ‘probably?’” Melissa asked.

“I don’t think I did.”

“I will resume my place amongst the living,” Baloc said, the imposing orc’s voice cutting through the banter. He had been standing with his back to the group, eyes locked on the planet below.

Jason rose from his luxurious cloud couch and walked over to the much bigger man.

“You don’t have to make that choice quickly, Baloc. In fact, I strongly recommend you don’t.”

“I could do nothing about the corruption,” Baloc said. “It was an enemy I had no weapons to fight. I died believing that I had reached the end of my path as a warrior but I realise that it is a road without end. You have shown me, Jason Asano, that a true warrior can makes the stars themselves his enemy in the boundless pursuit of conquest.”

“Uh, that’s great, Baloc, mate, but maybe we table the ‘rampage across the stars’ plan for right this second. A lot of details still need to be worked out with the Reaper’s bloke Velius. Enough time that we can have a few chats on the virtue of not murdering your way across the galaxy.”

Baloc let out a bellowing laugh and slapped a heavy hand on Jason’s shoulders.

“You will make a fun enemy, Jason Asano.”

***

“I do have a vampire planet floating around,” Jason told Thadwick, “but I think I’ll leave your people here for now. It’s something of a prison planet for the bad ones. Not entirely, but it’s a whole thing. I’ll put you and yours in my populated city on this planet for now, and eventually the vampire city I have back on Earth. I just can’t send you there right now; if I touch the Earth with an active power it will get invaded by diamond-rankers.”

Farrah took Melissa, the afterlife’s singular living refugee, to the city of New Water. As for the dead souls, Jason didn’t want to drop a planet’s worth of ghosts on the locals, especially with so many freshly uncorrupted and even more confused than the rest. He created a continent-sized megacity made of ice to float on one of the larger oceans and sent them all there until more permanent solutions could be organised.

Jason and Raythe remained on the space station. They sat across from one another, sinking into the plush cloud-stuff of the furniture. She took the opportunity of not being surrounded by people or the aftermath of planetary destruction to look him over.

“Your avatar is much better,” she observed. “Did you use the phoenix form to somehow remake it according to what I taught you?”

“That was always part of the plan. Building a fresh avatar to hold my diamond-rank power would take too long. Since my prime avatar was being recreated anyway with the phoenix rebirth effect, I took the opportunity to make some tweaks.”

“Those are more than tweaks. You’ve redesigned it from the ground up.”

“You’re a good teacher.”

“Now that you have your freedom and a functional prime avatar, what will you do?”

“Find my friends, figure out how to kill Knowledge and then put her down.”

“Any thoughts on how?”

“One. But I think you already know what it is.”

She nodded.

“I believe so. It’s the right choice.”

“Because it will give me a way to kill a god?”

“Because it will lead you where the cosmos needs you to be.”

They sat, Jason’s face marred with a scowl.

“You’re not happy with me,” she said.

“We made a deal. I back off on the time travel and allow my world to be invaded, and you promised to help me when no one else could. Now, people on earth are dying because I acted in good faith. You didn’t.”

“I helped you.”

“You know the help I wanted. To escape, so I could help my world.”

“There were limits on what I could do, but even if I could have returned you to Earth, you weren’t ready. What I did give you was what you needed. How many years would it be before you were able to act outside of your astral kingdom if I hadn’t taught you how to craft better avatars? When would you have reached diamond-rank and gotten free of that afterlife if I hadn’t pushed you? I gave you the tools to escape and move forward.”

“In the direction you wanted. Funny how the second you don’t like what was happening, the rule about not being able to take me out of that place went away.”

“There were specifics circumstances—”

“There always are. Always reasons that I have to do what I’m told.”

“Yet you never seem to do it.”

“I ALWAYS do it when it matters!”

Frowning, he closed his eyes and leaned back into the cloud couch, letting the glorious softness envelop him. He took slow, calming breaths as Raythe watched in silence, waiting to see how volatile he would be when he spoke again.

“Justify it however you like,” he said softly. “Say your hands were tied and that you did what you could. Pick over the details all day long, but it doesn’t change the fact that I upheld the spirit of our agreement and you did not. Everything else is noise.”

“What I did was for your own good.”

“But you don’t really mean my good, do you? You mean the greater good, as you see it. You don’t care about what I want, only what you think I need, and it’s not really my needs you’re concerned with. You were putting me in a position to serve the needs of the cosmos.”

“You would have chosen that path for yourself, if given the choice.”

“But I wasn’t, was I?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“If you could have seen the right path clearly, you would have chosen it. We know this because you’ve made similar decisions in the past. This time, your vision was obscured and you couldn’t see the correct way forward. You’re too young. Too caught up in mortal concerns. We had to guide you onto the road you would have chosen for yourself if you could.”

“Do you have any idea how condescending that sounds?”

“Yes, but we treat you like a child because, cosmically speaking, you are one. I’m sorry, but that’s just the truth. You aren’t old enough to see that ephemeral concerns simply don’t matter in the face of eternity.”

“Ephemeral concerns like my family. My friends. Every person on the planet I’m from.”

“Yes.”

“And what is this great purpose you have for me?”

“I think you already know. You all but admitted as much a moment ago. Perhaps you’re denying it in your own mind because it isn’t what you want.”

“So, I should what? Let myself be a pawn of fate to the end?”

“You still don’t understand. The reason you are here is not because it’s where destiny put you. It’s because this is where you put yourself. Your actions, your choices. You keep accusing us of manipulating you; we’re simply clearing the weeds from your path. You think we’re getting in your way, but the truth is, we’re getting out of it. What we want is for you to be who you are. Who you’ve chosen to be, time and again. We didn’t come out and tell you because it was a choice you had to make for yourself. We simply accelerated the arrival of that decision.”

“I told you.”

“Told me what?”

“That you can pick over the details all day, but it means nothing. Look at who you’re speaking to; I know all about talking and talking until you convince the other person that the sky is down. At the end of the day, you pushed me where you wanted me to go. The rest, as I said, is just noise.”

“I will acknowledge that we did not respect your autonomy, or understand the degree to which that was important to you. A blindingly obvious folly in hindsight. You feel that I have not lived up to my side of our agreement, so let me ask you now, what can I do? There is still much I can offer.”

Jason sighed.

“Raythe, I know that you and Dawn are friends, as are Dawn and I. But you and me? We can’t be. I’m well aware of Dawn’s divided loyalties. She serves the World-Phoenix, whose goals don’t always align with mine. The reason we met is that the World-Phoenix wanted her to nudge me in certain directions, to make certain choices, just like you’ve been doing. The difference is that Dawn actually cares about what I want, not just what I can do for her. She’s conflicted about her loyalties, and when she is able, she does what she can for me, instead of the best she can with me.”

He smiled, looking off at nothing.

“I used to say that I was good at people, not with people. Looking back, I think I’ve been trying change that about myself. For all her conflicts of loyalty, I can trust Dawn to do her best for me, within whatever boundaries she finds herself. You, I can’t trust. You’re good at people. We can be allies, but we can’t be friends, and I’ve never liked allies. They keep betraying me. At least Dawn stabs me in the front.”

He leaned forward on the couch.

“I know you don’t care what I’m saying. I’m going on and on, as I’m wont to do, while all you’re hearing is the babble of a child. Someone too young to see the world as it really is. But you’re overlooking that in all those words is the thing you need, and you don’t even realise it. My power isn’t special, not on a cosmic scale. There’s plenty of diamond-rankers and messenger originators. I’m not even the first mortal turned great astral being. What I have is youth. You ancient immortal types are too smart, too sensible. Too accustomed to eternity. The idea of sacrifice is completely alien to you, but I do it. My friends and family grow up, grow old, while I’m off repairing the cosmic throne. They fight and die without me at their side while I’m purging a corrupted afterlife. Eventually, time will take them, if nothing else, while I’m off somewhere, doing the right thing.”

He looked out at the planet looming beyond the observation window.

“Do you not understand that they are the reason I do what I do? That their fleeting lives aren’t what makes them irrelevant but what makes them precious? You need me because I care, even as you manipulate me into setting aside the things I care about. Do you not realise that you’re working to destroy the very part of me that’s valuable to you?”

“We do care, Jason.”

“But not enough. Not enough that any of you will do what you’re pushing me into. Not because you can’t, or you won’t, but because you know that it’ll go wrong. That you won’t care enough to sacrifice your needs for everyone else’s. You don’t trust yourselves any more than I trust you.”

“You’re right. What we want from you is too important for someone who will not subordinate their own desires, their own wellbeing, to the greater good.”

“It’s a big cosmos. There’s enough people out there who’d make the same choices as me to populate a trillion worlds. What makes me the one?”

“You’re not the one who would make those choices, Jason; you’re the one who already has. I’m willing to sit here and listen for as long as you need because we both know that, in the end, you’ll make the best decision. Not for yourself but for everyone else. You always do. All we did was provide clarity, a space to make that decision with clear eyes.”

Jason scowled and got to his feet.

“It’s time for you to go, Raythe. Helsveth took my friends from Pallimustus, so tell me where I can find them and get out.”

Previous Next