Wish upon the Stars chapter 1186 (Patreon)

The next stop was quieter. No battle, no captivity, just me in a room with two people I was very familiar with. My old friend Cark, who I had met all the way back on Callus, and his sister Cassidy, who I’d helped rescue from a cultist.

In fact, as I looked at Cass’s young face, her eyes shining with panic as she forced herself to put on a brave smile, I knew that this was exactly that day. It was the first time I had met her. She was about nine, several years younger than the last time I’d seen her. It always hit me like a ton of bricks exactly how much time had passed since my journey started. Not only because it had been so long but because it hadn’t been long at all.

Three or four years. Three or four years since I opened that scroll and my life changed forever, three or four years since I called Benny to the park to tell him about my powers.

It was absurd, honestly. The amount of change. I had been just turning eighteen, alone except for Benny and Zeke, spending all my time playing Doom Sovereign and hiding from the world. I’d been…empty. I’d never felt like I fit anywhere, back then. Sure Benny was my best friend and his sister Maria and I had been close, but that wasn’t the same as knowing who I was.

That had been part of why I’d gotten swept up in the Wishmaster inheritance trial so easily. I’d spent all my time having fake adventures online, and then someone offered me a real one.

And it had been an adventure. I’d left home, traveled the stars, met my mom and sister, gotten married, and now I was starting a family of my own. I stared at the past version of me, sitting there trying to console a little girl who had been ripped away from everything she knew and then put back but didn’t know which way was up…and he looked so young. Even through the mask, he was just a baby.

But I could see the start of it. The moment that he processed what had been done to Cass and made a mental promise not to let that happen to anyone he cared about. It had been a fleeting thought, there and gone, barely even a conscious impulse. But it had defined so much of what I had done since then. Because Cass, at the end of the day, was a very important person. She was the first innocent I ever saved.

I’d helped people, of course. But Cass was the first time I had put my life on the line in defense of the helpless. And more than that, I knew from our conversations over the years that she was important to someone else in my life. Callie.

Callie had bonded with Cassidy deeply, as had all of us, but her value to my wife was beyond that. This moment had been a defining incident for me, but it had also been a defining moment for US. This had been the moment Callie fell in love with me. Or rather this rescue had been what showed her what kind of man I was.

I reached into my Domain, finding the tome I needed effortlessly, because I always knew where it was. I cracked it open and found a blank page, and I focused on Angelic Bond.

Of all my demons, Angelic Bond was the one that meant the most to me. He wasn’t the first, or the strongest, but he represented what was important more than any other. I could have gone a million different ways in the early years of my development, could have earned a million skills or created a million techniques. But one thing had been crucial to my development. One thing had kept me on the right track and made all of this possible.

My bond with Callie was a part of me. Beyond any skill or soul connection, that link kept me grounded and stable at times when I would never have managed, otherwise. It was fitting then, to bind this page with an event so crucial to both of us. It wasn’t big or flashy, but it was special. Important.

I bound the page without stopping. I wasn’t sure what had stopped me last time, honestly, but it didn’t happen again. I still didn’t have any idea if I had actually BEEN there when I had killed Stricture, but thinking about it was giving me a headache.

Still, I continued on. Two wasn’t my limit here, I could keep going. I still had time left in my hour.

The next few moments weren’t as big or impressive, or even as important. I knew that the type of event you bound with a page mattered. Not just because of the recursion but because the weight of those collected moments made up your Chronicle. They would play a role in what kind of Saga you would, what kind of Domain seed you could form.

One might think that given this fact, it would be smart for me to load up all my strongest moments. Godslaying and winning tournaments and becoming the Wishmaster, all of those fundamental parts of my legend who made up the guy people saw when they looked at me.

And I would definitely include some of those. They were important to my progress, to my strength, and just to me. I was proud of my achievements. But more important than that was the person I knew I was. My mother’s son, my sister’s brother, my wife’s husband. I could turn myself into the perfect monster of an ascendant with this place, I could make myself an unstoppable beast with the most stacked Chronicle ever made, in a way that people normally needed to hit the peak of A-rank to manage.

But I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be an unstoppable monster. I wanted to be me. Picking the right events, the important parts of who I was, mattered more than raw power. Besides, I could refine the Mythcrafting on my pages at A-rank when I authored them. Just as I could eliminate recursion I didn’t want from certain events then, I could add depth and complexity and with my training in Mythcrafting I could make them GOOD.

No, I wasn’t worried about long term power. Especially given the changes to my Domain recently. I could bind a hundred memories of me eating cereal in my underwear and it wouldn’t stop me from creating a powerful Domain seed.

But obviously I didn’t do that. I followed the stream to important moments. My first date with Callie, the first time I met my mom, my first conversation with Chelsea. The conversation with Zeke where he told me not to let my power change me, meeting Abel. I didn’t see them in order, though I had up to this point, I just sailed through. There were no more illusions and I didn’t confirm my presence in the actual timeline, but it didn’t matter. It meant a lot for me to feel those things again.

I bound five more pages before it was over. Cosmic Collapse for the meeting with my mom, Sammael for my sister, since it had been based on her angel friends, Beelzebub for Zeke because I’d based it on his masks, Mephistopheles for Abel because it was the punchiest of my forms, and one page for Cooking, because that was the first thing Callie and I really did together as a couple.

Apparently the hour was only enough for those seven, bringing me up to thirty total. Over nine hours I would be looking at eighty eight total, leaving me twelve pages from being able to step into A-rank. That was a lot better, though not as close as I’d hoped. As I climbed out of the boat, I found Callie waiting for me, smiling softly, and I stepped forward and wrapped her in my arms. She laughed against my chest. “Well someone is happy to see me, what did I do to warrant this kind of welcome?”

“You were yourself,” I said quietly. “That’s the most important thing anyone has ever done for me.”

She chuckled to herself wetly, and I realized she was crying. Not out of sadness, I could feel that through the bond, more out of relief. “You’re such a sap,” she said, her face muffled by my chest. “You’ve always been a sap. My sap. Please don’t change? This is a lot to go through, you’re going to be taking in so much recursion. Don’t…don’t stop being you. I need you.”

“I promise,” I told her solemnly. “I won’t. In fact, making sure that doesn’t happen is my number one priority. I can do crazy universe shaking things later, for now, the most important thing is making sure I can be there for our family. For you and the baby. And that anchor agrees with me.”

Grinning, I filled her in on my journey. She was fascinated by the meeting with the illusion, and even asked to meet him. Elonwy ALSO requested a meeting, and her excitement over what had happened to me in that first moment blew Callie’s out of the water. She seemed convinced I had experienced some kind of unique temporal event and begged me to let her write a paper about it and any other similar incidents that happened during my time using the Strange Aeons Ship.

But since I wasn’t going back out until the next day, there wasn’t much she could learn besides what I’d already figured out. After a conversation with Double Trouble, Elonwy agreed to meet us back there the next day, and we went home.

I spent the day with Callie and made her dinner. The others visited, but it was mostly just the two of us, and once that was done, I decided to try and center myself a bit. I had a lot of techniques and skills that could have helped, but my most direct was the Nine Phoenix Reincarnation Art. It made my body stronger, but it also helped it connect more firmly to my soul.

So I went through a few rounds of body tempering. Without a template I didn’t get any stronger from it, but using Peaceflame to temper my body helped center me and ease some of the mental strain of binding so many pages so quickly. It was soothing.

Beyond that, I even managed to elevate Nine Phoenix himself to tier 7, pushing him that last little bit over the threshold when I incarnated him for my practice. 

After working out for a few hours, I climbed into the shower, sitting under the hot water and enjoying the experience of letting go of all stress completely. It was one of the most relaxing showers I’d had in years. Then I climbed out, went into my room and climbed into bed, pulling my wife against me as I drifted off to sleep.

As my mind faded into slumber, I couldn’t help but think about everything that had happened. Not just here, or now, but since this had all started. What would I see on the next trip, on the one after that? It felt like I was traveling down a road that led to myself, and I wasn’t exactly hating the journey.

Really, I wasn’t too excited to be going home. We still had the war to worry about, the Void (though we’d made some progress on solving that problem here), and this place was…nice. We’d made friends and met interesting people. I had a mentor…but in the end, it wasn’t where we belonged. We’d come here for the ascension theses, and we had them. We’d barely needed to use any of the contribution points for them. So we would just need to make the most of our time here. I could do that.