Chapter 845: The End Of The World (Patreon)

Now that the crowd had finally given me enough breathing room, I noticed there were two people standing at the back of it. They had been standing there the entire time and hadn’t tried to push forward with the others. Instead, for some reason or another, they had been content to look from afar.

The one on the right was a man with broad shoulders, grey-flecked beard, and forearms dusted white up to the elbows, which made sense because despite the world-shattering events that occurred these past few months, the mill wheel down by the river still needed turning.

What surprised me was how his hair had turned completely grey. The last time I had seen him, the grey had been merely touching the temples. But I guess when your son’s body was taken over by a stranger who claimed that the boy was destined to save the world, it took a toll on the body.

As for the woman standing beside him, she wore a brown apron with patches sewn in multiple colours of thread, and she was clinging onto her husband’s biceps with both hands, her knuckles turning white.

For a few moments, we just stared at each other across the crowd, then the wife said something that I decided against using spiritual energy to overhear. The miller nodded and took a deep breath, pulled his shoulders back, wiped his palms on the front of his trousers, and then started moving forward in my direction.

“It’s Da and Ma…,” Tomas whispered inside my head, his voice trembling.

“You can come out if you’d like,” I said, hoping that he’d take me up on the offer. “I can hand control over to you right now. Just give the word.”

The quiet went on for long enough that I actually thought he was going to say yes.

“No,” he said finally. “I can talk to them every supper. They’re walking over here for you. I think they want to say something.”

Yep. That’s what I’d figured. I just wasn’t looking forward to it because one of the most awkward things about possession, if you ignore the practicalities of actually sharing a body with someone else, was how to interact with the family. Sure, it was worse when no one knew you were wearing their loved one, but even a situation like this brought its own issues that I really didn’t enjoy dealing with.

“Master,” Azure piped up, “at least the boy doesn’t look like a tree right now.”

My thoughts went back to the monastery, how I had to channel the Genesis Seed to bring out my Golden Sun into this world, and how that had caused this body to grow bark left, right, and centre.

Fortunately for us, as soon as everything was said and done in the vale, I had been able to reverse the physical transformation quite easily. Otherwise, awkward wouldn’t be the word to describe the impending conversation between me and the boy’s parents. What was the appropriate thing you say to someone after having turned their son into some human-plant hybrid abomination? Yeah, there wasn’t one.

“Saviour,” the miller stopped two paces in front of me while his wife stood behind him, half of her body obscured by his. Their eyes were red around the edges. “The old ones been telling us to call ya saviour. But that…that sounds dafff to say to my boy’s face, ya understan?” His accent was heavier and completely different to what I had expected. “Lad…can I call ya lad?”

“Yeah,” I nodded gratefully. “I prefer lad.”

“Right. Good. I thought ya would,” He rubbed the back of his neck, and a little cloud of flour came off it. “Listen eh, I'm not a man for lon speeches. I grind grain. That's what I know. So I'll say it plain.” His jaw worked for a second. “When ya took my boy, I wanted to bring out my big ol axe. I'll not lie to ya about that. Yeah, I know it won’t get us nowhere but ours grave. But that’s my son, eh. If I didn’t see ya save us all from those freaks, I would have come at ya…”

“Love,” his wife said quietly, nudging his shoulder.

“I'm getting there, woman.” He took another breath. “Ya made us a promise that ya bring him back. But that's what they all say. The tax fellow says it. The city lord's dogs say it. But it’s all words, lad. Nobody brings it back. Nobody.”

“But you did,” the wife stepped out from behind him and reached up to press a shaky hand against my cheek. “You did what you said. You kept him breathing. You kept him from those red devils and the blue ones both.” Her eyes watered. “Thank you… thank you for bringing our boy home.”

For what felt like the hundredth time this month, my throat closed up. It still baffled me how I could face extraterrestrial threats that could devour worlds and stare them dead in the eye, yet talking to those who had no power of their own, but looked at me with such powerful emotions made my knees feel weak and my heart clench. It seemed that this was not something cultivation could protect me from, no matter how far I ascended in the future.

“D-don’t thank me,” I finally managed to say. “I should be the one thanking you. I came with the impossible, and you…you both trusted me. You didn’t try to take my head off even though you wanted to. And the son you raised is a good son. He offered his own life so that the world could have a sun. Most people, no matter how powerful they are, they would never do such a thing.” I placed my hand on her hand. “By the time the sun sets, I will give him back to you, and he will be strong enough that nobody will dare to take anything from this village again. That’s my promise to you.”

The reaction that I got from them was greater than I had expected. Uncontrollable tears fell down the wife’s face, and a rough, chesty noise escaped from the miller. He turned his head towards the statue so that no one could see his face.

“Da…Da is crying,” Tomas whispered. “I’ve never seen him cry. He didn’t even cry when the mill flooded and we lost the whole spring harvest.”

“He earned it,” I replied mentally, understanding how difficult it was for men to let go of their emotions in the safety of their own home, let alone in public. I didn’t know why, but whenever I saw a grown man cry, it was always difficult to witness. It had always been like that for me, even back on Earth.

“I want you to stay for supper,” Tomas’s mother finally said, wiping her own wet eyes with the corner of her apron. “I’ve a hen that stopped laying, you see. What good is fat old thing now, what I’ll do is—”

CRACK.

The sound came from above. It was as though the heavens themselves were splitting open. Everyone looked up, and what I saw brought a frown to my face.

I had spent an entire week in the monastery, staring up at the sky, waiting to see if this exact scenario would play out, and everyone assured me that nothing was coming, that we had done enough. But they were wrong. I was wrong. It wasn’t enough. Yggy's sacrifice hadn’t been enough.

In the middle of the sky, the Golden Sun hung, but now there was a thin black line that ran across its face, from one edge to the centre. The lines quickly split into two, then four, then more until there were too many to count. As the fractures continued to creep over the surface, the light falling on the world flickered. The shadows on the ground turned grey, then gold, then grey, and it looked like at any moment it was going to turn black forever.

“What…what is happening to the sun?” a woman by the well shouted.

“It’s breaking,” a man whispered, falling to his knees as he stared up with wide eyes. “The sun is breaking!”

“Ma!” a child cried out from somewhere in the crowd. “Ma, I can’t see. Where are you. It’s going dark. Ma!”

The boy, who looked to be around six years old, continued to scream as he ran looking for his mother, and when it looked like he was about to trip and fall, Henrik grabbed him by the collar and threw him over his shoulders. He then turned to look up at the sky with narrowed eyes and a clenched jaw.

As for Maya, her eyes were vacant as she stared at the impossible sight before her. The girl had defiantly stood her ground against Sun-Touched and even a Skybound, but this was beyond anything that she had ever imagined.

By the well, where my rusted sword hung under a little roof, Old Teller dropped to his knees and began muttering a prayer to the Blue Sun out of habit, but then he stopped halfway and looked lost, because he didn't know who to pray to anymore.

At the edge of the square, Eda dropped the yoke and glared at the sky for an enemy to fight. Her eyes flashed gold in preparation, but there was nothing up there she could hit. All she could do was watch as her future crumbled before her.

“Big brother!” Something small slammed into my side. It was Liara, she wrapped both arms around my waist and her face buried in Tomas's shirt. “What's happening? Is the sun sick? Make it better. You made it the first time! Do something. Please!”

Cobb stood behind her with a pale face. There were no comments about eating three suns now.

As the reality of the situation sunk in, everyone turned their gaze away from the sky and towards me. Hundreds of faces, staring at their ‘Saviour’ to reassure them that he was going to take care of it all, but I didn't say anything.

What could I say?

I didn’t even know what was going on, but for their sake, I kept my face calm even though my heart pounded hard enough to hurt. In my inner world, Yggy curled tight around the Ancient Oak's root and sent me a feeling that was small, scared, and sorry.

“It’s not your fault, buddy,” I reassured it. “You did what you could. We did what we could.”

Looking at the cracks spreading over the sky, I ran through every technique that I had, but none of them had the ability to put a sun back together temporarily, let alone permanently.

“What…what are we going to do?” Tomas asked, his voice shaking.

Before I could think of a response, the world bent, and what happened next was too difficult to describe in words. The square stretched to one side, the statue of Tomas tilted at an angle that was inconceivable, and the noise of the crowd cut out all at once. One second, Liara’s arms were clinging onto my waist like I was her lifeline, then the next they weren’t. And that was when everything went black.

When I opened my eyes, I found that I was floating in the middle of nowhere. There was no ground, there was no sky, the only thing visible in every direction was pure white. The exception being the massive white crystal that hovered in the centre.

Actually, the word massive didn’t do justice to it, it was greater than even my Dharma Vessel and the Eldest Tree combined. The surface was cloudy, and there were fine cracks that ran across it. The impression that I got from it was that it was a touch away from shattering into pieces. But what drew my breath was what swirled inside it – purple energy that pulsed like a heartbeat.

“What is this place?” Tomas whispered. “Did we die? Is this what happens when we die? But I thought…Da said that we—”

“No,” I cut in. “We’re still alive."

My spiritual sense expanded as far as it could go, but it didn’t hit anything. There were no people, no auras, no hidden formations. No matter how many times I checked, the scan came back blank. But that didn’t make me feel any better, if anything it made me tense up. After all, when something powerful dragged you somewhere without asking for permission, it rarely ever wanted a friendly chat.

“Azure,” I said inwardly, remembering a similar incident in the Starhaven Realm where Astralis wanted a conversation with me. “If an inner world spirit did this, where is it? I can’t sense it anywhere.”

For a few moments, there was silence, and when Azure finally spoke, there was something in his voice that I rarely heard from him: awe mixed with fear.

“Master, what you’re looking at is greater than any inner world spirit,” he whispered. “This…this is the soul of the world.”

A/N

This is Tomas's epilogue, comment below what you think will happen next.

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