Chapter 44 - where to remember

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"Well that was about what i was expecting." Flipping the page of a book i was currently reading i mumbled to the air in distaste.

Lifting his head out of a bowl of steaks and shrimps Thorn spoke while still chewing, "fwat ish?" Gulping his meal down his beak the raven coughed. "Let me guess. The Cult of the Nameless made another statue?"

"Nope. Neveah caught one of our echoes." I answered.

Shutting the book after finishing its last page i glanced around the restaurant briefly, mainly eyeing the digital stream of water running through it with various fish and mermaids using it like a highway.

Thorn scoffed spitting some bits of meat onto the table. "Of course that dumb kid did. What did you do?"

"Only what you would do. Insult her, mock her, and demean her existence. You know, being a general asshole."

"How unoriginal of you." Thorn's sarcasm was pungent across his face.

At the same time I noticed a mermaid get kidnapped from the river flowing through the restaurant and dragged into the kitchen. At the same time the restaurant's waiter approached our table, "is everything all right dear guests? Would you like any dessert?"

"Just the bill." I said and the fish-man placed down a plastic board with the meal total and a finger a slot. Briefly using the after my finger pressed onto the boards slot a deduction of currency shards was taken from my account.

"Thank you for your patronage at Digit Fin. We hope to see you again."

The waiter left and as i stood up from the table i stretched my arm out to Thorn and he quickly climbed up to my shoulder. Together we walked out of the restaurant into the street that could only be described as game-like with the various strange shapes and mismatched clothes of everyone roaming the street.

Whistling pervertedly Thorn eyed up a beauty in skimpy fur clothing as we walked past her and her friends. "Say what you will about digital worlds but they sure know how to make pretty girls."

"You know that could be a man, right?" I scoffed.

"No harm in observing the scenery." Thorn said back with a lusty grin as a woman wearing a bikini and a helmet passed by with many Demi-human men surrounding her. "I'm a pervert, not a sex-offender. There are standards I abide by. It's better to appreciate and observe art than to touch it."

"So says the play-bird whose had… what? Three hundred ex-girlfriends?"

Thorn jumped atop the pink beanie on my scalp and huffed. "Not my fault fine dining knows whose going to appreciate the meal more. Unlike you whose stuck on the same fucking meal."

Grinning at the sly barb i shrugged. "My wife is more appetising than any buffet could ever be."

"Guess being a obsessive psycho over you does give her an exotic taste." Thorn nodded as if to agree with himself. "Speaking which, you sure you don't want to just barge into Anplagace to see her? The contract be damned and all that?"

Sighing while ambling down the busy street aimlessly, i made my refusal clear. "You know what will happen if we go against the agreement we made with the CGA. In exchange for not seeing my wife again the galaxy can maintain its isolationism from the CGA's repeated attempts to colonise them. If i do go to her right now thats the same as lighting her entire home on fire."

Groaning Thorn fell down from my head slumping across my shoulder. "You are really going to wait for Anplagace to have an eclipse even though it's impossible? Mad idiot. Clearly your insanity doesn't get enough credit."

"Who knows what the future holds in store." I mused getting an irritated slap from Thorn's tail-feathers at the back of my skull. "Well, anyway, theres nothing really entertaining going on here on this world. Anywhere you want to go, Thorn?"

"Succulon." Thorn said without hesitation.

"We're not going to a lust world."

"Succulon!" Thorn demanded.

"I'll abandon you with the cult of the nameless." I threatened, making Thorn quiet. "Pick somewhere else we can travel to. A place thats fair on both of us so I'm not just waiting around for you."

"Fine, fine. How about we just head to the galaxy and have a look around different solar systems." Thorn offered and i became interested. "There's also been tell on the forums that a new planet with a bunch of minor gods appeared. Think that was in the galaxy."

"The latter sounds more appealing to travel on. Especially if its an undiscovered planet till now." Thinking for a moment my strides came to a stop in the middle of the street. "Okay. The galaxy it is. When we reach the planet you can do what you want for a few days."

"How generous." Thorn moaned, still upset i refused to take him to Succulon.

Then a sudden thought crossed my mind unbidden. "Actually... what do you say to revisiting the places we recruited Ingrik, Taul and the rest of the ink-spirits? We haven't been back to those places in ages. It'll be a nice stroll down memory avenue."

Thinking about it Thorn wasn't against it but he didn't like it. "Well, its been over sixty-thousand years since we were last in those places so I'm not against it but... why? You want to visit the ruin Ingrik laid a beat down on you just to reminisce?"

"More or less. Not like we know anywhere else we can go to do something entertaining." I argued. "Plus, i'm suddenly curious how much those places have changed from the first time we were on them. We've spent the last seven-thousand years exploring undiscovered areas of the universe and completely neglected places we already knew of."

Staring at me deadpan Thorn was speechless against my reasoning before giving up. "Fine, pisspot. Why the hell not. Now that you've mentioned it. I'm curious as well."

A little surprised by his agreeable attitude i wondered if my sudden reminiscent thoughts stemmed from Thorn's emotions and he didn't even realise it.

"So are we going or what?" Thorn asked meanly.

"Yeah. Just surprised you aren't arguing for the lust world more. It's unusual for you to listen to any, let alone agree to my suggestions like this." While saying this the [mach void] spell constructed around me.

"I'm allowed to be a pleasant experience when i feel like it." Thorn scoffed with a toss of his head. "Slingshot us on the fucking way, pisspot."

"As you wish."

Crushing the energy anchor in my palm. A beacon of light shot me and Thorn out of the 2D world made of digital energies before we went barreling through the void.

Flying through the white dimension filled with floating fragments of black glass we quickly crashed through one of the many tears in reality before shooting down from a different planets clear sky like a meteor, crashing onto a black landing pad of marble.

Instantly recognizing where we were, Thorn muttered near my ear, his voice flickering with nostalgia and scorn. "Starting off chronologically, huh? Been a while since we stood at the Warden Spire. This is where we first fought the —and you ripped the Empyrean's clean out of its chest."

I glanced up from the cratered ground beneath my boots. Across the broken landscape, the ancient tower still loomed.

A colossal spire of black marble that drank in all light. Twin pillars rose from its sides like horns, draped in vines of shimmering gold that pulsed faintly with old divinity. Around it stretched a clear lake, and beyond that, a forest of redwood giants, their bark scarred and half-turned to glass from battles long past.

Even after perhaps millions of years the tower still stood. Defiant. A monument to impossible endurance.

"Right," I murmured. "Then that enlightenment freak salvaged what was left of the and dragged it back to the Buddhist origin world." My fingers traced lazy sigils through the air as I started walking into the spire's shadow. "Ingrik, you wanna come out and watch our history?"

The was the warden itself of . Now however it's a cultivator of worlds and host to intergalactic entertainment systems and communication.

From the shimmering aether beside me, the massive black knight stepped into being—towering, broad, his armor radiating silent pressure. "It would be my honour, Archon of Severance," he said, voice a deep, melodic rumble that shook the ground.

[Skill: Autumn King's Conquest — History Upsurge]

[Skill: Horizon Chain — Memory Projection]

Flicking my wrist forward, a wave of golden light burst outward like a tidal flood, washing across the black spire. Time responded—ancient echoes pulled screaming into the present. The halls came alive with illusion, as moments once dead replayed like specters on stage.

We walked through corridors meant for titans. The cracked obsidian walls were gouged and scored with centuries of violence—deep claw marks, melted scars, and glimmering veins of gold half-swallowed by decay.

"This place…" Ingrik's low voice broke the silence. "So different from when I was enslaved as its guard. It was cold then. Suffocating. Now it feels… empty. Dead."

I followed his gaze. In one of the walls, a small hole had become an owl's nest. Nature reclaiming divinity's carcass.

Then—a flare of gold. A mirage dropped from above, crashing into the same hole before tumbling to the floor. A ghost of myself, from a lifetime ago.

Ingrik's helm tilted. "It's… strange to see your younger self."

I watched the illusion of me rise. Half-broken, smiling like a masochistic lunatic. Patches of armour crawled across his body like living infection, wrapping around charred skin. Then came the light. Dozens of searing beams lanced through him, burning holes clean through his torso.

Still, the past me laughed. He forced his broken limbs to regrow through sheer will, flooding his body with aether until his wounds sealed with molten light. Then he vanished in a storm of amber lightning, bursting back down the hall he'd been thrown from, through a collapsed wall of black stone.

[Aspect: Taken Devourer — Telekinesis]

Following that ghost, I waved a hand. Spectral gauntlets bloomed from the air, lifting aside the rubble like invisible giants. I compressed the debris into rough statues. Two imperfect effigies of myself. They bore my draconic knight's helm and a cracked white smile stretching across their visors.

Thorn groaned, feathers rustling. "It's when you pull crap like this I start wondering which of us is the egotistical one."

Grinning, I replied, "Only reason there aren't more statues of me is because I end up possessing them. They need to be imperfect first to be perfect later."

Thorn scoffed, clicking his beak in mock disgust. Ingrik remained silent, his eyes dimly reflecting the statues as we moved onward to the end of the platform.

Below us stretched a massive basin carved into the tower's core. Waterfalls poured from arched openings high above, filling the basin with silver mist. Within that fog, the illusion of the past continued—seven Kralscells united in chaos, driving back a mechanical python the size of a mountain. Its body constantly shifted, made of orbiting plates and glowing cores, every motion screaming with tortured machinery.

I leaned over the ledge. Deeper down, through the veils of mist and spray, I saw the moment when I emerged from the waters below—half-drowned, half-laughing—and was pulled to shore by a man in a tattered military coat.

"Raptor," I breathed, recognition stabbing like déjà vu.

The memory of this place sharpened. An ancient prison carved into a moon, built by the long-dead hands of cosmic engineers. It once held every Kralscell the universe feared. Wars were endless inside its hollow core, fought by its prisoners not for conquest but for distraction. For laughter in the face of eternity.

Raptor was one of the first commanders among the inmates. He built Ignis Fatuus—one of the few warbands that fought not out of hate but out of joy. Lunatics, wanderers, and failed gods who treated every battle as a celebration. I met them by chance when I first arrived. Flung sixty thousand years backward in time through a temporal rift and immediately captured by the universal scans.

Ignis Fatuus scavenged my crash site, dragged me from the wreckage, and brought me to Raptor. He laughed in my face, handed me a broken blade, and welcomed me to his army of fools. We killed each other daily, resurrected hourly, and shared stories over the ashes of the fallen. It was… fun. In a horrifying, impossible way.

Back then, I was an immature Kralscell. Barely divine. I didn't even realize what I was until Raptor told me. That is was the Kralscell of Sentience, and he the Kralscell of Adventure.

Years later inside . Outside of the yearly warring while searching for ways to escape the prison. A chance came in the shape of a little girl who had inherited the powers and memory of the Kralscell of Order. She found a clue to leave that fell from the sky with her when she arrived.

A way out of the prison moon. It was here, in this very spire, under the warden's gaze, that nearly every Kralscell gathered for the final rebellion.

From the edge of the basin, I watched the projection replay those final moments. Raptor and my younger self standing shoulder to shoulder, battered but grinning, as the waterfalls thundered around them and the other Kralscell's distracted the .

Together, they dove through one. vanishing into a secret chamber hidden behind the curtain of water.

[Skill: Autumn King's Conquest — Abyss Ice]

"We're getting close to our meeting now, Ingrik," I said, tracing a curved line in the marble with my boot. The path flared faintly gold, leading straight toward that same waterfall. "It's going to be quite the collision of wills if I remember right."

Thorn's feathers rustled. "That's one way to describe it. You nearly killed each other."

I smiled faintly. "Nearly."

The tower groaned around us as the projected time deepened—echoes of the past trembling against the present, ready to collide again.