Free Tier - Accidental Champion (Book 7) - Chapter 46 - The Third Unfolding

Indescribable pain ripped outward from his heart and tore through every inch of him. The wave of destruction was unrelenting. Not a single drop of the Soul Energy was contained or slowed. Nothing Xavier did prevented it from consuming his entire body.

The agony of death was somehow everlasting and yet passed in a mere fraction of a second.

Xavier was returned to the frozen moment in time, hovering beside the beautiful spirit from the Otherworld. His face paled, eyes wide in terror as everything he’d experienced trapped inside the other version of himself lingered.

He blinked away the fear, the pain, his own death, then shut his eyes.

Two unfoldings had now passed him by.

The first unfolding and the second unfolding were almost identical—nothing Xavier learnt from the experience helped him alter the outcome. It had been a fruitless endeavour, sending a second version of himself to their doom.

Are you ready now? The Spirit of Time sounded solemn.

Not yet. I need to think.

I don’t mean for another unfolding.

Xavier smirked. Though his eyes remained closed, and his Farscope was currently deactivated as he wanted to reduce the number of stimuli entering his mind, he could imagine the expression on the woman’s face—an odd mixture of care and bewilderment.

I’m not going to give in to death, if that’s what you mean.

You have but one more unfolding, Xavier Collins. Giving in is not required; death comes for you as it comes for all.

Xavier would have sighed if he had any breath here in space. As it was, he gave an impatient flap of his leathery black wings. He was well aware that only a single unfolding remained.

Doubts crept in, of course. How could they not? From everything they’d both seen, the chances of him surviving were exactly zero.

Yet he refused to believe that. He refused to take that in. His resolve did not waver for a moment. He had experienced his own death many times now—either in the form of an unfolding, or from having his mind inside one of his drones. It wasn’t logic, or even fear, that drove him to thinking he would never die.

It was necessity.

There is too much at stake for my death to be allowed.

You confound me, Xavier Collins. Take as long as you need to think, for all the good it will do.

Xavier’s wings flapped slowly in the blackness of space, but his main consciousness was no longer in his physical body. He had withdrawn into the rooms of his mind. Two unfoldings and he’d made no visible progress.

He had, however, gained an in-depth experience of what that Soul Energy did, and just how powerful it was.

He didn’t need more unfoldings undergo more tests. He could use the abilities first learnt by Siobhan back in the Roving Seed Base to create a virtual environment within his own mind, using his memories and knowledge to shape it.

A highly sophisticated simulation.

It would not be able to give him everything he needed. These simulations could not account for what he didn’t know. That was the main reason he’d needed to summon the Spirit of Time in the first place—so he could experience just how powerful the explosion of Soul Energy was, and how much damage it would do to him if allowed to continue.

In the span of roughly one minute, Xavier played out tens of thousands of simulations. His mind worked faster than the super computers had back on pre-System Earth, and yet he all too often didn’t take full advantage of those capabilities.

When Xavier opened his eyes again it wasn’t a smirk he wore but a warm smile. In those simulations he’d come to what he hoped was a solution—the only problem was he wouldn’t know if it would actually work until he tested it out.

Well, that wasn’t the only problem—but it was at the top of the list.

To test the solution would mean using his final unfolding. He simply didn’t have enough information to play out the situation to its true end within his mind simulations. When he summoned the Spirit of Time, he hadn’t expected to have the use of many unfoldings given the portal to the void currently open inside his heart—but to be limited to only three had been a wrenching disappointment.

I must use what I have.

You have an idea.

Considering how sure the Spirit of Time was that Xavier would die, one might have expected her words to sound dubious, even sarcastic. Yet a hint of something else surfaced in her tone.

Was that… Excitement?

Maybe she does have a little faith in me, Xavier thought to himself, then looked at the woman. Yes. I have an idea. He inclined his head. And I’m ready for the final unfolding.

As you wish.

~

Xavier Collins - The Third Unfolding

The moment before the unfolding began, Xavier Collins wished himself luck. Now, his mind working as fast as it ever had, the frozen moment with the Spirit of Time was gone.

Xavier didn’t have time to think on the position he was in. Didn’t have time to lament or come to terms with the fact that he was the version living out the third unfolding in this impossible situation. The other, “true” version of him would be tucked away in his mind, unable to hear his thoughts, unable to interact in any way.

Without time to ponder any of that, Xavier instantly put his mind to work.

In the tens of thousands of simulations he’d run, once he’d come upon the course of action he hoped was the solution he’d put all his energies toward practicing that solution.

Mental Practice wasn’t exactly the same as practicing in reality, but with the ability to create a virtual world inside his own mind, it was damned close—to the point where he’d discovered it actually had a visible effect inside his brain.

Even before Xavier became a dragonkin, he was no longer “human” by the standards of pre-System science. His body, mind, soul, had all underwent changes that simply wouldn’t have been possible pre-System—or, at least, not without the necessary Celestial Energy.

Regardless, whatever Xavier considered himself—human, dragonkin, Denizen, cultivator—even with so much of him changed, and in particular so much of his brain strengthened, the pathways that had been there in his youth remained. Not only that, from his research, his brain worked on the same principles it had worked on before his enhancements.

Neurons that fired together, wired together.

And the enhanced form of Mental Practice he had access to allowed him to “embed” reactions and impulses into his body and mind in an incredibly short period of time. Whether he performed an action or thought process within a simulation or within reality, the same neurons fired. The same pathways strengthened.

This was an insanely powerful tool, and the entire reason this solution could even be possible.

Thousands and thousands of times, Xavier had practiced what he was about to do in conditions as similar to reality as his mind could make them.

That was why he didn’t need to think. Why he didn’t hesitate. Even in the merest fraction of a second before his body would be consumed by Soul Energy, he could act.

Xavier possessed the ability to manipulate energies in ways no one else in his own universe, even his own corner of the multiverse, could manage.

The explosion coming through the void portal that had been inserted into his heart was made from pure, raw Soul Energy. The Soul Energy was incredibly dense and turned toward a destructive power he foresaw rupturing a hole in the fabric of reality—not because the power was so strong, though it was, but rather because it was Soul Energy.

Such energy possessed something that couldn’t be harnessed from Celestial Energy or the various different energies Celestial Energy could be distilled into.

The type of energy being used was very important to his possible solution. Xavier had control over his own Soul Energy, and he could harness other beings’ souls—but he had never controlled another being’s Soul Energy before. Such a thing had not even occurred to him until it had become necessary for his survival.

And that was the main problem—he’d practiced this solution within the simulations as much as he’d wished, but he didn’t know if it would work.

Xavier pulled every drop of Reality Energy he possessed from his core and burned it for fuel all at once. The power was intoxicating. He had never burned so much before. Even in the simulations it had been intoxicating, and there he hadn’t experienced the true feeling of it.

This experience was so much more.

In the simulations, with an intoxicating feeling that was perhaps a tenth as strong as what he was now going through, Xavier had needed over a thousand attempts before overcoming it fast enough to harness the foreign Soul Energy exploding from his heart.

He hadn’t lacked self-control. He simply needed that self-control to be exercised reflex-fast.

There was no time to panic. His survival hung by a thread thinner than spider silk. Xavier pushed his mind to overcome the power overtaking him and managed it faster than he ever had in the simulations.

The strength of all the Reality Energy he’d burned, though incredibly intoxicating, lent strength to his willpower. It allowed him to push harder than he’d imagined.

Instantly, Xavier shifted his focus to the Soul Energy and pushed his will onto it. At first, in the simulations, he’d thought he would need to control and shape the energy to reverse its explosive power and even harness it for himself—but doing such a thing would take far, far too long.

He’d also tried shifting out of phase, but he’d known that wouldn’t work. When the strength of soul apparitions was potent enough, they cut through beings even when they were out of phase—it was one of Soul Strike’s many benefits.

Xavier had experimented in sparring enough to know Soul Energy had the same effect.

This Soul Energy explosion was too strong to simply be avoided.

Xavier had explored other avenues. Hundreds of them. Some held promise, but not enough for him to perform in the necessary timeframe or with his current abilities.

So, he’d concluded that brute force would be needed.

In the end, it came down to a simple push.

With more strength than Xavier had ever wielded, in an action practiced tens of thousands of times, he pushed at the dense mass of Soul Energy, applying all his willpower to the task.

All he needed to do was push it back through the portal, and he would survive.

When Gregori The Collector had activated his spell and placed the void portal in Xavier’s heart, the void portal had tugged at his soul. This tugging sensation hadn’t lasted long before it stopped and the dense ball of Soul Energy on the other side of the portal had flowed through it into his heart.

But it had lasted long enough for Xavier to identify that the portal wasn’t a unidirectional portal that had simply reversed its flow—it was an omnidirectional portal.

When that portal had tugged at his heart, taking with it a small amount of his Soul Energy, there had been something behind that tugging—a presence on the other side of the portal.

A Void Being.

The presence brushed Xavier’s mind with the most subtle of touches, something he never would have been able to identify if not for all the practice he’d put into doing the very same thing with the Arak drones.

If the void portal only went one way, it would have prevented the Void Being’s presence from reaching into the Mortal Realm. The omnidirectional nature of the portal was fortunate for him. It meant he wouldn’t need to reverse the flow.

The nature of that presence had made him wonder, however, about a lot of things. Xavier had never once encountered a spell that would allow him to access the void. For a time, after he’d discovered what Universal Pressure was and why it acted on him the way it did, his interest in the void had been piqued. It was clear the System didn’t want the fabric of reality to be damaged, which also implied it didn’t want Denizens able to access the void. Xavier assumed that meant there were no easily accessible spells that could do such a thing, but he hadn’t wanted to stop at a simple assumption—all his research proved the assumption to be correct, however.

Until now.

Of course, Gregori The Collector didn’t technically have access to the void. He simply had a spell that created a portal to the void. The portal was far too small for one to travel through it.

Xavier inspection of the spell’s energies and properties, and the dense ball of Soul Energy—an inspection he’d performed while reviewing memories inside the frozen pocket of time—made him conclude that the spell must have been active inside The Collector’s own heart for an unimaginably long time. The Soul Energy had all come from a single being, and while Xavier didn’t know what The Collector’s Soul Energy’s signature felt like, he was sure it came from him.

That meant The Collector had the Void Being’s presence touching his mind for a long, long time, which had led Xavier to wonder whether the man had been negatively influenced by that presence. It wouldn’t surprise him to discover that a malignant presence had helped turn Gregori into the monster he now was.

But evil didn’t need to be encouraged by outside sources to emerge—it could be bred in the hearts of anyone susceptible to it.

The power of the burned Reality Energy surged through every fibre of Xavier’s being. His will pushed on the foreign Soul Energy and a scream would have escaped his throat had there been sound in space. Pain still tore at him coming from his heart.

For what felt like an eternity, his willpower did nothing. He pushed on the Soul Energy and it proceeded to explode outward unabated. Only the habit developed inside those simulations allowed him to alter that push. He pulled energy from his own soul, merging his Soul Energy with his willpower to strengthen the push. This was an option he hadn’t wished to perform. With no Reality Energy, and very little Soul Energy to draw upon, he might survive—but he would be severely weakened.

He remembered, quite clearly, what it felt like to overuse Soul Energy.

But he couldn’t risk not using enough.

The gambit worked. His own Soul Energy allowed him to manipulate The Collector’s Soul Energy. With every ounce of power in his possession, the push shifted the explosion’s flow, pushing it back through the portal and into the void. The strain took its toll on every part of him. He felt the damage to his soul—the soul sickness it was causing him.

Muscles tore. Skin prickled and burn. Energy channels were pushed to new limits and beyond, ripping through them. His mind stretched to the point he worried it would shatter again.

His body, mind, soul—they were not strengthened enough to wield this level of power.

The explosion, too, had damaged parts of him. His heart had been ripped apart. Blood no longer pumped through his veins.

The silent scream continued as the explosion of Soul Energy was shoved all the way back through the portal and into the void.