Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion (Book 6) - Chapter 58 - A Fond Memory

Xavier frowned.

The dwarves and the Phoexians banded together, throwing everything they had at him. Streams of fire poured forth from the closest Phoexian flights. Ballistae bolts arced toward him from the dwarven battlements. Spells were cast by every mage along the walls.

The leaders, too, joined the fight. Which was something Xavier hadn’t seen the last fourteen times he’d been on this floor, though he’d never pushed until the end. Perhaps they would have been revealed if he had.

Before any of the attacks could so much as reach him, he shifted the speed at which he moved within the time dilation shield wrapped around him. Once more the world froze, spells and bolts immobilised in the air.

Xavier released a long sigh. He gazed at the space where the pattern of runes he’d painstakingly drawn over and over until he’d finally gotten them right had flickered out of existence after a targeted hit with a ballistae bolt.

Why are you doing this? the Lost Bone of a Dead God asked.

He took a moment to think on that. Initially, it was because the idea had struck him to do so. He kept thinking about the innocent lives that would be lost, and once he’d thought of a way to prevent those innocents from dying, it had been the obvious choice.

But did he truly care about the innocents in the subterranean levels of the city?

As Xavier didn’t respond right away, the Lost Bone of a Dead God continued.

I have seen you, Xavier. Observed you on many different floors. You are not one to avoid conflict. I understand you have a hero complex. Something inside you compelling you to save people. That is not a terrible thing to have. But sometimes you point it in the wrong direction.

Xavier cocked his head to one side. His soul bound weapon, since it had attained sentience when he’d given a part of his soul to it so it could be repaired, had often been a voice of reason only he could hear.

When Xavier had been pushing down through the deeper depths of the Hell Moon Thazamar, it had been the Lost Bone of a Dead God that had convinced him not to push beyond the level of his ability—that not every impossible challenge was one he needed to fight.

There had been wisdom in those words, even if Xavier struggled to hear them.

He wasn’t ready for every fight that came his way. If Adranial’s ancestor appeared and challenged him to a death-duel, accepting would be a death wish granted.

But the words the soul bound weapon spoke to him now were clearly said by someone who’d grown up in the conflict of the Greater Universe.

The soul bound weapon wasn’t entirely wrong. Xavier did have a hero complex. He was well aware of it. It was why he’d left some of that C Grade Hunt Squad the Collector had sent after him alive, even though they’d actively been trying to capture him.

He released another long sigh as he read the last line of the System notification again, after it had informed him that the parameters of the floor had changed.

There can be no hostilities if everyone is dead.

The System was pushing him to kill everyone here. Not only that, it had locked the exit to the Staging Room. Xavier couldn’t leave the floor and start again. As far as he knew, the System had never locked someone on a floor where there was usually an exit on it before.

Xavier didn’t let the anger that heated within him boil to the surface. He controlled his emotions lest they influence his actions. If he let anger guide him in this moment, he would take the simplest path—the one that led to the deaths of everyone around him, including the dwarven children in the subterranean levels who hadn’t yet gained the System.

He alighted onto the stone floor of the battlements, next to that same dwarven gravity mage he’d first stolen the Untethered spell from. She’d cast the spell once more. Xavier clearly recognised its energies in the air. He’d told himself he wouldn’t leave this floor until he’d permanently learnt that spell. If he wasn’t careful, that opportunity would drift away.

He had a decide how to handle the floor’s changed parameters, but first he needed to fulfil his initial goal, rather than continue to get distracted from it.

Xavier hadn’t drawn the pattern of runes so that he could use it on these people. He’d done it because it was the first step in his plan to gain the spell permanently.

Ignoring everything around him, as he was always good at, Xavier sat, cross-legged on those hot stones, falling into a deep meditative state.

This was the second step in his plan to permanently gain the spell. It was the step he was the least sure of, and he’d barely been sure of the first one.

But that had worked. Not only had it worked, it worked better than I could have imagined.

There were notifications that he hadn’t read from when he’d first activated the pattern of runes. Ones he’d ignored, as he’d been focused on the dwarves and Phoexians at the time. He would get to them later.

But the fact that drawing the pattern had gotten him all the way to Rank 150 in Inscribing, and the strength of the pattern had been beyond his expectations, indicated he was on the right path.

Breathing in a perfect rhythm, Xavier activated Body Cultivation. Eyes closed, he observed the energies as they flowed around his body.

He’d come to this idea because of what he knew about the different energies. Because of what he knew about how things were like in the universes before the System had been created.

There had been countless universes around before the System had been created. Countless universes where there was no guiding voice behind it all.

The peoples of those universes didn’t have patterns of runes handed to them by the System. They didn’t have blueprints stamped into their brains. They’d figured things out for themselves. They’d brought their universe’s energies into their bodies through sheer force of will and controlled them in creative ways to discover what powers they held.

It was a raw power. A power of untold potential. A power that had created the System itself, for those who wielded the power thought they needed something more.

Xavier still wasn’t sure if they were right or not.

He based the plan he was attempting to enact on assumptions he’d yet to prove. First, he assumed that the language of the universe—the runes—had been around before the System. Second, he assumed that those who created the System had used runes to do it. And not only to do that, but to cast their own spells. To impose their will upon the universe.

The deeper he looked into things, the more runes seemed to be behind everything.

Xavier already had a way to impart his will upon the universe that was similar to the ones those before the System used. That was how he used Body Cultivation. There was no guidebook when it came to that spell. There was a pattern, but it was the smallest pattern of all the spells that Xavier had ever seen.

And all it really seemed to do was allow him to cycle the Celestial Energy he cultivated through his body in a particular way.

Once he had that ability, figuring out how to use it was entirely up to him.

When he’d first learnt the Body Cultivation spell, he’d earned a title for it, Revive a Lost Art, as no one had used the spell for a very, very long time.

Xavier wondered if what he was about to do was something similar. He had been told by Adranial’s mother, Rowalla, that with the combination of his class and the Recursive Analysis spell, he would eventually be able to permanently learn other spells. It was a crucial part of his plan to defeat the World Destroyer and save not only Earth, but the entire Silver River sector.

But she hadn’t told him he would need runes to do it.

In fact, she hadn’t known when he would be able to do it. That was something Xavier hadn’t thought much about, as he didn’t want to limit himself. But she’d doubted it would be possible for him to manage until he reached C Grade.

And here he was, trying to do it well before he’d advanced.

Seeing the pattern of runes in his mind, Xavier knew this wasn’t what she’d intended.

He breathed deeply, in and out, in and out. Celestial Energy coursed through every line in his body. The more he used Body Cultivation, the more he discovered about the spell. He had already reached Rank 150, and yet he found the spell could still become stronger—even if he hadn’t been focusing on it heavily since he’d returned to the tower.

Then there were the things he’d discovered about his own body, mind, and soul that he was yet to understand.

For instance, he could flow Celestial Energy into his mind to make it work more efficiently. It was like a constant boost to his mental capacity. This was something he often did without even thinking these days, as it had become so natural.

As he’d been creating the pattern of runes, Xavier had been pooling Celestial Energy into his mind. It had fortified him. Strengthened him. He wasn’t sure he would have managed to perfect the pattern of runes without it.

But when he’d first flowed Celestial Energy into his mind—his brain, essentially—he’d discovered a new awareness, new spaces within himself that he hadn’t previously known about. As though he’d thought his mind was the size of a single large room, only to discover that was only a part of his mind, and there were actually thousands of adjacent rooms.

The Celestial Energy had flowed freely into them.

He’d discovered these rooms after he’d discovered the patterns of runes that controlled spells—after he’d pushed his time dilation field through a portal for the very first time.

When he’d first discovered those patterns of runes, it had been because the Time Alteration spell had been at the forefront of his mind.

When he discovered these other spaces? That was when he realised he could access the patterns, see the blueprints the System had stamped into his brain, without needing to cast a spell.

Though there was a problem—well, maybe not a problem, but something to overcome. Those rooms weren’t always open to him, as though the doors to them were locked.

It took an incredible amount of mental energy to open those doors. Regardless of whether he could open these doors, the Celestial Energy still flowed into the rooms. That was how he knew they were there, even if he couldn’t enter them.

The easiest doors to open, however, had been the ones that were empty.

Well, empty wasn’t the right word. The rooms weren’t only to hold patterns of runes for the spells and skills Xavier possessed. They held other things, too. Such as memories. Emotions. Aspects of his personality. These were more ethereal than the runes, and more varied in the nature in which they appeared. Like the spells, Xavier could call these memories to the forefront of his mind—to the central room—if he wished. But it was as though this was where they were stored.

Xavier didn’t know whether or not these were actual “spaces,” or if that was simply how his mind showed them to him. A way to depict them to help him understand. Having access to these rooms opened his mind in a way he’d never known was possible.

He had worked on ordering his mind before. Back on the hundredth floor, Liana had helped him with that, though he knew he still went off on tangents if he allowed himself to become unfocused. Still, his mind was more focused than it had ever been.

He’d thought he’d known it well. Thought he was near to mastering it.

That had been naïve.

Eyes remaining closed, another deep breath in, another out, his chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm, Celestial Energy flowing through his body and mind, Xavier opened one of those doors.

The room was empty of runes. In his mind, he stepped through the doorway. It wasn’t a sparse, white room like one might imagine. It didn’t look neat and orderly, either. On the walls were different posters. Some of them were still images, while others constantly moved as though they were television screens.

One image showed a small room with a crib, a rocking chair, and toys scattered about the floor. Xaiver blinked, staring at the image. Technically, his memory was perfect, but that was only when he chose to recall something. The image before him was something he’d forgotten about. It was his room, from when he was very young. The scattered toys on the ground—a plush elephant, a teddy bear, a few different coloured blocks with letters and numbers on them, and a blue rattle—were instantly recognisable.

He’d played with those toys for hours, alone in his room.

That crib… He would scream and cry when his mother put him down in it and left the room. He’d cry for hours at the top of his lungs. She never came. Eventually, he would be too tried to keep crying, and he would just lie there until he fell asleep.

God, he hadn’t known that. He tilted his head as he looked at the crib, then shifted his gaze to one of the posters with moving images on the wall.

A memory of him sitting in an armchair when he was eleven, reading a book. It was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. He could see the pages incredibly clearly as he looked at them in the image. Every now and then, eleven-year-old him would turn a page.

Xavier smiled at that. A fond memory.

Odd mist and smoke of varying colours wafted from the image. Xavier stepped close, moving his fingers through the smoke. As he did, he could feel what that boy was feeling, could hear what he was thinking. There was a sense of wonder in those emotions as young Xavier read about Harry arriving at Hogwarts.

Xavier’s awareness spread around the room. In a moment, he would refocus his attention on the task at hand, but time wasn’t moving forward in the real world, not while he remained within his time dilation field.

There wasn’t anything wrong with lingering.

There were different objects in this room. Random things from his life. The bookcase he’d had when he’d attended university. Next to it, the single bed he’d had when he’d lived with his mother. Two things that had never shared the same space. On the ground lay an old, blue laptop. It had a shattered screen, and it was impossible to use anymore. He’d remembered when that had broken—he’d gone without a computer for two years, between fourteen and sixteen, having to use the one at the school library.

There were more things here, but Xavier’s mental apparition shut his eyes to it all for a moment, before opening them again to concentrate on the space in the centre of the room.

He smiled. It was time he tried the second step of his plan.

Celestial Energy flowed into the room. He pooled it in place in the air in front of his outstretched hand. This was something he hadn’t tried before, and he had no idea if it would work. In his outstretched hand he held something—something from the central room of his mind, the one that was always at the forefront.

It was The Lost Bone of a Dead God in the form of a stylus. Technically, it wasn’t the actual soul bound weapon, but rather a mental depiction of it—like all the objects in these rooms.

Some of the Celestial Energy flowed into stylus. It glowed.

Xavier’s smile broadened.

He dipped the tip of the Stylus into the pool of Celestial Energy, as though he held a quill and the pool was his inkwell.

Then he started to draw.