Kernoel77

Chapter 123: Rainbow Fire

I stepped into the mirror. 

Glass filled my face. Liquid glass pushed against the air in my nostrils, pressed against my lips. But I kept my eyes open.

One moment I was in a temple made from cold stone, the next I was on an ethereal road in the midst of infinitely reflecting space. I took a step, towards the other world, towards where Ann would be waiting for me. 

And then the pain set in.

I looked up. Four figures. Humanoid, yet carved from glass.

One ...

Chapter 122: It's finally over

I fought. 

Y’know, it’s a strange thought now. Back then, everything had been so difficult. It had taken every ounce of willpower I could muster to even drag my tired body out there to fight at all. Yet, now? Looking back at it, it doesn’t seem that hard.

In a way, it wasn’t really. After all those talents from the archmages? My world had shifted again. No one in the wellspring realm was a match for me. Maybe Matt, who had similar benefits, but that was it.

Afte...

Chapter 224: Rust Red

Chapter 224: Rust Red

The court was made of vast fields of rust and decay. Pieces of rotting trash being consumed by waves and salt. Pieces of metal, beacons of civilization and progress, broken against the ebbing edifice of age.

Mercury took a deep breath, smelling iron on the sea air. The statue of liberty didn't stand; it laid among the rubble, shattered to pieces. Mercury breathed out, feeling the lingering sting of salt in his nose.

One by one, the rubble receded...

Chapter 121: Hope for Tomorrow

One after another, I looked at the archmages.

Saif Zolycc, war mage, a wind spirit in a wheelchair. Her hair floated behind her in the air, her eyes of radiant purple boring into me with kindness. She had two right arms, both her left ones missing. Her legs were covered by a blanket.

Erasmus Pulie, the seer, a human whose head was shaved bald and whose eyes were milky and dull. He wore plain white robes, but his old skin was dotted with pale scars.

Lyria Kiryel, space mage. ...

Chapter 223: Practice makes Perfect

Chapter 223: Practice makes Perfect

Mercury read the letter over a second time, then placed it down. The moment it left his hands, it burst into flames, reducing itself to ash, before that ash turned to air. All that remained in the wake of the letter was a small draft within Mercury’s log.

Its contents, though, were seared into his mind. Some of the fae were going to die. Frankly, it wasn’t really unexpected. Oberon had been getting in his way at every step of the path...

Chapter 120: Memento

Chapter 120: Memento

The monster, a blur of electricity and razor sharp metal wings, was lightning fast. Each of its strikes brought about a gale of wind and lashed out at me with a thundercrack. It was like a dance. My Wanderer’s Key warped the attacks faintly at a cost to my Qi, and I wove past them, avoiding the arcs of power by a tiny amount each time.

Whenever I dodged, Astraeus would fly forward and smash into a wing. If he didn’t succeed or was parried, there would be a...

Chapter 222: Benefactors

Chapter 222: Benefactors

A name had been granted, and now there was the price to pay. Mercury felt his focus being consumed like a wildfire burning against his consciousness. The darkness boiled, and somehow, he understood every inch, every movement, every moment.

Ciarski, ruler of Shadow, being of darkness born anew. An ancient shadow, reshaped and known once more. More than ever before, Mercury felt the realm around him breathe a sigh of relief. It was his third namin...

Chapter 119: Muscle - Memory

As every night before, Ann eventually woke up. She felt like absolute garbage. Each bone in her body ached from the hard floor, and somehow, that sensation felt strange. Like sleeping on a hard surface shouldn’t bother her. 

That, then, marked her first cohesive thought of the day, and it was instantly one dealing with her missing memories. Wrenching her tired eyes open, Ann pushed herself off the floor. She left behind some bloodstains from where the glass shards had cut her, bu...

Chapter 221: Someone’s Truth

Chapter 221: Someone’s Truth

[<Oceanic Consciousness> has levelled up! <Oceanic Consciousness lv. 3 -> 4>]

At the end of the night, Mercury still felt well rested. What wonders that Skill did for him. His minds, despite each one being put to rather heavy work, had taken it all in stride. Really, compared to the absolute mental battering that the surgery and Oberon had been, this was child’s play.

Mercury took a deep breath, focussing on the shad...

Chapter 118: Resolution

Eventually, after an amount of time I didn’t really keep track of, Cass let go of me. We split apart. I was left leaning against the bed frame, sitting on the floor. 

There were more aspects of my growth to change, but as I looked at Cass, something in my vision sputtered. As I focused again, the [Budding Nova] of my talent reignited, and I saw it bloom within her.

A star. 

I smiled faintly at that, too. Not that I needed to tell her, she could see it through my ...

Chapter 220: Shadows

Chapter 220: Shadows

Mercury faintly nodded at the fae welcoming him. He was curious to see how long his stay in this place would be. How long would it take him to find out Shadow’s real name? Would he reshape things here, or just help them rediscover themselves?

What a fun little thought. 

“It is a pleasure to meet another one of you,” Mercury said to the ancient tree spirit, then he turned to the serpent. “And we meet again.”

“So we do,”...

Chapter 117: Real

[Name: Fiona Bellum

Class: Superimposed Paragon (20)

• Techniques

  • Spear Techniques

    • Spear Technique - Fundamentals (Inevitability)

    • Swift Spear (Intermediate)

    • Momentum Shift (High)

  • Qi Techniques

    • General

      • Aura Suppression (Intermediate) (Keeping your Qi contained inside your body allows you to appear perfectly ordinary)

      • A...

        2024-10-21 21:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post

Chapter 219: Through the Fae Realm

Chapter 219: Through the Fae Realm

Mercury spent a rather peaceful time sleeping. Of course, he found himself in his inner world, with Kim, the gardener, working away at the landscape. Whisperstar flitted across the sky. Mercury smiled.

Having something living, something moving in this inner world of his was rather pleasant. 

The landscape had many features now, courtesy of breaking the world of Yearning. Maybe he should prepare for a similar influx once he i...

Chapter 116: Heaviness

My hands were shaking for the entire duration of the journey. There were no more usurpers. The giant of black fire was dead. I had absorbed the shards of its gateway, and the rest of that fire had been absorbed by [Transference], and crafted into some kind of magic item.

But I ignored the pull of the Gift. I felt entirely too numb to interact with it. My heart thumped in my chest, beating on cruelly as Ann’s laid still. 

Thoughts flowed slow as molasses and I could...

Chapter 218: Rules and Rulers

Chapter 218: Rules and Rulers

Mercury stood before Oberon, the king’s might weighing down on him like a heavy blanket. He faced it calmly, breathing slowly. 

Not that he did it effortlessly. After the surgery, Mercury felt tired. Drained of effort and interest. Still, he thought about the favour closely.

There were lots of things he needed help with, but his bargaining power wasn’t that high. If he asked the king to support any decision he made in court, ...

Chapter 115: Ruination

The fight had been over, the giant broken and dead, yet now it moved once more.

Flesh writhed, then dissolved as it was shedded. Black flames flickered forth from the corpse, surrounding a perfectly polished abyssal sphere. It called out to me, as if screaming for help - gateways. Corrupted and twisted, their fragments broken and melded together again, into this.

“Back,” my own voice whispered in my ear.

Stunned, I still obeyed, and my allies followed a moment later. As ...

Chapter 114: Dark Fire

“Let’s go.”

As the words left my lips, I didn’t even need to check whether or not my guildmates would be with me. I knew they were, from when I took the first step towards the giant. And they were still there as I took my first step into the air.

I stepped down hard on the Qi platform, using my enhanced manipulation to slingshot myself up into the air. As my foot landed I took a deep breath.

With an [Iron Will], I took hold of the raging energy. I drew from my wellsp...

Chapter 217: Surgery

Chapter 217: Surgery

Mercury drew in a deep breath. He took a long, still moment to stare at the dead tree. The way the wilting leaves still clung to pale husks of dried bark. He slowly dragged his healthy front leg over the wood he stood on, at the heart of the gigantic corpse. He felt the bumps and grain, the fibers still attached to one another.

The air left his lungs, and he sunk into ihn’ar. 

- - - - - -

Orin watched as Mercury acted. The two of ...

Chapter 113: At the Threshold

I felt like a shooting star.

Every day that passed, I could feel the constellation within me roar. I could feel my Qi scream. Feel the world buckle at my demand, feel reality itself become malleable to my power. 

Every day that passed, more people survived. More usurpers fell. The walls held. They stood strong against any and all assault. We fought and we thrived. 

It was stunning to see how the constant battle drove us to excellence. The exhaustion was we...

Chapter 216: Perspective

Chapter 216: Perspective

It had been a long while since Mercury last rode a carriage. It had been… with Zyl? All that time ago? What a strange thought. 

When reincarnated into a somewhat medieval world, Mercury had expected a lot more… well. Horses, knights, dwarves and elves. Instead what he got were entirely alien creatures beyond mortal comprehension. Well, and humans, ironically. But he knew there were elves and dwarves out there. One day he would get to th...

Chapter 112: Joy of Freedom

I don’t quite know how we survived those days, not to mention how we managed to keep morale generally high. Every day was a grind. We still hardly slept, though more than when just marching. Battle was tiring, after all.

Every day, I would empty out my wellspring multiple times over. In sparring, in fighting. Once, I awoke in the middle of the night, and found Astraeus floating besides me, enveloped in slowly coursing Qi. Enhancing the material he was made from even further.

Fig...

Chapter 215: A leaf in the Wind

Chapter 215: A leaf in the Wind

Time passed. Despite everything, despite the work to do, despite the fact that Mercury knew the fae realm was struggling, he didn’t rush.

There would have been no point. In order to find out the rulers’ names, he would need to spend time with them, anyway. It wasn’t like he could conveniently kill them to see it on a sheet. It was no longer logged on their own statuses, either.

How strangely that worked. Did the system display...

Chapter 111: Rhythm

[Golden Wellspring advanced to 5th Step.]

[Mirror Wellspring advanced to 5th Step.]

It took little time more on the frontlines for my combined talents to begin truly shining. Seeing the stars resolve in the usurpers was strange. I could see theirs were different, colours that I could not describe and that made my eyeballs itch on the inside.

The feeling was miserable and disgusting, a power I was entirely incompatible with, yet, when they fe...

Chapter 110: Stargazer, Startaker

“Fio,” Ann told me, holding her face in her hands. “You have to stop recruiting people who tried to kill you.”

“You know, if I had nickel for each time you brought over an ex-assassin and asked if they could join the group,” Matt said, “I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.”

Ann had her arms crossed, while Matt raised his eyebrows. 

I stood, with Olivia in tow. Emilia, for one, seemed excited ...

Chapter 214: The Beginnings of the Fae Accords

Chapter 214: The Beginnings of the Fae Accords

It always came down to names with the fae. Remembering them, changing them, their meanings, owning them… all of that. Calling a ruler simply by the name of their court was, in a way, the same as removing their identity. 

Of course, not all decay in the courts could simply be explained by who knew their name and who didn’t. That would have been far too easy. It was a lot more complicated than that, in fact.  2024-09-14 14:28:51 +0000 UTC View Post

Chapter 109: New Beginnings

With more force on our side, we were able to split the tide of enemies. Break the waves against us. My team was a spearhead, diving deep into the ranks of the usurpers, taking them down by the dozen.

At some point, the city mages began relaying messages to us through telepathy and voice projection, similarly to how Liam usually did it, and we began hunting down priority targets.

Matt and I fought against a humongous creature made from steel chains that whipped around, breaking it ...

Chapter 213: Memory

Chapter 213: Memory

Mercury had 1600 Skill points. The fused evolution of <Unbroken> and <Unfatigued> would cost 900 of those. His other option was between evolving <Dreamwalking> for 500 or <Adaptable> for 700. Mercury used the former quite a bit, but the latter was more important in his day to day, so he decided to evolve <Adaptable> first.

[Evolution confirmed. Engaging. Please pick an option to evolve the Skill into. The price will be t...

Chapter 108: Rousing Dragons

Chapter 108: Rousing Dragons

The march was fine. It wasn’t easy or fun, but it was fine.

I hadn’t lost my love for travelling at all. But part of what I enjoyed was seeing new sights at the destinations, and that… was taken away. Most of the landscape we passed through was not in a pleasant state. Trees had been razed, broken apart. There were carcasses, still dissolving into ambient energy, laying around.

Blood soaked the ground in more areas. There were so many usurp...

Chapter 212: Evading the Courts

Chapter 212: Evading the Courts

Mercury breathed, the old realm of Yearning now gone and torn apart. The space they were in was slowly dissipating into a white void. Appreciation would take root here if everything went well, slowly spreading out to occupy the freed up space and hold it together again. 

Had Mercury done a lot of damage? Yes. He had absorbed the vast majority of this world into his own. But at the same time, he had woven the new tapestry, and connect...

Chapter 107: Fragile World

It turns out not all rifts were made equal. In fact, the vast majority of rifts were small, tiny tears.

The danger was that they did not greatly enjoy staying small. Even as I watched the tiny tear in the air, it expanded. A hand reached through, and I felt my heart stop in my chest.

Before I had the chance to experience any more fear, Matt moved. Instantly, there was a storm of flowers. It lasted only a single moment, then it crashed into that hand - a bornin’s ha...