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Chapter 471: Full Circle
Early Morning - Early Spring : Year ??? : Delphi
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Bahamut was an utterly fascinating experiment. Even with a body at the limits of organic perfection, he was weak—indescribably so. His scales which should have been stronger than the darkest mythril were always brittle, his skin which should have been akin to a layer of diamond was easily scarred, and his muscles that should have been woven with threads of widows' web was never untattered.
He should have been the ultimate being—regeneration rivalling jellyfish, sight rivalling thunderbirds, and mobility rivalling a panther.
...He should have been untouchable...
But never was there a future where he didn't struggle.
Merely to get out of the swamp he hatched in, he fought, he bled, and he cried without end. Having to put every drop of willpower he had into fights that should have been a breeze, he seemed to barely survive every engagement, while collecting scars from them like trophies of achievement.
Despite everything I did to give him the perfect body, it was almost like he was cursed. His vision was blurry and scattered, his muscles were always torn and tattered, and his regeneration that should have been able to regrow entire limbs, couldn't heal cuts in his hide, or repair shattered scales.
It was.. rather pitiful...
Even compared to the dragons that should have been entirely inferior to him, he lost in every aspect.
He was physically weak, exponentially smaller than his peers, and laden with so much trauma that the thought of fighting churned his gut.
Rather than blessed as he was, he considered himself cursed—smited by karma, and struck with sin.
'This' was fate getting back at him... 'This' was the revenge of the universe.
He could not heal. He could not grow. He could not improve.
He was talentless, lost, and terrified.
Even I, his creator, found it puzzling. The golden luster his scales were meant to have were tainted black, and his body that should have been indestructible had no place unscathed.
Nothing about him was as it should have been.
But he wasn't a failure. -Something changes in the future...- Looking thousands of years ahead, his state wasn't always going to be so disheveled.
So as such, I continued observing.. watching over his struggles, his cries, and his deepest internal struggles.
Until finally, the dragon sleeps began coming.
Dragon sleeps were rather complex phenomena. With each one, a dragon would have another shackle released—sometimes this was simply tempering their scales or tightening their muscles, but in other cases, it was gaining access to a humanoid form, or forming a mana core.
For some time I considered the formation of a proper core as one of the lesser important sleeps. Even without one, dragons could use mana to temper their bodies or even cast magic.
But the day Bahamut formed one and I watched as the constant tearing of muscle, shredding of organs, and internal collapse of his body eased, that view changed entirely.
Mana cores weren't merely means of storing mana, but in fact we're the vessels of souls.
To put it simply, Bahamut's endlessly degraded condition was never because the attributes I gave him weren't working properly, but because they simply couldn't. Prior to forming a mana core, his soul was breaking down his body merely trying to hold onto it. Without a proper anchor, his soul was grabbing at whatever it could—his heart, his lungs, his brain—blending it all constantly and endlessly trying to hold on.
That was why it wasn't until that dragon sleep he should have had decades prior, that the exceptional attributes of his body managed to have the headroom to show themselves.
Bahamut was never truly weak, his body was simply so burdened by his presence it struggled to do more than just keep him alive.
His condition wasn't an anomaly.. his survival was an exception.
The moment I had that realization, my entire understanding of draconic lifespans changed.
Over the years, I had endlessly questioned what the determining factor of a dragon's life expectancy was. Unlike other species, they didnt have the degradation of genetic material that normally led to aging and death—organ failure, heart attacks, and strokes simply didn't exist for them. Rather, if a dragon didn't die young or die from an injury, it would only ever die in a dragon sleep, seemingly randomly...
Some exceptionally strong dragons died in earlier sleeps, and some exceptionally weak ones lasted until they were among the eldest.
But that wasn't for no reason. At the end of it all, it came down to their souls.
If a dragons soul was too strong, they would die before a mana core could form, and if it was too weak, they would die during one of their dragon sleeps.
Every time a dragon hatched, it was threading a needle, too much to one side, and it dies young.. but if just right, they would live into their thousands.
It was like an artifical limit placed on the entire population to keep behemoths like Typhon, Bahamut, and my inevitable reincarnation from existing.
...A limit I wasn't sure how I'd overcome. Had I been the one to possess Bahamut's body, I would have died in days. That body's healing factor never would have been able to keep up.
But such was the beauty of experiments.
With time, years came and went, and his abnormalities began changing from curses to the blessings they were meant to be.
Though, it took time.
Likely thanks to Bahamut's body struggling to grow with how much his soul was boiling his insides, his sleeps took countless times longer to reach than his peers. A sleep that should have happened at age 40, happened at almost 180, and the one he should have had around 180 he didn't have till nearly a thousand years old.
But as more locks were undone and a more substantial and solid mana core was formed, his body's growth became exponential.
In a handful of years, he went from half the height of those his age to a few heads taller as he always should have been, and at last, the monster I created was coming to fruition.
...Though even with the regeneration he had then, the scars that had been etched into him by then were all too deep to heal.. whether the gashes and fractures in his hide, or the trauma carved from eons of fighting for his life.
Among the dragons, he was an outcast, and among the humans, he was a monster.
But perhaps that part of him was what drew me in.
Despite the main portion of the experiment being concluded, and the time for the next experiment to begin finally arriving, I was hesitant. Though my visions through time told me I needed to stay firm, as I watched him venture to Siratha, the land of the elves, I felt pause... -Why does a part of me want to speak with him...-
Looking a thousand years into the future, nothing was different. The best results with Hera would come soon if I ignored him and moved on...
But my hesitance made Delphi's words echo...
'Don't take risks you mustn't.' I needed to trust myself.
-Maybe.. this is a more important decision than I thought...- But there was only one way to truly verify it...
-Maybe.. it's finally time I look all the way down the tunnel...- Maybe it was time to finally choose the distant fate I would aim for...
...Time I burned all the divinity I had accumulated to look over the horizon.
It was risky to look that far ahead. Even my mind struggled to contain the knowledge if I pulled on the thread of time that hard.
But something in my gut told me I needed to.. so grasping the culmination of my life's time, the wad of divinity so immense I could grasp the timeline of the entire planet, I pulled the threads of time weaving my own body as hard as I could.
1,000, 10,000, 30,000...
The years spread from me in a blur—the world blending and morphing with the layered infinite. Around me I saw gold, ash, floods, and magma... I saw disaster, prosperity, cataclysm, and watched the infinite ends where I was erased by a being beyond my grasp.
I saw everything... I looked upon every possible future, only stopping on timelines where my existence was erased...
But death was the only destination I could find...
50,000, 60,000, 70,000...
With every continuous tug, my mind split further.. my soul frayed and splintered.
But at the end of it all... At my final limit...
I finally saw it...
86,361 years into the future, I saw the hatching of myself on hundreds of separate, isolated timelines, and upon one final push, watched the deaths of every. single. one...
Not only was my mind at its limit.. there was no timeline I could peer further down...
It was the final.. most distant end to my soul's existence... There was no future I could look farther down...
At least.. that was how it seemed...
Among the infinite web of death and despair.. there was one future where I managed to come back from the grasp of death... One reality where my soul didn't entirely scatter...
Tracing that distant future back to the present, I found that I had to thread a nearly infinite number of needles, some so small it should have been impossible to pass through.
But that day, rather than dwelling on the futility, I shed my free will entirely and carved the path I needed to take into the deepest reaches of my being.
With the splitting and fraying of my soul from looking so far ahead, I had burnt so much of my strength that I had no other choice but to follow that infinitely fruitless path...
Every decision.. every action.. and every breath had to be made meticulously.
But regardless, I continued. I tricked myself into befriending Bahamut, nurtured him through his years and nudged him in the direction of that future regardless of my hatred for the decision. I put Hera into an unsuitable body regardless of my ability to change that.. and sacrificed my mortal body to clear away the monstrosities of the hive just to let in an alien race that would certainly destroy everything Delphi had built...
I had to give up everything...
Going against her words.. I had to risk it all...
Working with a foreign species that only wished to milk Delphi like a parasite even worse than Jormungandr, I had to create countless artifacts that would allow me to grow and survive in the distant future, then scatter them around the world and plant the seeds for them to be in the right place at the right time...
But it all had to fall into place...
I spoke with my brother, tricking him with a different plan.. carved false legends into the mythology of the world.. and left Bahamut to be betrayed by the Aesir.
I took the hands of devil spawn.. I took hold of the lives of angels of another world...
I turned the universe into my chess board.. and played it like a machine...
It was an act that couldn't bend.. warp.. or break...
One misstep, and everything would crumble... One misstep, and I'd have to give in to the futility of reaching the future I wished to find...
But I trekked.
Every step I made was firm.. not confident or arrogant, but simply sure and mechanical. My emotions, as if maintained out of simple necessity, were dulled purposefully.. and my judgement was skewed similarly.
Free will wasn't even considered.
But then, the final stretch finally came... Having Dagr sacrifice his life to destroy the Acardi mothership at a precise time on a precise day.. I left Delphi.
It was time to retrieve the soul that would become the new foundation of my being... The final step before disconnecting my consciousness, and letting fate take the wheel...
But.. it wasn't an easy task...
Travelling through the void for what felt like an endless eternity, following a single thread through that infinite emptiness exactly as I knew I needed to do... I reached a different place... A world with no presence inside the void...
A world almost entirely devoid of mana...
From that point.. I waited.. and waited...
I didn't know what to expect.. while peering into the future, the time I was merely in my soul form, I couldn't see.. rather only feel...
But then.. it happened.
*KREEEE-* After an eon of silence.. that world.. so empty and devoid of mana.. tore a hole in the fabric of space...
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