READ WEBNOVEL Chapter 365 - A Choice Is Made
Eric had no words for what he was experiencing, a gestalt of fury, exultation, and the transcendent glory of truly becoming one with the elements of his soul.
“So this is what it feels like to become a god,” he couldn’t help thinking to himself as he raced through the stars by his mother’s side, a fiery phoenix comprised of the furious fusion in the cores of countless stars and the bitter chill of the absolute depths of space.
He flew on wings of Wrath and righteous vengeance, and wherever he and his mother appeared, they did so as twin Phoenix autarches judging all before them, cleaving true to the bounds of sacred oaths, summoned where their Dominion held sway.
Before every world that had ever surrendered a gilded fey crown, they appeared. And every world that had embraced the sacred mercantile trust of the Blue.
Every world where ancient trusts had been shattered was an agony crying out within Eric’s galactic soul as he and his mother raced through the heavens in clouds of fiery gold, Eric howling in the astral ether as he embraced his Fiery Wrath and consigned countless dreadnoughts and battleships to the fiery reaches of oblivion where they would eternally howl their frigid despair.
Only occasionally did Eric receive flashes of insight and ego from the countless billions gazing on in breathless awe from battered worlds below when entire armadas were frozen to bitter cold ice before erupting in transcendent flame.
Eric could sense their desperate cheers and adulation so piercingly well, his own daring transcendence in realms of Psychic dream having gifted him with an exquisitely sensitive mind, where sometimes the memories of others became his own. Perilous, sacred, and profound. It gave him both battlefield awareness and a vulnerability, because unlike his lastborn beautiful daughter, he had no natural Psionic resistance. As a mortal, his Sylvan blood had been far too strong for that.
Yet his mother’s laughter resonating in the countless quantuum fluctuations of all the forces and fields around them made it clear that Eric never needed to worry about such vulnerabilities, as they both perched upon Gold’s glorious cusp, embracing the darkest secret of the galactic cluster.
That it was upon the ashes of countless billions that new Golds were forged and would ascend.
And ascend Eric did, howling with revelations and darkest mirth by his mother’s side. Becoming ONE with the fused platonic ideals of higher order concepts that were, in fact, his dao. The core of his being.
For he WAS the Phoenix Reborn. Fire’s Wrath eternally blazing forth from Frigid Dominion and sentience’s calculating control. Forever on the knife’s edge of transcendence, where the bridge between high order evolutions was the playground for sapience itself.
It was a bridge he sensed his mother would glory in embracing for a million years, laughing with fiery mirth as righteous vindication and the glory of salvation became heeding the call for darkest vengeance.
Thirteen Sylvan worlds saved and Eric could taste the cusp of his own ascension even as Earth groaned and shook as the wild fires of a centuries-long ascension was channeled into a pair who would catapult themselves to their primal ideal.
Eric was barely aware of his own planet’s dying groans as his mother catapulted them upon vengeance’s crimson path, the pair’s triumph turning to bitter fury as they unleashed their furious wrath upon numerous goblinoid planets, nearly as lush and fecund as their Sylvan counterparts.
Planets that were doomed to frozen hellfire as Eric and his mother squeezed TIGHT the bubbling magma cores within their hearts as entire cities were frozen to lifeless perfection, the handful of desperate screams and pleas for mercy howled by the handful of mothers and sages able to endure for even a few awful seconds were always met by the same pitiless decree of the Dark Queen herself.
“Thrice trust was given, and thrice betrayed!
So the bitter road of ashes and ruin was paved.
One betrayal and your body freezes from the whole.
Twice betrayed you forfeit your mind, blank as the winter snow.
And thrice betrayed spells the fiery damnation of your eternal soul!”
The air rang with pitiless cackles as countless dying screams became the roar of planetary cores erupting, transforming once nation-wide megalopolises to plains of frozen ice soon to be overrun by seas of magma as entire worlds were brought to a primal state a billion years past, all life wiped clean upon what had been lush green worlds, a single act of vengeance past.
Yet as horrific as mortal Eric might have found the billions he gleefully slaughtered by his mother’s side, the mortal shell that had once encased his fiery soul had long since ceased its relevance as Eric embraced a feat even his interface was forced to acknowledge with a shock so profound the System itself seemed to pause, as a mortal white-tier Classer dared to ascend straight to Gold.
The primal being encompassing so fiercely the higher order concepts now flooding his soul was so utterly beyond his mortal shell that there was no comparison, merely the savage sweet glory of growth and ascension, feeling his fiery phoenix wings blossoming just as brightly as his mother’s as the pair gazed at the impossibly brilliant and vast shimmering prisms of hyper dimensional realities and transcendent realms just a single flap of their glorious wings away. So much more than the flat, essence-baron plain of existence they had both been trapped on. One for well over 2000 years. The other for twenty.
Yet they both yearned desperately to be free, to ride the heavenly ethereal currents for adventure and glory beyond all mortal dreams.
A single fiery cry that would have crumbled the shell of the world they roosted upon as Aurelia crowed her approval, if Eric hadn’t buffered the blow, allowing it to ruffle his feathers instead.
You have done well, my son. Come, it is time for us to ascend in full. The multiverse beckons. Our glorious adventure has just begun!
The young infant phoenix gave a mournful cry, then slowly shook his fiery head, unwilling to leave his fragile perch.
His mother tilted her head in confusion. “Why do you not ascend?”
The smaller phoenix wilted. “Because the minute I leave... our perch will crumble. Just ashes in the cosmic wind.”
Aurelia blinked one massive eye containing the birth and death of stars. “Why does this bother you?”
“Elonia is still on that world! Along with all my friends.”
“One child among hundreds I have given birth to. One child among millions with ties of blood to my womb that you have SAVED upon a dozen worlds!”
“True.” The younger phoenix bowed his head with zero animosity, yet his talons still held tightly to his crumbling roost, all that was keeping it from imploding on itself in a final glorious ascension that would send Eric soaring just as high as his mother. He then gazed down fondly at his fragile perch. “But I would save it still.”
His mother gazed at him for long, sorrowful moments before solemnly bowing her head. “So be it.”
Without another word, she flew off with a cosmic cry that sent Eric crumpling to his knees as his entire world shook and trembled, reaching out with the blazing remnants of his soul to hold TIGHT to his fragile, beautiful world of forests and fields, lakes and ocean, beauty and corruption, and a thousand million wonders and a thousand millions souls that were far too precious to lose.
Not for any price.
Not even when the monstrous power of an ascending Gold Phoenix a single kiss from exploring all the secrets of the multiverse flooded into a violently shaking world undergoing boiling seas, erupting volcanoes and earthquakes... before settling down as the disaster that had an entire world’s population panicking miraculously abated to countless sobs of gratitude and fervent prayers that Eric shuddered to feel ringing through his soul nearly as loudly as the System messages shuddering through him as his psyche faded from the impossibility of transcendence to the fragility of his still mortal frame.
Eric’s aching cry for the miracle he had lost was a pain that transcended any loss he could have ever conceived of... before, thankfully, his mortal mind lost all clear recollection of the pristine divine glory that had been his for a single eternal eyeblink and he slipped into the dark seas of oblivion, a slumber so deep it kissed death’s precipice, for all that his chest continued to rise and fall.