Sacrifice Mage

Chapter 253 (B3: 80): Solar Demiurge

The change was instantaneous. I was mesmerized. Where the facsimile of the sun my Icon normally looked like was a magic, somewhat holographic construct with those silvery spikes and swirling script on the surface, it now looked like an actual sun. A perfect replica, burning and brilliant and almost impossible to look at. Like everything else, the Weave didn’t give me any information about it. Whatever I could do, whatever I was capable of, whatever could do, were all things I’d need to explore and determine on my own. Again. Just like with everything else.

My Icon was still too intense. I was burning up, my skin gaining an instant tan. I was pretty sure I’d be catching fire in moments if I didn’t do something soon.

As such, the first thing I needed to do now that it had manifested in truth was figuring if and how I could control it. I might have captured the divine energy within the bounds of my Icon, but that just meant my Icon was supercharged with incredible potential now, and I needed to figure out how to turn it on and off. Could I moderate it? Could I make it manifest anytime I wanted?

A lot of those were things I’d only find out later by experimenting with the thing, if I even could do so. After all, this was incredibly powerful.

I swallowed. Sending out Sacrifice threads had no effect. It looked like Sacrifice wasn’t an option. Hmm. A few separate attempts revealed it wasn’t a matter of belonging, especially since even Overclaim failed to even scratch its surface. Rather, my Icon just wasn’t something that be Sacrificed, almost like it was a Weave property like my Attributes and whatnot.

That made me shift my directions a little. I could feel the connection of mana between my Icon and me. It was that connection I needed to solidify. Highlight once again helped in “seeing” that line of mana, of magical potential.

I gasped when I turned on Highlight, forced to look away because of the glare of the brightness. The link was terribly potent, burning through my eyes and stabbing into my soul. If I turned to look at the Icon itself, the true sun that I had manifested, I was vaporizing my retinas at the sheer magical engine pumping out pure power in the air.

“Ross!” Hamsik shouted. “Get it under control!”

Ah, right. Shit. The radiance of my new Icon was almost hurting me. What kind of effect would it have on Sacrseekers and Scarthralls?

My heart pounded with even more urgency than before. Ring Four was filled with Scarthralls. People who would turn to ash under the effect of this eradicating light, one that seemed even more intense than when the divinity was blasting out its power.

I took a deep breath. When I sent out Sacrifice again, I wasn’t targeting my Icon any longer.

Instead, I focused on that burning link between me and the Icon.

Thankfully, it disappeared in motes of mana.

I wasn’t sure about the thirty percent, but when the link reforged at the connection, I could finally a sense of greater control. The line of mana extending from me to the Icon and back again was now a constant motion thing, pulses of mana traveling between us like vehicles on a busy street.

The feeling of the mana line between the Icon and me seemed expanded to encompass the Icon as well. I gained control. I gained the ability to influence it with my will. It felt like a thousand tiny ants running out of my fingers to rework the Icon as I directed. All it took was just a tiny bit of focus to finally start lowering the intensity of my Icon.

I wanted to grin, but a part of me was still anxious about the Icon’s effect on Ring Four. When the heat and glare had reduced to a level where my retinas weren’t trying to rip out of my eyeballs, I finally felt my breathing return to a somewhat relaxed rate.

But first, the damage.

“Mage Moreland,” Wargrog said with no small amount of wonder. “You… tamed it. You tamed .”

I swallowed. He was right. I had taken control of what was essentially a divine manifestation, a remnant of the power of the god that the Ascendants had locked within a Nether Vein.

“But it’s not ,” I said. It wouldn’t be gone. Even if I had diminished the sheer output of my Icon, I found I couldn’t banish it completely like I could do with my Aspects and so on. Eternity. There was no way to get rid of it permanently. Even the Ascendants had only been able to lock it down for a millennium. “I can keep it contained, though.”

Even as I said it, I felt a mite unsure. The connection between my Icon and me was a continuously running thing. I was worried about slips in concentration. Would focusing on something else make my Icon go haywire?

Would the divinity merged with my Icon turn blinding and searing if I stopped concentrating on it for a bit?

I found out the easy way by experimenting with it as I went down to street level. No. The control was strong. Just as the Sacrifice reward had promised. Even if I wasn’t putting one hundred percent on it—or even ten percent of my thoughts—I didn’t lose control of my Icon.

Which was good because I was already wincing at the destruction that the unleashed divinity and my Icon had wrought.

Hamsik’s skin was terribly red and splotchy, like he had suffered an extreme case of sunburn. He was luckily healing up very rapidly. That said, he was still shading his eyes a little bit when he looked at me.

Not at my Icon. At .

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You’re too bright,” he said simply.

I blinked. Then looked down at myself to see that he was right. I was glowing way too much.

It took a long while for me to realize that there was just energy that I’d been channelling and controlling and outputting for the last few hours, I had long since lost track of when I had turned into a beacon of power. Another conscious effort of will made me feel a little less like a… well, like a star. I could feel my spinning mana cores slowing down a bit.

Nearby, the Vaunted from Claderov had finally been shackled. Metaphorically, speaking. In the midst of me claiming the divinity and merging it to complete my Icon, Wargrog had trapped her in the dark box.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

She wasn’t going to cause any further mayhem anytime soon. Honestly, she was lucky she was getting such civilized treatment.

We decided to survey the damage of everything. My biggest fears had been about the Scarthralls, but it looked like most of them had taken shelter against the terrible light as soon as it had sprung up.

Pits, even most regular people had done their best to get out of the gaze of that burning star of a god’s remnant. The healers had worked in the shade and Wargrog himself had been terribly injured. I had contained that power for now, but this light wasn’t going to go away permanently.

Especially when I looked around and saw the way the Nether Vein’s metal had somehow a good chunk of that power.

“Do you know what’s happening there, Councillor?” I asked. “I know the Nether Vein is intricately linked with this divinity, so it kind of makes sense why it’s turning gold now, instead of raining the same kind of dark that it used to be.”

“But are we with it?” Hamsik said.

The Councillor, who had finally come down after taking some time to survey the surroundings some more, looked at it all rather critically. His eyes were a little unfocused, like he was seeing past the Nether Vein manifestations all around us and thinking about something else.

“I don’t believe we will be able to simply remove the manifestation of the Nether Vein on Ring Four,” he eventually said. “But that might not necessarily be an awful thing.”

I thought about the Paragon and his warning of consequences again. Was this another one then?

“The problem,” Hamsik said. “Is that the walls are glowing. And a quarter of Ring Four residents can’t stand the light.”

I nodded. “That’s my main concern, yes.”

“I do not know a solution off the top of my head,” Wargrog said, shaking his head slowly. At least he didn’t sound callous about it. He recognized that it a problem. The Scarthralls weren’t expendable. We couldn’t just throw them to the wolves because we now had sunlight everywhere. “But the reason I say it’s not a terrible thing is because you could, in theory, turn Ring Four into an extended Preserve…”

I blinked. I had been so focused on mitigating damage, on keeping everyone safe and sound, that I hadn’t thought of applications. Ugh. I was falling into the same old traps again, wasn’t I?

Some things were just going to take some time to overcome.

Once again, I was so focused on everything that had us beleaguered that I was obsessing over just surviving. I was so cautious about protecting others, about the danger of this new power and my new circumstance, that I hadn’t yet thought about its future uses. Uses that could be for the entirety of Ring Four.

Wargrog was right. Natural light would be useful in so many ways, I could already feel my mind getting overwhelmed at the possibilities.

None of which meant the problems were minor enough to ignore.

“Can you…?” Hamsik was asking, though he seemed unable to voice the full question. Maybe because it would have sounded ridiculous.

I had walked over to the nearest chunk of Nether Vein metal. This section had taken over the entirety of the rear of the Sun Cult temple. Like the rest, there were intricate patterns of gold light running through the metal, which was also hot and molten in certain places. I blinked. The metal was reforming. Reshaping into something different from what it was currently. Huh.

“No…” I said after a while. “I can feel my Icon harmonizing with the Nether Vein somehow, but I can’t extend my control onto the Nether Vein through my Icon.” I frowned. “There a link, though. So maybe I could use that.”

Like I had used the link between myself and my Icon. Another Sacrifice, another flash of white mana aimed at something so ethereal that only Highlight could fully see it. This time, I had added Overclaim to the mix, to try and enforce ownership on the connection. Because it was a line of mana too, just like the one I had Sacrificed earlier. It work.

The Sacrifice reward was weirder this time.

“It says I need to work to gain control, basically,” I said.

When the two looked at me quizzically, I read the notification to them as it disappeared.

The Councillor stroked his long beard. He was looking much better than before, his wounds seeming to heal on their own. No doubt he had a powerful Affix or Augmentation that could take care of injuries without too much trouble.

“It certainly makes sense,” Wargrog said. Chains of purplish grey power rattled around his arms, twisting this way and that like tentacles of an octopus. “My Icon took me over a year to master, even after I had managed to manifest it fully. And that mastery included discovering and understanding all the capabilities of my Icon.”

“What your Icon, Councillor?” I asked out of curiosity.

“The Icon of Judging Chains.”

He didn’t explain anything beyond that, despite me clearly presenting a continued front of curiosity. But now wasn’t the time for explanations about all that his Icon was capable of. Instead, I needed to focus on what I could do with mine. I needed to concentrate on both learning to control it and exploring its powers.

Which were clearly linked to the manifestation of the Nether Vein all over Ring Four.

We ended up touring the whole area, visiting other neighbourhoods overseen by other cults. Of course, the Wind Cult and the Sea Cult, our closest neighbours, had popped in to assist earlier. We just had to meet the rest like the Earth and Fire cults. Then there was the Anymphea we needed to brief about everything.

Honestly, I was just glad that we were able to hold a big, communal meeting where we went over everything that had happened and what was next.

“Cultist Favoile,” the youthful leader of the Wind Cult said. “I’m sure those bastards were the ones to kill him too!”

While that was harder to prove, I for one wasn’t going to rule it out.

“So this is our new reality now?” Durica asked. He was looking past me to where my Icon still burned bright, to where even his neighbourhood had been taken over by the Nether Vein’s manifestation. “Will we need to find a way to live with this?”

“Honestly,” Thyrethena, the local Anymphea leader, said. “Zairgon has gone through far more upheaval in a matter of months than any settlement I’ve ever seen.”

I winced. That wasn’t wrong. There was Glonek. Then there was the Blight Swarm. Now this evil plot by the Claderov Vaunted.

“We must adapt,” Wargrog said. “And overcome. I know this is rich of me to say since I don’t even live here, but I am offering the best advice I can.”

“You don’t have to live here, Councillor,” Hamsik said. “You just need someone from here to represent Ring Four in the Council.”

He was looking at me a little too meaningfully. It wasn’t just him either. Several of the Anymphea and the cultists and the general public who had gathered were all staring at me. I blinked. What else was I supposed to be doing? Wasn’t I already representing Ring Four’s best interests to Zairgon Council? Didn’t I already have the ear of at least two Councillors?

“Kalnislaw is correct, Councillor,” Durica said. “How long has it been since Ring Four has had a direct hand in the city it belongs to? How long has it been since we’ve had a Councillor of our own to stand tall in Zairgon’s highest chamber?”

Oh, crap. So was why they were staring at me? This was insane…

Wargrog cleared his throat. “I can’t say yes, obviously, in such circumstances. But at the same time, such circumstances prevent me from saying no outright as well. Rather, what I want to point to is the fact that much of the power for change resides in all your hands now. You are the ones making a difference. I can lend aid where appropriate, but you hold the cards in your hands.”

I cleared my throat. “Instead of focusing on mere titles, if there’s anything we need to be focusing on at the moment, it’s a more meaningful change in and of itself.” My voice grew growly. “And we need to make Claderov pay.”

There was a chorus of resounding agreement to that. People spoke out, cursing Claderov and the situation the Vaunted and her minions had left us in. A lot of them had more questions, even though I had tried to be thorough when I was explaining everything in the beginning of the meeting.

We discussed options going forward, directions we needed to go from this point on. I was kind of winded by how much people were willing to see this as an opportunity. While there had been some damage from the monstrous wraiths, there had been no casualties thankfully.

Really, I just felt proud of how people were willing to embrace something that had essentially been forced upon them as an opportunity. Just like how we had used the corpses of the dead bugs of the Blight Swarm. Turning adversity into progress. That was what I had been doing since the moment I had landed in Ephemeroth.

We were discussing theoretical things like the Nether Vein manifestation also bringing up the potential for finding the special mana stones that Zairgon liked to mine in Ring Four now, while also mining the metal itself, when one of the new initiates of the Sun Cult ran over.

“Cultist Ross!” He—Houlaire, if I was remembering his name right—was hurrying towards me with… I blinked. Was that the plant the Anymphea had gifted me? The one I had been trying to keep alive with the help of Enrico? “Cultist Ross! .”

Since the meeting had broken up into different little discussions, Houlaire’s approach didn’t draw all that many eyes. There were people coming and going all over.

But I didn’t really care about any of that. My eyes were glued to the plant. It had finally flowered. The petals were inky dark, but strangely giving off a sense that it was alive. After all this time, it looked like the Anymphea’s prediction that I’d be able to open it up had finally come true.

It was only when it reached me that I finally saw the real magic of the little flowering plant. Of the Shineseeker, as Ascelkos had called it.

My Icon flared. Solar Demiurge turned molten bright as Houlaire held it up near the orb of concentrated power. A flare curled out to touch the plant, which then embraced the glow of the Icon. The dark petals shone with dots of starlight, and a sweet scent filled up the entire space.

I breathed in deep, relaxing for the first time that day.