Orphan At The Edge Of The World - 266 The Magician 24

The old woman sniffed disdainfully. “Look behind you, fool. If I knew you were this soft and unprepared, I’d have fleeced you first and then showed you a little kindness.”

Not taking his eyes off her, he used spirit sight to note three figures that were riddled with holes. Moments after they fell, the would be attackers evaporated. Raising her head and sneering at him for all she was worth, she picked up a few items they had left behind in the large but gently sloping pit they were standing in.

“I and a friend are acausal. All you would have done is send me to my backup vessel and p*ss off this guy’s mentor. And thank you, by the way.” Orison said.

A shower of light descended around her and she was dressed in the clothes the young mage had given her. “No need for threats. I’m well aware that you are less dangerous in your current pitiful state than what would happen if your soul was imperiled…

“Refusing the chess board’s request for your friend’s conduit saved us all. We may have agreed to shelter and share our remaining strength to survive but that thing had no intentions of letting us go. Helping a weak little child survive some idiot pawns was the least I could do.”

More to himself than her, Orison said, “Should I not have reclaimed the resources those pieces ran off with? I may have accidentally hurt or endangered people that might not have deserved it.”

She laughed. “Oh you sweet thing. If you hadn’t, the white king or dark queen would have gobbled you up.”

She waved her hand and a few half transformed chess pieces crumbled to dust in her hands. After that, the woman started looking a little more real than Orison. In reply, the young mage exercised a bit of the key’s power to reclaim others in nearby extra-dimensional spaces the woman apparently couldn’t reach. Once the key ‘ate’ them, some of those pieces’ power of existence trickled down to him, balancing things between them again.

She smiled and said, “You cultivate some strange form of karma manipulation? Perhaps we could exchange a few pointers before I try to find my creator’s soul… Why does this place have so much spirit water but only poisoned and broken qi?”

Orison said, “This is a planar fragment within a splay of realities not associated with cultivation. My insights aren’t related to cultivation or… Dao. Not in any way meaningful enough to exchange.”

Looking through his ‘resources’, Orison picked out one non-sentient pawn that had transformed into a sword that required the foreign essence that cultivators used.

As she took the blade, she chuckled bitterly. “First, you’ll have to show me a way back. Without directions, it could take me… a long time.”

Thinking for a moment, he said, “Do you feel confident enough in formations that you would be willing to try break through ones laid by a Nascent Soul level flood dragon? Otherwise, we’d be trapped there.”

Hope bloomed for a moment and then withered into deeper bitterness on her face. “Before I failed my void tribulation and became a spirit cultivator, it would have been easy enough but after everything…”

“The garden I can take you to has a samsara fruit and I think I can maybe pick up a fruit of rebirth along the way there if my causal orders aren’t too screwed up,” Orison said.

The woman was on the verge of tears. “All of that would be fortune beyond fortune but I have no flesh and blood body to anchor me. Just jumping in any old body won’t… You said you have a vessel there?

“It galls me a great deal and I’d have to learn much all over again but a rebirth fruit would allow me to match the body to the soul for the most part. I don’t know how being male would affect my teachings but I won’t quibble over the food at a banquet when I’m starving.”

It was Orison’s turn to look bitter. “It’s a woman’s body. It has some vestiges of dragon and fey, er, yaoguai bloodlines lingering in it too. So, converting it to a cultivator body wouldn’t be THAT difficult.”

She said, “Since a rebirth fruit will be involved, I’ll refrain from asking personal questions but… What are you wanting from this? A vague promise to look after a sibling and friend I may never meet doesn’t seem equal to the trade.”

Orison nodded. “There’s a man named Arazmus that’s trapped there as well. He can’t come back to this splay of reality because he’ll cease to exist. Help him become a cultivator. He has strong dragon heritage and he’ll be in a great deal of danger by himself.”

Smiling, she said, “I’d play Dao guardian for a complete trash 108 years if your offer is all it seems at face value… How do we get there?”

The young mage said. “First, I have to wait for my friend to finish doing his thing over there. Then, I load you up into my spiritual realm and zip over to my other vessel. I hand over ownership and then return to finish.”

After offering to ‘follow the karma’ alone, Orison added. “That vessel will only become completely real after I go to it. It’s in causal limbo, both real and not. It’s also in a semi ‘no-when’. I only have one chance to go there and I’d like to at least explain what’s going on to him.”

She sighed and said, “I’ll go around and collect as many radiant spirit stones as I can, then. They aren’t very useful to me but they’re worth a good deal to the right cultivator.”

He tossed her the triangular storage device that he’d originally given to Patrick. “Pick up some extra for Arazmus too. That thing’s only going to be good for a couple of weeks where you’re going but that should buy you time to find a better alternative.”

It took a little explaining but she was happy it didn’t take blood to bind. That was one resource that she had very little of. Following lead, he summoned out a couple of small water elementals to go fishing for things in the mud as well. Outside of life crystals, there wasn’t much to find.

Orison vaguely knew that there had been a rescue attempt here once before. He wasn’t sure how it turned out but there were no longer any bodies left to be found. He did manage to release a few trapped souls as he dug out crystal deposits, however.

While he had been busy doing that, the two sentient pawns had moved into his key and became pact shadows. Although it irked him to have lost physical helpers, helping him collect power of existence was more long game useful anyway. What gave him the hardest mixed feelings was when he discovered that his key had drew in and ‘ate’ the rook that carried the positive energy plane rift.

He had no doubts that it would turn out for the best but the key was already stressed to the limits. Whatever the rook had added to its capabilities, Orison would have to wait some time to find out. What was worse, he could feel the key’s intent to take the other rook as well but couldn’t justify it under its own supernatural prerogative to serve its creator.

Looking over what the rook had turned into, the young mage was slightly puzzled. It was a disk with a fat, sloping belly. Since the knight seemed to be knowledgeable of the pieces, he woke it up to explain. It was currently in a state of self repair and was some kind of transportation that had the ability to shrink and expand.

Orison wanted to write it off as not overly useful to him for long but some ideas dawned on him. Those ideas would have to wait until it was repaired or the key was no longer bound up. If the ‘flying saucer’ had decent deep space travel possibilities, then it was far from something he should be willing to easily discard. Not to mention, the knight in streamline armor was originally ‘salvaged’ by it when it was operational.

By the time that Daniel had finished growing to somewhere around fourteen, he opened his eyes. “Anything you want my help with before I go?”

After all that had happened, the young mage almost didn’t know what to make of the terse question.

“Actually, could you watch over MY body for a little bit? I need to escort this gracious lady to a place. I don’t plan on being gone long,” Orison said.

Daniel nodded and said, “I have to be back after fourty-three astral hours. I wondered why master started keeping me on a strict time table. Now I know why. I should have been tier five a long time ago.”

A little worried, Orison said, “When you say ‘master’ are you a student or a servant?”

The unassuming man shrugged. “Both is about right. If you’re worried about me, don’t be. It’s a mostly voluntary arrangement… Master’s going to be in a good mood when I return too. She always is after I fetch one of her spiritual echoes.”

Stunned, Orison slipped out, “Lily’s your master?”

Looking confused, he said, “No. I think I’ve hear my master bring up the name a few times.”

It was the young mage’s turn to be confused but the lady cultivator was growing impatient. With apologies, Orison excused himself to handle business. It wasn’t overly complicated. He was disappointed to discover that Arazmus wasn’t able to be awakened, still in the throws of a perpetually stalled spiritual tug-of-war with an underworld that wanted to reclaim him and a cultivator world anchoring him in place.

Due to logistics, Mei Ling couldn’t offer him a cut of the spoils she intended to claim but she promised to treat Arazmus well. The oaths were fair and she was understanding about possible misconceptions that Arazmus might have when he awoke despite the vessel conforming to Mei Ling’s aesthetics. With all meaningful words shared, because of her low energy, Orison had to quickly vacate.

Returning to his own body, the young mage consulted Daniel on a few things before the man went about his own business. The brusqueness the unassuming man consistently displayed had little to do with ungratefulness. He was simply always on a stop watch.

With an eye on his own time, Orison had Daniel drop him off back where he’d been abducted from. After finding out where the trail of instructions would lead him, the young mage balked hard at his friend’s and Lily’s intentions. There was no way he would go to a nexus point to get paired up with Gravat, new and improved or not.

He didn’t really have any intentions of getting paired up with anybody but he didn’t want to go around by himself either. Thinking about the most useful but hassle free individual that would most likely still be available to abduct, he could only think of one person. Ready to burn the last bit of charge the knight had at any given moment, he went to see if he could get Edos.

It became obvious that wasn’t an option pretty quickly. He was greeted by a beam shot from a wailing man statue and the dragon blooded centipede looking over the edge wasn’t sporting any damage on its head. When Orison attempted to use force after reason didn’t work, the world instantly kicked him out. He found out the hard way that the world the undead empire was on, didn’t welcome outsiders that were tier four.

���Damn, I forgot that last time I blackmailed the world will into leaving me alone,” he said disgruntled.

With no orienting directional points to draw from for dimensional travel, he went to the plane where he’d ran into Jarvis. The reincarnations of fellow Emerald Island outpost veterans were his goal. After some travel and a few minorly irritating encounters with creatures that posed the current him no difficulties at all, Orison discovered something incredibly disturbing about the ‘branching world’.

All of its reoccurring people were like hollow puppets. Souls merely passed through in one roll or another before moving on as a branch died off to be reabsorbed. Wherever Hefty and Mellow were, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack to find them. It did give him an idea, though.

He skipped through to a branch where a relatively young Jarvis, hollow soul unoccupied, was getting ready to expire. Exercising as much key power as he could without risking the door opening again, he drew other alternate Jarvis’ the world wasn’t clinging to that tightly. He got five before the plane kicked him out.

Immediately, the planar will entered into a tug-of-war session with him and the key started whining. Reading its maker’s need and understanding its own, it released a life crystal into Jarvis’ soul shell. The person before Orison underwent a metamorphosis that severed it from the Branching World as they floated over to the third material plane of the three that were tied together.

As soon as they arrived, Orison could see that the possessed Jarvis was going to die. There was too much strain and shock. Taking a rebirth fruit he’d picked up from dropping off Mei Ling, he fed it to the man.

The person laying before Orison several hours later was familiar yet not. There were tell-tell signs of Rogers family lineage. But it was packed into a body that was meant for killing, not getting picked for professional modeling or acting in superhero movies.

Backing up to a relative safe distance, Orison said, “What is the name of the entity I’m speaking to?”

The man sat up and locked dark gray, almost black eyes with him. “Seriously? Did you bring me from the land of the dead with a Ouija board? Alright, alright. Please lower the-Cane? Walking stick?-down. It’s Dustin. I know we didn’t spend that much time together but… damn, that stings.”

The young mage had to rack his memories to dredge up what he knew about that particular Rogers family member. It had been buried deep and nearly forgotten entirely.

Orison sat down on the ground and pondered. “There’s no confusion at all? There’s five versions of Jarvis that should be floating around in there.”

Dustin took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a few minutes. “I know a great deal more than I used to but no… Ha! Would you look at that!?”

The man made a gesture and a small symbol lit up in the air before a spurt of fire flew about three feet away and died. Orison would have dismissed the bit of flashy magic but it didn’t run off of the essence that the young mage was intimately familiar with. It was something older and less tame. It stirred something older and less tame within himself as well.

“What kind of magic was that?” the young mage asked, more than a little curious.

Dustin said, “I, uh, deep magic. Some call it eldritch magic, I think.”

With a fanatic gleam in his eyes, Orison asked, “Are there prerequisites for using it?”

The Rogers man stood up and said, “Yeah. Something called eldritch blood. Thing is, I don’t think its actually blood. Not blood as I know it anyway… Mind helping me with this… set of leathers? When you regrew me like a clone, they don’t fit right. They’re kind of tight in the wrong places.”

Orison absentmindedly hit his outfit with a mend and a presto. “Lets get an inn room for a few days. We have some catching up to do and you’ve definitely got some things to show me. I wonder why I never saw the original Jarvis do that eldritch magic stuff.”

As they walked, Dustin explained what little he knew about it. It was dangerous to over use it in ways typical magic wasn’t. It didn’t make a person tired so much as damaged and twisted them. His best guess was that Jarvis had overused it a few too many times and decided it wasn’t worth the risk to use it anymore at all.

***

Over the next few days, Dustin spent time recovering up to full snuff. He balanced his time between light practice, teaching Orison the foundation of eldritch magic and relaxing in the inn. He took the news of his world ceasing to exist fairly well. Knowing that some of his family had made it under someone’s protection and that souls moved on to other things helped.

Dustin didn’t exactly know what happened to himself but he knew that Garret was under Bab’s watch. She had pulled herself back from some underworld and hit the divide between mid and high dimensions. So, the Rogers man was assured that one of his sons was still just that.

It wasn’t that he cared about Gurrut less. THAT son of his consciously decided to live a simpler life and Dustin respected that. He never really got to know Gurrut outside of what Garret and Babs had told him but he had grieved and moved on from that personal loss quite some years before his memory hit a dark wall.

“I’m surprised that you never had more children. I was under the impression you were somewhat of a womanizer,” Orison said after a tutoring session.

Dustin replied dryly, “You’d be surprise how much of my reputation was my sister’s doing. Gurrut’s mother, I never would have met her if it hadn’t been for a bet my sister lost using my safety as the collateral. If the drinks are on you, I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. Tonight, I think you’re ready to have your eldritch blood kindled. Honestly, it’s like I’m helping you remember the magic rather than teaching you.”

The young mage smiled. “It feels like that.”

The ritual was fairly simple. Aside from some protective sigil work, Dustin pushed a touch of eldritch source essence into Orison. If there was something for it to latch to, it would catalyze. As long as the person being kindled had some basic knowledge on how to direct and store it, then all was well. The real danger came in the years that followed.

What neither of them expected was that the kindling was the catalyst for something else as well. The moment Dustin’s eldritch source essence touched the invisible spiritual bloodline within Orison, they were ripped away from the reality they were in. It wasn’t a pleasant experience.