The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 665 – Calamity affinity (6)

The colourful portal swirling around Ishkuria’s arm wobbled, her body shaking in unconcealed agony. The whole room appeared to tremble with her, a few books falling from the shelves as the goddess gripped her desk hard enough with her remaining hand to split the jade-coloured wood in half.

“Lady Ishkuria?! What the fuck is this?!” Percy cursed, those choice words finding their way out after all.

The titaness wasn’t paying him any attention. She stubbornly clung to whatever it was she was holding, her beautiful face paling as her smooth forehead creased.

Violent gales of wind and thick bolts of lightning spilled out of the vortex, carving curved or zigzagging lines across the walls and ceiling of the study. Percy was sure that his host’s body would turn into a pile of minced meat or get incinerated if the blasts of divine magic so much as touched him, though Ishkuria thankfully retained enough control over her mana to prevent that from happening.

Percy and his companions watched in horror as the glossy brown hair on the deity’s scalp greyed and the feathers on her wings fell off one after the other. Permanent-looking wrinkles appeared on her skin as her body visibly aged – something that Percy hadn’t known was even possible for a god to experience.

The energy gushing out of her internal world intensified, accompanied by bursts of booming thunder that nearly ruptured Kassorith’s eardrums.

A few seconds later, Percy heard something rip.

It felt like somebody had torn a page out of a book, but magnified a thousandfold. The sound was still almost muted when compared to the cacophony of noise that had rattled the whole building up to that point, yet Percy could tell that whatever Ishkuria had just done was of great significance.

The titaness finally pulled her shaky hand out of the closing portal, holding something tightly in her grasp. Indigo tendrils of electricity and miniature cyclones tried to escape through the gaps between her fingers, but they could only flail for a few centimetres around her hand as something appeared to anchor them to the centre of her palm.

With a wave of her free hand, Ishkuria caused a small object to shoot out of the pile of books on the floor, landing on what remained of her desk. After rolling a couple of times atop the broken wood, a treasure chest came to a halt between Kassorith and the titaness, seemingly fashioned out of the same material as everything else inside the World Tree sapling.

Ishkuria’s feathers – all of them: those that had already fallen off her back, the ones that had somehow survived her insanity, and even the new feathers that were currently growing on her wings – flew above the desk, landing softly in a pile tall enough to easily bury the chest.

The goddess did something, and the brown feathers lit up in various different colours, melting into a series of glowing lines that snaked their way onto the container. The substance hugged the treasure chest tightly, the lines interlocking to form intricate symbols of a runecrafting language that Percy didn’t recognize, before fading into the object.

Ishkuria placed whatever it was that she had ripped out of her internal world into the enchanted chest, closing it with a swift motion. Finally, she completed the process by locking the box with a jade key that she had pulled out of seemingly nowhere.

Examining her handiwork for a few seconds, she didn’t seem satisfied with her arrangements. She waited for her feathers to grow back a second time, applying yet another layer of enchantments to ensure that the treasure chest remained sealed.

Percy was too shocked to speak. He merely stared at the titaness in disbelief, soon realizing that her aged body wasn’t going to fix itself anytime soon.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Ishkuria said, her voice tired and raspy. “The damage is not permanent. My body and the hole in my internal world should both recover in a few thousand years at the latest. A drop in the ocean for one as long-lived as me.”

“A few thousand years…” Percy muttered, the weight of the deity’s words hitting him like a battering ram.

His grandfather – no. All of House Avalon – hadn’t even been around for that long. Percy obviously understood that Ishkuria was much older than that, but it still seemed like a long time to cripple herself for – and all of this on a whim.

“Why the hell would you do that?! I didn’t agree to your request! I wasn’t going to! I…”

Percy’s voice trailed off as he realized that it didn’t really matter. Ishkuria was clearly insane, but she wasn’t stupid. She must’ve known that he’d been about to decline. He’d managed to get enough of the words out before she did whatever she’d done, and his response had been obvious enough even before then.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

She’d done this on purpose.

“Like I said…” The now-old lady sitting across from Kassorith smiled weakly, though her tired pupils burned with an intensity that didn’t match her new appearance at all. “I won’t force you to choose anything. However, I hope that you understand how much of a pity it would be to pick a rare affinity for your new core and let my sacrifice be in vain.”

She pushed the jade box closer to Kassorith.

Percy sighed. “What even is this?”

The titaness shrugged. “It’s a carefully selected piece of my internal world. It would have dissipated already if I hadn’t stabilized it with a prototype of my Decree. It works a bit like the flowerbed that you have used earlier, but it’s flawed in a number of ways.”

“Flawed how?”

“Once you open the box, everyone in its vicinity will be able to briefly experience the storm affinity. It won’t give you a choice, it will only work once, and I doubt that the illusion will last for more than a minute or two. Even if you don’t use it, the fragment will probably fade away in a few centuries – long before my internal world recovers.”

“So, it’s basically a small part of the functionality that you want to eventually install into the Decree?” Percy asked.

“More or less. It’s the best version that I can currently produce. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but even the common elements simulated by my flowerbed are imperfect, and the problem is only compounded for composite affinities. Even after I upgrade my Decree, I don’t expect it to simulate calamity mana types very well. The fragment inside the box is even worse than that. Do not attempt to model your storm element according to it, as it will only mislead you. The best way to use the box is to try to figure out the storm affinity on your own for a century or two, and only open the box to gain some insight in case you hit a wall.”

“I still haven’t agreed to your request,” Percy reminded her. “You’ve just mutilated yourself for nothing.”

Ishkuria chuckled. “It’s called a gamble. From where I sit, the odds of getting my way are slightly higher now than if I hadn’t done this. Besides, whether or not you had agreed, words are cheap. I’ll only recoup my investment when you show me a storm spell. If you don’t, so be it. Sitting on my ass all day, trying and failing to comprehend the life concepts oozing out of a broken Source is hardly a more productive use of my time.”

“You’re nuts. All of you gods are,” Percy spat, but that only caused the ancient Inimit’s grin to deepen.

“Before I send you back, I want you to have two more things,” the titaness said, scanning the pile of scattered books in search of something else.

Eventually, she pulled out another box, not too dissimilar from the first. She opened this one without a key, showing Percy that it didn’t contain anything dangerous or sensitive, and that it wasn’t enchanted.

She went as far as to scratch its base with her fingernails to carve three deep grooves into the material, probably to ensure that Percy didn’t accidentally mix the boxes and open the wrong one later.

“What are these?” he asked, examining what appeared to be a couple dozen tea bags, a bright, green powder glowing inside them.

“They’re exactly what they look like: concentrated extract of first-generation leaves. I would have treated you to some tea at the start of this meeting, but it has only just occurred to me that those from weaker factions can’t easily get their hands on the leaves. Am I right to assume that you were planning to claim some from the tournament?”

Percy nodded, his host’s mouth drying.

“They work just like the leaves themselves,” Ishkuria explained. “Boil a teabag in water for ten minutes, and make sure you drink all of it. Only the first portion will triple your lifespan, it’ll upgrade the effect of a second-generation leaf but not stack with it, and you can’t have multiple people sharing a single portion. The teabags will last for a few thousand years, so you don’t have to use them immediately.”

“Lady Ishkuria…” Percy gritted his borrowed gums. Speaking his next words felt like stabbing himself in the heart, but it had to be done. “I can’t accept this. For the umpteenth time, I haven’t agreed to your request, nor am I going to.”

“Then don’t,” the goddess said, pushing both chests even closer to Kassorith. “Either way, this is a gift. If you do decide to help me, we can’t have you dying of old age right before you succeed, and if you don’t, you can just treat this as compensation for being forced into this meeting. I would have pulled some strings to bypass the tournament’s rules and get you a bunch of free-type Decrees, but the alliance is a lot stricter about those. However, if you fulfil my request, I’ll do whatever is necessary to get you a form of our ancestral Decree.”

Percy’s borrowed eyes widened. “You can do that?”

“It won’t be easy,” Ishkuria admitted. “It was only cast once, affecting the bodies of a group of mortal Inimits who had been alive at the time. Afterwards, it was passed from parent to child until it spread to everyone else.”

“Doesn’t sound like you can give that to an outsider,” Percy pointed out.

“Not me. The titan who created it is a friend of mine, however, and he owes me a favour. I can get him to do it again, and we can probably modify it to affect your scales or any other body part you want.”

“I’ll consider it,” Percy said with a sigh.

Crazy or not, Ishkuria had already given him a lot of priceless things for free: an opportunity to greatly accelerate his mastery of the storm element, several rewards’ worth of first-generation leaves, and a chance to obtain another powerful Decree that he had no idea how else to get his hands on. At least, it didn’t sound like one that he could steal merely by possessing an Inimit.

However, Percy was going to be at odds with the Void Hand after Lanthaniel’s ruse was uncovered, so arranging another meeting with Ishkuria wouldn’t be easy – let alone bringing his main body to Tanarill to receive his prize.

For now, he could do nothing but nod and tentatively accept the terms she had forced on him.

“It’s all I ask,” the titaness said, sounding pleased.

Another portal opened right where Percy had entered the room from, a familiar-looking forest visible on the other side. Just before he slithered through it to reach the teleportation platform, Ishkuria tossed him the third and final object that she had promised him: a round piece of jade-coloured wood with two of her actual feathers sticking out of its edge. Both sides of the vibrant coin depicted the face of the titaness, seemingly carved into the material by her own nails.

“If you ever get in trouble with anyone in the alliance, show them this,” she said as the portal closed behind him.