-

-

Ch235-Leaving The Nest

-

-

“Can you talk?” Edmund asked.

The question was partially literal in this case since Sylver’s body was currently floating in a large glass vat filled with a glowing blue liquid. A large pipe was sticking out of his left shoulder blade, into which a shade was slowly feeding a paper-thin purple tinted thread.

8 days had passed since Sylver’s and Edmund’s return.

During those 8 days, Sylver introduced his lifelong best friend to his more recent friends. There was a great deal of eating, drinking, and sleeping, followed by even more eating, drinking, and sleeping.

By day 2, Edmund was sick of it.

Sylver wasn’t a person people would describe as “lazy,” but Edmund was a human who had to sleep every night to maintain peak mental acuity, and therefore not just every hour was important to him, but every minute.

The idea of “resting” more than absolutely necessary didn’t sit right with Ed. If Sylver hadn’t looked as exhausted as he did, he was fairly certain Edmund wouldn’t have waited anywhere near as long as he had.

That, and Edmund also needed time to catch up with what had happened during his nap. As he had predicted, history hadn’t remained consistent since he died, Edmund’s accomplishments were diluted, or downright removed, and chronologically shuffled around.

Since Edmund was just one man, his accomplishments created a path, a relatively straight path, and even if he wasn’t mentioned by name, it would be fairly easy to notice that events of great importance occurred in a straight line, one after the other.

Instead, according to the history books, Edmund was often at 2 places at once, and instead of moving in a straight line, he took the sort of path a drunken toddler would have taken.

Something was fucking around with Eira’s history.

Something, or someone, had erased Edmund the [Fire Bird] from history.

But that train of thought was dangerous to pursue, given the gradually increasing pressure Sylver felt being exerted onto his mind.

“Did you find everything you needed?” Sylver asked.

Edmund was dressed in a clean white shirt, with black trousers, and matching black boots. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, as they usually were, and his sword hung neatly over his left shoulder. It was almost as long as he was tall.

If you got rid of the overly large sword, between his neatly combed blond hair, and the way he was standing, he looked like he was a student at a military academy. All he was missing was a book bag.

“I did, Benny was very helpful,” Edmund said, as he walked over to the vat that Sylver was floating inside of.

“So what’s on your mind?” Sylver asked. His voice came from one of the shades standing on top of the vat.

“What’s our next move?” Edmund asked with an optimistic voice.

“Honest answer?” Sylver asked.

“That bad huh…” Edmund said.

Sylver had attempted to find damage on Edmund’s soul, but every single test he could think of came back… inconclusive. Sylver’s tools weren’t precise enough to give him an answer that would let him say Edmund had ever been dead with certainty.

“Do you know the closest thing I have to a “lead?” She’s sitting upstairs, having dinner,” Sylver said, and the shade he was speaking through lifted his hand and pointed it upwards, towards the dining room.

“Your current plan is dependent on a little girl riddled with night terrors, armed with an eyeball that she just barely understands, let alone controls?” Edmund asked.

“I wouldn’t phrase it like that, but yes. Even with all of that, she’s significantly better than what plan B was,” Sylver said, and made the 4 shades standing on top of the glowing vat shrug.

“What’s plan B?” Edmund asked.

“Plan B used to be finding Carr Da’Nerto, and having him reveal that someone from the Ibis sold him one of my grimoires,” Sylver said, as Edmund’s eyes opened a bit as he realized why Sylver spoke about this plan in the past tense.

“Ah… Except now that you know I’ve found our grimoires in dungeons, you no longer believe there’s any point tracking that man down… Do you have a plan C?” Edmund asked.

The shade through which Sylver was speaking gestured with its hand towards the small bookshelf in the corner, and made a small bundle of discolored paper float into Edmund’s hands. Edmund silently flipped through Sylver’s notes and ritual frameworks, and page by page, his eyes got wider and wider.

Meanwhile, the shades finished feeding the string into Sylver’s shoulder blade and were now gently twisting the metal pipe, as they pulled it out. Sylver opened his eyes and turned his head to look at the wound.

The circular hole remained as it was for a while, before a spiderweb of threads appeared inside of it, and forced the wound closed. Sylver touched the stitched tight circle and then checked that he hadn’t sewed his muscles together.

So far, as stupid as the initial idea had been, it seemed to have worked exactly as Sylver intended.

“Eighty thousand…” Edmund mumbled under his breath, as he continued reading through Sylver’s notebook.

“Don’t whisper it. And that was back then, with you to help, the figure is closer to 40, maybe even 35,” Sylver said.

The liquid Sylver was floating inside began to disappear in huge chunks, as he absorbed it into his [Bound Bones] storage.

“Thirty-five thousand lives... Where did you plan to get so many?” Edmund asked, without once looking up from the notes in his hands.

Sylver used [Fog Form] to turn into a formless gas, floated over to his robe, and materialized inside of it.

“I would start with pirates, that will get between 5 to 10 thousand, depending on weather, how spread out they are, and so on. Then bandits, the hard part with those will be physically moving them to Tuli. Don’t know how many I’ll be able to gather, but in the time frame I imagined, that’s another 10 thousand, possibly 15,” Sylver explained, as he adjusted his robe, and brushed his hair out of his face.

“That’s 25 thousand if you’re very lucky. Where are you going to get another 10 thousand?” Edmund asked.

“Slaves, mostly. But considering I don’t like using non-criminals, that’s what? 3 thousand? Maybe 5, if I push my definition of a crime. And the rest-”

“Invalids, cripples, incurable diseases, the usual list of people willing to sell their lives for a large sum of money,” Edmund continued, while perfectly mimicking Sylver’s speech pattern.

“More or less,” Sylver said.

Edmund flipped through more of the notebook until he reached the end, which had a very worrying figure.

“42%? All that, and your most optimistic probability of success is 42%?” Edmund asked.

“I wouldn’t go as far as to call them “optimistic,” but yes. Keep in mind, I made those calculations before I reached level 100, and-”

“Ballpark figure. We somehow gather 40 thousand living people, we have everything we need component-wise, how likely is it that we’ll be able to wake a demi-god up?” Edmund asked.

Sylver gave his question the seriousness it deserved, while he put his boots on, and drank down a flask filled with a glittering mess of metals and crystals.

“If I asked for it, would getting a demon core be on the table?” Sylver asked.

Anyone else would have gasped at the question. Edmund just shrugged his shoulders and considered the likely hood of winning against a demon that was strong enough to have a demon core.

“For the sake of argument, let's say yes,” Edmund offered.

“I wouldn’t go higher than 50%. There are too many unknown variables, not to mention she’s a demi-god, and I’m not, so there’s a not unlikely possibility the ritual might not even affect her,” Sylver explained, as Edmund flipped back to a page that caught his eye.

“Zesheti… That was…” Edmund’s voice trailed off as he recognized the name, but couldn’t remember who specifically it belonged to.

“Zesheti the tongue-twisting ghoul. He was the one with the giant meatball made out of skinned people, you distracted the meatball, while I handled Zesheti,” Sylver said, as Edmund nodded at him, and continued reading through the notes.

There were a few minutes of Edmund asking Sylver to remind him who each name belonged to, followed by Edmund asking Sylver to explain his reasoning behind using whichever framework he had chosen to use for that particular portion of the ritual.

“The thing is, I can’t think of an alternative. Fixing the runes on her shell is one thing, but kick-starting her heart is a whole other matter… Even if I was at my prime, and had a 10th-tier healer as backup, it would still…” Edmund’s voice trailed off as he went over Sylver’s calculations in his head, and converted them into numbers he was familiar with.

“The difficulty of it is kind of the reason it’s plan C, as opposed to plan A, or B. To be perfectly frank with you, if I had more plans, waking Tuli up would be further down the list. Then there’s the Council, and the Krists,” Sylver said.

“You said Lola is handling them?” Edmund asked.

“The council I’m not too worried about, they’re just high-elves with big ambitions, nothing we haven’t seen before. But the Krists… There’s something there… They’re a nuisance right now, but I’ve got the feeling they aren’t going to stay that way…” Sylver said, with the barest touch of worry in his otherwise relaxed and rested voice.

“Because of the two that stood over my coffin?” Edmund asked.

“Among other weird behaviors. On the bright side of things, pun fully intended, we have a bit over 13 years until the real summer solstice starts. So at least we don’t have to worry about being vaporized for the time being,” Sylver said in a much cheerier tone of voice.

“The Sun Demon… On the topic of demons-”

“No,” Sylver said, with the kind of finality that would have taken the breath out of anyone who heard him.

Sadly, or luckily, Edmund was one of the few people who wasn’t, and couldn’t be, afraid of Sylver, regardless of his mood or appearance.

“You’re the expert…” Edmund said in a tone that could be misinterpreted as mocking, if not for the fact that he was completely sincere. Sylver was the expert, and if he said no, then the answer was no.

“I know-” Edmund coughed into his fist to clear his throat, and then took a moment to decide on the specific words he was going to use. “I know this is a touchy subject, but I would like to ask, just so I know it’s been considered,” Edmund said.