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Ch231-End Of An Era

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By the time Sylver was halfway down the mountain, the bloody rain had subsided to an almost gentle drizzle. The blood flowing on the ground had halted its descent and was slowly, but surely, moving upwards towards the peak Sylver had just left.

He could see the same was happening to the other remaining mountains, the blood was enveloping them like a swarm of red serpents. The ones that had already fallen were instead being rebuilt, albeit out of blood, as opposed to stone.

From his position, Sylver could vaguely make out sigils appearing on the forming blood obelisks, but because he wasn’t insane, he wasn’t going to investigate any further.

This was a dragon.

If anything, given what Sylver saw it doing, this was the Dragon. With a capital letter and everything that that entailed.

If it wanted to build some sort of blood-based contraption to completely eradicate this piece of land, there was fuck all Sylver could do about it.

The Dragon had a reason for doing what it did, and even if it didn’t, it didn’t matter, because, and not to make too fine a point of it, there was absolutely nothing Sylver could do about it.

Therefore, because he wasn’t insane, he wasn’t going to investigate, interfere, or involve himself in any way, shape, or form, with whatever the Dragon was up to.

Edmund was in Sylver’s hands, and the details were largely irrelevant.

“What did you do?” a barely audible voice asked from behind Sylver.

It spoke in almost a whisper, with the sort of mind rendering disbelief that most people reacted to with very loud screaming.

Sylver preferred the whispering types, the loud ones were a lot harder to talk to and tended to turn violent.

“Are you asking about the method or the motivation?” Sylver asked the old, and somewhat disheveled-looking, Owl.

Apparently, he was one of those people that aged whenever they saw something their minds couldn’t comprehend. Sylver didn’t feel sorry for him, seeing unbelievable shit, or in this case, feeling it, was a pretty big part of being a [Hero].

Even if he was just faking it.

“Both?” Owl asked.

Another reason Sylver liked the whispering types, is that by the time they came to their senses and started asking proper questions, Sylver was long gone.

Sylver turned around so he was standing face to face with Owl.

And Hound, and Lion, and way in the back, Aurick.

“Regarding the method, none of your business, and regarding the motivation, mind your business,” Sylver said with the sort of sunny smile that would have resulted in what could loosely be described as a massacre if someone told him to fuck off with such an expression on their face.

Roughly 10 seconds of total silence passed, during which everyone that wasn’t Sylver, was desperately trying to figure out why Sylver was acting like this.

The answer was that Sylver was so unbelievably overjoyed that he was currently experiencing a near brain-damaged level of optimism. He literally couldn’t bring himself to see the four men as a threat. And even if he recognized them to be threats, he couldn’t imagine losing to them.

Sylver had experienced hardships in his life. More than he cared to remember. More than he felt he deserved, although a large number of people may disagree.

But all of those were always softened by the existence of Nyx, and later, Aether. Regardless of how badly he fucked up, how irreversible the damage he caused, how unbearable the situation became, he always knew in the back of his head, that he could run home, and count on their help.

Even the 3 times he was banished, the banishment never really sunk in, he was too proud, or to be more honest, stupid, to even consider the idea that he wouldn’t eventually be allowed back.

The whiplash of losing everyone, and then finding someone, was a new experience for Sylver. He wasn’t sure how long this would last, but truth be told, this was an improvement to what had become the norm since he took over Ciege’s body.

It also helped that Sylver was carrying a mysterious box on his shoulder. Which made the smiling necromancer appear as if he was happy because he got his hands on an extra deadly weapon.

“If that will be all gents, I have things to do, and people to see. I hope we never meet again, but I have a feeling we will, so I’ll just say I hope we meet under better circumstances,” Sylver explained, in an uncharacteristically playful tone of voice.

He turned around, took 5 steps away from the group, and then turned around again.

“Actually… today is a day of celebration for me... in light of that, I’d like to offer you some help,” Sylver said.

They were all still in shock.

Aurick was the closest to being “fine,” but that was likely due to his inability to interact with the outside world. Owl had felt the dragon through his mana perception, and so did Hound and Lion, but all Aurick had to go of off was the reaction of the people around him.

“If you can find a couple of drops of the emperor’s blood, I might be able to cobble together a short-range tracker. It won’t be as good as the one the you-know-what gave you, but it will be better than nothing,” Sylver offered.

Aurick walked around his dazed companions, so he was standing in front of them.

“The emperor is still out there. Are you not coming with us to catch him?” Aurick asked, and Sylver shook his head.

“Nope, I’m leaving. I’ll very likely be out of here by the time the first sun rises tomorrow, so you have until then,” Sylver said, as he turned around, and left.

Aurick’s group didn’t follow him, and after about a minute, Owl teleported them away.

Sylver almost jumped when Ria spoke up.

“So, right now, we’re standing on a toroidal planet?” Ria asked.

“That’s what you want to talk about?” Sylver asked.

The question was so… unexpected, that he couldn’t think of a proper answer. He had been ready for her to ask about Aurick being a fake [Hero], or about the dragon, or about Edmund, or one of the many things Sylver would have been asking about, had their positions been reversed.

“I know the answer is going to be “magic,” but… how does… well, everything, work?” Ria asked, and Sylver had to stop walking to concentrate on what she was asking.

“I uh… As you said, the short answer is-”

“Magic, I understand that, sure, but how big is it?” Ria interrupted and caused Sylver to lose his train of thought.

“The uh… the distance between the major radius, and the minor radius, the “thickness” I guess you could call it, is 15 thousand something kilometers. That’s the estimated average at least, one of the drawbacks of living in a realm where distances aren’t exactly consistent,” Sylver explained, as Ria made a sort of clicking noise.

“I know the suns revolve around the planet, but is this planet rotating?” Ria asked.

Sylver started to walk again and adjusted his grip on the metal coffin he was carrying.

“It is. It’s spinning vertically, at a slight angle, 7.7 degrees if memory serves me right,” Sylver said, as he used the blood raining down around him, and created a model of Eira using [Dead Dominion].

Ria just stared at it for a long while.

“Alright…that makes sense… I mean… It makes sense, for a planet that’s shaped like a donut. Is it just empty space in the middle?” Ria asked.

“Not quite. There’s a big bubble of water floating in the middle, with inverted hurricanes coming out of it, pulling chunks of whatever happens to be close enough into the bubble,” Sylver explained, as he made the Eira-shaped blood model bigger, and did his best to convey the exceptionally weird shit he saw the one time he had to travel through the center.

“So, it’s not a donut, it’s a flat disc, with an ocean that goes all the way through the middle?” Ria asked as Sylver adjusted the floating model to better convey the sheer amount of empty space between the inner edges and the bubble of water.

Spring materialized next to Sylver.

“You’re going to give yourself a headache if you try to dig too deep into this. This whole planet is just the rotten scales of an impossibly large snake,” Spring explained.

About a minute of silence passed, as Ria tried to process what he had just said.

“What?” Ria asked.

“A giant snake devoured countless stars and planets, and because it was so ravenous, it ended up trying to eat its tail. It died, and its scales ended up forming everything we see around us,” Sylver said, while he vaguely gestured towards the horizon with his free hand.

“He’s not joking, by the way, that is literally what happened. Dragons are presumed to be as powerful as they are because they’re the descendants of this dead serpent and draw their power and knowledge from it. You can even sort of make out where the head meets the tail if you look at a world map,” Spring explained, as Sylver did his best to adjust the shape of his floating blood model to include the aforementioned swelling piece of land.

You had to squint a bit to see it, but it was hard to deny it once you saw it.

“So, if someone was to dig deep enough, at some point they would find rotting snake meat?” Ria asked.

“They would have to dig really deep, but yes. The deepest anyone has ever been is roughly 70 kilometers. Dwarves, obviously,” Sylver said, as he arrived at a strange sight.

The jade golems he had launched away, had all been melted and then molded into the shape of a 4-sided pyramid. They hadn’t been melted past the point of recognizability, it was the opposite, it was more like someone had glued them all together.

Sylver walked up to the pyramid and watched the man-shaped golem struggle to do anything other than move its eyes. Its face had been fused to the back of another golem, as were its legs, and hands, it couldn’t even open its mouth.

“Should we do something?” Ria asked, as Sylver reached out with his hand, and touched the golem on the shoulder.

[Kirth – Verra Dur’Shey– 1]

[HP: N/A – 100%]

[MP: 0 – 0%]

[Stamina: 0 – 0%]

[Corpse – Inferior]

[Soul – N/A]

“Huh…” Sylver said as he tried to figure out why the race and class sounded familiar.

“What?” Ria asked as Sylver removed his hand from the struggling golem.

“The Dragon got to them… I don’t know what Kirth means, but I’m pretty sure Verra is a slur for humans… The second word might be traitor, but I’m not 100% certain,” Sylver said, as he summoned his ax into his hand, and smashed the blunt end against the green golem’s head.

The piece of moving rock shattered as if it was made out of brittle glass. The golem’s body began to violently shake, the sort of shaking that most living creatures did when they were in great pain but were incapable of screaming. The golems surrounding him also began to shake, and in a matter of seconds, the whole pyramid was almost blurry from how many hands, feet, heads, and other body parts were moving back and forth.

Once the level of collective pain seemed to reach its apex, the pieces of jade scattered on the ground flew towards the spot they had been broken from, and in a matter of seconds, completely reformed the golem’s head.

“Been a while since I’ve seen one of these…” Sylver said, as he lazily swung his ax at the golem’s head again.

“How long are they going to be like this? You said you felt souls inside of them, are they just stuck like this?” Ria asked, as Sylver shook his head and turned to continue walking down the mountain.

“Considering this is a curse made by a Dragon, forever. Don’t worry about them too much, without something to act in place of a nervous system, they’ll lose all sense of self and pain in a couple of centuries,” Sylver explained.

A beam of sunlight forced its way through the dark clouds above and made the bright red blood almost glitter. Sylver wouldn’t go as far as to say that it looked like he was walking through a field of roses, but the blood had lost a fair amount of its sinisterness.

There was a reason Sylver preferred working under the cover of darkness.

Skeletons, zombies, shades, and even intangible types of undead worked better when the people they were attacking struggled to see them.

Not just in the tactical sense, in Sylver’s experience, if the opponents could see exactly what they were up against, and could count how many zombies were left, they tended to get increasingly confident with each defeated undead.

On the other hand, if they thought they were fighting against a possibly endless swarm of skeletons, every defeated opponent just made them realize that they got more and more tired while the undead just kept on coming.

“So… The whole snake eating its own tail thing… How certain are you?” Ria asked with a very odd note of uneasiness.

“I mean… As I’ve said, no one has been able to dig deep enough to see it, but it sort of makes sense,” Sylver said.

“A giant dead snake being the foundation for your whole planet makes sense to you?” Ria said.

“It would certainly explain all the alive ones floating through space,” Sylver said.

A good minute of almost silence passed, during which the only source of sound was Ria’s constant clicking.

“You’re saying you’re certain this planet’s core is a giant dead serpent because enough living serpents are flying through space, that you’re sure that they aren’t anomalies?” Ria asked as Sylver nodded his head.

“Ours is the biggest though,” Sylver said.

Ria didn’t say much for the rest of the journey, mostly she asked a variation of “is there really a dead snake inside this donut-shaped planet,” and each time Sylver gave her the same answer.

Admittedly, Sylver had the same reaction when he learned that Earth was a hollow sphere and not a flat disc as he had been led to believe. Except even back then he wasn’t all that combative about it, he just accepted it and moved on with his day.