Two tasks, so simple and harmless when described. Well, one of them actually was fairly simple and harmless, it was just a repeat of previous actions, namely to establish yet another shrine with an attached library. Nothing we hadn’t done yet, just this time, I’d also get a direct reward for it. Somehow, I had a feeling that the reward was primarily to get me into a good mood, to entice me for the other task the Goddess asked of my group. That the shrine was supposed to be done after the second quest was completed, making the other quest technically the first one, was only adding to that impression.

And that task was a doozy, there were no other words for it. She wanted us, or rather, She wanted Luna, to head to the central crater I had discovered and perform some sort of ritual there. In theory, it was incredibly simple, an escort quest, to use the gaming parlance of old, exactly the type of quest most players, back when the real world wasn’t just as insane as anything some video game developer could imagine, had hated the most. Sure, I doubted Luna would become retarded just because she was the target of an escort quest, or start running into walls or something like that, but still, knowing that we had to move into an incredibly dangerous area made me apprehensive.

Before, I had weighed the dangers and decided to move alone for a reason. Alone, I could move both quickly and stealthily, an advantage that went away when we moved as a group. I wasn’t powerful enough, at least not yet, to conceal the entire group, like I had done in the White Mountains when concealing the others along with me. And even back then, it had taken most of my attention, forcing me to ride on Ylva, or I would have stumbled around like some drunk, a status highly problematic in rough, mountainous terrain.

No, if we moved to the centre as a group, we’d have to fight through the various enemies I had mostly ignored with a combination of mobility and stealth, meaning it would take us far longer than it had taken me. That, in turn, meant we wouldn’t be able to make the trek in a single night, we’d have to spend the day within the dimensional weirdness that was the Charland. Sure, Lady Hecate had assured me that the dimensional warping wouldn’t be dangerous to us, but that only went so far when considering the various monsters within the area. My scouting before indicated that the monsters were more active during the daytime, meaning we’d have to hole up somewhere, likely literally, and hope for the best.

Quite literally, all the reasons that made me go alone before still applied. And yet, the quest, or rather, the offered rewards, were enough to tempt me. Hel, they were enough to do more than that, I was having a hard time arguing that the risk wasn’t worth the reward, simply because that reward was just too good. Hecate likely understood just how incredible a reward She had offered, making us an offer too good to refuse.

According to what She had described, each of us would get an individual boon and while She had only described mine and hinted at the one for Luna, I couldn’t reject the quest. The boon she promised for me was deceptively simple but the implications were incredible. She offered to grant me a trait that sounded like a cross between my magical sight and my extra-sensory perception of minds, only that it would apply to souls. Meaning, it would allow me to perceive souls, which, in turn, was the first, and possibly most difficult, step to manipulating souls, at least at a delicate level. Currently, the only thing I could do with souls was forcibly evict them using Death Magic but if I wanted to learn Soul Magic, that obviously wasn’t the right way to go.

And Soul Magic was the first step to decipher the mysteries of the Soul, one of the three requirements I had to achieve to bring Sigmir back. It was the perfect reward, simply too tempting to ignore.

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Plus, from the thinly veiled hints she had been dropping, Luna would receive an upgrade to the class she’d gain upon crossing the first Divide, something she already could barely do when going by level but Hecate had deliberately held Luna back a little so she could earn a better reward.

So, at the end of the day, even if I had been comfortable with insulting Hecate by rejecting Her quests, the rewards were simply too good to give up on. We’d just have to be incredibly careful on our way in, I’d likely have to do quite a bit of digging to make sure we didn’t get stuck in some sort of hideyhole, but that shouldn’t be a problem. In the worst-case scenario, I should be able to keep us completely underground, though doing so might cause other problems, forcing us to flee. For that case, I was considering whether I could create something similar to my shadow bag, only that it would allow Lia to hide within, so Silva could carry Luna while we ran through the day. With only Silva and me, we should be able to escape, even with the sun in the sky. Preparations would be needed but for the rewards offered, I was willing to spend extra time preparing.

After asking a few more clarifying questions, I accepted the quests, before leaving the Lady Hecate’s presence.

Looking back, it was interesting, the way Hecate had described the situation with Luna’s crossing of the first divide. It sounded as if it wasn’t Hecate who actually decided what classes Luna could gain when crossing the first divide. The hints She had given left me with the impression that the class Luna would be offered was dependent on some sort of milestones Luna had to cross in the service of her Deity, with a degree of normalisation between the different divine factions.

That, in turn, strongly implied that the Gods had fairly little direct influence over the classes their followers gained, outside of things like this, where the Deity offered a dangerous quest in their name that would allow a follower to earn a greater reward. There might even be a limit to the amount of power a Deity could directly bestow upon an individual follower, that the parity of power wasn’t due to the previously assumed situation of too many eggs in one basket but because the Gods were simply unable to create an overpowered servant due to some rules enforced by the system.

The hypothesis made me wonder. If the system was powerful enough to enforce rules upon the Gods, even rules in regard to what I’d consider one of their most important and intimate aspects, the connection between them and their followers, who had created the system. Or maybe should that be, what had created the system, as it was fairly obvious by now that it wasn’t some sort of divine creation but nobody would argue that it wasn’t an intelligent design. Something like the system couldn’t be created by evolution or a similar process, at least I couldn’t imagine a way for it to come into existence, nor a reason why it would evolve.

Unless the multiverse itself was an analogue to a living being and the system was an analogue to the immune system or something along those lines, something that helped the inhabitants, or cells, within the body to survive. It sounded… not impossible, but it was also incredibly farfetched, if only because it assumed that the multiverse itself was a slowly evolving being, an idea I couldn’t even begin to wrap my head around. To say nothing of the somewhat discomforting sensation of personal insignificance I suffered when thinking about it, it was one thing to realise that the world you were living on was just a tiny speck of dust in the vastness of the cosmos but to consider that that vastness itself could be just a slowly evolving element of something even greater?

The idea was on another level of scale, sending shivers down my spine. And not the good kind of shivers, though there was another sensation accompanying the idea. One of greed, or maybe ambition. If the system was merely part of an even greater being, that being the cosmos itself, I wanted to reach a scale where I could comprehend that greater being.

The idea was grandiose, insanely so, and yet, it was enough to bring a wide grin to my face, one that might have been discomforting for anyone seeing it. Luckily, I was nicely alone, drifting within the darkness of my mind after I had accepted the quotes given by Lady Hecate. Drifting, dreaming, thinking.

Wishing I could get some rest on the slopes of my beloved mountain.