Chapter 167: Colossus

Jaxir opened his eyes to find himself sitting in exactly the same place he had logged out from, with the Mutated Black Gem Alpha stretched across the crystal floor only a few meters away. The enormous wolf was asleep again, its chest rising beneath the black crystal covering its body while tiny golden lights drifted beneath the surface like fireflies trapped under ice. Jaxir looked down at himself, checked that all of his organs still seemed to be where he’d left them, and couldn’t help chuckling.

"Well, thanks for not eating me."

The wolf’s ear twitched without its eyes opening, which was about as much acknowledgment as Jaxir expected from it. He was about to stand when a notification unfolded across his vision, the sudden appearance of the screen making him pause with one hand against the floor. The title at the top made his eyebrows rise.

[Quest Received]

Quest: Slumber of the Black Gem

Type: Special Quest

Description: You have spent a night beside an Alpha of the Black Gem Race and have come to understand a portion of its plight.

The Black Gem Race is a rare lineage that has endured across time and space, yet the creature before you is the last known Black Gem remaining in this world. Without family, companionship, or hope of producing another generation, the Alpha no longer sees purpose in continuing its existence.

Only one burden has prevented it from choosing its own end: it refuses to become the one responsible for extinguishing the final remnant of its race.

Choose:

[Grant the Black Gem Alpha its final wish.]

[Attempt to revive the Black Gem Race.]

Jaxir blinked and read the choices again, mostly because the second one sounded like the System had skipped several fairly important steps. He was one person, the creature in front of him was apparently the last of an entire race, and he had absolutely no idea how those two facts were supposed to combine into him fixing the problem. More importantly, the quest seemed strangely interested in making him decide right now.

His gaze returned to the sleeping wolf, and the first option never became a real consideration. Even when Jaxir had been at his worst, after his parents were gone and Jahbri had left him with little more than an empty house and too much time inside his own head, ending everything had never entered his thoughts. That wasn’t because he believed he had been stronger than the creature in front of him, because looking back, strength had very little to do with it.

He had simply been too busy rotting.

Most days had passed with Jaxir staring at one screen or another, waiting for the next video to start so he wouldn’t have to decide what to do with himself. When that stopped working, his mind usually wandered toward Jahbri instead, wondering where she was, what she was doing, or whether she ever thought about him at all. There had barely been enough purpose in him to make breakfast, let alone enough to sit down and make some grand decision about whether life was worth continuing.

Who knew what would’ve happened if the thought had ever come.

Jaxir looked back into the wolf’s sleeping face and remembered the emptiness he’d seen in its eyes the night before. The thing didn’t need somebody to decide its life had reached a proper ending. From what Jaxir understood of that kind of despair, it had probably been making that decision every day simply by refusing to move. What it needed was one reason to move again.

One spark had been enough for Jaxir.

It hadn’t fixed him overnight, and Divinity certainly hadn’t erased everything that came before it, but entering the game had given him something to reach toward when he hadn’t cared enough to reach for anything. Every fight, argument, stupid quest and increasingly ridiculous problem had added another piece until the person he’d been at the beginning of all this already felt farther away. The wolf didn’t need its entire life repaired right now either.

It just needed somewhere to start.

Jaxir selected the second option.

The quest window flickered violently, its words scattering into streaks of pale light before reforming across his vision. The original choice disappeared completely, replaced by another screen carrying the exact same title. Jaxir leaned forward slightly as he began reading.

[Quest Updated]

Quest: Slumber of the Black Gem

Type: Special Legacy Quest

The Mage Conjurer God has taken notice of your choice.

Forgotten by history like many of the races he failed to save, the Mage Conjurer God banished his own name from the annals of the world as punishment for those failures. Yet for every race lost beneath his watch, countless others endured because of him, their bloodlines surviving in forms even they may no longer recognize.

You have chosen to restore what appears lost rather than grant peace through its ending.

The spirit of the Mage Conjurer God will guide your path.

Should you succeed, his Legacy may become yours.

Jaxir stared at the screen for several seconds before his eyebrows slowly climbed.

"There were four?"

Heresy in Threefolds had introduced the Mage Alchemic God, Mage Combat God, and Mage Formation God, which had made three sound suspiciously complete. Now there was apparently a Mage Conjurer God hiding outside that group, forgotten so thoroughly that none of the information Jaxir had gathered even hinted at his existence. That opened several questions he didn’t have the answers to.

What was the relationship between the four of them? Were there even only four?

Conjurer was one of the Magic Class Paths alongside Hex and Destruction, which immediately made Jaxir wonder whether there were forgotten Mage Gods tied to those Paths as well. The Mage Combat God could potentially fill some part of Destruction’s role, but the name was broad enough that assuming they were the same thing felt dangerous. The more Jaxir learned about the Mage Gods, the less the neat little group of three seemed to make sense.

"Alright." Jaxir looked around the cavern as though the forgotten god might materialize somewhere between the crystal formations. "How exactly are you planning on guiding me here?"

Another window opened.

[Hint]

True extinction is rarer than history suggests.

When a race disappears, its bloodline is often not destroyed completely. It is diluted through generations, altered by mutation, environment, interbreeding, and time until what remains no longer recognizes the ancestor it descended from.

To begin restoring the Black Gem Race, locate four creatures carrying ancestral ties to the Black Gem Alpha.

Required Targets:

[Elite: 0/3]

[Mage: 0/1]

[Are you ready?]

Jaxir stared at the final question, then looked toward the sleeping wolf as though it might somehow explain why a supposedly extinct race had four relatives conveniently waiting to be collected. The wolf continued sleeping, leaving Jaxir with very little help. He eventually shrugged.

"Sure?"

The entire cavern flashed white.

Jaxir barely had time to realize that answering the question had apparently counted as consent before the crystal floor vanished beneath him. Space folded, his stomach lurched, and a heartbeat later his boots slammed onto rough stone somewhere completely different. A roar blasted his hair backward before he had properly straightened.

An enormous stone golem towered above him.

The creature stood nearly three times Jaxir’s height, its body built from thick slabs of dark gray rock fitted together around a glowing core buried deep inside its chest. One massive arm pulled backward while chunks of loose stone rattled down from its shoulders. Jaxir focused on it just as the status screen appeared.

Name: Ancestral Obsidian Colossus (Elite)

Level: 22

Jaxir’s lip twitched.

The golem roared again and lifted both fists overhead, each one large enough to flatten Jaxir without much argument. There was no Level restriction anywhere on the quest screen, no reassuring note explaining that the targets would scale to him, and apparently the very first creature was already thirteen Levels above him. Jaxir slowly raised his staff.

"They’re fucking with me."

The Colossus brought its arms down.

"They’re definitely fucking with me, because there’s no way in bloody hell a golem is descended from a fucking wolf."

BOOM.