Chapter 175: Ancestral Spirit

[A/N Don’t forget to go back a Chapter to read the one before this first. If you still see the wrong Chapter, go to your settings and clear cache, then try again]

The new lines kept forming beneath the quest title while Jaxir kept a hand over his face. He was already regretting everything. Maybe he should have just been an asshole and killed the depressed wolf instead.

He lowered his hand just enough to read, peeking through his fingers, then glanced at the wolf. Maybe the System had mistranslated whatever those enormous eyes were asking for?

It hadn’t.

--

[Slumber of the Black Gem]

[The ancestral spirit of the Black Gem Race is awakening.]

[The final Black Gem Alpha has neglected its growth for too long and no longer possesses the strength required to earn its ancestor’s acknowledgement.]

[Should it fail this trial, the opportunity to restore the Black Gem Race will be lost.]

[Assist the Black Gem Alpha in defeating its Ancestral Spirit.]

--

Jaxir stared at the final line for several seconds before rubbing both hands down his face.

"Of course that’s what you wanted."

The Black Gem Alpha lowered its head a bit, which somehow made the whole request even more pathetic.

Honestly, Jaxir had known something unpleasant was coming the moment the quest updated. If the final obstacle was just another Mage-grade creature, there would’ve been no reason to interrupt the original sequence in the first place.

He had already fought 3 Elites for the Mage Conjurer God, each one more troublesome than the last. As it turned out, the entire point of those sacrifices had been to wake up whatever was waiting inside the pillar.

And now the System wanted him to help the wolf earn that thing’s acknowledgement? Then there was almost no chance the coming fight would be reasonable.

The pillar answered before he could complain any further.

Black light folded inward from every wall of the cavern and poured into the pillar, until its crystal surface started losing its shape. The straight edges softened, then split apart and stretched outward as the condensed magic packed inside gathered into four enormous limbs.

Jaxir took a step back as the top of the pillar widened into a head.

It was a wolf.

Its body was half-transparent, made of ghostly black mana rather than flesh or crystal. Even so, every part of it looked far more solid than it had any right to.

It stood nearly twice the size of the Black Gem Alpha. Even from several meters away, its shoulders rose above Jaxir’s head, and slow currents of darkness rolled beneath its spectral hide like storms trapped in glass.

Its paws touched the ground without a sound. Though, the crystal beneath them still sank slightly under its weight.

The last of the howl faded from the cavern.

At that moment, Jaxir’s expanded mana senses recoiled.

During the last battle, he had learned to spread his awareness into the surrounding mana, forming a sphere around himself that let him feel movement before his eyes could catch it. That sphere had still been open when the ancestral spirit took shape.

For one brief instant, Jaxir felt its presence brush against his own, and then his entire field collapsed. It hadn’t just been weakened, it had been crushed flat.

Jaxir’s breath caught as every thread of awareness outside his body vanished under a pressure so complete that his Attune might as well have been switched off. On instinct, he tried pushing outward again, but he couldn’t even get the first meter around himself back.

As for the ancestral spirit? It was just standing there.

Jaxir focused on it.

―

Name: Black Gem Ancestral Spirit (Sovereign)

Level: 12

―

His lip twitched.

"That’s new."

Elite, Mage, Archmage, Grand Archmage... Jaxir understood those terms well enough to at least guess how badly something might ruin his day.

Sovereign, however, meant absolutely nothing to him.

A Level 12 creature with that title had just crushed his new mana field without so much as looking in his direction. That alone made him reluctant to randomly start trying to test things out. Unfortunately, experimentation seemed to be exactly what the Mage Conjurer God had in mind.

The ancestral spirit finally lowered its gaze to the Black Gem Alpha.

Its eyes were filled with disdain.

It wasn’t angry, and there was none of the excitement Jaxir had seen when the Alpha first sensed the pillar awakening. The ancestor simply looked at the last living member of its race the way someone looked at a broken tool they couldn’t understand why they were still keeping around.

Jaxir felt the Black Gem Alpha shrink beside him.

Its tail lowered first. Then, its ears followed.

Whatever excitement had briefly returned to the creature sank beneath something much uglier. Even without a human face to read, Jaxir recognized it as shame.

The Alpha stared at the ground rather than meet its ancestor’s eyes, and the dark lights beneath its crystal body dimmed until only a few of them were still bright.

Jaxir frowned. He didn’t like that.

The spirit could be as disappointed as it wanted. Jaxir had only met the big idiot yesterday, and even he knew it had wasted a long time doing absolutely nothing.

What bothered him was the contempt.

The ancestral spirit looked at the creature below it as though it weren’t the final Black Gem desperately clinging to existence. To the ancestor, it was just an embarrassment that had failed some standard nobody had ever bothered helping it reach.

Jaxir shifted his staff onto one shoulder.

"Hey."

The ancestral spirit’s eyes moved to him.

"Maybe be less of a dickhead and your race wouldn’t be dying out, huh?" Jaxir gestured at the Alpha beside him. "Did you think of that?"

The cavern went quiet.

The Black Gem Alpha slowly turned to look at Jaxir.

The ancestral spirit stared at him a moment longer, then snorted.

Jaxir’s eyes narrowed.

Black mana gathered in front of the spirit’s maw so fast that he didn’t even recognize it as an attack until it had already condensed into a sphere. His Attune still couldn’t push through the pressure around the creature, so he was blind to it until the glow reached his eyes.

Jaxir moved his staff.

Too late.

The sphere became a beam.

Black light crossed the space between them without any visible travel time and struck Jaxir square in the chest. The front of his Aegis caved inward, and the 10,000 MP stored inside the inner skin nearly vanished in one savage chunk.

The rest of the force went straight through his body.

Jaxir didn’t even have time to feel the first impact before the crystal wall slammed into his back.

BOOM.

The cavern shook.

[-3,486]

Jaxir’s body left a crater in the black crystal before he dropped a couple of meters and landed on one knee. Pain ripped through his chest and back at the same time, while shards of shattered crystal rained down around his shoulders and bounced across the floor.

He coughed, tasted blood, then looked up.

The Black Gem Ancestral Spirit hadn’t moved.

It was still standing beside the pillar with its head slightly lowered, watching him with the same detached look it had worn from the start. An attack that had just erased over 3000 HP, and 6000 MP, apparently wasn’t even worth changing its stance for.

Jaxir slowly wiped the blood from his mouth.

His lip curled, a savagery growing beneath his tone. "Oh, you’re a real piece of shit."