Chapter 434: The Gates Of Xiltra
Chapter 434: The Gates Of Xiltra
The harvester’s star-orb eyes held Bruce for a moment longer.
"You will hunt them. That is one of the main ways awakened souls in this city earn soul points. You will enter dungeons, and labyrinths, and other places in this realm where soul beasts live, and you will kill them, and you will sell what you take from them at the city’s exchanges. The cores can be eaten. The flesh can be cooked. The bones, the hides, the materials, all of it has value. Some awakened souls hunt. Some awakened souls cook. Some awakened souls fight in arenas. Some serve in the city in other capacities. There are many ways to earn soul points. The path you choose will be your own."
Bruce nodded slowly. The pieces were beginning to fit together. The food he had eaten in the carriage. The flesh of soul beasts. The fresh-soul concept. The dungeons. The currency. The hunger of his own soul-body. The Soul City as a place where awakened souls, people who had once lived in other realms, gathered to do exactly the kind of work that kept them alive in a realm designed to slowly dissolve them.
He had a thousand more questions. He set most of them down. There would be time.
"And our soul points," the older man with the soft voice asked. "How do we, how do we know what we have?"
"You speak it aloud," the harvester said. "Or you think it, with intention. The Soul Realm will answer."
The harvester paused.
"Try it. All of you. Soul points."
The fifteen of them, hesitantly, did.
Bruce thought the words quietly inside his head. Soul points.
The air in front of him bloomed.
A small, soft window of pale light opened in the air, hanging at about chest height. It was small enough to be private, Bruce could see it clearly but he doubted the others could read his from where they stood, and the writing on it was clean and simple, in characters Bruce could read without effort, even though he could not have said what language they were in.
The window read:
BRUCE ACKERMAN
Soul talent Class: unknown
Soul Rank/Existence Level: F
Soul Talent: [Sanare Veritatem/Godly Writer] — Awakened
Soul Points: 0
He looked at it for a moment, frowning slightly.
Unknown. Same answer Kael had not been able to give him in the Mistlands. His soul class, apparently, was not something even the realm’s own system could read.
The class of his soul talent is unknown unlike the class of his body talent class which was ex... It was easy to tell which possessed greater potential...
Sighing, he filed that with everything else. The talent was named honestly, by the Latin, Sanare Veritatem, there was also the English translation, Godly Writer.
Anyone who walked over to Bruce and somehow saw this screen would know more about him than he had told Kael. He was going to have to be careful about that.
The points were zero.
He had expected that. He had killed/purified hollows so he didn’t know why those didn’t count, maybe it was because that was before this system showed itself.
Around him, the others were looking at their own windows with various expressions.
Theron was staring at his with the small lit-up face of a man who had just been given a video game in a place he had not expected one.
Kael was already grinning. The two friends with the different fires were leaning toward each other, comparing readouts. Iret and Halen were nodding to each other gravely.
The nervous thin man was muttering, "Zero, zero, zero," under his breath.
The harvester watched them all without expression.
"You will find," it said, "that the system shows you what is relevant. Your name. Your rank, if it can be read. Your talent. Your points. Other information may appear as you progress. The system is the Soul Realm itself, not a tool of mine, not a tool of the harvesters. It is how the realm communicates with its inhabitants."
It paused once more.
"I have given you what you need to you can proceed into the soul city, it’s the only good path forward."
The lead harvester took a slow step backward toward its carriage. The other harvesters around it were already moving, climbing back into their seats, the glowing horses lifting their heads, the pale footholds beginning to form again in the air beneath their hooves.
The bell at the front of the carriage gave a small, soft ding as the lead harvester climbed back into the driver’s seat. The star-orbs of its eyes settled on the fifteen of them one last time.
"Good luck," it said.
Its voice was not warm. It was not cold either. It was simply what it was. A statement, given honestly, with no expectation attached to it.
The carriage lifted into a slow trot. The horses ran into the air, the pale frost-footholds blooming and dissolving behind them, the bell ringing once more, soft, clean, and final, as the carriage turned in a wide curve and started back the way it had come.
It did not look back.
The fifteen newly awakened souls watched it go in silence. After a few minutes, the carriage was a small distant shape against the grey of the Mistlands beyond the city. After a few more, it was gone.
Bruce stood very still, looking at the place where the carriage had vanished, and tried to absorb what he had just been told.
A whole economy. A whole system. He had thought, vaguely, in the brief moments he had had to think about anything since arriving, that the Soul Realm was a wilderness with some loose civilization scattered through it. He had been wrong. The Soul Realm had a currency. The Soul Realm had a system display.
The Soul Realm had cities and hunting grounds and an interlocking economy of fresh-souled beasts and awakened souls who hunted them. It was a place. A proper place, with proper rules. He was in somewhere, not in something, and he was going to have to learn how somewhere worked very quickly if he wanted to get anywhere near SSS rank.
He took a slow breath. He turned to face the gate.
The gate of Xiltra rose above them.
Up close, it was even more impressive than it had looked from the carriage. The pale soul-stone of the wall was carved in long flowing patterns that Bruce could not read but that felt like writing, the same way his own imprint had felt like writing. The gate itself was a great arched opening, wide enough for ten souls to walk through abreast, with smaller side-doors set into the larger structure for what looked like staff or smaller traffic. The lanterns hanging from the arch glowed steadily. The light inside the gate was warmer than the pale luminous sky above, almost golden.
Two guards stood on either side of the main opening.
Bruce noticed them at once. They were awakened souls, not skeletons, not harvesters, just regular souls in armor, the soft glow of their soul-bodies visible at the edges of their helmets and gauntlets. They were tall. Their armor was made of some pale-grey metal that Bruce did not recognize, etched with the same flowing patterns as the wall. Each of them carried a halberd, a real, solid, soul-energy halberd, the kind of weapon that did not dissolve away after a fight because its owner had built it to last.
They watched the fifteen of them approach without moving. They had clearly seen this exact moment many times before. A carriage of harvesters dropping a fresh batch of awakened souls at the gate. They knew the script.
One of the guards, the one on the left, a broad-shouldered woman with a short cropped haircut visible under her helmet, raised a hand as the group came within speaking distance.
"Stop there."
The fifteen of them stopped.
"Names and talents will be recorded when you reach the inner registry. For now, listen. You are about to enter the city of Xiltra. The city is open to all awakened souls who can sustain themselves within it. Sustaining yourself within Xiltra means," she paused, her voice taking on the slightly worn rhythm of a speech given many times, "earning soul points. The harvesters will have told you that already, I expect."
She glanced over them. Several nodded.
"Good. Then I will only say this once more, plainly. The city does not carry passengers. You are welcome here as long as you can pay your way. You are not welcome here if you cannot."
She raised one armored finger.
"You have twenty-four hours from this moment to earn ten F-rank soul points. Ten. F-rank. If you have not earned at least ten F-rank soul points by the end of your first day, the city will know, the system tracks this, and the guards will escort you back to this gate, and you will be put out. Outside the walls. Back into the mist."
A small murmur ran through the group.