Chapter 225: Nerfed Civilization

I was back in my own head.

The doppelganger had retreated to whatever corner of my mind she'd emerged from, but I could still feel her there, like a warm, satisfied kind of presence. It wasn't much different from a cat that had spent the afternoon eviscerating every small animal in a three-mile radius and had absolutely no regrets about any of it.

I couldn't say I blamed her. I also couldn't say I wasn't slightly horrified. Just a little. A tiny, manageable fraction.

The battlefield— or what was left of it— stretched out around me in a smoking, glassy crater that still radiated heat in shimmering waves. My bare feet crunched as I walked across the surface. Fused silica. Vitrified stone. The kind of geological feature that normally should have required a meteor impact or a very determined volcano to produce. She'd done it with a spell. A single, catastrophic working, cast through a body that was still technically Red Core, and it had turned three Gold Core demigods into a sadistic game of cat-and-mouse that ended the way all such games eventually ended.

I had watched the whole thing from behind my own eyes, a passenger in my own body. My main motive had been educational, to yoink whatever spells she cast, maybe try to comprehend them, increase my general spell knowledge, which was once again rather depressingly scarce. Most of what I knew had come from trial and error and Xaleth's increasingly insufficient spellbook. So while my motive had been academic, I still didn't fully understand what I'd witnessed.

That spell. That ritual... thing. That whatever it was.

It hadn't felt like normal magic. I'd cast enough spells by now to know what magic felt like. There were fundamentals. The channeling, drawing mana through your pathways in controlled streams. The formation, shaping that mana into a structured matrix of intent and effect. The release, letting the matrix collapse into its intended outcome. There was a logic to it, a sequence of cause and effect that could be traced and understood and eventually replicated.

This had been none of those things.

The spell circle she'd painted across the battlefield had used thousands of corpses as ink. The runes had felt elusive to look at, like they actively refused to be comprehended as my eyes kept sliding off them and my brain kept refusing to process what I was seeing. The preparation had been massive and meticulous. And yet the spell itself had no true formation that I could identify. No stable architecture. Just... raw expression. Mana shaped by will alone, with no proper matrix to mediate between intent and effect.

Well. She was still here. I might as well ask.

What in the actual fuck was that spell?

What do you think it was?

I'm asking you.

And I'm asking you. She chuckled in my head. Humour me. You witnessed it from the inside. You felt the channels I used, the pathways I carved. What did it feel like to you?

I replayed the memory behind my eyes. The way the heat had built without any apparent source. The way the corpses had ignited without being touched, that part hadn't been the work of any spell matrix I understood. The blood running in patterns hadn't been either. She'd just been expelling mana from my body in a rather crude manner, which was wildly different from how one would cast a spell or even a ritual. I couldn't see anything analytic beyond that. It was like trying to analyze a symphony by examining the conductor's baton.

Well, no idea. Stop acting like a cryptic bullshit hoarder! You're doing the exact same thing Lotte does, and it's just as annoying coming from myself.

She sighed. Very well. What I cast was indeed a spell, but only in the loosest sense of the term. The framework was a memory. A pale shadow of something I once wielded in its full, actualized form, back when my body was capable of containing it. What you witnessed was perhaps a fraction of a fraction of what that working was meant to be. An echo. Enough to cook three overgrown fish, but nothing compared to the original.

An echo did that?

An echo backed by a thousand sacrificial anchors and a battlefield's worth of kindling. The scale helped compensate for the lack of proper authority. But yes. An echo, in the end. She paused for a moment before she continued. Every element is bound to a concept. This is fundamental as you know it. Each concept casts a wide umbrella over everything associated with it— physical phenomena, metaphysical principles, symbolic resonances. The boundaries between these categories are porous, overlapping, endlessly complex. Most practitioners spend their entire lives engaging with only the shallowest layer of their chosen element, never realizing that beneath the surface lies something far deeper.

She made a sound that might have been a rueful laugh. Well. At least on this continent, they do. I can't blame them. I am, after all, responsible for their elemental incompetence.

I blinked. What?

When you resonate with that deeper layer— when you advance far enough along your path and your understanding aligns with the depths of the concept itself— you begin to unlock Authority over it. Authority is different from Mastery. Mastery implies you are imposing your will on the concept. Authority implies the concept recognizes you and consents to be wielded. It is a relationship, of sorts. A pact between the wielder and the fundamental principle an element embodies.

NovelPhoenix contains the author's chapter, but this duplicate was made without permission; the original posting supports its creator.

I was still stuck on the previous part. What do you mean you're responsible for their elemental incompetence?

I sort of had an inkling already. The studies on runes and spellwork and the elements themselves were wildly lacking from what I'd seen across my limited world. That was the whole reason I'd wanted to join a proper academy— to finish even the most basic of my magical education. I had the aptitude and the fuel. What I lacked was a reference. Not even a tutor. Just a basic bitch book that went over runes and spellworks and gave me enough foundation to build more flexible magic. Right now, everything I had was derived from whatever I'd managed to extract from Xaleth's spellbook through a process that was thankless and explosive and consisted mostly of throwing runes at the wall to see which ones didn't kill me. The process worked, sort of, but it wasn't perfect. With proper understanding— proper runes, proper frameworks— it could have been wildly better. But I'd never found a reference anywhere. Not in any library. Not from any pathwalker mage I'd encountered.

Now that she'd admitted it, and considering everything I knew about her setting up this entire continent as her personal experience farm, it made a certain sense. Limiting something as wildly unpredictable as elementalism and spellwork was exactly the kind of thing someone would do if they wanted to make sure their reincarnated self didn't get blown up by a magically advanced civilization before they could reach maturity.

But how was she still affecting things? She was dead. Reincarnated into me. The people should have started doing their thing by now— adapting, innovating, rediscovering what was lost. That was what civilizations did. And yet the world felt stagnant. Like it had been stuck at the same level for centuries.

She seemed to sense where my thoughts were heading and chuckled. You already know the answer. Didn't that insufferable lizard once warn you about the 'History Keepers'? The reason your history is limited to almost six hundred years and nothing before that is the same reason your elemental studies are so lacking. I left behind... well, not people, exactly. To make sure no such research ever happens, and no one ever digs too deeply into the past.

I remembered that. But how did you make sure they'd keep working for you even after your death?

Because they can't disobey.

She refused to elaborate further. I felt her presence settle back into whatever corner of my mind she occupied, the mental equivalent of a door closing. Fine. I shook my head. At least I'd gotten a lot out of her. More than I'd expected, honestly.

Elemental and conceptual authority. Something beyond the realm of mastery. I had barely scratched the surface of even basic magical competence, much less anything approaching mastery. The gap between where I stood and what I'd just witnessed felt like the gap between a puddle and an ocean. And I couldn't even be properly frustrated about it because the reason I was so far behind was literally sitting in my own head.

But it was still fascinating.

So the spell you cast was using this Authority you once had, I said, pulling the conversation back on track. From our past life.

Correct. In my time as the Overlord, I achieved full Authority over Solar Fire. The Sun's path. Light and heat and the terrible, beautiful certainty of entropy. The enlightenment came in its own way, and that understanding left an imprint on my soul that even death and rebirth couldn't fully erase.

But Authority cannot exist as pure spirit. It requires a vessel, a body capable of containing and expressing it. The physical and the spiritual must be in balance. My memories of Authority are pristine. My soul remembers what it felt like to command the solar winds. But your body, our body, has not undergone the necessary transformations. It cannot hold what I once held.

So I cheated. The admission came with a mental shrug I could feel. I used ritual to compensate for the lack of physical vessel. I burned a thousand corpses to fuel what our body couldn't sustain. The result was a shadow of the original, like a candle compared to a star. But even a candle can burn, if applied correctly.

I nodded slowly. That answered the question I'd been about to ask. I couldn't learn what she'd done. Not without the necessary enlightenment. Not unless I accepted her memories, let her merge with me, let myself become something I'd already decided I didn't want to be.

She laughed, clearly sensing the direction of my thoughts. You're not wrong to be wary. But you're also not starting from nothing.

Divine Infusion. The ability I got when my heart mutated. It mentioned conceptual authority in the description— like resistance to disruption by lower-order energies. That's related, isn't it?

Yes. Divinity allows you a sort of pseudo-Authority in itself, applied to any spell cast with it. It functions as a superior energy resource, you've seen the conversion rates and the enhanced outputs. But more importantly, you're teaching yourself what it feels like to operate on a level where Authority matters. For beings born with it, it offers a tremendous head start. The enlightenment comes much sooner because you're already doing it, in a way, even if you don't know it yet. You're a bit late for your own species, but still far sooner than most mortals. Starting at Red Core, you're laying the groundwork for what comes after Gold.

After Gold, I repeated.

Platinum. And beyond. She said it like it was obvious. But that's a conversation for another time. For now, the important thing is that you understand what you witnessed— and what you cannot yet do.

I nodded slowly. My body had been crippled before I even hatched, robbed of divinity and forced to scrape its way up from nothing. I'd spent my entire existence playing catch-up, patching holes, compensating for deficits I hadn't even known I had. And I still had a lot of catching up to do.

I ignored the part about something beyond Platinum. I didn't want to think about it. I was already an ant in the wider scheme of things. Gwen, powerful, terrifying Gwen, had told me she was still small in the grand scheme, and she was already Gold Core. Maybe the next opponent I'd face would be Platinum. Hell, one had been about to cross over into Varkaigrad before I'd stopped it. The thought should have been terrifying. It was, a little. But it was also... irrelevant. None of it mattered until I got out of this trial.

For now, I was standing in front of the Kovrath barrier, waiting. I'd knocked politely. I could have tested a divinity-infused Terrorist clone on it, the thought had crossed my mind, but I didn't want the people inside to get the wrong impression. Also, the scale of destruction from such an act was still entirely uncalculated, and I'd just finished glassing the neighbourhood. More explosions seemed excessive.

So I knocked and waited. I had a very confused Kovrath leader to reassure. And after offering some explanations about why I'd turned his battlefield into a glass sculpture and butchered his enemies with what had probably looked like gleeful sadism, I could finally ask him what the hell the Water Leviathan was doing here. This whole attack on the Fold still made no sense from my perspective.

Within less than a minute, the barrier dissolved. The Kovrath leader, the one my doppelganger had commanded earlier, the one who'd looked at me with those wide, terrified eyes as she'd squeezed his heart, stepped outside and bowed so deeply his horns nearly touched the vitrified stone.

"The Fold welcomes its benefactor!"