Malcolm Tent
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Wish upon the Stars chapter 1019
🕑 Added 2025-11-18 02:38:20 +0000 UTCI woke up groaning. Callie was sitting next to me, looking concerned, and my mom and sister were behind her. Zeke was napping in a chair nearby, and my dad was leaning against a wall looking away, though the effect was kind of spoiled by him shooting glances back at me. “You’re up,” Callie said with a relieved smile. “Did you get it all repaired?”
After Callie helped clear all the lamentation liquid out of my soul space, she’d returned to reality while I continued trying to repair all the damage as best I could. Which was, frankly, not that well. Genesis Burst applied directly to the damaged areas let me slowly fill in the pits and scars on the library, but it took HOURS to repair even a few of the surface level abrasions.
“Most of it,” I hedged. “It’s still underway. I left a few clones in there to keep at it. I was going stir crazy.”
I could still feel the damage. It felt…off. I’d cracked my soul before. It was a natural part of cultivation, even if one you were REALLY supposed to try to avoid. But that was cracking. This was worse. Cracks were light and spread out, but they were mostly even. The damage from the lamentation liquid was irregular and uneven. A deep gouge here, a light scrape there. It was unbearable.
“Did you guys carry me back to the suite?” I asked slowly, looking around.
Callie nodded. “We did. Actually, Bethy did. She used her Domain to bring you back, because she was worried about jarring your concentration and messing up your recovery.”
I glanced over to find the tiny vampire sitting with Chelsea, looking at me worriedly. I shot her a grateful smile. Bethy’s senses were a lot sharper than most people our rank. Even Callie might not have been able to see as much about my situation from the outside as Bethy. “I appreciate that,” I told her sincerely. “It means a lot.”
“Of course,” she said quietly, with a shaky smile. “You’re my bestie. I was…you sounded really bad, Shane. Really bad. The screaming was awful. I’ve never heard someone sound so absolutely devastated."
Honestly, I was more worried about HER than I was me. I could handle pain, even soul pain. I’d long since subjected myself to infinitely worse. I was almost positive that recursion played some role in my frankly absurd pain tolerance, but even that hadn’t saved me this time. Luckily pain tolerance wasn’t just an in the moment thing. It was also how you dealt with pain after the fact, and I bounced back fast.
“I’m good,” I assured her. “Bit of a rough time of it for a minute there, but I’m mostly healed up, and it’s just pain.” I grinned at her. “Besides, do you have time to worry about me? Aren’t you planning a huge D-rank stampede?”
Her eyes widened. “Wait, how did you know about that?’ She turned to Chelsea with a scowl. “You told?”
“She didn’t,” I assured her. “A little birdie told me.” Bethy’s ire turned on Archie, who she’d gotten kind of close with when he was staying in her Domain. “You? You were supposed to be the one! You were going to record it all while it was happening!” She slumped back into her chair with a dramatic wail, and Archie just cawed mercilessly. She sat up. “Well why didn’t you just SAY it was too heavy?” He cawed again. “How was I supposed to know you actually MEANT it?”
Callie raised a hand. “Um, what is a D-rank stampede?”
“She was going to turn them all into cows and let them loose in the halls with numbers painted on their sides,” I said bluntly. “I believe she was ALSO planning to skip a few numbers in the middle. Twelve, thirty two, and sixty eight. That way when people were searching for them, they would think they’d missed a few and keep looking. She might have gotten away with it too, except for one thing.”
“It was a bad plan?” Callie asked mildly.
I nodded. “Terrible, yes. Also Archie is very lazy and she wanted to use an oversized high resolution camera.”
“It records in nineteen dimensions,” she protested pleadingly.
“Bethy, you can’t even PERCEIVE that many dimensions,” I reminded her. “Where did you even buy that? And how much did you pay for it, because it was almost definitely too much.” Despite the tone of our banter, I could see Bethy relaxing. Our familiar dynamic was helping her forget the stress of seeing me go a little crazy.
While my constant need to shut Bethy down when she did things probably seemed negative or destructive to outsiders, Bethy valued our relationship a lot. She’d mentioned to Callie that I was one of the only people that consistently said no to her, even when she was being unreasonable, and that she respected my willingness to stand up to her. To this day I had no clue how much of her…Bethy-ness was faked, but I was happy to play the bad cop, if only because I was always highly entertained by her antics myself.
We chatted for a while before Gabe came and he and Chelsea took Bethy to get something to eat. She’d been waiting her for hours apparently, and I made sure to thank her for being such an excellent Master of Challenge, then turned to my parents.
“What happened?” my mom demanded anxiously, having been holding in her worry as I put my friends at ease. I appreciated it, because that had been a lot.
“The lamentation liquid was…tainted. Something was in it. Something I’m almost positive Morwenna is responsible for. It felt familiar somehow.” I turned to Callie. “Did you feel that? Like something about it reminded me a little of…”
She nodded. “Adam,” she confirmed. “But not. I mean, it DOES make some sense. Morwenna was there for his initial rise, right? Maybe she like…copied his original power? Experimented with it?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t know a lot of things. Have you been able to contact Atlas?”
She shook her head. “I’ve been trying. I’m not even sure he can BE contacted outside of the space we went to when I formed my Chronicle. He’s been dead a long time, and even as his avatar, there are limits. I’ve been trying to use the gem in Gossamer’s hilt to reach him, because your mom said it was an object of power. I feel…something. Like there’s an open line there I can’t connect to. I’ll work on resonating with the gem.”
“You should also take my scrolls,” I said with a grimace. “I only have about fifty, but any little bit helps. In the meantime, I’m going to let my stats roll in. I need to get stronger. Like…now. With all the buzz from the trial and the coronation, I have to have at least STARTED getting some of that Wishmaster income, even if I haven’t been crowned yet. Any little bit will help.”
I handed over fifty four scrolls to Callie. It wasn’t many, but every little bit helped. I couldn’t help but laugh at my own largesse as I had that thought. Fifty four wishes. Back in the day I’d had far fewer wishes per day, and I couldn’t stockpile them at all. Not to mention my stat cap was ten points compared to the current one hundred. My income from wishes was incomparable to what I could net now.
But still…it wasn’t enough. At my current income it would take me thirty YEARS to hit B-rank without any supplementation from renown. I had always been kind of perplexed how other members of the family could spend decades in D or even C-rank. But doing the math…I got it. It would be even longer at a lower rank with a lower stat cap.
Luckily I didn’t need that. I DID have income, and I was sitting on a huge backlog most likely. So I retired to my room to get ready to let the power roll over me. I just hoped it wasn’t too big of a percentage of my current value.
Closing my eyes…I let the energy hit. It was quite a bit. It wasn’t double what I had, but it was definitely close. Maybe two thirds? It took me a minute to grit my way through the pain as I let the stats bolster me. Shockingly, most of my income was in Might and Focus. Since it was all from the same two sources I supposed that made sense, but it was still kind of staggering exactly how many of the points were concentrated in those stats.
Three hundred and twenty thousand Might, two hundred thirty one thousand Focus, and varying amounts in my other stats mostly coming in at less than a hundred thousand, giving me a current grand total of two point five million, two thousand six hundred and ninety four.
But more than that, I achieved something else. What I’d done earlier was nothing short of staggering. Driving out the energy of actual gods, even with help, was no mean feat. And I had decided that it was a skill I wanted to double down on. When you bound a page of your Chronicle, the skill or technique used in the binding created a powerful enhancement effect. As a thing became part of your legend, it became more legendary, and I was unwilling to let this particular skill bump go.
So I reached for the fact of what I’d done. Describing how to bind a Chronicle page was kind of like describing how to breathe. You can document the general motions, but it kind of misses out on how fundamental an act it is. Your chest moves and air gets sucked in doesn’t really cover the miracle of inhalation, and describing the actual act of binding a page doesn’t even come close.
But still, I knew how. I’d done it before, I could do it again, and I did. I pulled the truth of my earlier actions around me like a swirling cloak, pushing and condensing it into the Ten Demons Tome. The page was imbued with Leviathan, but also so much more. It was imbued with defiance. With resistance. With the very concept of raging against the Void, the corruption of Hatescream, and against anything that would attack my soul.
I felt the truth of these factors engraving themself into me, slowly integrating into my being in a way that I hadn’t really experience before. I got SOME of this during stat increases, and I’d bound a page before, but I had been a little distracted. Now though, I was experiencing a change of my very nature (and one done at my own recognizance) and it was truly staggering.
Even thinking back on what had been done to me, I felt…less. Less bothered, less worried. If that happened again, I could feel that I’d be better prepared, that I was MADE to fight back.
Callie busted into the room, eyes wide as she searched the space frantically. “Shane!” she shouted in a panic, before freezing when she found me staring back at her with a raised eyebrow. “You…I felt, that is…what?”
I chuckled, then described what had happened. She nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a smart idea. Increasing your resistance. Maybe I should do the same. I did help you cleanse it, and I have a feeling it might not be a bad thing to be prepared for running into Morwenna’s…whatever that is, again.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” I nodded. “But that’s your first page, are you sure that’s what you want?”
She nodded fiercely. “I never want to watch anything like that again. If I’d been more prepared maybe I could have helped faster. Besides, Morwenna will be targeting me, I’m sure. Might as well be prepared.” I nodded, then gestured for her to sit down. I was already down here after my own binding, might as well help her out with hers.
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Peter Smith
The Demon of Destiny's End, Guardian of the Soul, and Healer of Profane Corruption.
