Chapter 413:Ruin.
The world spun around him before concrete slammed into him. He heard something crack and the pain seem to have dissappearred for a moment.
People screamed from a far but he wasn’t even sure if it was screams. The sky appeared above him. His past self lay twisted on the road, blood spreading beneath his body.
Atheline stood beside himself, unable to move.
"No."
His human eyes stared upward as the light started to fade from them. Then... Darkness.
He gasped.
He was somewhere else again. A cup touched his lips, a strange taste. It was bitter and his throat burned. His stomach seized in protest.
Atheline instinctively dropped the cup. He knew immediately he was taking poison. He collapsed before he could even understand how it came to be.
Then he heard a familiar voice scream his name.
Lilith.
He couldn’t breathe, his vision was blurred and his body convulsed. The poison spread too fast for anyone to respond.
He died.
Then... he was back in the therapy office with Sera sitting opposite him.
"...Klaith..."
The scene jumped.
"...Sovereign of Fire..."
Silence swallowed the important words, then the found himself on the street.
The impact came and he died again. Then the Dark Elven Palace with a wine cup at hand. He drank it even though his psych new he it was poison.
Lilith caught him but he still died. Then he was back at the office.
Again.
Atheline tried to scream for it to stop but the visions accelerated. His human body struck the road. His Elven body collapsed into Lilith’s arms. His human eyes stared at the sky. His Elven eyes struggled to remain open.
Again and again and again.
Atheline couldn’t tell which death belonged to him anymore. The pain began overlapping, he couldn’t even determine what on earth was going on or how to save himself.
Suddenly Atheline finally tore himself free. He stumbled into real darkness, back into the ruin. He dropped to his knees, his hands striking the floor.
He couldn’t breathe. He gasped desperately, one hand gripping his chest while the other pressed against the stone beneath him.
"What..." his voice trembled. "What the hell was that?"
His heart hammered. He touched his several parts of his body in a panick and eventually came to a conclusion that was alive.
Atheline remained on his knees for a long time. Slowly, the pieces returned; his modern life, his death, the book, his reincarnation, and his death in the world the ruin had just shown him.
Except... Atheline froze.
"No."
He looked up.
That wasn’t right.
If the book’s world was merely a fictional world he’d reincarnated into after dying on Earth, then how could Sera have discussed details connected to Klaith that his current self had never consciously remembered?
And why had the ruin shown his death twice?
Atheline slowly stood.
"How many times have I died?"
His voice echoed.
Once on Earth and once in whatever version of this world he had just witnessed, but he was alive now.
A third life.
Atheline’s breathing became uneven again.
"Earth." He touched his chest. "Here."
Then he remembered Lilith saying it.
He’s finally out of this cursed world.
Atheline stared into the darkness.
"Then I came back."
Something reacted at those words. The floor trembled.
Atheline immediately stepped backward. For the first time since he’d entered the Unaspected Ruin, the darkness surrounding him moved.
Reality itself seemed to ripple. A symbol appeared beneath his feet, then another, then hundreds.
Atheline’s eyes widened as ancient markings spread across the floor, walls and darkness above him, illuminating an enormous space he hadn’t realized existed.
His heartbeat became deafening. The ruin had been silent through everything but now that Atheline had realized he’d died more than once... it answered.
A deep vibration passed through the entire structure. His elements reacted simultaneously; wind surged around him, water gathered in the air, ice crawled across the stone, lightning snapped between his fingers, earth trembled, and gire ignited above his palm.
Atheline stared as every element he possessed awakened without his command. Then something deeper inside him moved.
The same thing he’d felt since absorbing the orb. The thing that had refused to awaken. A crack sounded from somewhere inside his core.
Atheline grabbed his chest.
"What is happening?"
The symbols brightened.
His forgotten memories surged against something invisible inside his mind. Everything pressed together until Atheline could barely remain standing.
Then the ruin pulsed once and every element vanished. Atheline was plunged back into absolute darkness. He stood there breathless, sweat running down his face, his hand still pressed against his chest.
But something had changed. The ruin was no longer ignoring him, Atheline could feel it now. Something enormous had turned its attention toward him.
After seeing himself die again and again, Atheline had finally asked the question the ruin had apparently been waiting for him to ask.
How many lives had he actually lived?
.
.
.
Atheline remained completely still in the darkness, one hand pressed against his chest as the last echoes of the ruin’s reaction faded around him.
His breathing was slowly returning to normal, but his thoughts were anything but calm. He had watched himself die beneath the wheels of Sera’s car. He had watched another version of himself die from poison in Lilith’s arms.
He had seen a world destroyed by choices that had never happened in his current life, and somehow all of those things felt less like possibilities now and more like events that had genuinely occurred.
Then a voice spoke from everywhere around him.
"What you witnessed was Nirvana."
Atheline raised his head.
The voice had no obvious gender. It wasn’t loud, yet it seemed to exist inside the darkness itself, reaching him without passing through his ears.
"Nirvana?"
"The end that becomes the beginning."
Atheline frowned.
"I thought Nirvana was supposed to mean escaping a cycle."
"Words change between worlds. Meanings are given by those who speak them. Here, Nirvana is the name once given to the great recurrence; the point at which a world reaches an irreversible end and returns to an earlier state."
Atheline was silent for a moment, then his expression changed.
"You’re talking about a reset."
"Yes."
The simplicity of the answer made it more disturbing. Atheline slowly lowered his hand from his chest.
"The world resets?"
"When sufficient pillars of an era are lost, when the destined paths collapse beyond recovery and when the continuation of that age becomes impossible, the World Will may invoke Nirvana. Time does not simply reverse. The world returns to a state from which its intended course can begin again."
Atheline thought about the battlefield and the enormous number of dead.
"So what I saw really happened."
"It did."
"That wasn’t a possible future?"
"No."
"An illusion?"
"No."
Atheline’s mouth became dry.
"The book." For the first time, he truly hated calling it that. "What I knew as a novel on Earth..."
"Was an echo."
Atheline’s eyes narrowed.
"What, that doesn’t make sense."
"When worlds touch one another through souls, dreams, laws and recurrence, fragments can cross boundaries. A history in one world may become a dream in another. A person may call that dream inspiration. Another may call it prophecy. Another may write it as fiction without ever knowing that somewhere beyond their world, those events were real."
Atheline thought about Sera. She had known names and had spoken about people who had genuinely existed.
"So the novel wasn’t simply a novel."
"It was a distorted record of one recurrence."
Atheline closed his eyes briefly.
That explained too much, and simultaneously created hundreds of new questions.
"What about me?"
The darkness remained silent.
Atheline opened his eyes.
"You said the world resets its major people. Then why do I remember Earth? Why did I die there before coming here?"
"You are the exception."
Atheline laughed quietly.
"Of course I am." There was no amusement in it. "Why?"
"Because when Nirvana occurred, your soul did not return with the others."
Atheline’s expression became serious.
"Where did it go?"
"You already know."
"Earth."
"Yes."
Atheline stared into the darkness.
"The World Will lost me?"
"For a time."
"How does a world lose a soul?"
"Your death occurred at an abnormal point within the recurrence. Your soul had already begun separating from the world’s cycle when Nirvana was invoked. Instead of being carried backward with the world, it crossed the boundary."
Atheline thought about his death from poison, Lilith holding him, and his family dying afterward. Then everything eventually collapsing into war.
"My soul went to Earth."
"Yes."
"And I lived there as a human."
"Yes."
"Then I died again."
"Yes."
Atheline rubbed his forehead.
"And somehow I ended up back here."
"The other world rejected the anomaly."
Atheline slowly looked up.
"What?"
"Your soul did not belong to its cycle."
Atheline’s expression changed. The voice continued.
"You lived there, formed memories there, and became part of that world in every way that matters to an individual. Yet at the deepest level, your soul remained an existence originating from another recurrence."
"So when I died..."