Chapter 441: Flammable
Sitting on top of the barn, Aether watched the fields, watching for anything to happen. Night had come, and he had a feeling something might happen, and this feeling wasn’t driven just by his gut. The description of the book had said with its own words that there had been something that made their harvest fail.
And since tomorrow was harvest day, something was bound to happen tomorrow; any Reader could be able to figure it out. Using Eden, he was able to see just fine, but for an hour or so, nothing had happened. Which was pretty discouraging.
A part of him was annoyed, since he had to climb the barn to get the best view, and for nothing. True, it hadn’t been that hard; he just threw Voidpiercer and used it alongside some Abyssal Matter; it wasn’t such a big deal. But it was still effort for nothing.
He sighed, almost falling asleep, which... surprised him. After all, as a Reader, he would have never been tired around this time... "I guess I got used to sleeping early due to the Blue Rose... really strange how big of an effect that place had on me in such a short time..."
He felt his eyes slowly close as he just stared into the darkness; a part of him even wanted to turn off Eden and just rest, but as his eyelids slowly closed... he noticed something was wrong...
Inside the valley of wheat... there was something; there was a place where he saw nothing... which was strange, since Eden just didn’t work like that. If wheat was missing there, he would just see the ground, but no.
He didn’t see anything. Just darkness, and nothing else, as if Eden wasn’t working on that specific spot. Which made no sense, since it worked just fine around it.
At first he had thought it was his imagination, but it remained there for a good while, even after he acknowledged it...
Opening his eyes, Aether stared more closely at the spot. Watching as it... slowly moved?
Aether tilted his head; a part of him wanted to be confused, trying to think of some grand explanation for it. Maybe it was his skill acting up, maybe he was hallucinating because he was tired, or something like that.
But his rationality screamed at him that it was obviously a monster with some sort of ability that made it harder for him to detect; it wasn’t like before with the monsters in the mountains in Demon of Dread, so it wasn’t his awareness.
"Is it some kind of soul ability? Or maybe a mind skill?" Aether continued to watch it as the crops near it got destroyed. From just that, he could figure out what the main story was. In the original, the beast was killed, and the village was saved, a normal ending, nothing special.
But he wasn’t focusing on that now... something far more important to him had caught his eye.
"Really strange... as much as it hurts to say, since even if I’m not the most knowledgeable in it, I know more about soul attacks, but I don’t think it’s related to the soul at all. If it had the ability to hide its soul for me, it wouldn’t have this effect... the only thing I could figure is that it placed some kind of spell, maybe on the whole village, that made it so the brain and eyes ignore it and replaced it with something else, which for him, what I would normally see if I looked there with my eyes, which in this case, is darkness."
Stopping Eden, Aether looked in the darkness; he couldn’t see anything, nothing at all...
"But because the darkness my eyes force me to see is not real, Eden is not going to work on it..."
Aether smirked, his body leaning forward. "How fun..."
It wasn’t his first time going against something with some kind of mind power. Denial was much more powerful in that department, by far. But it was... entertaining to see these kinds of reactions, how Eden reacted to things. After all, it was a skill he created; it wasn’t fully documented, its limits and such were unknown even to him.
He chuckled. "Now the question is, what do I do with you..." He said, staring at the small patch of darkness going around in the field, as if it were nothing, destroying the wheat. If he stopped it, the village would be saved... but they would also be trapped inside the story. He would just reach the original ending faster.
’If in the original, the village is supposed to survive, then if I want the opposite of it... it has to be destroyed.’ Aether sighed. ’Do I really have to be the villain of a story again? If this continues, the Codex might have to break its rules and go above Titan for my Trial.’
It was... a funny situation, as ironic as it was. If you did nothing, you would probably be able to get out, since you would let the world be destroyed; that is, if no one else caught on, but they probably would.
So instead, if you just helped the beast not get caught and such, the village was going to die, and you would be able to get out. Probably not with the best ranks, since you don’t have... that big of an impact in the story yourself.
In some cases this strategy doesn’t even work, or rather, the Codex doesn’t count it, usually in stories where you take the role of the main character that is the only person that can make the story reach the original endings.
But he didn’t think it was the case for this one.
"Still... I’m not going to protect this thing for who knows how long just to get a low rank... I have other plans. After all, I just need to find a better way to make the village fall... and I think I have the perfect option...."
...
"This whole thing is weirdly flammable."