Soul of Searing Steel

As the Legends and deities mulled over the information bombshell that the Knowers had dropped upon them, the Elite Party who were forced to soak in everything discussed had complaints, but were not able to vocalize them.

Wait, Sir. Should you be telling such things to minor characters such as us? Do you really not have to keep secret the vital information you are defenselessly revealing to us now?!

Priest’s premonitions were warning him wildly—would he not be aware that his team was here only to testify about the Knowers’ unusually old history? They had existed over 770,000 years ago, and even taking into account Mycroft’s time dilation, there would be merely a difference of tens of thousands of years between Lost Galaxy and the Multiverse. They were incredibly ancient, but that length of history had been precisely why the champions were able to deduce the truth of the information provided.

Still, not knowing if deliberate or if the champions had simply not been paying attention, the Elite Party who should have quietly left after providing their evidence remained in the conference hall, was forced to take in most of the information laid…would they really not be silenced eternally for it?

Though nonsensical, the thought itself was not impossible. Priest was fidgeting from anxiety filling his mind with the sense that he had forgotten something.

At that moment, his party members were also communicating.

“Won’t our memories be wiped later?”

Clergy and Rider made an exchange with a shimmering gaze.

“You want me to hold my tongue? It goes without saying, and I also have to be bold enough to do it!”

Rider got the idea at once through past experiences, and replied with a flash of his gaze.

“It sounds like the Knowers are volunteering to exchange information about the Wise Ones… is that about the Sage? I’ve even heard the term ‘Wise One of the Arcane Arts’—what does that mean?”

Mage was thoughtful as well, with a cool flash in his eyes. Being a spellcaster, he was naturally sharp about related jargon.

Beside them, Alchemist watched as his teammates’ eyes flickered in all sort of gazes and thinking they were trying to indulge themselves in some sort of entertainment, he confidently smiled. His eyes which had been transformed suddenly emanated rainbow colors, leaving the others chagrined and feeling inferior.

***

Meanwhile, as the Elite Party tried to entertain themselves despite their troubling situation, Joshua began using the simplest layman terms to analyze the information delivered to them by the Knowers, and to speculate on the origins of the Knowers.

Firstly, the prehistoric ruins in World 39958 was definitely an advanced warship from an alien civilization belonging to the Knowers—it had lost control, crashing down into the Devastator Crater in battle against Evil Gods and was preserved until then.

One could infer plenty from that brief information. Firstly, the Knowers and their allies were fighting Evil Gods 770,000 years ago, and suffered heavy losses—the Fleshists’ homeworld was decimated, their civilization fallen. The Knowers’ homeworld must not have survived either, which was why the civilization turned into its present fleet form.

There was no question that the scale of the war 770,000 years ago between Evil Gods and civilization had been profound—there were signs everywhere across the Galaxy of Beginnings. What remained of the battles made it clear that the Evil Gods had won—most of the Galaxy of Beginnings were wastelands, and it was only several hundreds of thousands of years later that the Elders were unexpectedly born into an insignificant world, even believing that they were the only intelligent life in that galaxy.

Despite that, the Knowers were not destroyed by their failure, and silently roamed the Void, gathering ‘knowledge’ or ‘information’ they wanted. They were a machine-like existence to the Great Khan and any other native civilizations, one which they kept a respectful distance away from while the Knowers harvested knowledge both discreetly and efficiently. Still, now that the Mycroft civilization knew about their purpose, they could see clearly that the Knowers were running around the reaches of the Multiverse for the sake of finding legacies similar to Mycroft’s own, superior civilizations where the greatest of champions such as the Sage existed.

“There is no doubt that they call themselves the ‘Last Inheritors of the First Magic’ and the ‘Caretakers of Knowledge’. The ‘Glorious People’ meanwhile refers to the civilization that is preserving an ancient legacy from the Wise Ones—it must be referring to Mycroft, where the Sage once existed.”

Holding a thin roll made from special materials, Joshua pointed at the first and second paragraphs in the greetings that the Knowers had sent them and calmly explained, “On the other hand, Precursors of Order, Nameless Creator and the Fabulists should be referring to an individual or civilization which has inherited the message left by the Wise One of the Arcane to all intelligent life thirty million years ago, even before the Knowers themselves.”

There were no issues with that explanation and the others certainly had no objection. Everyone even thought that only the Knowers would be aware of the civilizations whom those names belonged since it was over thirty million years ago—it would not be unusual that the legacy changed hands over generations, and after having wandered the stars for 770,000 years, the Knowers were probably one of the older species around.

“Then, as the name suggests, the ‘Wise One of the Sacred Light’ would refer to the Sage, just as the next part makes evident that the Knowers are purposefully collecting messages or any legacies left by the Wise One. The infamy they earned from being an apocalyptic civilization is from their unrestrained behavior of gathering information.”

Joshua’s words caused the conference room to stir. In fact, it had been what they were talking about previously. In that case, how many beings that the other civilizations had said to be of the Sage’s level existed, and what did they respectively correspond to?

At the moment, even if the Legendary mages were reluctant to agree with the perspective that magic was like Holy Light and was a supernatural power established by a certain profound being’s alteration or refinement, their opinions had naturally placed the origins of magic to the Wise One of the Arcane. After all, being unsettled was one matter and truth was another—even if there was no verifying which was genuine at present, they could gather from the Sage’s power that it was perhaps reality.

Divine power, psionic, magic, ether, lifeforce, Holy Light and Shadow, as well as the Malevolent Chaos exclusive to Evil Gods and varied from the Chaos in Creation—those were the core Extraordinary forces that the champions of Mycroft could sum up. Other seemingly unusual ones were merely variants or combinations spawned from those abilities.

First and foremost, [divine power] was energy originating from the Initial Flame, an exception directly linked to the Root. It was the most basic and powerful force, although according to what they knew at present, there was no such thing as the ‘Wise One of the Divine’. Still, it might have been the first supernatural power to have exist, appearing in Steel Pythons and other early deities.

Next was [Psi] —a force originating from the spiritual aspect, a power of thought and logic, emotion and will. It was the earliest example of ‘will affecting reality’, with no information about its origin, and yet every known civilization acknowledged existence of psionic energy and souls as a cycle in the Multiverse. It incidentally made evident that it was developed early as well, and was recycled through the rise and fall of innumerable civilizations across the multiverse.

The ‘Wise One of the Psi’ should thus have existed. He was perhaps not the first to awaken psionic abilities, but he had definitely been a sage who had brought it to new heights and marked it upon the Multiverse.

Things were complicated when it came to [magic] . Research from the Glorious Era and hypotheses from the Starfall Era asserted that it was a primitive energy that had expanded since Creation alongside the Multiverse to span every reach. It was from the withering of the Initial Flame’s existence, which explained its ability to transfigure any known object and spiritual state, even conjuring things or phenomena that had never before existed in the Multiverse.

If Psi represented the changing of things through spirit, magic was the phenomenon of all things. Both were deeply connected, perhaps originating from a single vein—Mycroft’s early history in supernatural powers development had begun from psionic powers, then refined to magic.

The psionic families were blessed with spiritually strong individuals who had better perception of magical energy and elements. They directed their strength that was capable of altering the physical world into influencing magic, and proceed to use magic to create phenomena too complicated for psionic powers. Naturally, dormant magical energy could hardly be used in the beginning of the Multiverse, which was why the first being who had awakened it was truly prodigious, and found it a joy to open new paths—it would have been easy to become one of the Magnus otherwise.

That was followed by [ elemental ] and [ ether ], terms that were often linked to magic. Those three supernatural powers were basically what all spellcasters had to study since every spells emerged from those three forces. Firstly, elemental signified ‘attribute and change’, its presence labelling every supernatural ability, clarifying every phenomenon or change that was previously vague.

Fire magic gathered flame elements, just as thunder magic gathered thunder elements—the meaning of elements was akin to humans naming all phenomena that existed upon this world, seemingly unimportant and yet determining the basis of order. Mutually reinforcing or neutralizing each other, the relationship between the six major elements and the variants that existed between them was the topic of research that mages examined for life.

Just like psionic powers and magic, the relationship between elements and magic was very close. One could deduce that the sage of the elements would have been an ancient existence who had cultivated their magic to the highest boundary, developing brand-new paths beyond pure arcane arts.

As compared to the commonly-used terms of ‘elemental’ and ‘magic’, ‘ether’ was relatively unheard of. But even so, it represented fundamental magnitude and direction, and was the essence in which Extraordinary realms were born.

The existence of ether gave form to many environments and creations—it was with ether that everything from floating islands to floating cities or worlds of airships appeared. It was impossible to depend on elements and mana alone to create momentum for the Void battleships without that supernatural force which governed over ‘magnitude and direction’, since the welling power would have incinerate the engine furnace. It was only with ether, virtually unaffected and able to directly control power and route to bind formless mana and elemental forces together, that present-day modern magic and enchanted industrial systems could be created.

For instance, creating controllable nuclear fusion with only materials and various phenomena would have been very difficult, since nuclear fusion had considerable requirements and there was basically no material that could steadily restrain the core conducting nuclear fusion. Radiation from nuclear fusion would have also destroyed any matter that appeared indestructible on a molecular level, and yet if a spellcaster who had mastered ether spells was present, he could have directly created an ether boundary to contain all emerging heat and radiation and direct the energy to another controllable direction.