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Ch147-Each Charted Course

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In three quick steps, the person was crouching over Sylver, and Sylver all but jumped out of his skin when the man touched his face.

Deciphering souls is more art than it is science, it is nowhere near as simple as a large majority of people imagine it to be.

For starters, it wasn’t infallible. 

A person’s personality tended to determine how clearly Sylver could feel and read their soul, but it wasn’t uncommon for those in power, the people Sylver really would have liked to be able to read the souls of, to be so on guard that it was like trying to see someone’s face while they are wearing a mask. 

But usually, Sylver could nudge the mask out of the way to see the person hiding behind it.

In this case however, Sylver had no such luck.

The man’s anti-magic interference was so powerful that, forget reading his soul, Sylver’s magic was nulled.

Sylver let the bullet fall out of his hand, and used his finger to plug the wound leaking blood from his forehead.

“Are… you alright?” the man asked, as he tried to pull his hand away, but Sylver grabbed him by the wrist and gave himself a moment to catch his breath.

The inflection gave it away instantly, this person hadn’t spoken a word of Elvish for months, years possibly. Sylver took several long and deep breaths, as for a few seconds he enjoyed the relief from the pain.

“I’m fine, just give me a moment,” Sylver answered in Elvish.

“Good,” the man answered, as he brought his other hand up to Sylver’s chest, and Sylver heard a very quiet thump. “Do not worry,” the man said.

There was no point in asking what exactly the man meant, as Sylver felt a chill spread out from his chest, all the way to his shoulders and hip, by the time the man had finished speaking.

In a split-second decision, Sylver decided to play along. 

He had roughly 3 seconds of movement left, after which his whole body went limp and lax, and the man just barely managed to catch Sylver’s head to stop it from bouncing off the floor.

It was actually kind of relaxing to be so fully numb. Sort of like floating in a warm pond, except you couldn’t even feel your heartbeat anymore. Sylver could still quite easily stand up and fight like normal, but he wanted to see where this went first. 

Grant, who had previously remained silent and motionless, now had his gun in his hand. Sylver didn’t quite hear what the man had said, but Grant very slowly put his gun down onto the table, and walked backward, until his back was against the fridge.

This sort of… naïve trust in the Garden, was one of the main reasons Sylver had decided to leave Grant here. Just because this man was a Flower apparently meant he couldn’t hurt or kill Sylver.

Or, more likely, Grant knew that there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop him.

It was hard to blame Grant’s inaction when that was taken into account, if anything Sylver considered this as something akin to trust.

That whatever was about to happen, Tod the necromancer would be able to deal with it, and anything Grant did that resulted in him being hurt would pointlessly complicate matters.

On the other hand, Edmund would have ripped this man’s head off, just for touching Sylver. He’d then likely try to find whoever was flooding the area with their clairvoyance magic, and would rip their head off too. 

Granted, Sylver preferred inaction over overreaction, but there was something extremely comforting about being around a person who was willing to single handedly fight off an army of cannibal priests for you.

Sylver mentally swallowed down the lump in his throat, which was slightly swollen shut anyway, and did his best to concentrate on something other than his fond memories of Edmund.

Like the fact that the Flower had placed a bracelet on Sylver’s wrist, that had a very familiar feeling to it. The feeling condensed until it was a single point through Sylver’s wrist, after which the feeling traveled up his arm, into his shoulder, and spread out into every single inch of his body.

Luckily Sylver was too numb to physically roll his eyes and sigh, as his surroundings changed in the time it would have taken him to blink.

When Sylver was the Silver Lich teleportation magic was limited to mages that specialized in spatial manipulation. The average age of a mage capable of teleporting anything was in the 50s and 60s, on account of how incredibly advanced and difficult the magic was.

In modern-day Eira, everyone and their grandmother seemed to be able to teleport.

And apparently the same was somewhat true for this realm, given that they somehow managed to teleport Sylver without utilizing any magic.

The man who had teleported along with Sylver removed the hand that had been holding Sylver’s head, and he touched something on his wrist. The man’s bracelet made three clicks before Sylver heard another dull thump in his chest.

The chill was gone within moments; it was actually a little disorienting to regain feeling so quickly.

He had been numbed for a total of maybe 2 minutes, it was hard to keep track of time. The more important thing right now was figuring out why Sylver was incapable of accessing his magic, despite the man no longer touching him.

“You’re going to feel a little nauseous for a while, but it will pass,” a different man’s voice said, as Sylver kept up the act and slowly and groggily stood up from the floor.

The room he was in was empty and tiny, Sylver could reach the ceiling with his hand, and estimated the width and length of the room to be roughly 10 meters. There wasn’t a door anywhere, all that was inside the room was Sylver, and a man leaning against one of the walls.

The man who had brought him here was gone, and Sylver didn’t even know when exactly he had left.

Sylver adjusted the bracelet on his wrist and confirmed that it wasn’t the thing keeping his external magic suppressed. By the way his skin crawled, it was whatever those floating drones did, except gentle enough that Sylver didn’t even feel all that uncomfortable.

If he weren’t an undead that was alive mostly through the use of magic, it might have even felt pleasant.

Sylver didn’t get to get a word in, as he was suddenly surrounded by a never-ending field of flowers. Each one was perfectly in line with the other, to the point he couldn’t see the floor beneath them. He noticed right that there were several branches mixed into the green stemmed flowers, as if someone had broken a branch off a tree, and stuck it into the ground.

Just as Sylver had finished turning around, and once again faced the man leaning against a now invisible wall, the field disappeared. A thin coating of black smoke emerged from beneath the ground and submerged all the various flowers out of sight.

“In hindsight, it should have been obvious. A new person is brought into the Garden, and quite literally on the same day, the certainty of events that used to be all but set in stone, drop from 99% to 86%. We’re all still kicking ourselves over how exactly no one put 2 and 2 together there and then,” the man explained.

Sylver looked at him, and as he tried to walk towards him, realized that the flowers beneath his feet hadn’t gone anywhere, he just couldn’t see them.

He was a little shorter than Sylver, by about half a head, but he made up for it by the fact that there was a sort of heft to the way in which he stood. Despite being dressed in a simple dark blue suit and tie, his body language all but screamed that he was wearing a literal ton of armor.

“You’re supposed to choose a flower. This hasn’t been done in a very long time because, by the time a Branch or Leaf is in the process of being promoted to a Flower, they already have a name picked years in advance. I’m Laven by the way,” the man, Laven, said.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Laven. Is kidnapping people from their homes the norm around here?” Sylver asked, as he brushed off invisible dust off his robe, which turned out to be real on account of him being on the floor.

The blood that attempted to leak out of Sylver’s forehead flowed back into the wound, which quickly formed a thin layer of skin to close it up.

“In most cases? No. When someone is actively interfering with Chrys and appeared to be moments away from a heart attack, yes. The sedative was to keep you from moving during transport, the first time is the most dangerous. You should know, you were being investigated,” Laven said.

“I take it “were” is the keyword here?” Sylver asked, as he felt around with his feet and probably broke around 20 flower stems in the process. 

He pretended to be focused on the dark smoke below him, as he inched his way towards Laven.

“It is. While a majority of us have more or less abandoned the traditions that made the Garden what it is, something this direct is impossible to ignore or go against. So yes, you “were” under investigation,” Laven continued, as Sylver took 5 more steps towards him.

“What would have happened if I weren’t a Flower?” Sylver asked.

Laven chuckled to himself for a while, and the sound allowed Sylver to put this human-looking man somewhere in the 40s area.

“At the very least, you would have been interrogated. Foreign dark magic that no one had ever seen, fighting abilities that don’t match your level, an accent that we can’t match to any known tribes, and then there are the pitch-black eyes, along with a surgically implanted ribcage that somehow isn’t made out of anything,” Laven explained.

Sylver kept his head down and pretended to be attempting to look through the dark smoke to find a flower to choose, as he continued to walk towards Laven.

“Oh! And there’s also the fact that you’re allergic to healing potions, had daggers that are made out of an alloy that just doesn’t exist, and on top of all that, you also somehow managed to interfere with Chrys, to the extent we had to give her several days of rest,” Laven continued, as he counted out all the evidence against Sylver on one hand.

“Not to mention, your DNA is all over the place, you’re part elf, part high elf, and part “undetermined.” Nearly forgot, you also somehow don’t have a cut gland,” Laven said, as he stopped leaning on thin air, and gestured at his right side.

The area where Sylver had found that all of the people he had had time to dissect had a gall bladder like organ that stored an impossible amount of positive energy.

“Cut gland?” Sylver asked with a raised eyebrow.

“There’s a proper name for it, but I can’t quite remember it. Part of the process for becoming a flower is having your cut gland removed, except, you already don’t have one. Not only do you not have one, but you have two kidneys, as opposed to the usual one,” Laven continued, as Sylver nodded along.

“So now what?”

“Now you pick a flower, which will determine your name, and then you will meet with Chrys, and she will determine how best to put your “talents” to use,” Laven said, with a condescending tone that was usually reserved for children that had asked the same question ten times over.

“I see… So just to clarify, you’re not going to question me regarding all the weirdness you just mentioned?” Sylver asked, as he reached down and searched around with his hand until he found something flower-like.

Laven shrugged his shoulders as he stopped leaning on the wall and stretched his back.

“Who am I to question the wisdom of the Garden? I’m certain all will become clear in due time,” Laven said, as Sylver pulled at the flower, and found himself holding a light red flower. It had several small branches that were all covered in small red fuzzy petals.

“Amaranth. I had my money on black rose, but this works about right for someone with a [Necromancer] class,” Laven explained, as Sylver turned the red flower around in his hand.

It looked… familiar.

But not in a good way, Sylver couldn’t understand why, but he didn’t get a good feeling when he looked at it. He also found out that [Seed Store] didn’t care whether or not Sylver wanted to add it to his list of available seeds, it was already there when he considered adding it.

Given that the perk hadn’t activated when Sylver was busy touching all the flowers on the ground, either this was the only real flower, or the others didn’t count on account of not being visible.

“Amaranth…” Sylver said softly, mostly to himself, as he tried to remember why this flower, in a different realm, looked so familiar to him.

“Would you prefer to be called Amar or Ranth? Personally, I’d go with Amar,” Laven said, as he touched something on his bracelet and Sylver’s stomach somersaulted as he was suddenly standing under direct sunlight.

Sylver gave his eyes a few seconds to adjust, before he opened them properly and saw he was standing in a wooden room, with a bunch of wooden chairs pressed up against the wall. There was only one door, made out of wood, that for a moment freaked Sylver out on account of how similar it looked to the one had walked through when he maxed out his [Necromancer] class back then. 

But as he looked at it, he realized it was just his imagination playing tricks on him. The floor, walls, and door were all made out of wood, while the ceiling was made out of crystal clear glass, and allowed the full undiluted rays of sunlight to shine down on Sylver and suppress him.

Out of habit more than anything else, Sylver knocked on the door, before he opened it.

The room was barren, save for a girl sitting with her back towards Sylver, and several tablets spread out around her in a circle. She touched one of them with her left hand, and did something else to a different tablet with her right hand, at the same time.

She floated up off her pillow, and after a moment's pause, uncrossed her legs and nearly fell over as she floated back down and landed on her feet.

She was human, or at least she looked like one, with the only exception being that her eyes were covered by a thick piece of metal. She was dressed in a simple white shirt and matching white shorts, both slightly too big for her as if she had recently lost a lot of weight.

There wasn’t much of her anywhere, she had a sort of gangly structure to her, that indicated very poor nutrition, or more likely, was the result of overusing her magic. Her hair was barely long enough to reach her shoulders, and it was a surprisingly normal brown color. She must have not washed out all the hair product properly because it looked far too shiny under the sunlight.

“Chrysanthemum, Chrys for short, pleased to meet you. Would you like anything to drink? Tea, coffee, water?” Chrys asked as she adjusted her clothing, and then finally tugged at the metal device around her eyes, and pulled it off.

It floated out of her hand and landed down onto the pillow surrounded by tablets. She had a blank look on her face for a few seconds, while she kept her completely normal-looking dark green eyes fixed on Sylver. 

“Amaranth, I see, great choice. Especially for an undead, you lot are immortal as it is, not to mention such a well-maintained undead,” Chrys said, as she walked over to Sylver, and did a circle around him while he just quietly stared at her.

“Given that you can’t stop getting in the way; I’ll need to put you somewhere far enough away that you’re not going to wake up every morning screaming in pain… On the other hand, once the Dark Year starts, you’re going to be a great asset to have around… Hmm…” Chrys thought out loud as she walked over to her pillow and tablets, and picked one of them up.

Sylver managed to suppress a shudder as wave after wave of memories of getting shot in the head passed through him, and then seemingly instantly were replaced by a jumbled mess of painless nothing.

“92.3%, now it makes sense… See, usually, when someone is shot in the head, I’m eventually told about it, and I can work to prevent it from happening. But if someone is shot in the head, and doesn’t tell anyone, it really makes things difficult for me,” Chrys continued, as Sylver’s frazzled memories just harmlessly fizzled out of existence.

“I’m starting to see why my predecessors were so against having undead in the Garden, you people are a nightmare to work with,” Chrys continued, as Sylver just mutely stared at her.

At this close a distance Sylver could feel Chrys’ soul as if he was directly touching her.

And what confused him more than anything was how weak it was. Even for a child, it was weak.

A weak soul could still use magic, that wasn’t what was freaking Sylver out, the part that freaked him out was the precision with which this seemingly frail girl handled her magic.

On its own that normally wouldn’t be anything to be surprised about, Sylver was great at magic, but he never fooled himself into believing he was the best. But this was precision on a level even Aether couldn’t achieve.

It didn’t make sense.

“Would you mind if I touched you? It will feel weird for a moment, but it will make it a million times easier for me to figure out where to put you,” Chrys asked, while Sylver continued to just quietly stare at her.

It was only when she started to sway on her feet, that Sylver realized the source of the magic wasn’t swaying along with her, it felt like it was coming out from somewhere underneath them. 

Stupidly, Sylver looked down and squinted towards where he felt the magic coming from.

“Impressive, it normally takes everyone a couple of minutes,” Chrys said, as she turned around, and moved her hair out of the way, to show Sylver the back of her neck.

The scarring was minimal, but once he saw it, Sylver could tell by the way the skin near the top of the scar was shaped, she had had her whole spine operated on.

“We’re free to talk, you know. This is just about the only place in the Garden that no one can listen in on. They wouldn’t dare damage the equipment by accidentally forming a feedback loop,” Chrys continued, as she turned back around and stepped directly into Sylver’s personal space while maintaining eye contact.

They were the same height, but Sylver’s limbs were proportional to his body, Chrys looked like someone elongated a child to be the height of an adult.

There was a sort of… innocence? It was hard to describe the look in her face, or in her eyes, as she seemed to be completely unafraid of Sylver, if anything she seemed to regard him as some sort of harmless but interesting animal. 

“That’s odd... No matter where I put you, the probability doesn’t change… Almost like you’re no longer in the Garden…” Chrys continued. The tablet in her hand made a sound, and she leaned her head down to look at it.

Her hair hid just about everything, but Sylver was close enough that he could see the faint bumps from the brain surgery. They were old, but the quality wasn’t as good as the work done on her spine.

“Honestly, at this rate, I’m tempted to start from scratch. The fact that you won the Gold Giers Trials is odd in it of itself, but the fact that you were promoted to a Flower? That’s almost 4 points worth of deviations…” Chrys continued.

As hard as Sylver tried to gather his thoughts, the constant influx of future memories made it difficult to concentrate, it was like trying to solve a puzzle while swimming in a raging river.

The trick Sylver used to stop Kass from seeing his future, won’t work on Chrys. The difference in raw power was too much.

Sylver could only rely on his natural undead’s resistance to having his future foretold, and a bunch of mental exercises that in reality didn’t do a whole lot against someone this powerful. Shutting off his access to primal energy wasn't an option either, Chrys would be free to mess with him however she wanted if he did that.

Chrys’ eyes rolled up into her head for a split second, and her whole soul went from peaceful and calm, to practically bursting out of her chest with emotion. Despite that, she managed to maintain a very neutral tone as she spoke.

“If you get me out of here, I’ll help you steal The Story Of The Seven Suns,” Chrys said.

Sylver wasn’t sure how well he had managed to keep his reaction hidden, but Chrys’ grin told him he hadn’t done all that good of a job of it. Her teeth were white, straight, and if Sylver’s eyes were to be trusted, artificial.

“I’d love some tea,” Sylver said calmly, as Chrys nodded with an almost childlike smile plastered all over her face, and gestured for him to sit down on a pillow on the floor that hadn’t been there before.

Sylver sat down, and a glass cup of steaming hot tea materialized next to him.

A bottle of a foul-smelling colorless liquid appeared near Chrys, and she gulped it down while Sylver continued to gather his thoughts.

“So tell me, in your world, do you have dragons? I always wanted to see a real dragon,” Chrys asked, as Sylver’s reflexes kicked in, and he managed to successfully not spit up his tea.

“Did you organize it so I ended up here to help you?” Sylver asked after a few seconds of pause. 

Chrys drank another mouthful of the clear liquid and swished it around for a few seconds before she swallowed it.

“I wouldn’t be here if I could do something like that. No, it’s just that there’s going to be a great deal of chaos in the next couple of weeks, so I figured this is my best chance to leave. I’m not sure what exactly is going to happen, but I know you’re the source of it. Once Kass tells you where the book is, I’ll tell you what you need to know to steal it,” Chrys explained, as she finished her bottle, and gently placed it down onto the floor.

Sylver just looked at her and did his best to contain his primal energy field to minimize the effect her clairvoyance had on his thoughts. It helped a little, but Sylver was still being bombarded with memories of his future self.

The likely answer was that Chrys wasn't seeing Sylver’s future, but the future of someone or something Sylver would interact with often. Sort of like tying a balloon to a dog, even if you can’t see where the dog had run off to, you can very easily see the balloon floating above it.

“I know, I know, the gate might rip me to pieces, but if we’re being honest with each other, and I am, I would rather die than have to continue living like this. If not for the fact that I don’t even have a heart, I would have ended everything years ago. It’s a one in a million chance, I know, but I’ve got nothing to lose,” Chrys explained.

Her voice remained slightly upbeat as it had since the beginning of this conversation, but sitting this close Sylver could almost taste the desperation in her soul.

“If I say, no, what are you going to do?” Sylver asked.

It was only as Chrys’ eyes shivered without any movement in her face did he realize her “face” was artificial.

“I’m going to pretend this conversation didn’t happen. And in 9 days there will be a Garden wide power outage, during which I’m going to go downstairs and get my body crushed beyond any chance of repair. By the time they manage to restore power, it will be too late… hopefully,” Chrys explained with the same upbeat tone a normal person would use to talk about a good dessert they recently had.

From the way she spoke, Sylver understood this meant this wouldn’t be her first attempt at something like this.

Sylver quietly sipped on his tea while he looked Chrys right in the eyes.

He noticed after a few seconds of this that only her left eye was real, the right was a very well-made fake. And the more he looked at her, the more barely visible scars he saw. Her fingers, wrists, elbows, feet, toes, she even lifted her shirt slightly to reveal her stomach area covered in so many scars that there was more scar tissue than skin.

The worst part was she looked similar enough to Oska that it was clouding Sylver’s judgment. Chrys’ hair was longer than Oska’s was back when he found her, but the quiet glass-eyed terror was identical. Sylver washed down the lump in his throat with another sip of his tea and did his best to consider his situation without getting his emotions involved.

If he just left her like this, Sylver didn’t have a single doubt in his mind he would eventually forgive himself. It was one of the reasons he’d never tried too hard to make his memory better than it already was, there were things Sylver wanted to forget without having to do anything to forget them.

This wasn't his realm, it wasn't his fault, and this was likely one among thousands of little girls being experimented on “for the greater good.” It was a sad situation, but it wasn’t anything new. 

It also meant he would be limited in what he could do, and how he could act. He could barely protect himself, protecting another person would be incredibly difficult.

On the other hand…

This would make it easier to get the book…

And more importantly, Sylver didn’t want the first thing that Edmund saw when they met was Sylver riddled with guilt. Edmund was one of 3 people who could read Sylver like an open book, he’d know exactly what had happened with a single glace.

And even more importantly… 

He kind of liked her spirit, and as much as he hated himself for it, Sylver had already decided when she looked at him with the same eyes Oska once had and was now just trying to rationalize it to himself.

It didn’t mean what he was doing wasn’t idiotic. But at the same time, Sylver knew he would rather try and fail, than not try at all.

A part of Sylver wanted to make the kind of promise Edmund would, but Sylver wasn’t Edmund. He was a cold-hearted bastard because he needed to be a cold-hearted bastard to save Edmund.

So he compromised.

“I can’t promise I’ll manage to get you out alive… But I promise that if it gets to the point that getting you out of here isn’t possible, I’ll make sure they won’t be able to bring you back,” Sylver said, as Chrys immediately stuck her hand out towards him.

“You have yourself a deal,” Chrys said as she wiped a barely formed tear out of her one eye, and smiled at Sylver.