Serenity watched the entire ritual, all at once. He shouldn’t have been able to; each of his four pieces was able to watch something slightly less than a quarter of the ritual, so he should have had to move his attention around. He also hadn’t ever been able to integrate his senses this well before; with even two bodies, they generally interfered.

With the ritual, however, he was able to see how everything fit together.

He hurt physically, but that was nothing compared to the comfort of the level of Death surrounding him. If anything, it was reassuring; undead did not feel pain in the way the living did. The pain itself was reassurance that he was still among the living.

Once upon a time, the Final Reaper had decided that he did not care if he were undead or living. Indeed, he found being undead to be a superior state, without all the issues that the living had to deal with.

Serenity had found that he preferred living. There were more issues but there were far more joys. It didn’t just even out; living had a huge advantage. He knew that even if he were undead, his allies would still work with him and Rissa would still love him, but it wouldn’t be the same. No, he definitely preferred to be alive. Pain and all.

The odd green-and-gold mana continued to flow into Serenity; it finally reached the point where he started to shove excess mana through his Origin Rift. Nothing changed except that his headache grew worse; he’d probably overdone his mana use. Even if there was mana available, he could only channel so much before he started to hurt. It was one of the reasons that simply sitting in a ley line, which quickly refilled his mana, wasn’t enough to let him cast spells too far beyond his Tier.

With his healing, it was far less dangerous for Serenity than it was for most people, but he knew Blaze would insist on checking him for damage when he got back to the Palace. Serenity regretted that he might not have time for that before he dealt with Lykandeon. If Lykandeon was weak enough, Serenity wouldn’t wait.

Lykandeon had already been weakened enough that he was barely fighting the ritual anymore. He seemed to be conserving his strength while the ritual poured Death-attuned mana into his body. Serenity hoped he didn’t have a countermeasure already planned. He shouldn’t, Death-attuned mana was insidious and dangerous to those without the appropriate Affinity, but that didn’t mean he didn’t. Death-attuned mana was not exactly uncommon even if it was rarely deliberately used.

By the time the ritual came to an end, Lykandeon looked like a shadow of himself; scrawny and wasted, he appeared more like someone undergoing treatment for cancer than a healthy, powerful deity. His aura also seemed far fainter than it had been, but Serenity couldn’t tell for certain if that was because he was damaged or because he was conserving his power.

The moment the ritual actually slid to a halt, two things happened. The simplest was that Lykandeon vanished.

Serenity wouldn’t have known where he went if it weren’t for the second thing that happened. Serenity’s awareness was engulfed in green, the same color as the greenstone or Lyka’s core. Through the green, Serenity could see many things.

He could see Lykandeon collapsed on his couch. He could see the entire room; the door was closed and no one else was present. The only thing he couldn’t see was the crystal at the center of the room; instead, that was his viewpoint.

He could see the inside of a large number of dark places. They were mostly closed, but sometimes they were open enough to see or hear something from outside. None made sense, but he somehow knew they were scattered across much of Aeon. Some were on Lyka as well, but most of the ones on Lyka weren’t bags; they were in magical devices.

Sometimes his viewpoint seemed to be set as though he were seeing from the perspective of a monster core, but often he was the focus of the device. They were splintered enough that Serenity couldn’t make sense of any of them. He admitted to himself that even if he’d been able to focus, he would probably still have been clueless.

Many more viewpoints were scattered around Lyka; most, but not nearly all, were concentrated underground in the facility that surrounded Lyka’s core. At the center of it all, he could also see from the perspective of Lyka’s core itself. He could feel as the workmen chipped off more shards; it wasn’t painful, exactly, but it certainly wasn’t comfortable.

Lyka’s core spoke in emotions, not words. It sent feelings of fellowship and happiness that he was there mixed with sadness that he had to endure what Lyka did and a plea to stop the pain.

If anything, his own pain was getting worse. It drowned out the pain Lyka felt and made it hard to focus, but he tried not to share it with the World Core. It’d suffered more than it should have; he didn’t need to make it feel worse. He’d try to help it if he could, but that was all he could promise.

As touching as Lyka’s emotions were, they weren’t where Serenity’s attention fixed as the green started to fade from his vision and the pain intensified yet again. Instead, he looked out of the eyes of at least two dozen people, probably significantly more, who were collapsed all over the facility. He could hear from their ears, as well. Most of what he heard wasn’t helpful, but there was one conversation that held his attention.

“What happened?” A woman Serenity could see through two sets of eyes spoke angrily to a man. Both were dressed similarly in Priests’ robes, but it was obvious that the woman’s robes were finer than the man’s.

The man bowed deeply with his hand over his heart. “Priest-Inquirer Alanaeon, all of the newest members of the Legions in the Undergound have collapsed; I am attempting to find out if it affected those outside. The older members of the Legions are unaffected and stand ready to follow your orders.”

There were people outside the Underground who were affected; Serenity knew that without having to specifically look. Many were on Lyka, but he also found a good number on Aeon. Some seemed to be in the same sort of clothing as the ones in the Underground, but many were in less formal settings. In fact, Serenity was fairly confident that one was actually collapsed inside a “box” like the one Blaze had mentioned.

Beyond that, the conversation puzzled him. Serenity had talked to Rourke and Ekari about the Underground, Priestess Alanaeon, and the Legions more than once. He hadn’t heard the title Priest-Inquirer before, but that was minor when he compared it to the fact that neither Rourke nor Ekari had mentioned a connection between the Legions and the Priestess or the Underground.

All Serenity knew was that some of his people - Rourke estimated a few hundred - had been sent to the Legions for one reason or another. He’d originally thought the number was much higher from the way Rourke talked about it, but apparently it was a moderately high percentage of the first few “classes of novices” and almost none afterwards; none at all had been sent after the dungeon breaks.

Serenity was trying to figure out what it all meant and what he could do about it, not to mention why he was suddenly seeing through the eyes of all of the pieces of a World Core and people who’d probably been affected by it when a message from the Voice interrupted his still-pained thoughts.

[Evolution initiated: Dungeon Deity]

Serenity knew he should be able to read it, but he couldn’t. It simply blurred in front of his all-too-many eyes before everything faded into darkness.

When Serenity woke, he knew time had passed, but not too much. He tried to get to his feet, but he couldn’t focus on only one or even the four bodies that were still floating in the pools in the Water Garden; he couldn’t narrow his focus enough. Instead, all of the bodies he was seeing from moved as one.

At least it meant he was able to get his dragonling forms out of the water.

Serenity listened to a cacophony of reactions to the movements of the other bodies and tried to narrow his focus again. If he could just shift to his Sovereign form, it would help. He could gather himself together and reduce the numbers. Surely that would improve things.

Another spike of pain was interrupted by the Voice. At least this time it was more or less legible, even if it did waver in his vision. He’d have to remember to go back and ask what he missed.

[I’m sorry Serenity. I didn’t want to do this but there are no other choices. The damage is spreading]

[Evolution initiated: Incarnate of Death]

Serenity could read it this time, though the headache certainly didn’t help. He was about to say it was fine; he didn’t mind being the Incarnate of Death, after all. He was and that was all there was to it. Before he could pull together the words, he passed out again.

Serenity’s first thought when he came to was that all this passing out couldn’t be good for him. Or maybe it was the sign of something that was already badly wrong? He knew that he was in pain, but the Voice’s message seemed to indicate that it was worse than he’d thought.

Before he tried to do anything else, Serenity concentrated on the area around his four dragonling forms. He was out of the water, collapsed next to each of the four pools. The light level was dim and reddish; it was clear that although the eclipse was no longer anywhere near totality, it wasn’t yet over. It couldn’t have taken all that long.

Serenity checked the time but found that he couldn’t really place when the eclipse ended with certainty. He knew when it was supposed to end, but surely it wasn’t less than an hour ago?

Aide assured him that it was. He’d been unconscious for fifteen to twenty minutes each time. If they were both evolutions, they were by far the shortest Serenity had ever had.

[I’m sorry Serenity. You need to evolve again but I can’t help you, there’s nothing available. Nothing at all. I don’t know why, I’ve never seen this before]

Serenity was glad that he could see and hear the Voice again; that was an improvement. He tried to ignore the Voice’s babbling; this was the first time he’d seen the Voice truly perturbed and it was unsettling. He’d known the Voice paid more attention to him than it should, but its reaction said that it cared and that it was worried. He’d never thought that either was true of the Voice; he hadn’t even thought either was possible.

Even worse was the headache from all of the different viewpoints and sounds. He was able to mostly tune them out to make sense of a few clear conversations, but really all he got from that was that a few of the collapsed people had been moved into beds while he was unconscious.

Serenity tried to narrow his focus. He didn’t want to see out of the eyes of other people. He didn’t want to see out of Lyka’s core or Aeon’s, and he certainly didn’t want to see from all the shattered core-bits.

He was Serenity. He was himself and he wanted it to stay that way. Serenity had had enough of being pushed around. He was himself. He was the man he chose to be, not the man anyone else wanted to make him be. He was Serenity; that was the name he’d chosen and it both embodied who he wanted to be and rejected the man he didn’t want to be.

He knew who he was. He accepted what he was. Change was inevitable, but it didn’t have to change the things that mattered.

Something shifted and Serenity felt a weight that he hadn’t even known was present disappear.

[What did you do?] the Voice demanded. [That was an Evolution. Only it wasn’t. You stabilized a Core Tier without Evolving? How?]

Lillene

Do you remember the pieces of World Core Serenity prevented himself from eating even though they smelled good?

Well, he was correct that they wouldn’t directly harm him. A single piece wouldn’t have been a problem at all, it would simply have pushed his Core up a bit. Running the equivalent of about a quarter of a cubic mile of it through himself in energy form, however, had a bit more of an effect.

---

Also, the Voice doesn’t know everything. It’s smart, powerful, and can watch a lot - but it’s neither omniscient nor omnipotent. It knows that and it knows that certain people are good at finding things it didn’t expect; Serenity is one of them, which is one of the reasons it got interested in him back when he was Vengeance (not that it showed it). It still wasn’t expecting this.