Chapter 114: Byrone’s Lament - Interlude

  “Nice to meet you, Serval. Of course, I say meet in a loose sense. I’m just a phantom, a recording hidden in the recesses of the Delusional Sleuth,” the Emperor said. Serval had expected his voice to be majestic. Instead, it was quite smooth and carried a hint of mirth in it.

  “Yet, you can still respond to me, can’t you?” he asked.

  “Duh. Not in the sense that this is live. I’m just responding to what I have seen, what I’m seeing right now. And honestly, if my sight didn’t work, we wouldn’t be meeting here at all. So it’s a good thing to retrospectively know that I wasn’t hallucinating after snorting some mana crystals.”

  Serval did not expect that. If this was Byrone’s actual portrayal, then he was a completely different man than the mental image Serval had of him. But it made sense. The man was venerated beyond belief, but one had to just look at the name of some of the artifacts to see that he had a weird sense of humor.

  “Nine and a half millennia, huh? I did entertain the possibility that I was going crazy when I saw all this. So, either my intended audience of one is watching this. Or some lab rats and historians in the future are having a massive laugh at my expense.

  “But anyway, let’s get to business. I’ll keep talking, assuming that my sight is right and that I’m talking to you, Serval. My Stewards need to return the statue and the pendulum to their chambers before someone notices that they went missing. The next few security rotations are completely filled by undercover agents, so we should have time. But my sight is not all-seeing. So something might slip through the cracks. And their spoofing can fool the kingdom for only so long. Lest the ‘King’ get suspicious of my Faithful,” he said, uttering the word in a mocking tone.

  “So you even knew that nobody would be picking this artifact for the redistribution?” Serval asked.

  “Why else did you think we didn’t give anyone an entitlement this time around? Because if we had given entitlements, the order would have changed. Someone would have picked this. So we didn’t.”

  “And is there a reason why this couldn’t have been recorded farther in the past, when the security wasn’t that restrictive?” Serval asked.

  “But this did get recorded in the past, when I was alive,” Byrone joked with a wide grin. Seeing Serval’s impassive face, he sighed and continued. “I’m currently placing this imprint into the artifact as we are creating it. It’ll stay hidden until the correct time. But the artifacts and the redistribution mechanism need to be secure. We can’t afford for the artifacts to go beyond our sphere of influence. So, we created one specific backdoor for this artifact. The potion required to trigger this false redistribution contains a very specific magical signature. One that wouldn’t be developed far into the future, until a month before the ninety-fifth challenge kicked off.

  “This is so convoluted... And with all due respect, just talking to you, with these changes in tenses, is doing my head in,” Serval said.

  “Of course, you are speaking to a facsimile of me. It feels weird for you. Imagine how weird it feels for me to speak to thin air, hoping that an imaginary person several millennia later is seeing it. All the while, having a vision of this entire conversation and its multiple possible branches, guiding it towards a specific branch. Just learn to go with the flow, Serval. It’ll make life so much easier for you.”

  Serval couldn’t help but snort at the hypocrisy. “Let’s move on. Were the murals depicting the truth?”

  “Of course it’s the truth, Serval.”

  “Why was it hidden, then?”

  “You’re not naive. So stop asking stupid questions. You know the nature of royalty,” the dead Emperor said. Serval wondered how much Byrone actually saw to be so familiar with Serval.

  “Alright. And what about the dungeon?”

  “Still partially sealed. As I said through my Augury, our chains can’t hold for too long. The intent of the chains was to force it into hibernation for a while. We knew that we could never completely contain it.

  “When it was going on a rampage, we didn’t have the means to destroy it completely. The layers within the layers made it too hard. The Etheons had a postcog. You must have seen him in the murals. Even with his help, we weren’t able to map the dangers lurking inside the new and improved mega dungeon. So we could only plan for the future.”

  “And so you created the artifacts?” Serval guessed.

  “Bingo. It took us decades to create all these artifacts. Even though in the mural it seems like it happened all at once. It was not so. I watched my friends, the Etheons, die one by one, sacrificing their entire mana to imprint their personal magic into these artifacts. Unlike us D’Raacs, they could actualize their mana fully outside their bodies and use it in myriad ways. Each one was unique. And that’s why your artifacts are all unique.

  “And that’s what your voyagers are seeing. Echoes of people, long gone. Magic has intent of its own, after all. Especially the magic of the Etheons. Due to the sheer synchronization rate of Parth, he is seeing the imprints within his artifact. The others around him, seeing minor glimpses is because his monstrous reserves are amplifying the echoes. Which in turn is trigering their artifacts as well. But they will only catch mere glimpses because their sync with the artifacts is not that high. There’s nothing to worry about. In fact, this is expected behavior. In all these years, he was the only one who was in sync with the artifact enough to see it. And that led to you researching the Etheons and finding the murals.”

  “Expected? All this planning to this extent, but why? If you could see nine thousand years into the future, couldn’t you have orchestrated something that would have solved this problem sooner?” Serval asked, frustrated.

  “You think I didn’t try? You think it’s easy setting things up like this? I mean, if it were my brother, he would’ve had the tactical genius to end this long ago. But we lost him way back to the dungeon. And I had to work on my own. I watched countless futures and planned hundreds of thousands of contingencies. I explicitly gave my descendants instructions to destroy the dungeon.

  “The dungeons opened whenever they wished. They pulled people from several worlds into random death matches to feed themselves, because there were so many of the damn things. I didn’t create this system of artifacts to help the voyagers of my time. Because there were none remaining when we had sealed the amalgamated dungeon. “

  “The artifacts were weapons that were meant for the new generation of voyagers to arm themselves and to destroy the dungeon once and for all. Heck, we wouldn’t even have told them that they would die in the process. The plan was to arm the dungeon’s prisoners with the weapons. To help them fight the dungeon, and to tell them that destroying the crystal inside the dungeon would free them. You know, sacrificing a hundred lives to prevent billions of trillions of deaths.”

  “Sounds a bit-” Serval tried to interrupt, but Byrone would not have it.

  “Heartless? Ruthless? Nothing that you wouldn’t have done, Serval. Well, I didn’t have a personal attachment to people who would be dragged into it a hundred years after I sealed the dungeon. My plan was the best one we had. If everyone followed what I had said, the dungeon would have been destroyed exactly a hundred years after I sealed it.”

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  “Heck, if I survived just for thirty more years, I would have been alive to guide them. But the constant battles of my time took their toll on me. And I knew that my death was coming. That’s why I set everything up, even though it would fail. But there was nothing else I could do. All the other options that I saw led to failure. Ultimately, the dungeon would break free completely and wreak havoc across multiple dimensions.”

  “So this is the only plan that works?”

  “No pressure, huh? I don’t want to push you into this path. As I’ve said through my Augury, you are at a crossroads. Not completely right now, but you will soon be at a crossroads when you discover what’s hidden underneath the hall of centurions.”

  “You say as if I can just walk away from this,” Serval said. He was supposed to be angry; anyone would be. But he had already committed himself to the path. A revelation from a phantom would not change that.

  “You can if you want. At this point, it’s just your ego and sense of responsibility tying you towards this path, isn’t it? You always have the choice.”

  “But you know which one I’ll pick.”

  “Indeed, I do.”

  Neither said anything after that. For what could be said? Serval knew that he would be following through. And Byrone wanted him to do just that, despite the illusion of choice. The man was hell-bent on the dungeon’s destruction. That was quite apparent. But why did it have to come so far?

  “How did things turn out this way?” Serval asked, finally.

  “Like I said, hunger, greed. I designed the system to avenge my fallen friends. My fellow D’Raacs, my brother, and my dear friends, the Etheons. Their race was completely gone, you know? The dungeon swallowed their entire settlement whole. Only about a hundred and two of them remained. And those were all retirees who were away on a pilgrimage. And each one of those retirees gave their lives to create these artifacts. I designed the artifacts, sure, but without their mana, without their echoes, it wouldn’t have been possible. We D’Raacs can’t project our mana outwards, and just mana crystals weren’t enough,” Byrone said, his voice mourning the tragedy.

  “But why did it go this badly? I can understand hunger and greed. I’ve seen it plenty. But didn’t you have complete control over the kingdom? You said that you were only thirty years away from the dungeon’s reawakening. Couldn’t you have trained your successor?”

  “I did train him. I even warned him about the assassination attempts that would come for his life. He followed my prophecies to an extent, but then he got complacent, and he got too paranoid.

  “You need to understand. My prophecies do not come to me at my beck and call. I see what comes to me. But when I see the visions, I tend to see a lot.

  “So in the long term, after I am gone, it’ll be very easy to establish myself as a seer. But when I’m alive, when I can’t predict each and every situation that’s happening in real time because the visions didn’t come to me, there were many dissidents and many sceptics. My successor, my son, listened too much to his advisors, refused to believe certain things, and in a roundabout manner got himself killed.

  “And his son turned out to be a bigger shit than his father. He also knew what was at stake, but he apparently wanted to test my claims first. So the first batch of voyagers, the very first batch that was pulled in by the restrained dungeon, he didn’t tell them how to destroy the dungeon. Instead, he told them how to put it back into hibernation, saying that it was the only way to stop it.

  “The unsuspecting poor folk followed his instructions, took the mana crystals, and put it back to sleep. And therein lay the problem. The first challenge was a huge success, albeit with the massive death count of the voyagers. But for the royalty, it was a huge success. They got mana crystals. Tons of it. Way more than the smaller dungeons could ever provide. Not that there were any smaller dungeons after they all coalesced.

  “They wanted to monopolize the crystals, so they hid it all. I had foreseen it. That’s why these remote mountains had the murals. Mountains that they wouldn’t inspect properly until centuries later. The order of my Stewards was very small back then. It was not until several of my warnings came true, several disasters happened, that the people finally began believing, and the order gained its prominence. Only after wards, could much of my planning come to fruition.”

  “But even then, the Stewards themselves couldn’t take charge. You know why, because some of these artifacts are bound in certain ways that wouldn’t work for my Stewards.”

  Serval shook his head in dismay after hearing all that. “And here I thought that only the recent generation of the K’Wuls were a massive disappointment.”

  “Hey, not all of them were bad. Several of my descendants were very good, but unfortunately, the well had already been poisoned, and most of my plans for the destruction of the dungeon were wiped out. Except for the first few successors, nobody even knew that the dungeon could be destroyed this way. They didn’t know the true purpose of the artifacts. So the good ones and bad, all perpetuated the system. The only record of the truth that survived was the murals. And it was under the complete control of my faithful. They were not even allowed to show it to the many Kings in between, and hid it all. As I said, all other paths lead to disaster. And that has led us here. So, I waited. I waited for you.”

  “For me?” Serval asked, bewildered.

  “Yes, for you. Do you want me to spell out why?” Byrone asked, smiling cheekily.

  “No, I get it, I understand,” Serval denied. He had no interest in digging up that particular grave now. “So that was it? It was all greed?”

  “It was. As long as they held the monopoly on the crystals, their rule was undisputed. It guaranteed them control over the whole planet. Why would they let go of it? But the fools don’t understand that the chains cannot hold on forever. It fetches people from outside. That too, in limited quantities, because it’s chained. Its targets are limited, and not inside Tava, where the binding is physically present.

  “But nobody alive fathoms the true disaster it would be if its chains were broken. It would drag in several thousands of people inside each level, and each level will be magnitudes stronger than the fourth trials that you have seen.

  “It would wipe everyone out, feed on them, use that energy to perpetuate the cycle. It would keep growing. It’ll grow until there is nothing else for it to feed. But even then, it won’t stop. It’ll keep targeting other worlds, worlds beyond the four that you are accustomed to. It was horrible to see,” Byrone said, a haunted look on his face. Serval wondered how many such scenarios the man had seen.

  “You don’t really need to impose upon the gravity of the situation on me. My stance hasn’t changed. And it won’t change. I don’t second-guess my path. I won’t hesitate. So the crossroad that you mentioned, the choice that I have to make, even if you didn’t spell it out, was already made. My only concern is that I want to do this without sacrificing my voyagers,” Serval said.

  “Well, you’ll know once you discover what’s hidden beneath the Hall. Not that it’ll be hard. We have reached this point, after all. So it means that my faithful have more control than before. Especially, thanks to there being only one inexperienced Royal alive. Less interference that way,” the man said, uncaring about his descendants.

  “I’ve never been a huge believer in your far-reaching sight, to be honest. I didn’t believe in the augury as well when I first got access to it, but I guess now I have too many things being thrown into my face as tangible proof. This is indeed happening.”

  “Yes, it’s indeed happening. And I do have the dog in me, if you know what I mean?” Byrone tried, but yet again, Serval’s face was impassive in front of such tomfoolery.

  “You’re no fun. Anyway, if you still don’t believe me, then just wait. When your Voyagers come out, they’ll have a very interesting tale to tell you about the Etheons.”

  “You guarantee their safety then?”

  “There’s no guarantee. Not even with my sight, as was repeatedly proven to me over all these years.”

  “I thought knowing the future made things easy,” Serval sighed despondently. Byrone’s tale had made it obvious that future sight had several pitfalls. But he had hoped that it would have eased the way for him somewhat.

  “Not even remotely. If it were easy, then we wouldn’t be talking right now. This circus would have ended several millennia ago. It wouldn’t even have started in the first place. But anyway, that’s not the problem. I can guide you to destroying the dungeon. I can’t guide you to what happens afterwards. That is the real problem, apart from the dungeon, obviously. This society is dependent on mana. The royalty is dependent on it. They won’t allow you to do whatever you want, despite the influence that my Stewards have. You will face severe opposition. It won’t be easy.”

  “Nothing has ever been. It hasn’t stopped me, though,” Serval said, steeling his resolve.

  “Then good luck to you. If that’s your path, then my stewards will give you all you need to follow through. I don’t have anything else to say. I’ve done all I can. It’s in your hands now. Godspeed, Serval,” Byrone said.

  The illusion came to an end, and Serval was back in his office. On the screen, he saw that the mana crystal had been spent, and the simulacrum broke down into motes of light. This entire chat was considered a failed redistribution attempt. A Faceless Steward walked back into frame and picked up the artifact. As he headed towards Byrone’sBoon, the video abruptly ended.

  “What sort of madness have I gotten myself into?” Serval wondered out loud. But he stood by what he had said. He wouldn’t be backing down. This was the right thing to do. It was not just his hatred speaking. It was not just his pride. The stakes were high, and he had to be the man that his mother thought he always was.