Sovereign of the Karmic System-Chapter 678: Catching Up

Later that day the camp had been set alight.

It was already late evening, yet the muddy paths between tents were as illuminated as the cobblestone roads of a city’s red light district. The murmur of celebration deafened the splatter of people staggering through mud in a drunken fashion. The smell of a hundred traditional dishes of just as many different civilizations engulfed the entire camp, masking the oddly familiar smell of furnaces, wet dirt, drying blood and poor hygiene.

’The war is over!’ people chanted as mortals and cultivators alike as they thrust their wooden mugs in the air, wasting half of their drink before it could even wet their lips. The beginning of a long night, if not days of celebration that were only bound to get worse as the alcohol kept flowing.

Inside the tents, those not too keen on drinking labored to make sure that no one could pass out drunk without a belly full of food, while children were kept distracted and entertained by spectacles of lights and shadows created by the most amazing entertainers, the elementals.

In the midst of celebrations, however, one tent in particular had remained relatively quiet.

"My family is not here?" Daniel asked, lips twitching in veiled annoyance.

He was sitting at the middle seat at a long wooden table, right by Roley’s right side. In front of him, on the other side of the table sat Ligart, right in between Aeron and Xargy. Der sat by the corner seat, several seats down the table, facing his daughter Mea, the old woman that occupied the seat at the head of the table. The two had been finally reunited after millennia spent separated, and had days worth of catching up to do.

Roley was having a conversation of his own with Wolfe, the perfect elemental and leader of all elementals that were once part of Daniel’s group. The latter had been starstruck by Roley’s presence. In him he felt the wild nature of primordial metal essence, and just by standing next to him he could feel what he had long forgotten. A chance of advancing past what for all elementals across the multiverse was a hard limit to their evolution.. the stage of perfection.

Both were engaged in deep conversations, but at the mention of Daniel’s family both discussions came to a halt, and the two began to pay attention.

"Have they passed?" Daniel asked with a tone of indifference that made Ligart and the others uncomfortable.

"No." Ligart responded, reassured by the looks of worry that had appeared on the faces of Roley and Der. A normal reaction to the possibility of death of many of their friends. One certainly more natural than the indifference Daniel had shown. There was something wrong with him. He was sure of it. Yet, he was too happy about the reunion and the end of the war to ruin the moment, so he took a big swig of mead, and delved into his memories. Two actions he had never liked to mix, and a place he didn’t like his mind to be. "It was soon after you left, when you killed that guy from the blood domain and inherited his sect’s legacy."

Ligart took another sip from his mug, then placed it back onto the table, staring emptily at the waving surface of what little alcohol remained. "You were right, at first. With you gone, no one had come looking for us. We had kept moving, like we agreed, and kept our heads low for many years. But then something happened. We lost that.. What did you call it? the group thingy."

"The group effects of the system." Daniel said.

"Yeah. That." Ligart took another sip of his drink. "When that was gone, we lost a large portion of our strength." His eyes moved to the bottom of his mug, unconsciously attracted by a small crack. "Things went pretty much downhill since then."

"What happened?" Der said, finally joining the conversation by taking a seat by Daniel’s right.

"It started with Sewah leaving. He had never given up to the pursuit of power, but knowing that you were around kept him grounded. When we lost our powers, he was the first one to say that you were probably dead. We tried to keep him around, but. ’When the cat’s away..’ he said, then he just left.

The next time we saw him was after the better part of a century, when he came back accompanied by an army of the Blood Sect’s auxiliary sects-Turns out he hadn’t left to look for glory. He had entered Sacrifice’s domain instead, to look for traces of your disappearance." Ligart finished what was left of his drink, then slammed the mug on the table. "I could tell you he was trying to come and save you, but you know him better than we did. He probably couldn’t stomach the thought of somebody succeeding at something he had failed at.. the asshole."

Xargy’s reptilian eyes closed, and his upper body slouched onto his seat, while Ligart rubbed his eyes in an attempt to erase the mist that shrouded them. The only one who appeared calm was Aeron, but only because he had long since sealed those memories away.

"Naturally, when the Blood Sect arrived he was already dead. They were really eager to show us what they had done to him to get him to break. Though they were less enthusiastic about failing." Ligart recounted. "They only found out about us because they had asked for the help of someone with a system working Sacrifice’s domain."

The table went quiet for a few moments.

"What happened next?" Daniel asked, his tone calm and unbothered. Yet, something had changed. Something only Aeron had been able to notice.

Images and sounds, memories of Sewah’s voice of when he and Daniel shared the same body played in his head. Around these memories detached strings of emotions wiggled aimlessly, inching in their direction with the purpose a blind worm had while wiggling over wet soil. As the strings touched the images and sounds, they flickered with electricity, sending jolts to Daniel’s lips, brows and heart.

Aeron stared in silence as Daniel regained his composure, and the strings went dormant once more, allowing for the memories of a lost companion to dissipate once more in an ocean of unimportant past events.

None of the others could perceive this minuscule change, so when Daniel skipped past Sewah’s death, Ligart’s grip tightened, causing the mug he was holding to explode in a mixture of shards and dust. He turned to face Der, eager to finally hear an explanation for Daniel’s condition, but the latter stopped him, shaking his head left and right in quick succession.

"What happened next.." Ligart said through gritted teeth. "Is that we tried to fight our way out. We escaped a few times, but with another system holder at their beck and call, they were always able to find us, so eventually we were caught and stuck in this pocket dimension. After a few years of imprisonment, armies started to show up, attacking us either individually or as a collective."

"These armies." Daniel muttered, his fingers pinching pensively at his chin. "Were they always just shy in strength of your own?"

Xargy adjusted his large body in his seat. "Either that, or they retreat just before achieving victory."

"You were being kept as livestock." Der said. His palm landed heavily against the wooden table. "A farm for Sacrifice. We have seen hundreds of them while searching for you throughout his domain."

Roley shook his head. "As well as Horror and War."

Der and Roley come to the same conclusion. That instead of killing them, the domains of sacrifice, horror and war had kept the civilization that Daniel had created and nurtured as a farm for their lords’ powers of existence. Yet, while that might have been true, Daniel was not convinced. The blood-red power of Sacrifice, the murky gray of Horror, and the flaming yellows and reds of War were gone, disappeared from the multiverse when their aspects had perished, but one power remained, shrouding the entire pocket dimension in a chaotic white and black.

"How did you get separated from my family?" Daniel asked.

Ligart turned to look at Mea, the old lady who sat at the head of the table. She had been sipping tea from a ceramic teacup, peering into its surface memories of faces and voices of her best friend Alesia, her children and her parents. Minutes had passed before she finally chose to speak.

"It took hundreds of testimonies for your wife and children to give up hope." She said, her voice gravelly, strained and weak. "Prisoners of many wars, slaves rescued from enemy camps, and even kids who had thought of leading the sect’s forces to kill us as a school project. No amount of torture or begging got us a different answer to the same question. Were you still alive?

Perhaps the blood sect truly believed you had died, at the time."

Memories and emotions once again clashed in Daniel’s mind, a spectacle that to Aeron appeared like the rescue of someone from a desert, as they lay down on their back, with broken and dry lips, too weak to even accept the life-saving sip of water that was being offered to them. Daniel’s emotions were the water, his memories were the dying man, and the fight for survival was the fight for his humanity.

As Daniel’s emotions started to settle, Mea continued. "But while your family eventually gave up on finding you alive, Edmund had not. Every few years he would wake up from sleep, and swear that he had seen you. A flicker of an image among the trillions that haunted each second of his sleep. He swore he saw you alive and well, living through tens of generations among mortals.

Most of us thought he simply felt guilty.. after all, it was his gift that had summoned the lord of the blood sect. After centuries of living as a ghost, a shell of himself, we thought the news of your death had made him crack." Mea’s leathery hands trembled, as her voice grew weaker and weaker. Her eyes, shaded by cataracts, had started to swell, too dry to produce any tears. "Now I think.. I know that the reason why we refused to believe him was that we couldn’t accept that you would choose to leave us to suffer, while you lived happily elsewhere."

Daniel’s emotions were stirred once more, but he had now gotten the hang of it. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and forced them down, back into the oblivion they belonged to. When he opened his eyes, he noticed that Ligart, Xargy, and virtually anyone present was staring at their own hands, each struggling with their own guilt, shame and regret.

"How were you separated from them?" He asked.

It took a moment before Mea regained her own composure. She placed the cup on the table, put her hands onto her legs in a matronly manner, and continued, "Edmund resumed the research on his powers. He thought the worst that could happen had already happened, so if he couldn’t find a way to get to you, he was at least going to find a way to get us out of here. Then one day, out of the blue, a portion of our camp had vanished."

"Vanished? What do you mean vanished?" Roley asked.

To answer was Ligart, who said, "We woke up to a crater in the ground, roughly a mile in radius, with the epicenter being where Edmund was conducting his experiments. Whatever went wrong with them took him, his family and all of their descendants, as well as those who lived by them. My cousin Heimart and our families were gone too, and so would have been Mea and I, had we been home."

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More strings of emotional connection rose from the depths of Daniel’s spirit, enough for him to be unable to ignore them. He sprung up on his feet. "Is something wrong?" Aeron asked, speaking for the first time since the banquet had started.

"No. I just need to think." Daniel responded. "I just need a minute." He added before stepping out of the tent. Once outside he took several deep, calming breaths, but soon realized that that wasn’t working as well as it had before. His breath shortened and a weight landed on his heart. ’Ridiculous’ he thought. He was the aspect of karma, a deity.. yet he was having a panic attack.

He insisted on breathing in, ignoring the noise of chatter and celebration and using each breath like a bucket of water onto a raging fire, when suddenly, he smelled something not too far east that calmed him down.

He followed this scent for several minutes, avoiding drunkards and pot carrying wenches until he found himself at the very edge of the camp, where what appeared to be a mock training ground for mortal youths had been built. There, under the dim artificial starlight of the pocket dimension, a single young man practiced swordsmanship on a mannequin.