I blinked as I saw the scene playing out on the screen. “So, they are able to merge by using the teachings you gave them while they were growing up?” I asked, feeling briefly confused. Terra herself had admitted that she had never seen a situation such as this before, which was why she had been so excited about watching it unfold. As such, there would have been no way that she would be able to educate them to prepare them for their eventual godhood.
Terra shook her head. “All I did there was use a common method for nurturing opposing energies in twins. A lot of people in the ninja village use this to cultivate, so it’s not something I’d be restricted from using. As for the chaos energy… In truth, I only set her on the initial path following the information that had been discovered by the early fallen priests and dark knights. From there, I had her treat it in a similar manner to divine energy, since they were of the same level.”
I gave a small nod at that. “So, it’s really a coincidence that the two of them were able to merge in this way?” I looked at the screen as I spoke, feeling as if that was a bit too much of a coincidence.
“Actually, not at all.” Terra chuckled, shaking her head. “It’s all about their will. In the early stages of their ascension, they were unable to fully merge their energies because they had yet to fulfill the requirements. My guess is that one of those requirements was to finish their ascension, as that is when divine powers take their final form. You experienced that yourself, didn’t you?”
“Right…” It was true. The power of my Mirrors domain became incomparably stronger after I finished my ascension, not to mention that it evolved in complexity. “Would that mean that their fused state is what they would ‘naturally’ be, had she not been born with the anomaly?”
Terra tapped her chin in thought, as if unsure how to answer. “Yes and no? If she somehow managed to cultivate both energies in a single body, that might be how she ends up. But simply cultivating one or the other would not create such an effect.”
“Seeing as it’s happening now, there’s no harm in me telling you. When chaos and divinity coexist within the same body, they are able to achieve a level of power far beyond their normal strength. However, the level of restriction is also increased. As an example… say that the person to achieve this was not me with my power over Fate, but Phisher with the power of Blades.”
“In such a situation, it would not be hard for him to create god-slaying swords. He wouldn’t even need to expend much energy to do so. But, that would be the only thing that he could do with that energy. He would not be able to create an avatar, or use his energy to create a barrier against attacks. At that point, his energy would be the ultimate essence of ‘blades’, and able to achieve nothing outside of that domain.”
“Similarly, with my power of Fate… the combined form of the twins can peer into the weave of fate far more accurately than before, giving them a lot more information than they had access to previously. However, they can only attack people through that same fate system when combined. They are simultaneously stronger and weaker when in that state.”
Honestly, I didn’t see how that could be considered weaker. If you think about it, cutting off someone’s fate was a surefire way of killing them. Unless they had some special method to defy fate itself, they would be doomed. However, when I thought about that, I blinked in sudden realization.
“You’re only talking about Fate… doesn’t the merged form also have access to Inspiration and Stories?” I asked Terra, who gave a somewhat helpless sigh.
“As it turns out… no.” She said in an almost defeated tone. “I don’t know if it’s the system playing a trick on me, or a consequence of how I cultivated them. The divine sister has the power of Inspiration, while the other has the power of Stories. Unlike the other gods when they finished ascending with their incarnations, they did not get my full complement of domains. And they can only use the power of Fate when they are merged…”
That sounded… mildly unfair. But at the same time, I could see it being the result of special circumstances. “So, we have the Goddess of Inspiration, the Fallen Goddess of Stories, and… what do you call the merged form?”
Terra gave a knowing smile as she heard my question. “When all roads join as one and reach their end, they return to the origin. She would be called the Origin of Fate. And you’re lucky that the circumstances for her can’t be reproduced… The simple fact that she only achieved this by being an anomaly is keeping your rank from jumping.”
My eyes opened wide as I understood her meaning. “You mean, this is such a higher form of creature, its mere existence could tip the scales. But… wouldn’t it be possible for someone to cultivate like she did without being an anomaly? Simply using a constant avatar to cultivate divinity while they focused on the void would be enough to pull it off, I’d think.”
Terra shook her head firmly. “It worked for them because they are two copies of the same soul, both holding an identical essence without directly tainting the other. Cultivating both chaos and divinity at the same time would never be so easy as just splitting the work with an avatar. That would be no different than trying to reach godhood by only cultivating an avatar, without ever evolving your mortal body.”
“On paper, it sounds like it could work. However, your divinity would be unable to enter your unevolved body without causing you to erupt in a shower of gore. This is because your ‘essence’ was still mortal. Your essence is the center of your will, and only by allowing it to evolve will you truly ascend to a new level.”
I listened intently to her words, nodding every now and then. I had a little experience with something like this, honestly. Back when I created Clover Kyr, I had to divide my soul entirely to enable him to have his own mind, without tainting my own essence. To this day, I do not receive any feedback from him, and my own soul is not in contact with him. In theory, we have become two distinct creatures. However, I knew that he would disappear if my World Host was slain. Maybe not immediately, but it was certain that he would fade away.
I guess even that level of separation wouldn’t be enough to cultivate both types of energy. I shook my head, dismissing the thought of trying to find my way around these restrictions. Terra already said that an Origin is so strong that they would cause my level to immediately increase. I had just recently reached the third rank as a Keeper. If I were to suddenly rise to the fourth rank, there would be no way for me to resist the worlds that came after me.
If I only have a single Origin at my disposal, I’ll have to make sure to make it count. The fact that she has a domain as powerful as Fate can help her be a valuable asset in the future. Nodding my head, I looked up at Terra, who seemed to be waiting for something. “Are you planning to have her cultivate more types of Fate powers than simply prophecy?”
“Nope!” Terra let out a faint chuckle. “Would that I could, but I can’t anymore. I can guide the Goddess of Inspiration, as we have numerous deities already. As for the Fallen Goddess of Stories, I can offer advice based on existing gods, but nothing specific for her as a fallen deity. And for their merged self, the Origin of Fate, I can only leave that up to them to discover.”
Seeing my expression, Terra quickly added on. “It’s not that I don’t want to, really. The system just won’t let me cultivate something as strong as an Origin in a world this low rank. I can’t even offer direct advice, since it is so beyond the norm for your level.”
I nodded my head, reaching out to catch Terra’s wrist and pull her into my lap. I knew that she wasn’t holding back on purpose. If anything, she was more surprised about all of this than I was, as there weren’t very many chances for ‘new things’ to happen in a system this large and this old. “I believe you.” I said in a soft voice, and Terra suddenly froze up.
A silly smile plastered itself over her face as she leaned against my, grabbing my shirt and resting her head against my shoulder. “Thanks. I’m just glad they got away with a moderate to severe nerfing, as opposed to being deleted from existence.”
“Eh? That could have happened?” Now that caught me by surprise, as I figured that the system would have simply allowed whatever happened to happen. The idea of deleting something because a world wasn’t ready for it seemed… against what I normally knew.
“Only because I’m involved.” Terra looked up at me with a bitter smile. “If there was a precedent to a situation like this, and the system judged that I could have been aiming to create an Origin, she would have had an… accident during her ascension. And, while I admit that I did consider the possibility that something like an Origin could be created if the two of them merged, I thought that the chance of it happening was really low. As in, it was more likely for the sun to explode into a spontaneous shower of glitter.”
“Well, I’m not getting that image out of my head for a week.” I told her with a small grin on my face. “Tell me honestly, what did you think was most likely to happen?”
Terra glanced off to the side, almost guiltily. “I thought that the combination of their ascensions brought about at the same time, each with opposing energies to the extreme, would create a catastrophic explosion that decimated an area with a radius of two hundred kilometers. I assumed that it would be turned into a barren land of nightmares, a wound in the world exposing the void that would likely close up over a period of hours.”
“Just in case, I had them go to a remote region where nobody lived to minimize the damage from the explosion. And I had Leowynn on standby, just in case there was damage to the structure of the world that needed her intervention. So, even if it did come to that, the only damage that anyone in the world would have known was the same as a distant bomb exploding. By the time anyone arrived to investigate, Leowynn could have killed any void monsters that made it through.”
I couldn’t help but blink, staring down at the catgirl in my lap. “You thought that it would turn such a large area into a land of nightmares, damage the very foundation of the world, and you were that excited to watch it unfold? Girl, you’re making me rather confused.”
Terra stuck her tongue out playfully. “I had all the contingencies in place, just in case it happened. But, Dale, I see the whole of the world, of every world, played out every second of every day. I can play back the entire history of the Metong in my head in half a second, down to what type of plants the old Knight Callavast studied as his specialty. They were blue flowers that grew in storm clouds, capable of generating an electromagnetic pulse, by the way.”
“Anyways… it’s not just limited to your worlds. The information is locked to keep me from talking about it, but I’m connected to the system. That means I see everything, from every world, since the oldest surviving Keeper lineage. There are so few things that I’ve never seen before… Like I’m watching the same episode of the same show on repeat.”
“Now, suddenly, I learn that there’s a new show coming out. The reviews say that it will probably be pretty bad, but it’s new. Something entirely new that I’ve never known. So, I want to watch it. I prepare for it to be as bad as expected, but I still give it a shot. That way, if it turns out bad, I don’t have to worry and nothing will be lost. It’s still something to break the normal flow. And, if it turns out to be a hidden gem, I can proudly say ‘I saw it first’.” Terra grinned happily when she said that.
“No other System Companion has ever had this anomaly develop in this way before. This is me, my discovery, and something I was able to watch every step of the way. From now on, it will be known what happens in these circumstances, it will be recorded in the system, and the system will prevent another like me from purposely reproducing it. This is the closest thing to an ‘achievement’ I get. The knowledge that I witnessed something ‘first’, out of any world of any Keeper. And that’s something nobody can take away from me.”
