Another Perspective on Fate

Had Zariel been here, she probably would have yelled, "This is it!" Back then, when Anbaixiu's soul had shattered, it had been the exact same story—the cost to mend it had been terrifyingly astronomical. Unfortunately, Bel had never witnessed that scene, and Cyric had no inkling of what this number truly signified. Bel could only mutter under his breath, "An ordinary soul takes thirty to fifty soul coins at most. What in the Nine Hells did you shove in there?" Cyric, utterly clueless, asked, "Is there something wrong with that number?" "There's something very wrong, something completely abnormal," Bel said. "Every single soul coin is an entire soul—or even multiple souls compressed and stacked together. Even factoring in loss during the restoration process, it shouldn't take over a thousand soul coins without mending a single soul! Are you truly repairing a mortal? Or is it something else entirely?" Hearing this, Cyric also sensed that something was amiss. But things had already come this far, and the contract was already signed. If he gave up now, he would have done Bel's dirty work for nothing. Cyric said calmly, "According to our contract, you are to provide the materials to repair the soul." Since it wasn't his own money anyway, Cyric didn't feel the slightest pinch. Scowling, Bel tossed in another twenty thousand soul coins. Such a sum was negligible to him, and he was genuinely curious about what monstrosity Cyric was trying to fix. The machine rumbled. After a violent shudder, the progress reading shifted to "2%." Cyric frowned. "Does this machine of yours lack the ability to display values below one?" Bel's eyes widened in disbelief. Twenty-one thousand soul coins tossed in, and it was only at two percent? Was this wretched machine broken?! He felt half a mind to swap it out for another, but opening it now risked completely destroying whatever lay inside. "You damned fraud! Just what did you stuff in there?! If you don't explain yourself clearly, I won't honor the contract any longer!" Cyric didn't answer, because at this point, even he wasn't sure what kind of creature Harvey really was. *** At this very moment, Harvey, trapped inside the furnace, was having an agonizing time. The energy smelted from the soul coins relentlessly surged into his body. The sensation of being forcefully gorged to the brim was excruciating, bordering on pure torture. Infernal engineering never cared about comfort; it prioritized achieving results in the crudest, most violent manner possible. Yet even through this torment, Harvey gritted his teeth and held on. This wasn't merely mending his soul—it was supplying a massive influx of energy to incubate his child. The soul fragment had already taken humanoid shape, restored to a complete form. However, the child was exceedingly frail. Harvey had to constantly duplicate his own knowledge and memories to provide the best possible enlightenment. Though he had no idea what was happening outside or where this deluge of energy came from, Harvey recognized that this was a rare, miraculous opportunity. It could accelerate the child's birth; otherwise, who knew how many years he would have had to wait? Enduring the agony, Harvey frantically absorbed the power and channeled it into the newborn soul. Throughout this process, Harvey's own soul was undergoing a profound metamorphosis. As a mortal barely in his thirties, Harvey had accumulated a fair share of experiences, but his foundation remained far from sufficient. Even an impoverished wretch down on his luck like Anbaixiu had downed countless potions to bolster his soul and body, whereas Harvey had enjoyed almost nothing of the sort. Harvey had made it this far purely on raw talent. Now, Cyric was inadvertently making up for the one resource Harvey lacked most. The brutal soul repair triggered his transformation. His consciousness felt as though it had crossed into another realm, where everything he could perceive was fundamentally transformed. Threads of fate unfurled before his eyes, weaving together in an indescribable lattice. Looking closely, every single knot was formed from a twenty-sided die, spinning maniacally. Only when Harvey's consciousness locked onto one would the die halt its rotation, settling on a corresponding number. The moment his attention drifted away, the die would resume spinning wildly, never coming to a rest. They represented fate's infinite possibilities. The connections between all things in the world manifested as threads, and the Dice of Fate governed every intricate detail along their lengths. With every passing second, hundreds of millions of possibilities materialized, while hundreds of millions of futures dissolved into nothingness. A divination wizard was merely a tiny insect crawling across this cosmic web—one careless slip, and they would be cast off into the abyss of eternal damnation. Harvey clung desperately to this endless web of fate. Every direction looked identical; there was simply no way to orient himself. Even more suffocating was that these threads of fate were beginning to coil around him. The longer he lingered upon the web, the tighter his connection to it grew. Where there was connection, there was entanglement. Threads of fate sprouted accordingly, multiplying at an ever-accelerating pace. Harvey fought desperately to sever the threads and flee, only to find that the speed at which he severed them could not hold a candle to the rate at which they grew. Within moments, Harvey was encased in a thick, suffocating cocoon. In that instant, he was ensnared by fate, utterly powerless to struggle. The moment his body was immobilized, Harvey seemed to hear the desperate cries of countless souls. "Fate is cruel beyond measure; no matter what you do, you cannot break free!" "We foolishly believed ourselves favored by fate, when in truth we were merely fleas clinging to a temporary reprieve!" "Prophecy is nothing more than an invitation to death; even if you refuse, you must attend the feast!" "Fate grants you only the right to watch, never the power to alter what is to come!" "All things under heaven are merely prey bound by the snares of fate!" "The only difference between a divination wizard and any other prey is that you can see the cocoon around you, and thus your despair is all the greater!" "Beneath the weight of such overwhelming might, what do we have left?!" ... Across countless millennia, predecessors who had perished beneath the weight of divination poured their dying laments into Harvey's mind. Generation upon generation had racked their brains and exhausted their efforts, yet none had ever changed the outcome. Fate remained as it had always been: ruthless and unerringly precise. None could defy it; none could escape it. If the world was so cruel, why allow them to see? Why let them know? Why bring them into existence at all? Harvey's soul flooded with these questions, threatening to drown his consciousness entirely. For the first time, he experienced with crystalline clarity just how hopeless his predecessors had felt, and just how agonizing the culmination of a divination wizard's path truly was. Yet Harvey did not sink into despair. Because long ago, Anbaixiu had already posed this very question to him. "If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do?" Anbaixiu had asked back then. Harvey's answer had been simple: take advantage of the remaining time to read a few more books. Beyond that, Harvey would not put up a struggle; he would peacefully accept his death. At the time, Harvey hadn't been offering pretty platitudes. He had meant every word. His past suffering had forged the person he was today. The Goddess of Fate had wrested him from Demogorgon's clutches, allowing him to live freely up to this day. In Harvey's eyes, he had already come out ahead. He might harbor the occasional grievance, but on the whole, Harvey was quite satisfied with his life. For an orphan without a shred of background to have witnessed so much wonder in the world, what right did he have to complain? Most orphans like him had died nameless by the roadside, without even the qualifications to descend into Hell, simply dissolving into nonexistence. Harvey did not fear death, so he felt no despair at the prospect of reaching the end. Listening to the voices of those predecessors, he merely felt a deep sense of sorrow for them. Those divination wizards had once been the darlings of heaven, towering figures who swayed the world. Their intellect and dedication had likely far outstripped his own, yet every single method they devised to contest fate had ended in failure. If so, why should he bother resisting? All he needed to do was remain true to himself before that future arrived. Harvey offered no resistance whatsoever, allowing the threads of fate to wind ever tighter around him. Even as suffocation set in, he did not struggle. Soon, the cacophony in his mind faded away. Perhaps the lingering wills of his predecessors looked down on this layabout junior, disdaining to waste their breath sharing their suffering with him. Once those voices dispersed, only Harvey's own thoughts remained in his mind. He lay there peacefully. In his earlier panic when trying to flee, he hadn't noticed how serene this place truly was. Having accepted his own weakness, the cocoon that bound him turned into a cozy, soothing bed. Perhaps someone would breach the cocoon and devour him in the next instant, but at least for now, Harvey was safe. The only flaw in this tranquility was the absence of books. If only he had a few of those unfinished ancient tomes with him, it would have been perfect. Amidst this peace and quiet, Harvey's perception sharpened dramatically. The threads of fate tangled around his body did not seem entirely immutable. Layer after layer wove thicker on the cocoon's exterior, yet on the inside, they were slowly dissolving. The more tightly a thread clung to Harvey, the faster it dissolved. Harvey pondered in puzzlement for a moment, then gasped in astonishment. "Even if I do nothing, my original connections to all things will still shift—because even if I remain still, the world remains in motion. Ah! Why didn't I ever think of it from this angle before?" Harvey focused his perception once more. It was just as he had realized: the web of fate was not woven for him alone. The threads of fate had no end and no center; they linked every creature and object across countless planes together, perpetually shifting. The harder one struggled, the deeper the entanglement grew. But when Harvey ceased struggling, many threads that once bound him vanished simply because whatever lay at their opposite ends had perished. Just like Demogorgon back then. That had been a noose cinched tight around his throat, yet now the bonds had long since loosened—indeed, they had vanished entirely—without Harvey having done a thing himself. Or take the time he had recklessly charged toward Anbaixiu's castle. Harvey had been nothing more than a swept-along apprentice. Had he done anything to fight against Anbaixiu? Not at all. He had simply waited quietly, and those fatal futures had shifted on their own. Later still, when he foresaw the prophecy of his own death, Harvey chose to accept it—only to be rescued in the end by Anbaixiu. ... So, was this purely luck? Was it simply the favor of the Goddess of Fate? Harvey shook his head subconsciously. He recalled Anbaixiu's solemn warning: the Goddess of Fate despised those who relied on fate for everything. Divination wizards who constantly turned to augury before making any move were always the first to die. Fate would not let you off lightly, yet neither would it tolerate you mundanely reciting a predetermined script. There was a middle ground between giving up entirely and fighting desperately—a balance exceedingly few divination wizards could ever strike. Harvey extended his consciousness outward, seeking the opposite ends of the tangled threads, quietly sensing the self-destruction of those pivotal nexus points. It was like watching the collapse of an entire galaxy. At that moment, Harvey's comprehension of fate ascended to a whole new plane. See fate, accept fate... As it turned out, doing nothing did not mean one had no influence. On the contrary, if one could discern the exact right moment, doing nothing could actually steer one clear of those despairing futures. The Dice of Fate, the threads of fate, and the incantation that made fate forget oneself... In this instant, all the knowledge left to him by the three elders converged, throwing open another door of destiny for Harvey. A void seemed to tear open within Harvey's soul. The enormous energy deficit left him feeling hollow and famished; he required far more energy to sustain this deduction. He sensed that he was on the verge of breaking through to a new realm, yet he was starved of power. *** While Harvey was about to level up, outside the furnace, the two deities Cyric and Bel were on the verge of exploding with fury. Just moments ago, the repair progress on the furnace had climbed to seventy percent. Though it had swallowed hundreds of thousands of soul coins—making Bel grind his teeth in agony—it was not a ruinous expense. Even so, in Bel's eyes, he had been swindled by Cyric, suffering a sheer loss. To a devil, being trapped in a losing contract was worse than taking a blade to the gut. Cyric felt awkward himself. He truly hadn't intended to swindle Bel; he had genuinely come only to rescue Harvey. Who could have foreseen such an anomaly? Weren't devils supposed to understand souls better than anyone? Yet Bel's initial estimate was off by a factor of hundreds—and now the blame fell squarely on Cyric's shoulders? What followed was even more preposterous. The progress, which had just been at seventy percent, suddenly began plummeting wildly, crashing all the way down to eighteen percent. This completely broke Bel's composure. He had never heard of a soul restoration going backward! "You damned fraud! This is your illusion, isn't it?!" Bel's only remaining theory was that Cyric had deployed his divine authority to craft a hyper-realistic illusion. Could this bastard have been sent by Zariel specifically to screw him over? Cyric hurriedly said, "No! This has absolutely nothing to do with me! I can swear on Ao!" "Who would ever believe an oath from the Prince of Lies?!" Enraged, Bel swung his greatsword, cleaving Cyric's avatar clean in two. Bel's true body was present, whereas Cyric's vessel was merely a golem avatar housing a sliver of divine power, utterly incapable of resisting. Chopping him down wasn't enough to vent his wrath. Bel crumpled the still-twitching remains of Cyric into a mangled clump and hurled it straight into the furnace. "I want to see for myself just what in the hell is burning inside this furnace! Go be buried alongside my hundreds of thousands of soul coins!" The soul of Cyric's avatar was forcefully crammed into the furnace. Together with that sliver of divine power, it became nourishment for Harvey. A deity's avatar was naturally no trivial feast. The gauge on the furnace immediately began skyrocketing, surging straight to one hundred percent in no time. This meant that no matter what was being smelted inside, the repair was finally complete.