The Oracle Paths

Jake's facial muscles twitched at the news. Knowing that he had gone through so much pain was enough to make anyone feel disheartened. But it was the Moon Spirit's next comment that really got him, reminding him once again how limited their understanding of the world outside was, confined to the macrocosm revolving around Klayr's corpse.

"By the way, if you have all those things, why don't you just bomb the Blade Spirit directly?" she asked, her skepticism barely concealed.

"Precisely because, like I said, they aren't weapons of mass destruction," Jake explained again, with a hint of exasperation. "They're Aether Cores, the equivalent of your Lumyst Cores. Aether has no mass, no measurable energy, and no natural interaction with the material world. Yet it exists in everything, including the metaphysical, and is the origin of all things. Including your Lumyst and your celestial bodies, which are entirely made up of it if you zoomed down to the root of it all. If you remove all the Aether from an object, even the empty void of space where 'nothing' is supposed to be, it collapses and ceases to exist in an 'absolute' manner. Concepts like space, time, luck, and even more abstract notions like destiny or the soul aren't exempt from this principle.

"As for the Aether Cores I have, the ones that give you that strong sense of danger are Grade 9 and 10. A Grade 10 Aether Core without attributes could, on its own, siphon all the Aether in a radius of a million kilometers in just a few hours, and I know what I'm talking about. If I threw one of those Aether Cores at either of you with no possibility to escape, it would indeed be your death warrant.

"That's not the case for Twyluxia or the Blade Spirit. Klayr, the corpse you orbited, had at least the power of an Ancient Designer when it was alive. Lumyst is its invention, and its cells naturally convert ambient Aether into Lumyst, otherwise, with your cultivation, this resource would've been exhausted long ago. My body can match the energy production of an Aether Core between Grade 10 and 11 every second, and I am still far from being able to match the Lumyst production of a corpse dead for thousands of years. Moreover, the Blade Spirit's broken chitin belonged to a World Eater, an entity that devours all the Aether in its path to fuel its own endless evolution. Do I need to explain more, or is it clear now?"

"Your Aether Cores would just be food for Blade," the Moon Spirit concluded with a worried nod.

"Yeah, pretty much."

Jake held back from mentioning another, less admirable reason: his Ordeal Rating. If spamming Grade 10 Aether Cores to solve all their problems was possible, it would probably only earn him a mediocre evaluation.

Pay-to-win wasn't a strategy encouraged in these Ordeals. Each Player risked their life precisely because the difficulty was supposed to be tailored to each of them, and the rewards were proportional to their efforts, not the depth of their pockets or those of their sponsors.

That didn't mean he wouldn't use his resources if necessary—after all, he hadn't bought them but condensed them himself—but it had to be for something grand, something that far exceeded what the Oracle System would expect from an anomaly like him.

Besides, the presence of such an enemy still had a true purpose: forcing the Players of both Mirror Universes to divert some of their forces and attention to a common foe. If he used his resources now to eliminate their ultimate enemy, the Oracle Hacker and all the corrupted Players from the opposing faction would have free rein, making him lose his advantage as a rogue factor.

"If you have no more questions, let's head in," Jake finally said.

With a thought, he deployed his Purgatory World around them, the black space surrounding them replaced by the tangible illusion of a smooth, dark land, and a domed sky made of the exact same material. He had chosen to conjure Horizon Hardstone everywhere to ensure it would hold.

"... It's ugly," Ray commented.

"Not inviting at all," Moon added in the same critical tone.

"..." Jake held back an acidic remark.

If they only knew how much Aether it cost him to maintain even a gloomy illusion like this, they would've surely been a bit more tactful. Not his fault he needed to confine them like this.

"When you're ready, I'll teleport you and the Purgatory World into my Inner Space," he warned them one last time.

The two Spirits exchanged a nod, then dropped their mental defenses, allowing Jake access to the space around them. The next moment, the phantasmal image of the Purgatory World vanished with the two Spirits, the dead, dark silence of the cosmic void almost erasing the memory of the titanic clash that had just occurred.

As Jake pondered how to justify the destruction of the moon to any potential witnesses, the Moon Spirit's voice echoed in his head,

'No need to worry. I cast an amnesia curse during our fight. Most of the spectators bathed in my moonlight will think they had a hallucination. I also sealed the combat area beforehand to prevent Blade's senses from detecting what was happening.'

Jake realized at that moment he had underestimated the lunar avatar yet again. He thought she had given it her all in their battle, but she had made sure its fallout was as minimal as possible. Your adventure continues at m v|l-e-NovelFire

While descending towards Twyluxia, he discovered a striking illusion of the moon shimmering faintly above him. It shone only on one side, a mere image projected onto a canvas of emptiness. Like Ray and the carcass of the sun he'd left behind, Moon had also prepared for this.

Speaking of the two Spirits, his Inner Space was struggling to contain them, even with the help of the Purgatory World. It clearly wasn't ready to accommodate beings of their magnitude, and he felt a pressure in his chest that was metaphorically akin to a stomach about to burst. Just two minutes ago, this space had only held his Spirit Dimension, which housed his Fairy Spirits, and his biomass.

"By the way, don't you have a more normal name than Moon, like Ray?" Jake changed the subject to distract himself from the searing pain that hit him as he re-entered the atmosphere. The difficulty he'd had healing from his first passage was still a vivid memory...

The Moon Spirit went silent for a moment, also sensing Ray's enthusiasm to help pick another name for her. Her voice, strangely embarrassed, eventually whispered,

'Pick one for me...'

Jake didn't comment on her discomfort, but given how poorly he'd fared with naming before, he left the task to Xi. She hadn't participated in a while, so she was more than happy to comply.

[How about Selene? It's the name of a Greek moon goddess, evoking mystery, beauty, and power. On a similar note, Amaris means daughter of the moon in Gaelic. If we stick to deities from different cultures of your home planet, there's Artemis, Tsukuyomi, Ix Chel, Sina, Mawu, Máni, Hina, Hecate–]

'Not Hecate!' Jake immediately shut that down. The hatred he held for that bitch and what she did to Kyle didn't need any reminders to keep burning in his heart.

He then shared the rest of the suggestions with the Moon Spirit, who declared in an indifferent tone,

'The first one will do.'

'Selene?' Jake repeated. 'To be honest, it sounds too close to Seren, and it reminds me of another bitch I can't stand...'

*****

A certain female vampire, a member of Pureblood, drenched in blood, shivered inexplicably at the other end of the Mirror Universe. 'Who the hell is talking about me behind my back?'

The image of the grand demon Jake who had ruined her ambitions during her third Ordeal briefly flashed in her mind, but this time she hoped for his return. Since most of the Myrtharian Nerds had entered the Red Cube, their Floating Islands had been deserted, and all their enemies had seen it as a signal to launch a massive offensive.

This included the Space Digestors, but also the traitor to his faction, the self-proclaimed imperator Pyrrakles. The Myrmidian tyrant must have sensed the tide turning because his offensive was utterly desperate, as if he knew that if he didn't gain ownership of Jake's island in time, his defeat was inevitable.

To prevent this, Pureblood's leader, Wyatt, had upheld his role as an ally, committing all their forces, including those of their patriarchs, to defend Jake's island despite the many dissenters within his own camp wanting to take advantage of their internal strife. The young Vampire Progenitor had nearly failed to unify them, but the sudden attack of a gigantic horde of Space Digestors, unlike any previous assaults, had abruptly ended the debate.

For the past twenty hours, whether it was her faction or Pyrrakles', they had all been engaged in endless combat, too busy defending their own islands to care about anyone else.