Discordant Note: Crescendo | TBATE

Chapter 267: Gaze Not at the Past

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Seris Vritra

Toren did not know the worth of the item he had used for a simple weapon. The young man thought it a simple focus for his mana and aether, but that was such a baseline application. Inversion was so much more.

Atop my laboratory table, the horn–which reflected orange and purple along its pristine white length–glowed lightly in the relative darkness. Half a dozen measuring artifacts were hooked up to the item, tallying a dozen more metrics.

Not far away on an opposite table, two mana beasts lay dead. One corrupted, one not.

A test group and a control group.

Each had been pierced by the Inversion, then the horn had been flushed with pure mana. Though the test subjects had died, the knowledge I'd gained in the wake of their deaths had been worthwhile.

I hummed contentedly as I focused on the readings from the recording artifacts. Progress was an intoxicating thing.

The unique deviation of mana Inversion creates when filtered with mana dissipates quickly without active control, I thought, noting the exact measurements for mana concentration around the item after every few seconds. They were automatically recorded in a memory bank, but I didn't need to graph each number to see this pattern.

When suffused with mana, Inversion ever-so-slightly altered it. The mana that left the horn was imbued with a subtle sort of deviant nature. One wouldn't be able to notice the difference—at least until it met corrupted flesh.

That mana deviation—what I conservatively called anti-decay—was abnormally proficient at scouring away any taint of the basilisk. The mana seemed to hone in on anything touched by the Vritra, systematically annihilating it in an almost familiar manner. Like antibodies piecing apart a virus, it was an almost methodical deconstruction that I watched beneath a microscope.

That comparison was near perfect for what was happening, too. I suspected that it was related in some way to how Toren's insight into his abilities stemmed from blood and biological processes.

Aetheric insight is such a strange thing, I thought, picking up a nearby vial of blood that I'd injected with a viral strain. It appears to almost follow a common logical path, but it is conceptual in a way that mana is not. While I can almost understand how Toren's insight works, simply the fact that I am not Toren bars me from it. The fact that I am trying to follow Toren's path innately bars me from understanding.

I supposed that was why the High Sovereign and Lord of Epheotus both could not truly master aether. I suspected that every pathway of insight was unique to each on the road.

I gingerly disconnected Inversion from the testing devices, unclipping and untying them all. I held the beautiful horn, my eyes tracing its intricate grooves up to the sharp point. Even if Toren was far from me now, the pulsing warmth in my hand told me that he would return soon.

But beyond that, when close, the presence of Inversion served to silence the churning of my blood.

I knew why I held such a darkness. Many with potent strains of basilisk blood spoke of the sensation, the strange animus it could have. Sovereign Orlaeth had once told me that it was one of the more difficult things to account for when merging lesser and basilisk blood.

Most who experienced such drives from their Vritra ancestry went mad, unable to distinguish their true thoughts from those encouraged by the darkness in their veins.

And I suppose I am among those maddened few, I thought, letting myself lounge in the light of sanity for a time. It was... strange, my mind feeling so silent. Especially after an experiment.