Magical Soul Parade

Chapter 383: Truth of The World

Finn looked at Sage Limitless and chuckled darkly.

"You wish to become immortal?" he asked, his tone dripping with mockery. "Not even true gods are immortal. Despite their best efforts, even they know that their end is inevitable. It might take a very long period of time, eons even, but regardless, they know they will eventually die. They will cease to exist at some point."

He paused, his gaze sharpening as he stared at the Sage across the freezing distance. "But you? A man who simply controls mana alone wishes to claim this immortality for himself?" Finn shook his head. "Not to mention whether your plane could even support such an incongruence, but the Great Dao would never allow it."

"So you know about the Great Dao?" Sage Limitless said suddenly. His voice remained perfectly flat, yet it carried an underlying resonance that vibrated through the thin air.

"Well, you should anyway. You have been a God before, and you still retain some of your divinity even now. But since you know about the Great Dao, then you should surely know that it operates on cause and effect. The Great Dao is ruthless, unbiased, and unfeeling. But so long as there is a reasonable logic behind a thing, it will let it pass."

Finn snorted at the statement, a cold, sharp sound behind his bone mask.

"Logic?" Finn said. "You call placing order on your magic logic? That is nothing but a stopgap measure to curtail what was doomed a failure right from the onset." He laughed.

"I will admit, your existence is nothing but pitiful. Reality itself cursed you with a power that was never meant to exist. But it is just like you said... the Great Dao is ruthless and uncaring. You were doomed right from the moment of your birth."

The expression on Sage Limitless’s face did not change in the slightest bit. He seemed entirely serene and pragmatic, understanding this harsh reality much better than Finn himself did.

He had already spent countless centuries pondering it over and being sorry for himself, and he was completely done and dusted with that phase of his life long ago. The old monster that he was right now did not care for such petty, sentimental things. Finn’s words could do nothing to wound him whatsoever.

He simply responded in a casual, conversational tone. "What about you, Error Bearer? Are you not an embodiment of incongruence and flaws? The confluence of things that are fundamentally ’not supposed to exist?’" he asked.

"You are the literal embodiment of aspects of what I wish to achieve, yet you chastise me for wanting to live?" The Sage chuckled softly, then let out a brief sigh, his tone turning wistful as he moved on to another subject.

"In any case, Error Bearer, I did not come here to exchange ideals or hear your opinions on what I am or what I am about to do. You know as well as I do that it is useless to speak of such minor details," he waved a hand casually. "With that out of the way, let us now discuss the main matter."

His tone turned serious, his expression freezing back into the flat, stoic mask from before.

"You cannot kill me, Error Bearer. In fact, you cannot even reach me, not to talk of touching me. From the moment your soul entered into this world... my world, my plane of existence... I have sensed you. I have known you, down to every nook and cranny of your being. Even more than you know your own self, I have attuned myself to you... or rather, against you."

"Even the version of you that passed down his essence in a different time, I have adapted to that essence as well. Your lover, Elara... the single woman you intermingled with in this world. I have taken the parts you left in her, and I have adapted to it."

Finn’s brow furrowed tightly under his mask upon hearing the words. The way the old man spoke was so casual, so placid, as though he were discussing the most common, everyday occurrence.

For someone like Sage Limitless, the borders of right or wrong, the very boundaries of what should or shouldn’t be done had already been blurred. In fact, not only blurred, they had been long surpassed thousands of years ago.

The man simply did whatever was required to reach his goal, completely unbothered by any moral dilemma.

"You should have seen her already," Sage Limitless continued casually, looking down pointedly toward what remained of the ruined battlements with a placid gaze.

"I revived a bit of her from the piece that was remaining of her body. It is a gift to you... if you choose to see her. In fact, if you wish to use her body, I can make more of her if you want. Flesh and blood versions, not just soul masses in a different vessel. I have gotten that much expertise doing such things over the years. I have learned many implementations of mana to create things from scratch, so something like this is not difficult for me."

The man spoke with complete detachment, genuinely failing to see anything wrong with what he had just suggested.

"My only request to you is that you should convince the Order Bearer to do my bidding," Sage Limitless stated, his white eyes locking back onto Finn. "For reasons related to consciousness, the ruthless Great Dao has made it such that I cannot simply harvest her power and make it mine," he said.

"In the same way my will pervades the mana of this world, her will and essence also pervade that aspect of Order I wish and seek to control. For me to harvest and use her power for my own, she must be willing. She must concede and relinquish control willingly, removing her consciousness from that authority so I can take control of it."

He paused for a few moments, letting what he had just revealed sink in before continuing.

"For some reason, perhaps it is love, or maybe just lust, or whatever petty reason she feels, it is you she listens to and trusts more than anyone else in this world." The Sage suddenly paused, correcting himself with a slight tilt of his head. "Ah. I don’t mean you, Errant. I mean the Error Bearer. The one belonging to this world... Arros."

He stared at Finn pointedly as he explained.

"In a single body, the soul of the one she loves and the soul of the one she trusts as a capable person are wrapped into one. You are the only one who can talk some sense into her."

The winds in the high sky whipped about sharply and violently, roaring through the peaks as if the world itself were in vocal support of what Sage Limitless was saying.

"I do not get why she stalls," the Sage murmured. "The situation is inevitable. You cannot defeat me because you are in my world. None of the Transcendents can either, and they already know this. But perhaps you don’t know this, and that is why she still believes you can do something..." he paused, his voice turning certain with assured conviction.

"But I will tell you directly: even if a Great One were to somehow find His way into this world, this place would be their grave."

"I am the world. The world is me. There is no separating the one from the other. To go against me is to go against the world itself. The very fabric of the plane in which you currently exist."

His arms spread wide as he spoke, his unbraided white hair flying wildly in the high mountain-peak winds, looking every bit like an absolute deity ruling over the world.

"The only path forward is to give me what I want. It is the only logical choice. In one fell swoop, I will create Order upon myself, creating a balance to what is otherwise an incongruence, like you have said. I will heal the world again. I will become whole, and every single person will benefit from this. So why then does she hesitate? Why then do you also hesitate?"

He looked straight at Finn across the vast distance, his blank white eyes meeting the Heretic’s glowing green ones in genuine frustrated confusion.

He waited for Finn’s response, but was met with a still silence for several moments, until finally, Finn spoke: