Chapter 529: A Superposition of Souls

Aion was a famously capricious Supreme God. Setting aside the handful of deities who'd existed since the primordial age, plenty of gods had never once heard so much as a whisper of guidance from Aion. They simply had the misfortune of reverting to mortality the moment Aion happened to be in a bad mood.

Other times, when the mood struck, Aion might reach into the river of time, pluck out a soul that had already faded away completely, and grant it the power of divinity.

Usually, this happened when a mortal's death had been spectacular and dramatic enough to be worth talking about for ages.

But Aion almost never intervened directly in the fate of a living mortal. No one knew exactly why; they could only chalk it up to the Supreme God's own personal taste.

After all, the rules were Aion's to begin with. Aion held absolute authority to interpret them, and could rewrite them on a whim at any time.

Ambrose's death had been legendary in its own right, and the lich had accomplished feats that went well beyond the limits of any ordinary mortal in life. Being deified by Aion after death would hardly be out of the ordinary.

The God of Alchemy, surely, didn't want this particular student elevated to a similar kind of divinity. It would mean splitting his own domain, so he was hoping Ambrose would stay buried in Hell forever instead.

As long as the mortal in question hadn't died completely, Aion simply wouldn't step in.

"To the devils, this will make for an imperfect but reasonably convincing excuse. My poor student really did think of everything... It's just a shame fate wasn't on his side."

The God of Alchemy lounged in his own divine domain, pouring out his frustrations to Wauleen, the Goddess of Wealth.

"What kind of master spends every single day cleaning up after his student's messes? Shouldn't it be the other way around? I should be wringing every last drop out of him, treating him like a slave, while claiming all his academic achievements as my own!"

Wauleen, dressed like some elegant noblewoman, laughed. "Didn't you already claim his achievements? That's exactly how you became the God of Alchemy in the first place."

The God of Alchemy sighed, resigned. "Fair enough. I took the benefits up front, so now it's time to pay off my debts. I just never expected the trouble that boy would cause to keep escalating like this."

The night before the battle at the Arena of Storms, Ambrose had had an extraordinarily long conversation with the God of Alchemy.

Fate was fixed, and Ambrose knew he was destined to die in some humiliating, undignified way. But though every diviner talked a good game about accepting fate, every single one of them still tried to pull off one last scheme before the end.

Mr. Misfortune had done that, as had Selwyn. There was no reason Ambrose would be any different.

"I don't know exactly what happens after death, but I imagine I'll fall into Hell. My soul is bound to be shattered, possibly destroyed outright. If that happens, there's nothing you need to do, Master. But if even the smallest chance remains, I'd like to ask one thing of you."

Ambrose had made the request with such gravity that the God of Alchemy had no grounds to refuse.

He simply hadn't expected what came next to be quite this insane.

The God of Alchemy watched as Ambrose drew a great mass of glowing light out of his own soul.

The agony of a soul being torn apart was enough to drive even the undead to suicide, but Ambrose forced himself through it. He carved away a portion of his own soul and, with the utmost solemnity, handed it over to the God of Alchemy.

"Master, that hammer of yours ought to be able to turn this into an alchemical artifact, don't you think?" Ambrose gasped, trembling.

Only then did the God of Alchemy realize what Ambrose had actually dug out of his own soul: the complete memory of all three of his legendary boons.

The Mimetic Soul, the Golden Throne, and his Loom of Fate. Three legendary boons, all at once.

The God of Alchemy had no idea just how much resolve Ambrose had summoned for this. All he knew was that Ambrose really was on the verge of death this time. A legendary boon could be understood as an intuitive grasp of the world's own laws, a kind of minor divine authority in its own right, intimately bound to the soul. No mortal could simply extract that authority on their own. For instance, when Ambrose had received Loss's avatar, it had taken the God of Alchemy's own intervention to separate out the divine domains contained within it.

What Ambrose was doing now was, in effect, dismembering himself ahead of time and forcibly tearing his own soul apart.

The pain was almost beside the point. A forced extraction like this would cause severe damage to the soul itself. If Ambrose hadn't still had the strength of his legendary ranger's boon to draw on, he would surely have died on the spot.

The God of Alchemy couldn't fully grasp what Ambrose was trying to accomplish, but he honored the request regardless, using his own power to transform the three legendary boons into alchemical artifacts.

That crystalline hammer was the very incarnation of alchemy, an ability the God of Alchemy had come to understand only after growing stronger. A single strike could break down the underlying principle of any magic, or transmute any spell through alchemical means. In simple terms, it allowed for deconstruction and reconstruction.

The power of the three legendary boons, broken down by the God of Alchemy's hammer and fused back together, had turned into one enormous alchemical reactor.

This was the last lifeline Ambrose had prepared for himself.

Awaiting death, and hoping that Aion granted him a new lease on life out of mercy?

Ha! A man who'd never once bowed to a god in his life, only to beg for Aion's pity the moment he died? Ambrose wasn't capable of that kind of hypocrisy, and he had no interest in pinning his hopes on divine mercy in the first place.

Never worship the gods in peacetime, and never beg them in a crisis—that was Ambrose's creed.

At the end of the day, diviners didn't truly believe in fate. They always thought they could bend destiny to their will, or find some sliver of a chance buried in the darkest of shadows. It was practically a professional tradition.

Following Ambrose's plan, the God of Alchemy waited until after Ambrose fell into Hell, until the lords of Hell grew desperate enough to start seeking help on their own. Only then did he quietly let word slip of his own history with Ambrose.

Devils always assumed the worst possible motive behind any action, so there was no need to embellish anything. They'd arrive at that conclusion on their own.

Ambrose didn't expect the excuse to hold up to rigorous scrutiny. It only needed to be plausible enough, because the lords of Hell had already sunk too much into this bet to walk away. They genuinely couldn't afford to lose.

For gamblers who had already staked everything, all it took was a halfway-reasonable excuse.

Everything unfolded exactly as Ambrose had predicted. Once Sariel learned of the God of Alchemy's history with Ambrose, much of her suspicion melted away—or perhaps she simply talked herself into believing it. Either way, she finally decided to try out the machine.

Mammon agreed as well. There was no other option left at this point, anyway.

As for Tiamat, the Dragon Queen had been occupied with something else entirely of late, and hadn't been seen in days. Unable to reach her in time, and with Ambrose's soul on the verge of dissolving completely, Sariel finally couldn't wait any longer. She shoved what remained of the soul straight into the alchemical reactor.

The moment the reactor swallowed Ambrose's broken soul, it let out a deep rumble, and lines of text began scrolling across its display.

"Soul integrity: 13%. Please supply additional soul material for repair."

Sariel and Mammon both froze at the sight of those words.

Was that some kind of trap?

Before either of them could hesitate further, the soul's integrity had already dropped to 10 percent. The machine flashed its warning again, demanding soul material as soon as possible.

Sariel gritted her teeth. "There's no turning back now!"

Handfuls of soul-coins went pouring into the reactor, but the warning kept flashing regardless, forcing Sariel to keep feeding it more.

A hundred. Two hundred. Three thousand. Fifty thousand... By the time they were closing in on a million soul-coins, Sariel's eyes had gone bloodshot, and not even Mammon could hold her back. If anything, Sariel dragged Mammon into pouring in several hundred thousand more of his own coins.

Mammon now knew for certain he'd been played. This wasn't a soul-repair machine at all. It was clearly a money-draining trap the God of Alchemy had built to get revenge for his student!

Just as Mammon was about to talk Sariel into cutting their losses, the machine finally let out a piercing screech, and the display's message changed at last.

"Sufficient soul material received. Soul restoration sequence initiated."

Moments ago, Sariel and Mammon had been so furious they were half-intending to smash the reactor to pieces, but they both forced themselves to calm down the instant they saw that line. They'd already come this far. Win or lose, they'd see it through.

The reactor shook violently, as if it might explode at any second, sending both lords' hearts pounding right along with it. Every tremor left them on edge.

The reactor ran for a full day straight, teetering constantly on the edge of catastrophic failure, but never actually blew apart.

When the message finally read, "Soul completion: 100%," the reactor belched out a great cloud of smoke and, at long last, opened up once more.

A hazy figure appeared at the machine's core, and Ambrose's voice drifted out from within.

"Why, long time no see."

The hazy figure gave a friendly wave to the two lords of Hell.

Sariel roared, "I'm going to make you suffer every torment Hell has to offer before I let you so much as lift a finger to work! Prepare yourself, you damned lich! A hundred thousand years won't be enough to pay back what you owe me!"

Mammon gave a cold laugh. So this so-called trickster was nothing special after all. With his soul fully restored and in a devil's hands, his fate was sealed. He would be their plaything, their personal mint, doomed to eternal torment.

But when Sariel reached in to seize hold of Ambrose's soul, she frowned. It was hard and solid. What was going on?

When Sariel finally yanked the object out of the reactor's core, both lords stared in shock. It wasn't a restored soul at all. It was a magic mirror.

The very same kind the God of Alchemy had invented, capable of long-range, cross-planar communication.

And there on its surface, was Ambrose's figure, that black-haired, black-eyed young man's face rendered in vivid detail, winking at the two lords.

Sariel snarled, "You damned lich, what did you do?!"

Ambrose's reflection smiled. "Nothing much. I simply took a page from my old friend Arthur Lyon's book, and turned myself into a heroic spirit bound to an artifact."

Mammon sneered, his tone icy. "A heroic spirit? Looks more like a mirror-bound ghost to me."

Ambrose said, unconcerned, "Same thing, really—a soul bound to and sustained by an artifact. Hardly strange for the undead to switch bodies once in a while, is it?"

Sariel said nothing more. She simply thrust a hand straight at the mirror's surface.

Whatever shape this lich's soul had taken, the contract between them hadn't been dissolved. Sariel was still his creditor, and could still drag his soul out for torment whenever she pleased!

Sariel swore she would make this lich suffer every torment imaginable.

But the moment Sariel's hand plunged into the mirror's surface, she felt as if she were trying to grasp at the moon's reflection in a puddle of water. Ambrose's image simply rippled away. There was nothing solid to grab hold of at all.

"That's impossible! You cannot violate the laws of Hell! You fell into Hell as a condemned soul, so there's no way you could have escaped!"

Sariel was stunned. Ambrose's soul was right there in front of her, so why couldn't she catch hold of it?

Artifacts bound with spirits weren't unheard of; Sariel had seen plenty in her time. The heroic spirit always resided wherever the physical artifact was, and separating the two just took the right method. Arthur Lyon himself had fused with the time dragon's Eternal Hourglass and still managed to break free to fight.

But Ambrose seemed to simultaneously exist and not exist at the same time. He was impossible to actually seize.

Ambrose looked calmly at the two furious, bewildered lords and explained, "Of course I haven't violated the laws of Hell. My soul is still in Hell—at least, part of it is. Have you two forgotten? The magic mirrors are a set of artifacts, their power spread across many copies of themselves. Wherever a magic mirror exists, so too does my soul.

"But I'm not just in Hell. I exist simultaneously inside every single mirror out there. But the moment you try to grab hold of me, I won't be in that particular mirror any longer. It's a special kind of superposed state. I actually experimented with something similar years ago, when I was working out how to hide my phylactery—but applying it to a soul like this is a first, even for me.

"This is the boldest gamble of my entire life's research. Aion be praised, it actually worked."

As he eyed the two devils' utterly baffled faces, Ambrose continued to smile. "Don't look so upset. You just can't drag me off for torture, that's all. I never said I was going to renege on our original contract.

"That said, the terms might need a bit of revising. So, shall we sit down and renegotiate?"

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