The Path of Ascension Chapter 366

Chapter 366

 

Kai listened to the man in the sky speaking and felt it hard to accept what he was hearing.

But there he was. This… Ascender Titan.

There was a weight to those words, imparted by what he assumed was magic projecting the speech into his ears, that he couldn’t quite describe. He wanted to just call it magic, but it wasn’t that. It was part tonal emphasis and part stressing of syllables that wasn’t typical of the Noricum lexicon.

It was important. Kai didn’t know why, but he felt like a sword was hanging over his head and was correspondingly on edge, so he held on tightly to any possibly important tidbit and sorted it instinctively.

Kai had seen a lot of things growing up in a rough neighborhood, but he had never imagined that magic was real.

Magic was the thing of stories and legends. It wasn’t real.

But one glance up showed him a man floating mid-air with a giant fractal spider webbing across the night sky.

The architect part of his mind idly wondered what kind of material that spiderweb was made out of. Nothing had the kind of strength needed to reach the horizon without any kind of support. Or maybe the supports were there, but they were just magically invisible?

Could he get some of those invisible supports?

A shout from the neighboring apartment caught Kai’s attention. Any other day, the neighbors shouting at each other wouldn’t have been unusual. They argued over seemingly everything and anything, but it was easy to tune out because Kai didn’t speak Northern Cipri.

Except, just as he had heard the flying man’s words whispered as if right next to his head earlier, Kai could understand his neighbors yelling.

The woman was currently blaming the man for the appearance of the magical man in the sky.

Kai nearly panicked as his mind went to the two of them somehow being responsible, and him getting caught up in whatever they were doing, but it quickly became clear the two were just venting at each other when the man turned the accusation around and blamed the woman in turn.

That made Kai reevaluate just what was going on. He could understand the man in the sky speaking in his language. Heck, he was clearly magic, Kai would understand if he was speaking every language.

But this? He hadn’t just made himself understood, he made everyone understood. When that… Titan, he called himself, had said that they were all now part of this enormous Empire, did that mean he’d just gotten rid of all other languages? Was Kai actually still speaking and thinking in his native tongue, or was he speaking some kind of magical common language now?

What the hell was happening?

As his mind ran through the possibilities, Kai finally started to accept some of what he had heard.

Magic was real. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Magic could be cool. Kai had never been one to dive too much into fantasy, the real world was rough enough that he didn’t have time to spend on such extraneous pursuits, but he was in touch with nerd culture enough to know about typical magic systems. Assuming that ‘real’ magic was anything like the stories, which didn’t seem likely.

What kinds of things could he do with magical materials? There was clearly something able to literally stretch across the sky, and it was either ludicrously strong or supported by invisible struts. Could they build flying cities? Walkways that were invisible but invincible?

Actually that last one was a safety hazard, they would need to be at least translucent. But then again, magic. Who knew what was possible?

That brought his mind to the other things commonly seen in relation to magic. Fireballs, ice blasts, teleportation, and magical healing.

But what were the limits?

Kai didn’t suddenly feel the call to become some kind of fantasy healer, but he had seen people missing limbs one day with them back a few weeks later during his short time at Gate’s Rest.

Had that been magical healing? The obvious answer seemed like a yes but was that all it could do? Could it do more? Was it useful for the general pains of a lifetime of hard work like his mother had experienced?

His mother!

Kai slammed his shin into his coffee table as he moved to the apartment’s phone, causing a spike of pain that nearly sent him sprawling. Cursing, he hobbled over and punched in his mother’s number.

The phone gave a busy signal, and he had to call back three more times before his panicked mother picked up.

Their call was cut short as the phone network went down for a few moments, but when he called back there weren’t any issues and they were able to talk and comfort each other until they both felt the need to start preparing for other outages. It was enough to know she was ok and was staying inside until things settled down.

Kai went through storm prep even though he didn’t live on the coast any more. It was what he knew and he didn’t know what else might be useful. Tub filled with water, fridge closed tightly with the perishables noted, and windows securely closed.

Calming himself, Kai flopped onto his couch and flicked on his TV out of habit, but every station was static, some pre-scheduled rerun, or news reports talking about The Announcement.

Finding something inoffensive and unobtrusive, Kai turned the volume up to drown out his neighbors’ continued arguing. He did figure out that they were still speaking in another language, because if he really listened he was able to tell the difference between the sounds they were making and the words he was hearing… which was equal parts insane and distracting.

Looking up at his TV, he fiddled with settings until he changed the audio channel into another language, and to his surprise, he found that even the words of the movie were translated.

Not letting himself get distracted, he logged into his computer and paused as he saw on the front page of his typical search engine was a link to the document that the sky wizard had been talking about.

There were multiple forms of media, but Kai went for the document.

It was so large, his computer chugged as it opened the file, but after a minute that felt like an eternity, Kai was able to start reading.

The introduction chapter was a dozen pages long, but that was nothing to the tens of thousands of pages of the rest of the document.

Regardless, it was incredibly well-written, and he quickly felt a lot less unsure of himself. Things started to make more sense, and his fear of being killed by some magic man floating in the sky with nothing he could do about it slowly subsided.

That was, however, replaced by other fears.

These people, these cultivators, they were so powerful, so mighty, did they… have houses? Buildings? Did they need architects? The man in the sky had done something that wrapped around the entire planet, could they just magic themselves a house?

The prideful part of himself insisted that of course they’d need buildings and houses, that even if they just shipped in castles from other planets and dropped them onto estates made out of clouds, of course they’d still need architects to design things, but… what if they didn’t?

What if they didn’t care about that sort of thing? The introduction talked a lot about fighting and killing and wars and ‘rifts,’ were all cultivators soldiers? Did that mean they wouldn’t care about the beautiful and sublime, the graceful elegance that could be found in styles of building? Did they use architects, or did they just brute-force basic shacks by using impossibly strong materials?

He sure hoped they needed architects, otherwise he was probably screwed.

A decade of work might be in the trash if they just lived in basic buildings, if they didn’t care about the nuance he could provide. That thought ate at his mind. What else would he do? Any kind of academic job seemed useless with the existence of these magic powers that could seemingly hand wave issues away.

Were all jobs filled with these magical gifted people and only them? Would he still have a job if he didn’t get this magic suited for his profession?

Would he be homeless? Wait, the man had said housing was a right and was provided by the Empire. So they must have houses. But that didn’t mean that they weren’t just like tents made out of magic materials. Could he be the revolution that brought beauty into their buildings or would he end up with no skill set to market himself?

Kai had tried to avoid that thought, but it bubbled up like a pocket of noxious swamp gas.

He had worked too hard to allow that, to let the end of the world as he knew it make him or his mother homeless.

He was still worrying when he fell asleep on his couch.

The sun coming in through his window woke him up, and Kai felt a kink in his back from where he had slept wrong. Limping his way to the bathroom, Kai kept his ear out and faintly caught the couple next door talking.

Just like the day before, the words translated themselves. As Kai processed what they were saying, he flushed hot and rushed to play some music so he couldn’t hear them any more.

Looking up in the now sun bright sky, Kai was almost startled to see the man, Ascender Titan, was gone from his spot.

He had half expected the man to float there, raining down divine judgment until he was satisfied.

Seeing it was well past morning, Kai threw on the TV and cycled to a news station. There, he found two news anchors talking about what was going on.

The past president of Noricum had even come out of retirement to give a speech urging everyone to calm down and try to adjust to their new world as quickly as possible.

Kai wasn’t sure if it’s what the man intended, but it felt like the man was really saying that nothing they did would have any effect, and they needed to get used to their new reality. That didn’t sit well with him.

It felt gross, like they had given up.

Kai, like nearly everyone else, was glued to his TV in the coming days, as it was the best source of updates on what was going on. But it quickly became clear that things were truly different.

Two TV stations went off the air for ’inciting discord and spreading falsehoods,’ even though Kai felt like nothing they’d said was really that bad.

That left a bitter taste in Kai’s mouth, and he wondered just what they were trying to hide, and why this Ascender Titan felt like he could override their concerns. They had rights. Who was this outsider to decide what the truth was, and say that anything else was forbidden?

Thankfully, things did start returning to normal after three days of chaos.

The Falkner Architect firm was left adrift at first, not knowing what their place in this new world would be, and they mostly sat around their offices for a few days before they finally heard news.

They would keep their jobs, but some of their standards would be changing.

Kai was initially fearful that meant they would be told to cut safety corners, but if anything, the new standards were far safer than before. It wasn’t just more redundancies needing to be built into every structure, but every building was made for longevity, overbuilt to the point it should last centuries and with mandatory clear decommissioning plans, ensuring that any updates or demolitions could be done easily and cheaply. If a building was unlikely to last less than a century it could only be considered a ‘semi-temporary structure,’ and required a whole host of additional permits to even be considered.

On the other end of the spectrum, government buildings and other ‘fixture sites’ were to be designed to last for millennia, something that he would have scoffed at even a week ago. But magic… well, magic probably made anything possible.

That was another thing none of them wanted to hear: Most buildings were built with magic things called formations. Not just to do things like heat water, but to make the buildings themselves more durable and in some cases repair themselves.

Once they were familiar with their new standards and passed a grueling certification procedure, the orders started to pour in.

The city was expanding, and it was going to be doing so in three stages over the next decade.

Word was that the monsters had been temporarily dealt with, but they would be back in a few months.

The job security was nice, as were the new contracts they needed to sign, which was more generous than his previous in everything but terms of pay.

Money was weird.

After the first week, all of Soerilia switched over to the Empire’s currency credits. That would have been weird enough, but the value of things were all over the place.

Food prices especially had dropped through the floor, or at least raw produce had. The Empire set strict food prices with zero room for negotiation. Kai expected pushback from the farmers because there was no way the prices were sustainable, but they were even happier, as the Empire was subsidizing not only the difference to the farmers, but almost triple what they had earned before with the understanding that farms should not only be producing but over producing at all times.

Ready-to-eat food serving places didn’t change too much, as there weren’t any strict regulations over their prices, but most places did lower their prices somewhat which made it down right easy to grab a bite to eat during or after work instead of feeling bad about such purchases.

Some foods, mostly snack foods, did increase in prices thanks to taxes placed on them but they were one of the few to increase in price. A fair bit of luxuries had additional taxes placed on them beyond their normal prices increasing which put them out of reach for more people but it wasn’t so bad that people got upset.

It was strange, but Kai and everyone else got used to it before too long.

There were jobs to do, which kept everyone busy enough that they didn’t have too much free time to think how much everything was changing.

That was until Gate’s Rest got their awakening machine… thingy.

The news stations had talked about the devices that gave magic powers, but Kai, like most people of the mandatory age, was nervous. Not that they could refuse. Apparently it was obvious to tell those who had been awakened from those who hadn’t, and anyone who refused was forcefully put into the machine and then fined for their troubles.

The stories the news stations broadcasted about the awakenings were mostly positive, not strictly positive like Kai would have expected with media companies being shut down, but it generally leaned that way. Save for a few pieces about people getting seemingly boring powers, like the one lady whose power cleaned stubborn stains easier.

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There were a few rumors about people who had seemingly bad reactions, but they were rare. Far more common were all the people who got fantastical powers. The 18 year old girl who could now fly, and was now something of a minor celebrity, or the 25 year old man who could fix broken items with a touch so long as they were recently broken.

What Kai paid attention to was the few reports about architects. There was apparently one 14 year old who had gotten the ability that made it so any buildings off blueprints he created were stronger than normal.

Even a quick scribble was enough to make a suspension bridge made out of twine and thin sticks hold ten full grown adults. The kid had been given a full-ride scholarship to a prestigious university to get his architecture degree the moment he graduated high school.

No one said anything, but everyone at the firm felt the pressure. How could they compete with someone like that? Who would want their work when someone else’s work was appreciably better than theirs?

Kai didn’t know, and from the glum silences, no one else did either.

He just hoped that, despite the records saying otherwise, that because of his dedication to his craft, he would awaken a similar Talent thing.

Kai and seemingly half the town went to the facility, a massive building that had been converted from a warehouse.

Kai sat down and went through a dozen screens telling him not to share his Talent with anyone, and after confirming that he was sure he understood, he felt a rush of something enter him.

It was… more.

Kai couldn’t really describe it, but it was like he had a sense that had been asleep all of his life, and now it had woken up. He thought Awakened was just a word but he realized it was really the perfect thing to call it in absence of a better description.

The feeling faded quickly, and a beep from the screen next to him brought his attention down.

Kai looked at the result blinking on the screen in front of him. It was unbelievable, unacceptable. And apparently unchangeable.

He felt sick.

Sure, they said it was random and to not be disappointed with whatever you got, but he’d figured that just meant they couldn’t predict it, that he’d still get something related to architecture, the thing he’d devoted his life to. How was this awakening anything within him?

 

Tier 1 Talent determined.

Pigments you mix are more vibrant or subdued, depending on your desire.