Rivers of the Night - Chapter 700

Capítulo 700: Impossible

Theron didn’t show much of a reaction to this change. Angel, Demon… it didn’t mean much of anything to him. All he had to take careful note of was whether he would end up getting himself hunted down for using the Demon Doctrine aspects.

But as far as he could tell, this shouldn’t be the case. If even someone as wizened and seasoned as the Nightingale Ancestor Bird couldn’t sense it, then it was likely not easily understood.

However, that left the obvious question… did whoever left this behind know that the Demon Doctrine was part of it? Could that be related to why they left it behind?

Theron was a genius, but he wasn’t omnipotent. He didn’t even know where to begin in understanding why someone would leave something like this behind.

However, regardless, just based off of this new evolution to his sight, he highly doubted that the Assassin’s Guild would be able to continue hiding from him for very long.

Theron didn’t have any intention of going right now, though. He still had things to do.

“Is something the matter?” Theron asked the Nightingale Ancestor Bird.

“That metal…”

Theron raised an eyebrow. Was he talking about the foil?

“No… you don’t understand… How could you?”

Theron still didn’t say anything, but the lingering silence of the Nightingale Ancestor Bird seemed to mean that it didn’t plan on explaining—maybe not because it didn’t want to, but because it couldn’t.

Theron could feel the intentions buried deep within its soul. It was quite literally scared to speak.

Remembering the reaction of the Heavens when the words Voidwrought were spoken, Theron couldn’t help but wonder if it was related at all.

After a long while of silence, Theron chose to drop the matter for the time being. If he wasn’t going to be able to get an answer, he was just going to have to wait it out.

In that case, until night fell, he would just meditate on his new Spells.

Theron went to find a seat in the wet room, submerging himself in water and taking deep breaths.

Theron awoke when the moon was high in the skies. He hadn’t cast a single Spell from the very start, something that baffled the Nightingale Ancestor Bird.

But he didn’t feel like he needed to—not for this initial stage.

The Ancestor Bird gave him a path forward, but Theron had his own ideas on how to maximize things.

Learning new Spells, even for Theron, would be a huge drain on the mind, and most importantly, Mana.

When he first started cultivating, casting a single Spell just three or four times would drain him. While this wasn’t the case now, the amount of repetition it would take to drill that many Spells to perfection would leave even him half dead.

Instead, Theron chose a different path.

He simulated the casting in his mind again and again. Matching that casting, he also ran the Mana through his Meridians, getting more and more used to the circulation pathways without actually using up the Mana.

He also experimented with different methods of circulating, testing how much longer it took him to cast if he had to convert Dark Mana into Water Mana first—or vice versa.

This wasn’t good enough for him to suddenly reach Consummate Mastery. Reaching that level required you to understand how the Spell interacted with the world around you, which needed you to actually cast it first.

However, Theron felt like he had unearthed everything he could about how the Spells could interact with his body. He felt that by laying a foundation of perfect comprehension like this first, every cast would be worth orders of magnitude more than it was last.

This wasn’t all Theron had done, though.

He understood the casting speed, how one cast after the next interacted with one another, and how they might be synergized as well.

He hadn’t just built out a roadmap of how to use the Spells individually, but also how they might interact with one another.

Even without casting any one of them a single time, he had already entered the Proficient Boundary with them all.

Theron stood to his feet. With a thought, he was standing on the water as though it was solid ground, and with another, every bit of water on him vanished as black robes replaced them.

He vanished, and when he appeared once more, he was on the balcony, looking like little more than a shadow as Entangling Silence wrapped around him.

With another step, he vanished into the city.

There were two reasons Theron wanted to find the Assassin’s Guild. For one, he wanted to know who was targeting him, and the second reason was the spatial ring burning a hole in his necklace right this moment.

If he was going to check out the secrets of the ring and there was some danger involved in doing so, why not open it right in the middle of their den of assassins?

Since they wanted to take his life, he would make their existence a living hell.

“Father! It was for good reason, I swear!”

“You drained your line of credit for a friend?!”

“He’s a Dual Resonance Mancer! Also, I almost died today, don’t you think you should be a little more loving?”

“Hm?”

Chen’s father snapped his head toward him.

“Dual Resonance? Impossible.”

“What do you mean, impossible? I saw it with my own eyes. Dual Water and Dark Mancer, there’s no mistake. And both of them feel like they’re at least at the Primal Resonance level.”

“Impossible.”

“You sound like a broken record, old man. My eyes aren’t that bad. You can ask the old fogey if you don’t believe me.” Chen hooked a finger over his shoulder.

Patriarch Shonagh actually did give the grizzled guard a glance, only to receive solemn confirmation. His eyes couldn’t help but narrow.

“This is the same youth who was almost assassinated in the King Inn?”

“Yes.”

Patriarch Shonagh fell into silence for a long while.

“Are the Demon Corps finally making their move?”