Sylver Seeker

As Sylver stepped through the portal, he felt the metaphorical knot in his equally metaphorical stomach loosen.

And as the portal closed, the faint fluttering in his nonexistent belly disappeared completely.

Apparently whatever issue Sylver had left unresolved, was proximity based, and as of this moment, was no longer his concern.

The feeling of lightness remained throughout the day, everyone was checked over by healers, Shawn handled their paperwork, and Ging sorted out everyone’s belongings, and where they would be sleeping.

Until Faust arrived, the cultivators would be staying inside Sylver’s home, and it would be up to Faust to decide how to handle their lodgings afterward.

Including Xalibur, there were 22 foreigners currently spread out throughout Sylver’s home, much to the delight of his normally grossly underutilized staff. Maul in particular was excited at the chance to “prepare a feast,” as she put it.

“Is that him?” Bruno asked as Sylver closed the door behind himself.

Since he couldn’t carry Edmund via [Fog Form] Sylver had to use one of the secret entrances, and it took him a while to remember how the locking mechanism worked.

“It is,” Sylver said with a proud smile as he looked around the room.

Lola and Chrys were sitting down drinking tea at the back of the workshop, while Bruno was standing near one of the vats that were housing Sylver’s spare bodies.

The metallic firepit in the middle of the room had been scrubbed clean, and someone had enchanted it to deal with the resulting smoke.

Sylver stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the face Chrys was making.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, as the girl stood up and brushed the crumbs off the front of her robe.

She and Lola were wearing near identical light blue robes, and Chrys’ hair was braided in a style that was similar to Lola’s, the only difference was that Chrys’ hair wasn’t long enough to copy the high elf’s completely.

Chrys just looked at Sylver, and after a few moments of silence passed, Lola answered for her.

“She can’t find Faust,” Lola said with an odd defensive note in her voice.

“As in the eye isn’t working, or what do you mean?” Sylver asked as Chrys shook her head.

“I haven’t been able to find him since it started to rain blood. He’s just… gone,” Chrys explained.

Sylver waited a moment to see if his gut had anything to say about this.

“Don’t worry about it. Is there anything else I should know?” Sylver asked and brought his smile back onto his face.

There was another moment of silence, during which Chrys appeared to be waiting for Sylver to start shouting, or at the very least react with something more than just a slight shrug of the shoulders.

“Was this part of the plan?” Chrys asked, more confused now than worried.

“Not as far as I’m aware of. But you’re making a big deal over nothing, Faust isn’t defenseless, I wouldn’t have let him leave alone if I thought he couldn’t take care of himself. He probably thought he was being tracked by someone else and used a technique that just so happen to hide him from you,” Sylver explained.

No one did anything as obvious as sigh in relief, but Sylver saw the tension in Lola’s shoulders lessen.

“I feel like you two forgot that Faust and I have been on our own much longer than we’ve been under Sylver’s care. How far away was he the last time you saw him?” Bruno asked as Chrys closed her eyes for a moment.

“About 2 weeks, I think. I use birds, but there aren’t enough landmarks for me to know for certain where exactly he is, but I feel like 2 weeks is right,” Chrys explained, as Sylver once again shrugged his shoulders, and walked over to the firepit. It was an enlarged barbecue grill, essentially, but big enough to cook an adult human.

Everyone came over to him and just stared at the simple-looking rectangular metal box.

Sylver undid the clasp holding the coffin closed. He then used a thick tendril of [Necrotic Mutilation] to gently pick Edmund up.

Sylver immediately noticed that Edmund didn’t weigh right but considering how long had passed since the last time Sylver performed this ritual, there was a good chance he was simply misremembering.

Sylver laid Edmund down into the firepit, and just as carefully moved his beard off his nude chest and tucked it underneath his shoulder.

“Aim for his stomach,” Sylver said to Lola, as he and Bruno took a few steps away from Ed’s body and were quickly joined by Chrys and Ria.

Lola lowered her staff towards the old man’s torso.

“Do I just…” Lola asked, with a vague gesture towards Edmund.

“Yeah, as hot as you possibly can. Dark red cracks will start showing at some point. Depending on the temperature, he should wake up within 30 seconds,” Sylver explained, as Lola nodded at him, and began to chant under her breath.

Sylver decided to take another step back and pulled his 3 companions along with him.

A sphere of blinding white light appeared on the tip of Lola’s staff. She moved the sphere in a figure 8 motion, and a beam of vaporizing white flame disappeared harmlessly into Edmund’s gray chest hairs.

Sylver waited 10 seconds.

Then 20.

Then 30.

Then a minute.

And when Lola ran out of mana, and Edmund’s skin hadn’t even turned pink, he forced the quickly rising panic out of his mind.

“It’s fine, everything is fine. I expected this to happen, everything is fine,” Sylver lied.

Edmund wasn’t missing any limbs, his internal organs were all fine, a fucking match should have had enough heat to wake him up, a mage of Lola’s caliber was overkill 1,000 times over.

Sylver looked up from Edmund’s old wrinkly body and watched Lola’s jaw moving up and down.

He didn’t know what exactly she had said, because the only thing he could hear was a deafening ringing sound. He then saw that Lola turned to face Bruno and moved her jaw again, and Bruno proceeded to move his jaw up and down in response.

Sylver stood where he was for a while, and plain and simple couldn’t bring himself to pay attention to them.

He saw something moving on his left and shifted his [Lesser Perception] towards it. The various half-formed bodies floating together inside the various vats were all banging what would one day become a fist, against the glass.

The murky, orange-tinged liquid splashed out of the top, splattered all over the ground, and covered a good half of Sylver’s squeaky clean workshop in the sticky and slimy fluid.

Some of the liquid, which was essentially very well digested meat, landed on Sylver’s shaking hands. He looked down and watched as the disgustingly oily substance reached his sleeves.

Ed is in my hands, everything else is just details.

Sylver repeated those words to himself, over and over again, as he closed his eyes and willed the ringing in his ears to leave, and by the time he opened his eyes, he felt, if not relaxed, at the very least close enough to appear that way to onlookers.

Sylver turned to face Lola, and then turned again when he saw that she was staring at something behind him while covering Chrys’ eyes with her hands.

[Dead Dominion] informed him of what he was going to see, but he turned to look anyway.

Where before the vats had housed vaguely human-shaped bodies, there was now nothing more than minced meat floating around in a frothy mixture of red and yellow.

Sylver concentrated on his surroundings for a second and made every single drop of liquid float back into the vats. He turned around and spoke in an unusually quiet voice.

“Where is the nearest storm?” Sylver asked.

“Storm?” Bruno asked.

“A storm. You know, a storm. Thunderbolts and lightning, and all that,” Sylver asked.

He saw a small flicker of light pass through Lola’s hands, which were still holding Chrys’ eyes closed.

“There’s going to be a hurricane about 390 kilometers southeast of here. But going by the amount of interference I felt, it’s littered with Krists,” Chrys answered.

“I can hire a team of pyromancers!” Lola interjected.

Sylver shook his head.

“For starters, I highly doubt the people who describe themselves as “pyromancers” would be capable of outputting even a tenth of what you can,” Sylver said but was interrupted by Lola before he could continue.

“There’s a wizard, Allanther, he-” Lola started, but Sylver spoke over her.

“And more importantly, I can’t have someone that I don’t personally know wake him up. If Ed gets it in his head that he owes these “pyromancers” a life debt-” Sylver’s eye twitched “-if lightning doesn’t work, I’ll try an active volcano,” he explained.

In terms of being stubborn, Edmund had no equal.

If he decided he owed these “pyromancers” for waking him up, there was no telling what he would do to pay them back. The man was famous, or infamous, depending on who you asked, about always paying his dues.

Lola tried to argue with Sylver once more, but when she saw the look on Sylver’s face, she decided that he knew what he was doing, and trusted that if he needed her help, or wanted her advice, he would have asked for it.

Mora was thrilled to finally do something, after spending so much time doing next to nothing, and after Sylver gave the list of things he wanted to be bought for him to Ging, he once again left Arda.