“Yeah but you went from Level 47 to Level 214 in like three months.”
“I feel like you’re just sore that you’ve been stuck on the exact same level for those three months.”
“No I’m not.”
“What are you talking about? Of course you are,” Nyx said.
Shut up, I complained.
“Are you talking to Nyx again?” Freya raised an eyebrow.
“Uhhhhh,” I looked at her. “Yeah?”
“I see,” she said.
I wasn’t really sure how Freya felt about the whole concept of a voice just living in my mind. About three months ago, when I’d suddenly found out I was the Phantom Lord, there were too many things happening at the same time for me to keep track off. And in my deluge, I kind of forgot to mention anything about Nyx to Freya until nearly a fortnight later.
Needless to say she was not impressed.
“Honestly I think she’s fine with me,” Nyx said with a chill tone.
She’s never even talked to you before, I said.
“But she’s never tried to either, which means she’s fine with me.”
I don’t get your logic but okay, I mumbled.
Freya took a step closer. “We should head forward,” she said. “The fact that we found these many goblins here shows us that we’re getting close.”
“Did you check the maps?”
“It isn’t on the map,” she said. “Remember what Ijyela told us? This place isn’t on any of the modern maps. It was lost a long time ago.”
“Oh yeah, which was why the presences she felt in them seem a lot weirder.”
“Exactly,” she said. “The numerous goblins we faced so far attest to that. The warlord especially. I would not expect to see a goblin warlord in a forest like this, unless there was something else happening closeby.”
“Well, there have been a number of reports citing goblins and imps invading villages and towns.”
“It’s like they all got invigorated at the same time.”
Though it sounded mysterious, this was a pattern that had started those three months ago, and it was a pattern that we understood well. There was this certain event that I’d accidentally set into motion back then, and the results of that were cumulating now.
In essence it was all because this man called the Dark Lord had resurrected again. Of course, I’d taken him down a few months ago, but the things is, the Dark Lord’s race was that of the Eternal, just like me. And that meant that every time he died, he’d resurrect to a random location, with a bit of his power gone.
I hadn’t seen him ever since I beat him three months ago, but it was obvious to me that he was still alive. The fact that goblins and imps, the most basic creatures of darkness, had slowly become more active was akin to the fact that that that Eternal was alive, and that he was already starting to influence the tides over the lands.
One of my biggest enemy factions, the Dark Alliance, if their name wasn’t a dead giveaway already, had been the sole perpetrators in causing the Dark Lord’s resurrection. Of course, that meant now they were probably focusing entirely on finding him, or rising him up to his true potential. As I recall, when I faced off against the Dark Lord he had been at only a fractionth of his true power.
“Why do you think Ijyela asked us to come here?” Freya asked as we walked.
“What do you mean why?” I blinked.
“I mean, I get that this place we’re headed to has an aura of darkness around it. But it doesn’t have any actual purpose in what we wanted does it?”
“Oh, you mean the second Seal of the Eternal?”
“Yeah,” she nodded.
Since my battle with the Dark Lord, Ijyela, I and Freya had spent countless hours trying to figure out this entity called the Seal of the Eternal. This seal was something that I’d been bound by, to restrict me from gaining my true power, and as one would imagine, it was something I wanted to get rid off. Especially if I’d have to end up facing the Dark Lord’s full wrath sometime in the future.
Right now we still didn’t know much about the seal, other than the fact that it seemed pretty hard to find out how to break it. The seal I was under had five parts, and each one was broken through finding what was called a spectral spirit.
Long story short, I apparently used to be a overpowered super evil Eternal who killed things for fun and went on a world destruction rampage at some point in time. I say ‘apparently’ only because Ijyela and I were still trying to find documentation that this indeed was the case. Anyway, in response to my murderous nature the other Eternals all bunched together and placed a seal on me with their energy, thus causing the Seal of the Eternal to cut off my powers and use up their lives in the process.
The seal however had apparently split up my essence into five spectral spirits, thus creating five parts I needed to break through before the seal would completely lift off me.
I’d found one of the spirits for the first time about three months ago, but since then, I’d had zero luck. We hadn’t even come up with any guesses about where we might find the spirits. At the moment we were basically clueless.
And that wasn’t really preferred.
“Pick up the pace,” Freya said from ahead of me. “For a man with super speed you sure do walk slow.”
“Fine fine,” I mumbled as I shuffled up to her. Should probably check my Ga’em menu, I thought as I let my finger slide through the air.
DING!
A vertical column of five icons slid down. I looked at the first one, a shadowy silhouette of a humanoid upper body and tapped on it. Two screens slid out, expanding from behind the icon and taking space on either side of it.
The screen on the left contained the 3D full-body image of a young man in his early twenties. His body was toned, but not especially muscular. He had high cheekbones, a chiseled jaw and a skin tone that was a shade between tan and pale. His hair was a radiant silver-grey, the locks falling softly onto his forehead. His eyes were a shade paler than his hair and had flecks of grey in them, as if spirits and ghosts were trapped within.
Still pretty good looking, I thought playfully as I looked at the 3D caricature of myself. I then turned to the screen on my right.
Stats
Items
Equipment
Skills
I tapped on Stats, and a new screen opened up in front of me.
Name
Zoran Diablo
Level
521 (12% to next level)
Health
12650
Mana
14200
Stamina
11090
Strength
1598
Agility
2361
Dexterity
1236
Wisdom
3409
Constitution
1265
Intelligence
1380
Endurance
1109
Charisma
862
Luck
20
I put my finger to the screen and flicked it to the side, sliding the old data away and letting a new set of information come into my vision.
Name
Zoran Diablo
Race
Eternal
Abilities
Resurrection
Spirit King
Titles
Phantom Lord
Undead Emperor
Resistances
All Arts
Alignment
Neutral
Reputation
Level 10 - “The World shakes in your presence”
“What do you need to look at your Stats screen for?” Nyx asked, sounding genuinely confused.
Nothing really, I thought. You know how my information suddenly changed the last time around?
“You mean how it all basically got replaced when you broke the first part of the seal?”
I nodded. Sometimes I just check to see if my Ga’em menu has
added or removed any data from my information. I know it won’t happen, but it’s more of an assurance thing.
“Ah, I see,” Nyx said. “Well, I don’t blame you for feeling insecure about this though. Last time the Ga’em menu did kind of throw the Phantom Lord stuff at you out of nowhere.”
Yeah, I smiled, thinking about how people around me could blindly trust the Ga’em menu while I couldn’t afford that luxury for myself.
The Ga’em itself was basically a hidden entity that helped everyone interact with the world around them. It was an invisible power that bridged a connection between one and everything that they could do. The screens that I used were all examples of how the Ga’em interacted with living things and gave them information about the world around them.
Now there was something else called the Ga’em menu, which was what I was using right now. This menu was a powerful interface that existed between an individual and the Ga’em and helped them customize themselves completely.
My skepticism towards the Ga’em menu came mainly because of how for a long time it’d had told me I was a normal person, and then suddenly switched to identifying me as the Phantom Lord the moment I broke the first of the Seal of the Eternal. Of course, I knew it wasn’t the Ga’em menu’s fault that it was unable to display the information, but after that incident, I’d just begun to question, even if only a little bit, if the things that I saw on my Ga’em menu were actually accurate in any way.
I mean, what’s to say all of this is wrong too? Maybe I’m not really an Eternal, or a Phantom Lord.
You do realize there’s solid proof that you’re both an Eternal and a Phantom Lord, right? Nyx asked, adding his usual touch of snark in there.
“Yeah yeah,” I mumbled.
“What?” Freya turned to me, blinking in confusion.
“Nothing,” I blinked.
“Uhhhh, okay,” she said.
The trees around us began to shrink as walked further. Their barks were thinner and their tops, shorter. Less greenery surrounded us as we reached the end of the forest. A burst of wind sprung through my hair, enjoying its freedom in the open, now unconstrained by the scarce trees.
I took in a fresh breath and chugged along, walking besides Freya.
“Are you sure we’re on the right track?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, sliding out her Ga’em menu and going through a few options. A translucent white screen opened up and I could immediately tell that it was a map. There was small cluster of tree icons in the centre, with a blue dot pulsating on their left edge, and further left of that was a black ‘X’.
“This is the place Ijyela wants us to go to,” Freya said, pointing at the cross. “Right now we’re headed on the right track. The hard part is when we get there.”
“Why?”
“She could trace the presence she felt only so much, so although she knows a general location of where we need to go, the actual specifics are up to us to find out.”
“She seems to have been pretty specific already, to be honest with you.”
“I know, but still,” she said. “We don’t even know what we’re looking for at this point. For all we know, this darkness is probably some ancient rune or something.”
“That’d be neat.”
“That’s not the point!”
“Fine fine,” I put my hands up in the air, a smile on my face. “I get what you’re saying. I’ll keep an eye out.”
“Thank you.”
Of course, I did try to keep an eye out, but my mind quickly moved to my own concerns as we headed down our route. In the three months since my battle with the Dark Lord, things had changed considerably in my environment. Let’s just say, I was not that well liked by the people I used to know.
The Kingdom of Aingard and the Dargonian Empire were two big dynasties to the east of our position right now. As far as I knew, at the moment they both hated me. Like a lot. Last I saw of them they were both trying to kill me, but since then everything has been quiet. It’s almost like they forgot about me or something.
And that certainly wasn’t normal.
At the moment I’d spent all my time at Ijyela’s house in the Viridian Forest, a wide arc of greenery between the kingdom to the north and the empire to the south.
“Well, you’re basically a vagabond at this point,” Nyx said.
“I know,” I sighed.
“What?” Freya turned to me, just like before, only this time she seemed really intent on knowing what I was doing.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nyx just called me a vagabond.”
She looked at me for a second and then sighed. “Sometimes I realize it’s for the best that I can’t hear you both converse.”
“Hey, that’s just mean,” I said. “We have great conversation I’ll have you-” I stopped.
“What?” Freya asked, and then she jerked her head around, looking in the same direction I had.
“Do you feel that?” I asked.
She nodded. “Something is here,” she stretched out her arm, as if searching for something.
I closed my eyes and focused, trying to gauge my surroundings. I could feel a weird sensation come from ahead of me, as though something both did and didn’t exist.
I thrust out my hand. “Ulhius,” I said.
A blast of fire shot out, searing through the air. It dissipated about half a hundred yards from me, like an invisible wall had blocked it. I saw cracks form in the air, as though the air was being shattered apart.
All of a sudden the image flickered, a village faded into vision. Just like that.
“What the heck?” Freya gasped.
Wooden buildings and stone towers lined the edges of the place, with smaller homes seen further in. The village itself was moderately sized, with maybe thirty buildings in it total.
Unease built up within me as I looked at it. I couldn’t tell why.
And then I found my reason.
A monstrous shriek broke through the air, reverberating in my mind and resonating through the ground, its powerful waves of sound echoing deep into the wind.
A smile curled onto my lips.
“Found you.”
***
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CHARACTER SHEET (BOOK ONE)
WEAPONS (CURRENTLY KNOWN):
Weapon Name
Attack
Buffs
DawnBreaker, The Void Blade
12K - 16K ATK
+100% attack
+100% chance of critical hits
+100% resistance to all magic
+50% Accuracy
+100% Agility
+100% Dexterity
+10% health recovery
Imperial Scimitars
155-231 ATK
+5% Attack
+5% Agility
+1% Health Regeneration
King’s Mace
445-500 ATK
+5% Health
+5% Defense
Staff of the Goblin Shaman
45 - 50 ATK
+15% Damage to all fire spells
ARMOR (CURRENTLY KNOWN):
Armor Name
Defense
Buffs
Berserker Armor
18K - 21K DEF
+100% Defense
+100% resistance to all magic
+50% chance of evasion
+10% Health recovery
+10% Stamina recover
+10% Mana recovery
+4% rebound damage on receiving attack
Chest plate of the Adventurer
21 DEF
+5 Max health
Forest Tunic
15 DEF
None
SKILLS (CURRENTLY KNOWN):
Skill Name
Level
Buffs
Analyze
Level 2(86% to next level)
None
Tracking
Level 1 5% to next level)
None
&n
bsp; Herb Lore
Level 1(5% to next level)
None
Swordsmanship
Level 3(2% to next level)
Strength +6%
Agility +3%
Heavy Weaponry
Level 1(3% to next level)
Strength +1%
Defense +1%
Hand Combat
Level 1(15% to next level)
Strength +2%
Agility +3%
Dexterity +1%
Night Vision
Level 1(32% to next level)
None
Stealth
Level 1(23% to next level)
None
Fire Arts
Level 2(15% to next level)
Attack +11%
Death Arts
???
All stats +50%
+5% Attack for 1 hit K.O
Chain Casting
???
None
SPECIAL MOVES (CURRENTLY KNOWN):
Move Name
Level
Skill
BladeStorm
Level 3(29% to next level)
Swordsmanship
Weapon Shatter
Level 1(13% to next level)
Heavy Weaponry
Heavy Swing
Level 2(63% to next level)
Swordsmanship
SPELLS (CURRENTLY KNOWN):
Spell Name
Level
Magical Art
Blast Burn (Erkiela)
Level 1
Fire Arts
Flame Charge (Asgionis)
Level 1
Fire Arts
The Eternal: Awakening - A LitRPG Saga (World of Ga'em Book 1) Page 26
