Chapter 807: Thirty-Seven Years

The Virion Iridant Tree had grown.

Nobody noticed it happening, the way nobody ever notices a tree growing, but thirty-seven years is a long time even for something that old. Its branches spread wider over the pocket world now, and the light that came down through them in the mornings fell across a great deal more than it used to.

Almond woke early, the way he always had, and walked out under it with a cup of something warm in his hands.

The gathering ground had become a town. Then a city. Then something that didn’t have a proper word, because the pocket world kept growing to fit whoever came to live in it, and a great many people had come.

Asuras still climbed the Geneline from the bottom realm every single day. The count had stopped mattering somewhere around the second decade. Awakened constructs had families of their own now. Children who had been born in the pocket world were grown and fighting in events under a banner that had been ranked 341st on the day most of them were born.

It was ranked 8th now.

Almond drank his tea and watched the morning settle over all of it.

Lily found him there, the way she usually did.

"You’re doing the thing again," she said, sitting down beside him on the low stone wall.

"What thing?"

"The quiet looking-at-everything thing. You do it every morning."

"I like looking at it."

"I know." She took the cup out of his hands, drank half of it, and handed it back. "I just like pointing it out."

They sat for a while without saying anything. Thirty-seven years had not changed much between them. They still bickered the same way. They still sat in the same comfortable silences. Lily still stole his tea every single morning and never once apologized.

"Tier-92," Almond said eventually.

"Mm."

"Remember when Tier-35 felt like the ceiling of the world?"

"Remember when Tier-4 did?" Lily smiled. "Back when we were still in chains, I used to think if I could just get strong enough to not be scared anymore, that would be enough."

"And?"

"And I’m Tier-92 and I’m still scared of plenty." She leaned back on her hands. "Just different things now."

Rudra’s ship had its own dock.

That was not a metaphor. The pocket world had grown a small inland sea about twenty years back, mostly because Rudra had mentioned wanting one and the pocket world, which had always been oddly accommodating toward him, had simply produced it.

He kept the Chainbreaker there.

Not the original. The original had been retired to a place of honor near the dock after its eighth rebuild, its old red keel still intact under all the new timber. The one he sailed now was the fourth vessel to carry the name, and he spent most free mornings on her deck doing absolutely nothing useful.

Almond and Lily walked down to find him there with his boots up on the rail.

"Admiral," Lily said.

"Don’t," Rudra said, without opening his eyes. "I’m on holiday."

"You’ve been on holiday for six weeks."

"And it has been the best six weeks of my life. Go away."

They did not go away. They sat down on the deck instead, and after a minute Rudra gave up pretending and opened his eyes.

"The event board’s been updated," Almond said.

"I know."

"Everyone’s talking about it."

"I know that too." Rudra looked out across the little sea. "The whole layer’s talking about nothing else."

It had been building for about three years now, the talk.

The next World-Ending Event was still four months away, but it had a name already, the first one in living memory to be named before it arrived. People across the layer were calling it the Ascension Convergence, and nobody quite remembered who had started calling it that.

The reason was simple arithmetic.

The Six Empires sat at Tier-95. The layer’s ceiling was Tier-100. And every analyst on every kingdom’s council, every old cultivator, every scholar who studied the shape of these events, agreed on the same projection: whatever rewards the next event handed out, they would carry at least one of the Six the last five steps.

Maybe all six.

"Somebody’s actually going to touch it," Lily said. "After all this time."

"Somebody’s going to find out what’s past it," Almond said. "That’s the part everyone really cares about."

Nobody knew. That was the whole mystery. Not one lifeform in the recorded history of this layer had ever reached Tier-100, which meant nobody had ever seen what lay on the other side of it. Another layer, most people assumed, because every layer below had led to another one above. But nobody knew for certain, and the not knowing had gotten into everyone the way a good rumor always did.

"Taverns are running betting pools," Rudra said. "On which Empire gets there first."

"Who’s favored?"

"Skytheum, obviously."

"Obviously," Lily agreed.

Ainen’s restaurant opened at midday, and the line started forming at eleven.

He’d resisted it for years. A proper restaurant felt too much like settling down, he’d said, too much like admitting he’d stopped being a fighter who cooked and started being a cook who sometimes fought.

Then Saffa had pointed out that he’d been feeding four hundred people a day for a decade anyway and might as well get a building out of it, and that had been that.

The restaurant sat near the heart of the pocket world, and it had no name on the door, because everyone already knew what it was.

He came out to meet them himself when they arrived, apron on, flour across one cheek, looking considerably happier than any of them had ever seen him look in a battlefield.

"You’re late," he said.

"We’re early," Almond said. "You don’t open until noon."

"For you three, I open whenever you show up. Which means you’re late." He waved them in. "Sit. Eat. Don’t tell me what you want, I’ve already decided."

John arrived halfway through the meal, which surprised nobody.

He had a habit of appearing wherever the good food was, and after thirty-seven years he’d stopped bothering to pretend it was a coincidence. He dropped into the empty chair at their table and stole a piece of bread off Rudra’s plate without asking.

"Ninth," Lily said sweetly, before he’d finished chewing.

John closed his eyes.

"Don’t."

"You said one year," Rudra said. "At the party. In front of King Corvin. You said PeakWicked would take a seat among the Six within one year."

"I remember what I said."

"That was thirty-seven years ago."

"I am aware of the arithmetic, thank you."

Ainen set a plate in front of him anyway, because Ainen fed everyone regardless of their dignity, and John ate for a while in wounded silence.

"Corvin still brings it up," he admitted eventually. "Every single time we’re in the same room. He had it engraved on a plaque. It’s hanging in the Frosthold throne room."

Almond nearly choked on his water.

"It is not."

"It absolutely is. ’Give me a year. Maybe less.’ In gold lettering. He showed me personally."

"I love him," Lily said.

"Everybody loves him," John said darkly. "That’s the whole problem."

They talked about the event over dessert, because it was impossible not to.

"Four months," Almond said. "What are we actually expecting?"

"The Six ascend," John said. "At least one of them. The rewards will be enormous, bigger than anything this layer has ever put on the table. Everyone ranked near the top gets pulled along with them."

"How close?"

"Tier-92 is close." John set his spoon down. "Close enough that if the event pays out the way everyone expects, the two of us might not be far behind them."

The table went quiet for a moment.

"You think we could reach it," Lily said.

"I think I’ve stopped saying out loud how quickly things will happen," John said dryly. "I learned that lesson the expensive way. But I don’t think it’s impossible."

Rudra looked out the window at the pocket world beyond, at the city that had grown under the Virion Iridant Tree, at a kingdom that had started with a handful of escaped slaves and now stood eighth on a layer of three hundred.

"Thirty-seven years," he said quietly. "Feels like about a week."

"Feels like a lifetime," Lily said.

"Both," Almond said, and neither of them argued.

That evening, the whole family gathered on the old gathering ground.

It was not a meeting. There was nothing to report and nothing to plan, not yet. Just an evening, and a fire, and a great many people who had survived a great many things together, sitting close.

Big D sat at the center of it the way he always had. Thirty-seven years had not touched him at all, and he was still the one everyone looked toward when things got quiet.

"Four months," he said. "Then we find out what’s past the ceiling."

"Are you scared?" someone asked, one of the younger ones, born in the pocket world.

Big D thought about it honestly, the way he thought about everything.

"No," he said. "I’ve watched this family walk into every single thing this layer had and walk back out of it. Whatever’s waiting past Tier-100, it’s going to meet the same people."

The fire cracked.

Above them, the Virion Iridant Tree moved slightly in the evening wind, and somewhere far past it, four months out and waiting, the answer to a question nobody alive had ever seen answered sat patiently at the top of the world.