The Runic Alchemist

Stone-Father covered the whole kilometers-wide black oblivion in his pure divinity. The singularity had begun to impact both the land and the air outside the pillars. The land was the most affected; it had been corrupted. Black storms were brewing in the sky as well.

Dark, unnatural, monstrous beings were crawling out of the ashen land. Trees and grass became ashen and darker than night, and dead leaves fell as if afraid of catching the darkness from their parent.

The last thing Stone Father did before using his divinity was to tell us to hurry up and leave through the tunnel he had created under the barrier and check our status. Harmon and I did not wait for a single second and did so as we were told, running at full speed while checking our statuses. There was an additional skill in our status, a way to ascend without ascension stones.

We were too close to the center of ruin. And our bodies seemed to be affected by the center of corruption as well. Ascending was the only way we could live. And we had to, at any cost—to warn our people and get them as far away from this land of corruption as possible.

But it took centuries of preparation to become a fourth ranker. How much did one need to prepare for becoming a god?

Still, the choices were either to ascend or die.

I wouldn’t go into the details of what becoming a god entails, for obvious reasons.

When I passed the trial and gained divine spirit, becoming the true god of metal golems, Harmon was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t the tunnel that I had awakened in. It was my own astral plane. For a moment, I thought it was the real world. Since the increase in size and changes were shocking. It took me some time to figure out how to transition between the physical and astral worlds.

When I left the astral plane, I discovered my strength had actually decreased instead of rising. My flesh didn’t feel like it belonged to me anymore. The world had completely changed. Gone was the battlefield, the gods, and my army. Actually, it wasn’t even the same age when I regained my consciousness.

That is the end of the primordial age for me.

Afterwards, I learned what Lightbringer and others’ fate had come to after the Doomshard spell. But it’s just stories, rumors, and poorly recorded historical texts—the validity of which can’t be fully trusted.

I was in a village. A mixed-race village. A human-dwarf hybrid girl was the one responsible for awakening me. A mere apprentice runesmith. But she wasn’t alone. I could feel many lives connected with mine. My followers. The believers of the metal golem.

I can just guess what might have happened when we ascended. Most likely, even with Stone Father’s best attempts, somehow the other gods sensed what we were doing. We were discovered and probably killed by the other gods. Our physical forms perished, but being a true god, I could not be killed. I don’t know if Harmon succeeded in becoming one as well, but the man was wiser than I, so he must have. I searched for him afterwards but found no trace of him anywhere in history.

Since then, whenever I was reincarnated, the scion of this god or that always managed to kill me. I barely have a decade if I lived with caution, even less at times, sometimes outright killed, sometimes imprisoned by some sealing spells or runic tools.

It wasn’t just me, I realized, the beast god was having the same trouble. A giant bird-like creature claiming to be the wind god was also actively hunted and killed by people every time it reincarnated. A human mage, master of the dark element, was also having the same trouble. And those are just the ones I know. The ocean must have more than the mainland.

They did not want new gods. Already, they were actively limiting any man or creature from reaching beyond a limit. Now they were even killing the gods. I definitely don’t support such a barbaric idea, just as my Stone God didn’t, but after how close Lightbringer came, I could somewhat understand their fear.

Ages passed as I lived in and out of my astral world. Gathering knowledge when I could, trying to spread my influence, learning to become a true god, but I was just a newborn god. The others were living for centuries. They could sense my divine energy anywhere around the world.

With time, the gods changed their methods of worship, appearing less and less before their followers. Not even instructing their followers. The people lived and died through the ages in the name of the gods. Slowly, the religions were not as prominent anymore, and scions were not chosen publicly. The staying in the shadows method of the gods, while keeping a minimum connection to the mainland, had proved the most effective.

The divine code set by the prominent gods was set in stone; they kept improving it to better co-exist. The God of Chaos did not like the orders and set rules, and he did stir up the trouble again, as was his nature. There were big changes that happened on the mainland in one of my reincarnations, almost wiping out most of humanity, but people had still survived.

It was Chaos God’s fault. Since then, they have banned him from having any followers or scions. Throwing him out of the alliance. All gods had their people work together to eradicate all dark and chaos believers still alive. They made the use of the chaos element taboo. Which, to be honest, they should have done a long time ago.

Times kept changing, with so few believers and sometimes none at all, it took me centuries to be able to enter the physical world. The astral world, even though massive, was both my salvation and worst prison.

Eternal Solitude. It shapes a man’s regret and guilt into monstrous titans.

Plenty of time to face your wrongdoings.