Magical Soul Parade

Chapter 381: Revelation (I)

The moment Finn laid his eyes upon Sage Limitless, everything suddenly clicked into place.

Looking at the man who seemed like a well of power in its truest form, Finn immediately gained a profound understanding of exactly what had happened, both to the Transcendents and to the world itself.

For starters, the man floating in the sky ahead of him was no Ossuarist. This man was a Transcendent in body and in soul. Finn didn’t know exactly how old he was, but if he had to guess, the Sage was likely one of the oldest in existence, perhaps originating in the ages right after Finn himself had departed the past timeline.

Limitless... Finn played with the word in his mind, recalling the first moment he had heard the name being mentioned.

There was no such thing as limitless in the universe. All things had limits. They might have a long lifespan, they might possess a vast duration of time for their power to surge, but even natural things had boundaries. Even the universe itself had a definitive time and a limit.

Transcendent concepts were only born from core aspects of reality in one way or the other. How then could someone bear the path of Limitless — a concept that was fundamentally not found anywhere in the universe at all?

Finn had wanted to see with his own eyes how truly limitless this Sage was in person. And now that Sage Limitless was floating in the distance across from him, he was surprised to find that, in truth, the man actually was limitless... depending on how you defined limitless.

His body was a mortal, Arcanist one, remaining in the Transcendent state he possessed when he first came into his power. But around this man, reality seemed to bend. It was not in a physical or even a spatial way, but more like Finn was looking directly at a core aspect of reality with his bare eyes.

The Chaos Bearer’s array had been thoroughly lifted through Finn’s divine power, enabling him to use his Error abilities to their absolute fullest. He could see with his Error vision just how wrong Sage Limitless’s existence truly was.

All the power the man brought with him was purely mana, yet the way his existence transformed that mana was where the wrongness spurred from.

To Finn’s eyes, it was as though mana was being constantly created and destroyed around the man’s existence and his entire makeup simultaneously, millions and millions of times in an instant. The man was not only using mana. He was actively creating mana out of nothing.

How is that possible? Finn frowned behind his mask. His Error eyes read the erratic threads of reality bending and warping around Sage Limitless’s existence, trying to understand exactly how he was creating such a phenomenon.

As Finn analyzed the sight, his mind briefly went back to the moment before the battle, days before he had even begun his attack. Priest, the Truth Transcendent, had found his way to Finn’s camp somehow. The man had immediately rushed forward, jumbling a frantic fit of words, trying to explain exactly what was happening before Finn would strike him. He had rushed his explanation, saying something about Althea and Sage Limitless.

But Finn had not given him the chance to speak at all. He had attacked without hesitation, ensuing what was a very brief battle where Priest was on the defensive the whole time, trying simply not to die throughout the entire exchange. He had been yelling out words, saying something about Sage Limitless and Althea repeatedly. That had been the only saving grace that prevented Finn from actually killing the Transcendent, though he had still wounded him to terrifying levels.

Finn considered very briefly whether to send an order for Priest to be released from the camp and brought over here. But he discarded the thought a moment later.

Not at this moment, he thought.

Already, he had come to his own conclusion about what Priest had been trying to tell him at that time. There was no power without cost. Sage Limitless’s ability to create and destroy mana at such a rapid scale had to be drawing energy from somewhere. If it was not immediately visible even to his Error eyes, then it was something much more fundamental than what his vision could see.

Finn cast his senses broad and wide, not limiting his vision to just what was in front of him, but rather spreading it out so his consciousness could sense the wider world. It was then that he finally noticed what exactly was going on.

Everything clicked into place instantly.

The entropic decay of reality...

Chaotic soul masses...

The underlying reason why Arcanists, Beasts, Artifacts, Transcendents, anything with a soul or spirit that used mana — he now understood why they turned to chaotic soul masses after they died... the core cause that generated such a corruption in the first place... something that, at one point in history, wasn’t a natural occurrence.

Everything pointed directly to this man in front of him.

Sage Limitless hovered in the air silently. He stood there as if he knew Finn was coming to a conclusion of his own, simply waiting for him to finalize his thoughts.

"Your Transcendent concept is not limitless, is it...?" Finn spoke, his tone solemn.

"It’s mana. Your Transcendent concept is mana itself."

Sage Limitless didn’t respond. His face remained a canvas of stoic flat, with absolutely no change in expression. The only response Finn received to know he was right on track was that Sage Limitless closed his eyes right after, as if reminiscing.

Finn continued, his voice echoing across the distance. "It is a logical fallacy. All concepts are powered by mana. Yet how could the concept of mana be powered by mana itself? From the very moment you were born, you had damned the world and your entire plane of existence to entropic decay. Every use of your concept plagued mana itself from the incongruence of the logic."

The winds howled between them, but Finn’s words cut through the gale clearly.

"Mana in its natural form should not have been like a virus the way it is for Arcanists. The use of mana should not have influenced and intertwined with the soul of an Arcanist whenever they used any form of magic. It was only because of your concept... because of your repeated use of your magic, you influenced base mana itself, corrupting it with your essence... You forced a self-conscious paradox into the fundamental language of reality, turning the world’s lifeblood into a toxic, parasitic medium that aggressively glues itself to the soul of anyone who manipulates it."