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The Divine King of the Cold Star lightly narrowed his eyes, his question came with a clear expectation that Riven would give him a straight answer.
"It is a possibility, but I doubt I can do much right now," Riven sighed, he kept the reply honest and did not pretend the current gap in strength was smaller than it was.
The Ten Thousand Poison Master scoffed, shaking his head. "What a crazy guy. Do you really even think you’ve got what it takes to kill one of them?! Hah... Hahaha... HAHAHAHA! This guy’s hilarious!" he kept laughing for several seconds and only stopped when the Asura Blood Sea Emperor raised a hand.
"Now, now," the Asura Blood Sea Emperor smiled. "The only reason we’re here is because of him, we might as well help him grow even stronger, right? What else can we do here? And well, weren’t you complaining about Authorities eating away our power and solidifying even further?" He looked back at his friend. "Among us, several of them have predated our authority and cosmic power over the eons to solidify further, right? For example you, my old friend," he asked the Divine King of the Cold Star. "Haven’t some of them stolen the power you wield, Ice itself? Among them there’s the Ice Titan Queen Skadi. And more."
The examples were listed without any attempt to soften the loss of power each of them had suffered. "I don’t hate them, as long as they aren’t malicious," the Divine King of the Cold Star said with a gentle smile. "However..." he furrowed. "There are indeed malicious ones. Or some too selfish..."
That special distinction between the two groups stayed clear in his tone.
"And then there’s you," said the Ten Thousand Poison Master. "Are you really happy your legacy became that one of predatory blood suckers? And all of them are terribly evil!" He pointed the comment directly at the Asura without any hesitation.
"Hm, I certainly don’t like that either, hahaha!" the Asura Blood Sea Emperor laughed aloud. "But you, my friend, whom you were referring to?" he asked to the Ten Thousand Poison Master. He turned the question back around and waited for the Poison Master to name the Authority that had taken pieces of his own power.
The Ten Thousand Poison Master clicked his tongue. "Oh there’s quite a few, Snakes, Demons, Monsters, Beasts... they all "escaped" from my Ten Thousand Poison Heart Sutra when I died. And turned themselves into deities by assimilating belief and faith targeted toward myth and legends from the Blue Planet." He listed the categories without naming every individual one, as if the full count was too long to bother with.
"Blue Planet?" asked Riven. "You mean Earth? Is... Earth the origin of all Authorities? But aren’t there more planets, more...?" The idea that a single planet had produced so many of them felt too narrow given the size of the cosmos he had already heard about.
"At the time of the final battle against "Genesis", we were above your planet, yes," said the Ten Thousand Poison Master. "That’s when we all died and when Authorities were first born, their essence fell into your planet, the Blue Planet’s Noosphere and they assimilated everything there that would be and had been, and more, drifting apart through eons, billions of years through dimensions. When they returned they now embody belief and faith." The sequence of events stayed clear even though the time scale stretched across billions of years.
"Future and Past?" asked Riven. "How? What... the Noosphere has... no time, isn’t it?"
The contradiction between the drifting and the lack of time inside the Noosphere needed an explanation before he could accept the rest.
"It’s a dimension that exists outside of time, it’s been theorized... if we could plant our consciousness there and guide it perfectly to ourselves in a different past, it could be possible to "regress" but that’s... at the end, a theory that never came true," the Asura Blood Sea Emperor shook his head.
He presented the idea as something that had been discussed many times and never successfully tested.
"!!!"
Riven thought about it, what he was, how he’d "returned" to the past and everything else, further scaring him to believe that, perhaps, somehow, that’s exactly what could’ve happened to him.
But how? Who did this? And why him?
The similarity between the theory and his own situation was too close to dismiss, yet none of the pieces lined up cleanly.
The questions stayed unanswered and only added more weight to the silence that followed.
The Divine King of the Cold Star looked at the ceiling.
"Hm, for the time being, why don’t you let him simply ascend to Stage 3 already, Ten Thousand Poison Master? He’s already gathered five hundred poisons."
He changed the subject without waiting for the questions to be resolved and pointed the conversation back toward practical progress. After all, they couldn’t stay here chatting forever, Riven needed to return to his world.
"Tsk, fine, but he’s cheating!" said the grumpy Ten Thousand Poison Master. "It took me eons to gather ten thousand different poisons from all sorts of lifeforms across the cosmos but you’re just making and synthetizing random stuff inside your body? That’s cheating!"
He pointed at Riven while he spoke and made no effort to hide the irritation in his voice.
"Well, he’s the one who’d inherited her powers as well," said the Asura Blood Sea Emperor with a faint smile. "Perhaps... he’s the ultimate "Adversary" destined to defeat her."
The suggestion hung between them for a moment before the next voice cut it down.
"There’s no such thing as destiny," the Divine King of the Cold Star said while shaking his head. "Let alone fate. The world, and the present, are written by people. Nothing is set in stone, Riven, remember that. Never fall into despair, and look forward. Now that we’ve awakened, we will remain by your side and guide you along, as your three new masters."
He spoke the last part with a steady tone that left little room for argument from the other two.
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