A Novel Approach chapter 129
Arranging Perit’s resurrection took longer than expected. We had to arrange things with the body, wait for my points to be available, then wait until someone could be sent by the family to take care of everything, which given all my relatives who had been present had their OWN points to cash ou...
2025-09-15 22:30:58 +0000 UTC View PostThe rest of the ceremony was mostly just smiling and nodding, unfortunately. I shook the hands of an endless parade of relatives, and they definitely took me up on my open door policy. My head was aching from the sheer number of subtle overtures and attempts at backroom dealing. The politicking s...
2025-09-12 19:14:59 +0000 UTC View PostStepping out of the shuttle, I took in the location of the ceremony with fascination. I’d expected something ostentatious, maybe a huge castle or some kind of formation. Instead, we were standing in what appeared to be a soothing garden. Rock features, ponds, topiaries. It was…soothing.
It was the day of the ceremony. Not my coronation. That had been made clear. The actual anointing of my position would be undertaken at a later time, in front of a LOT more people. This was more of a confirmation. An award ceremony for the succession war rather than a passing of the torch as per ...
2025-09-10 19:29:16 +0000 UTC View PostIt took a week for the competition to officially come to a close. The succession war wound down in the background, and I didn’t do a single thing to participate. No alliance meeting, no trials, no recruiting. I had twenty five hundred people to free, and while most of them were D-rankers who wo...
2025-09-10 01:09:57 +0000 UTC View PostMaking it back up to the surface was exhausting, but not in the one you would expect. The slow, plodding rise out of the depths of perdition should probably have been grating. A pool of dread filling my stomach as I inched closer to the surface and the results of the competition (which wasn’t o...
2025-09-08 22:32:22 +0000 UTC View PostWhen Wise rose from the shattered remnants of the mirrored wall, his face was…wrong. Broken like the glass. The visage of me that he’d been using was cracked, and black mist leaked from inside of it. He snarled, his hands coming up to his face, trying to press the flaking shards back into pos...
2025-09-05 19:17:25 +0000 UTC View Post“You want…to surrender your forces?” he said slowly, his tone obviously disbelieving. “The ones with all your friends and your PARENTS in them? Those forces? You want to just…hand them over to the Void?”
I was panicking. Or rather, I would have been panicking if I could fucking ...
2025-09-04 20:24:01 +0000 UTC View PostDown, down, down into the deeps. The ritual, to no one’s surprise, was taking place on a much lower level, one much closer to the center of the planet. Not TOO close, mind. Our B-rankers and those of us with Chronicles were able to withstand the pressure, and Zeke had lent a few masks to the ot...
2025-09-04 00:09:03 +0000 UTC View PostI expected my dad and mom to leap into action. His shadowy black soul army spread out around them, taking up a sort of formation shaped like a series of concentric stars, easily thirty of the things. But rather than join him in combat, my mother hummed consideringly. “I’m thinking of a number...
2025-09-02 20:19:54 +0000 UTC View PostThe next day was hectic. Arranging the full court press of searchers we needed required calling in a lot of favors with a lot of people. Some of those favors I called in personally, some my parents called in, but the result was the same. We had officially gathered enough people to head down to cl...
2025-09-01 20:21:22 +0000 UTC View PostCreating my scrolls the next day was anticlimactic. There were nine of them now, which was new, and they were C-ranked, which was new, but they were…just scrolls. The same ones I always made. After getting that done and kissing my wife goodbye, I headed for my meeting at The Empty Room.
I...
2025-08-29 16:30:34 +0000 UTC View PostI regained consciousness slowly, seeing a familiar cheerful red haired face hovering above me, a wide grin on her lips. “Hey there little lord, how ya feelin?” She backed off as I sat up, groaning as I tried to get my head to stop doing its best impression of a six piece orchestra.
“L...
2025-08-28 21:36:57 +0000 UTC View Post“This is your worst plan ever,” my best friend informed me cheerfully as I stood across the ring from my mother’s apprentice. “You know you’re going to lose, right? Like yes, you’re the same rank now, but she’s got ten times the stats you do, and probably has a Chronicle. Not to men...
2025-08-27 22:08:33 +0000 UTC View PostWe headed back up to the surface after a bit more searching. We’d found two more anchors leaving, but since we knew the levels wouldn’t shift for another two days or so, we just recorded their locations for our wide purge later. Two anchors wouldn’t matter in the long run, but if we tipped ...
2025-08-26 20:16:15 +0000 UTC View Post