Eternal Master: Path to Godlike Status-Chapter 21: Thirst for Knowledge
The bells began to toll. The sound rolled through the narrow streets like a war drum
Doors slammed open. Soldiers poured out, armor half-fastened, blades drawn.
Elisa and Eira were seized almost immediately. The Church didn’t care that he had disavowed them.
They were shackled and thrown into a heavy iron carriage.
Their destination was a fortress of white stone and black iron. It was the heart of the town church—a place where heretics went to disappear.
And now the two women were being delivered to a fate far worse than death.
’Good thing I stayed,’
Rain slipped through the dark alleys. He didn’t flee. He doubled back the moment he reached the tree line, lifting a gray cloak from a laundry line.
He draped it over his shoulders, the damp wool smelling of cheap lye.
Only a handful of people would be intelligent enough to suspect about his trick.
And institutions — especially prideful ones — rarely assume they have been outplayed so quickly. Authority breeds predictability.
Up ahead, the structure loomed. Lumen stones flickered at its base, while torchlight burned along the upper walls.
The carriage slowed as it approached the heavy gate. A guard stepped forward.
Rain stopped in the shadow of a closed merchant’s stall.
He watched the exchange—the flash of a Church seal, the heavy groan of the winch, the snap of the whip as the horses were urged forward.
The girls were likely huddled in the dark, waiting for a trial that would never be fair.
A direct rescue was a messy solution. To extract them now would be to brand them as accomplices before they had outlived their usefulness.
Better to let the Church’s bureaucracy grind its gears for a night; it provided the perfect cover for a more logical intervention.
Turning away from the main gate, he began to circle the perimeter.
His eyes traced the vertical lines of the masonry, searching for the stress fractures that time inevitably carved into even the strongest stone.
Scaling it would have been effortless. His gut, however, advised against the direct route.
Soon, he found a drainage grate near the western wall. It was choked with filth and old bones, the iron bars thick with orange rust.
Rain knelt by the grate. He didn’t use a tool; he simply placed two fingers on the center bar and applied focused pressure.
The iron didn’t snap. It groaned, the metal screaming as it was forced to bend like soft wax. The air inside was thick with the stench of stagnant water.
Rain moved through the muck. His boots barely disturbed the black water.
Above him, footsteps echoed through stone corridors. He mapped the floors from their vibrations alone.
One vertical shaft emerged ahead, a heavy chain dangling down for a service lift. He tilted his head, studying the darkness above
’First, the records. Then, the girls. I have a feeling the archives will be far more entertaining.’
In the end, his thirst for knowledge overrode the urgency of the girls’ situation.
What he truly wanted to understand was the history of the Church. It bore striking similarities to the one from his own world.
’How were they connected?’
Such a question intrigued him more than his fight against the paladin.
Pushing the thought aside for now, he lifted his head.
The main floor was a labyrinth of stones.
Slipping through the gaps in the patrol required no magic, only perfect timing.
A guard turned a corner, the cape fluttering inches from Rain’s chest, yet the man continued on, oblivious to the ghost behind him.
It wasn’t long before he reached his destination.
Inside the library, rows of towering shelves stretched into shadow. Overhead, a chandelier of white lumen stones bathed the hall in cold, even light.
Its architecture was distinctly Gothic, yet the furnishings were noticeably a bit modern.
He ran a finger along the polished wood. The grain was exotic, out of place in this backwater town—a proof of the Church’s reach.
That was good news, because he truly wanted to experience more of this new world.
He stepped toward the nearest shelf and reached for a volume bound in dark leather.
The pages began to turn.
At first, slowly.
Then faster.
Soon, they blurred beneath his fingers, flipping so quickly that a spectator might assume he understood nothing at all.
A faint smile curved his lips.
The script was unfamiliar, untranslated. Yet it wasn’t entirely foreign.
Patterns repeated. Meaning revealed itself in pieces.
Snippets became sentences. Sentences became structure.
Although claiming he fully understood it would be a stretch. There were still countless ways he could misinterpret it.
’Interesting... So this religion was founded by the first generation of these so-called Chosen Ones. And when their world was assimilated, holy power appeared here.’
Rain paused, his finger hovering over the text.
’Assimilated...’
To the scholars who wrote this, it was a divine merging.
To anyone with a modicum of common sense, it meant their world was destroyed—its history, its people, and its very laws of physics ground down and fed into the furnace of a larger reality.
Just as he was about to flip the page, another idea came to mind.
’If their power can be inherited, can it also be acquired? Or perhaps, more accurately, harvested?’
With the possibility in mind, he began reading more intently, moving from volume to volume until he finally found one detailing how it all worked.
The Church venerated two gods—symbolized by the twin cross. Once, they had been a single divine will, fractured into duality.
Aethelon governed strength and conquest, blessing holy warriors who sought glory.
Aeterna embodied restoration and purification, granting grace to healers and those who drove out corruption.
The ink on the following pages detailed a more restrictive truth: holy power did not descend upon all who possessed fate. It was a matter of divine lottery.
In some respects, it was more difficult to acquire than magic.
