Chapter 970: Roseborn’s Curse
The two arrived on a large rectangular battleship that was moving speedily through the vacuum of space, landing on what appeared to be an elevated observation deck on its rugged metallic hull.
It was covered by a thick forcefield that prevented space junk and debris from hitting those standing there, and after giving a few orders to her subordinates, Alexia stepped outside the forcefield while speaking.
"Let’s take a walk."
The battleship stretched for kilometres, with uneven surfaces and similar structures, so walking from one end to the other would require quite some time.
As for the fact that they were in the near-perfect vacuum of space, both of them were full cosmic beings who could survive in that vacuum for years on end, and they could also use a small amount of energy to allow the sound of their voices to travel through space, so that wasn’t much of an issue.
"You’re a lot more powerful than I expected you to be in 150...ah, I mean, just 72 years, all things considered," Alexia said.
Her small slip and correction caused Arthur to raise an eyebrow in question. "It’s been 150 years for you? What kinds of universes were you in all this while?"
"I’ve been in some rather obscure Secondary Universes."
"Is that so?" Arthur murmured. "Up to what? Besides offing other Candidates."
Alexia turned to face Arthur after that question, and he returned her gaze calmly, his expression showing genuine curiosity.
"I’ve just been going around gathering oppressed children from different universes and training them up. Besides fighting the occasional war, that is," she finally responded.
Arthur’s expression turned strange when he heard the first part of what she said, but the second part pulled him back into curious mode as he asked, "You still got beef with your dad?"
"You’ve heard, huh?"
"More like, I’ve seen," Arthur corrected. "I found a lot more than just Lostvayne in Varona. I saw recordings of Lucifer’s memory."
Arthur didn’t tell Alexia that Lucifer had achieved some kind of resurrection, with his soul fragment gaining a soul core of its own and regenerating into a new, complete soul.
"I saw in the recordings, almost everything from how you two met, to how you tried to alter the futures of Cosmic Realm Existences just so you would face backlash from the Law of Time and have your ascension to the Monarch Realm blocked so your father wouldn’t be able to take control of your body through the little trap he placed when you were born."
Alexia’s father, Roseborn Vladi XIV, the Supreme Ruler of the Vladi Universal Supercluster, was in truth Roseborn Vladi I reincarnated.
The multi-universal empire’s founder had been moving between bodies for over a hundred million years, searching for a descendant who could reach Cosmic Superiority and allow him to surpass the Monarch Realm and attain even greater power.
With his special ability, he controlled his children, grandchildren, and so on, inhabiting their bodies and ruling his empire under different faces, and Alexia, the 179th child of his fourteenth incarnation, was the first among all his attempts to reach full Cosmic Superiority.
In other words, the paths up to the Cosmic Realms were open to her.
Roseborn coveted Alexia, not for her current power, but for the potential any child of hers might possess.
Unfortunately for him, his body inhabiting ability couldn’t work on women, a restriction which in turn amplified the ability when used on those who met its activation conditions.
As such, Roseborn wanted Alexia to have a child with someone of his choosing, and if that child was male, he intended to take that child as his next vessel.
Naturally, Alexia refused to have her life controlled in that way. However, her opponent was a man who had lived through over a hundred of Alexia’s lifetimes and possessed extensive experience in dealing with resistance from his descendants.
He had prepared a failsafe for the possibility of Alexia resisting his will, and even for the chance of her aligning herself with beings more powerful than him to prevent him from reaching her, just as Lucifer had.
A curse had been placed on her when she was two years old, and as she grew, it seeped into her existence, merging completely with her being and virtually becoming a part of her soul.
When she became a Monarch Realm Existence, the curse would activate, and Alexia would lose all control of her body, becoming nothing but a puppet for Roseborn to control at will.
She had noticed this during her ascension to the Monarch Realm, and she had cut off her own path to greater power by breaking the laws of Time and Causality.
A High-Tier Deity attempting to manipulate the past and future of not one or two, but hundreds of Grand Supremes simultaneously was simply impossible.
Alexia may have had an Aspect and a Monarch Rank Temporal Authority, but she had no Dictums in Time, and her Existence Realm made her completely unqualified in every possible way to interfere with the time of even one Grand Supreme, much less hundreds.
She still pushed through and attempted to influence the streams along the river of time that belonged to these powerful existences.
She had a unique ability called the ’Ruler of Time.’ Combining it with the power of her Aspect that she possessed as a Candidate, Alexia had accidentally gone beyond just influencing pasts and futures and had unintentionally entered a space familiar to Arthur.
The ’Conceptual Space’ Arthur’s mind had been accidentally pushed into while fighting Valkalonex.
The result was a backlash that reduced her power and stripped her law comprehensions away. This inadvertently made her unable to meet the requirements for the Monarch Realm, and as such, her ascension was cut off.
It had been tens of thousands of years since that incident, and Alexia had long since recovered her Existence Realm to the Cosmic Limit of the High-Tier Deity Realm, and had re-comprehended the universal laws she had lost up to completion in the Monarch Rank of those laws.
However, she couldn’t become a Monarch and advance even further into the Sub-Cosmic Realms until she dealt with the curse placed upon her.
"If I am to guess, you want to use my ’Null’ to remove your curse, right?" Arthur asked, despite already knowing that was what Alexia wanted from him.
He simply wanted her to say it in her own words, and she did without hesitation.
"Yes, that’s what I want. You have the same kind of erasure power as Lucifer, and it is possible for it to ’erase’ the curse that has melded with my soul."
This statement brought one glaring inconsistency to light.
If Arthur had the same power as Lucifer, then why hadn’t Alexia just asked Lucifer to remove her curse with his own power?
She had known him for close to 30,000 years, and he was aware of her predicament as well. He was also far more powerful than Arthur, so why not have him do it?
The answer to that question lay precisely in his great power.
Lucifer was a Grand Supreme. There were only two more Existence Realms ahead of him before reaching the Ultimate Realm.
He was far stronger than Alexia, and his existence was much vaster than hers.
The level of precision he needed to use his power to remove the curse melded into Alexia’s soul with the least possible damage to her was comparable to what a giant with fingers the size of planets would require to thread a needle.
Being even a single millimetre off could have resulted in Alexia’s existence being completely obliterated, and that was a risk Lucifer was unwilling to take.
It was because of this that Alexia began to search for alternatives, and after another trip to the Conceptual Space, willingly this time, she discovered Arthur’s existence down the river of time.
The distortions that the singularity that was Arthur Vaughn would eventually cause in the river of time had been visible to Alexia even tens of thousands of years ago.
It was for this reason she approached Arthur, revealed to him his Progenitor status, told him to go to Varona to find Lucifer’s weapon, the third strongest of the Rule Breakers, as well as his armoury, where he kept over a hundred other Rule Breakers he had collected during his lifetime.
She did all of this to set him on his path to cosmic power earlier, so he could grow strong enough to assist her more quickly.
The 10-year-old Arthur didn’t fully grasp the whole picture, and even after learning Alexia’s backstory, many parts of it remained incomprehensible.
But having attained Cosmic Superiority and come into contact with Aspects of Concepts, virtually everything was now clear to him as day.
Emphasis to be placed on virtually.
He still had some questions.
"I’m not your only option, right? I mean, there have to be other people with powers capable of helping you."
"Of course, you’re not my only option. Far from it," Alexia responded immediately.
"However, you’re the option where I have the least chance of death."
She bent down to pick up a small metal bolt lying on the ground, lifting it and scanning the area with her eyes to see where it had come from as she asked, "You understand the existence of the parallel paths of time, right?"
Arthur nodded silently, and Alexia continued.
"I looked at them, and the longest paths were the ones where I came to you for help. The ones where I went to others, those paths either ended when they tried to help me, or shortly after."
She placed the bolt back on the mounted cannon it had come from, alerted the maintenance team with a short message, then turned to Arthur and continued.
"As I was saying, you’re the option with the least chance of death for me. Only 15%."
Arthur’s eyes widened slightly at the figure she named. To think that even her best option still carried a 15% chance of death.
"That’s quite dangerous. A 15% chance that I might accidentally obliterate your soul with my power is no small risk," he said, glancing to the side at a gas giant planet they passed.
"But that’s the lowest chance of death. Still, that probability was calculated based on the potential I observed down the river of time, and the future is always changing. The powers you acquire, the laws you comprehend, and the experiences you go through all influence the future."
"But..." Arthur trailed off, glancing away from the stars around them and toward Alexia as he asked. "What if someone comes along who gives you a higher chance of survival?"
At that question, Alexia moved one of her hands that had been crossed behind her back and pushed back a few strands of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes as she responded.
"My actions would depend on how much higher that chance of survival is."
