Chapter 839: Super Abilities Mystery Box
The Super Abilities Mystery Box had been one of the rewards he’d earned from the success of the whole Jonathan affair — the saving of Roxanne, that entire fraught episode.
He’d walked away from it with three prizes for work done well. The Cosmic Dragon Face Manifest. The Mystery Box. And the Super Abilities Mystery Box. Three trophies, fairly won — well. Won. Eira had certainly contributed her share, and he was not so ungracious as to scrub her out of what they’d achieved.
But the credit, broadly, had been his to collect, and collect it he had.
All of it. Except one...
The Super Abilities Mystery Box he had simply... never opened. It had sat unclaimed in the System’s quiet inventory, a sealed promise gathering metaphysical dust, while he occupied himself with the next catastrophe and the catastrophe after that.
Until not too long ago — in the aftermath of Eira asking him, with that reckless ancient hunger of hers, for precisely the thing she could not handle, and then failing so comprehensively to handle it that she had not woken since.
He’d tucked the chaos incarnate of the Void-Ice elemental fairy beneath the covers like an exhausted child, which was its own comedy he intended to never let her live down.
And then, before he dressed, before he made his way to Melissa’s — Phei had finally turned his attention to the Super Abilities Mystery Box.
The thing had spent hours defiling his mind with anticipation. A low and patient itch behind every other thought, a sealed door he could not stop hearing breathe, no matter how many other doors in his life were busy trying to kill him.
A man could ignore a great deal. He had discovered, lately, that he could not ignore a closed box the universe had handed him and declined to explain.
So, he had stopped trying.
Phei had reached into the System’s inventory, found that unassuming sealed promise waiting exactly where he’d abandoned it, and — with the particular reckless calm of someone who had learned that hesitation cost more than consequences ever did — he had opened it.
And he had not believed his eyes:
Because whatever spilled out of that box was the reason — the precise reason — he now sat at the head of his table with his coffee gone tepid and a cold certainty threading the length of his spine:
It was the thing that had made the One Above’s gift suddenly, horrifyingly legible.
The key that fitted the lock like a proof, beyond any sober denial, that a cosmic entity had looked across the time itself and had seen this exact day, and timed everything — the gift weeks ago, the forced opening today — around the certainty that yesterday he would hold what he now held.
That was the first reward: the very thing that had made him think — right after the One Above’s gift — that they had known:
Known the day, the hour, the exact shape his understanding would take. Known he could finally put their gift to use.
And the instant the lid of the box had come off, this was what the System had shown him:
[Ding! Super Abilities Mystery Box opened!]
[Ding! Host has received —]
[Page of Infinity Runes!]
[Description: In ancient time — ????? — and so was brought upon the Primordial Sundering of the Tome that contained the entirety of the Dragon’s powers, and its pages were scattered into the Time River and the Infinity Void, never to be seen again. The Page of Infinity Runes is a single page of the hundreds the Tome once held.]
A single page...
...Of hundreds:
A fragment of the lost Tome of the Dragon, surfacing out of an unassuming little box the very day before the universe pressed its matching gift into his hands.
And that — that was the part that made something in Phei go very still.
Because most men were never planned for at all. Most men moved through their small lives unwatched, unbudgeted, unforeseen, and died having never once been a line in anyone’s design.
He had been planned for across the time itself:
In light of everything Eira had told him about the Original Tongue, Phei had arrived at a conclusion as clean and uncomplicated as a blade: it would be magnificent to learn it.
Better still — to learn how to invoke its true capabilities, the buried teeth of it, the part that did more than decorate: Runes.
And Phei’s desire to learn the Original Tongue — no matter how strenuously Eira insisted on the difficulty, no matter how many of her ancient cautionary sighs she aimed at him — ran exactly as deep as his desire to learn the runes themselves.
Which was to say: very hard.
It was hard, and it was that simple.
He could not have told anyone, least of all himself, how that swelling hunger had taken root in him.
It was not merely because it would be cool — though he was not above admitting that runes were, objectively, extremely cool, and a man should be allowed at least one shallow reason among his deep ones.
No.
There was something beneath the coolness, something he could not name and had stopped pretending he could.
He simply wanted it.
Phei wanted to learn the Original Tongue with a quiet and immovable certainty, to become a Rune Master.
It did not matter to him how meagre his proficiency might prove neither did it did not matter how thin his talent for runes turned out to be.
He was determined, and determination was a currency he had never been short of.
But there was one problem and that problem was an older and more boring one:
’There’s no one to teach you.’ she’d said.
Eira knew a thing or two about the Original Tongue — of course she did; she predated most things worth knowing — but a thing or two was not a curriculum:
It was not enough to teach him to speak it, much less write it, and much more less escort him toward to the path of anything resembling rune mastery.
And she had told him as much herself, with the rare un-mischievous honesty she reserved for subjects that had genuinely defeated her: across the long uncountable span of her existence, Eira had tried to master the Original Tongue, master the runes.
And had, by her own admission, failed at both no matter how long she’d invested in them.
So how could she possibly teach him what she had never managed to learn for herself?
Because both pursuits, it turned out, demanded more than desire; more than determination:
They demanded an innate talent — the kind a being was either born holding or born without, and no amount of stubbornness could counterfeit.
It was the same cruel arithmetic that governed the cultivation of power itself, and they had not discussed it in any real depth — talent, that quiet tyrant — but its shadow fell across all three paths Phei wanted to embark on: cultivation, the Original Tongue, the runes.
Eira, as it turned out, had been born with no real talent for either of the latter two. What little she possessed allowed her to read them — and even then, not deeply, not into the marrow of them — and to speak a scattered handful of words;
Nothing more.
It was that modest, unglamorous gift that had let her read aloud what was inscribed upon the Spiritual Bond ring.
That much had come to her easily, flawlessly — and it had earned her a few Cool Points from her Master, briefly, before he confiscated every last one of them the moment her ignorance of the wider subject became too glaring to ignore.
But she had other things to teach him about runes, even if she could not teach him the runes themselves.
And one of those things had lodged in him like a splinter of cold light.
The sheer, staggering rarity of Rune Masters.
In an entire realm — an entire realm — there might exist as few as one Rune Master, and never, under any circumstance Eira had ever witnessed, more than five.
And that figure landed with its full weight only once a man understood the scale involved:
Because the smallest realm beyond Earth, Eira said, was five times the size of the pitiful rock humanity called home. Ten times, on a generous day. Earth was a pebble: but the discussion of realms and their hierarchies Phei had wisely shelved for another, calmer morning — but the size of them he had absorbed, and it had not left him.
The greater realms — the ones that cradled powerhouses ranked at the primordial rank, beings whose mere existence bent the rules — those realms were thousands of times the size of Earth.
And even those could hold no more than five Rune Masters.
There was no percentage that could express a scarcity like that. No statistic small enough. It was not rarity; it was near-impossibility wearing rarity’s clothes. And it was precisely that — Eira had told him plainly — which made every single Rune Master a treasure valuable enough to ignite war between realms. Not a man. A casus belli with a pulse.
’So now...’
Now imagine his surprise.
Now imagine the precise expression that had crossed Phei’s face when, not long at all after Eira had finished pouring those revelations into him — the talent he might not have, the teacher he did not have, the obscene cosmic scarcity of the thing he wanted — he had reached into the System’s inventory, opened the Super Abilities Mystery Box he had neglected for so long...
And the very first reward to surface from it had been the Page of Infinity Runes...
