Aion looked around and then saw the inhabitants of the city suddenly stop moving, and then they sat down to meditate… the woman probably ordered them to feed the barrier with more mana.
"Please, don't ignore me. I am quite a fan of yours, you know," the woman said. "My name is Arlana, and as you might have guessed already, I am from the future."
"... Are you borrowing the body of someone else?" Aion furrowed his eyebrows without hiding his bloodlust.
"Yes, as you already know, time magic has a lot of limitations thanks to the relics that you have, so this was the only way I could talk with you," Arlana said. "First of all, I would like to say that I am not your enemy and that all of this was bound to happen even without my influence."
"Convenient, don't you think?" Aion showed a cold smile.
"If this weren't true, how would I have known the right moment to talk with you?" Arlana asked. "Besides, since I can do this, wouldn't it be better if I had taken over the body of someone else and then betrayed you? Your mother would be the perfect target for that… wait, wait! Don't look at me like that, and this is just an example. You might be thinking that the magic tool that your mother has protects her against everything, like negative effects. Still, even that has a limit of durability."
It wasn't like Aion never considered that, but he thought that it would take a long while, and until that happened, his plans would have already been set. Regardless, that woman sure seemed weird… in more ways than one. That was why Aion felt so guarded against her more than ever before.
"I am truly sorry for your sisters, but I couldn't change history that much since I had my hands full interfering with the real enemy this time around," Arlana said while bowing her head. "You might not believe this, but your sisters were supposed to die two weeks ago, and then you would have destroyed this entire country out of rage."
Aion furrowed his eyebrows… as expected, he was talking with someone that knew way more than anyone else. Still, her words didn't make much sense.
"They were captured ten days ago… how should they have been killed two weeks ago?" Aion asked.
"My passive intervention prevented that… while I could have stopped their capture if I tried really hard, I couldn't since that might have changed the future too much," Arlana explained. "Did you know that aside from creating timelines, altering the future too much might erase the existence of people altogether?"
"... I have heard of it," Aion replied after a brief moment of silence.
"That was why I couldn't take any chances… the best I could do was to delay what was supposed to happen enough to give you a chance to act and save them," Arlana added. "After considering many possibilities, it doesn't seem like your sisters and their descendants won't alter the future so much, so this was all possible."
Aion didn't like the direction the conversation was going, it was way too convenient for the enemy, but she had a point. When messing with time magic, things can become pretty nasty, but there were other things that he needed some explanations for.
"What else did you do to interfere?" Aion asked.
"With the spirit of your ancestors," Arlana replied as if it was a matter of fact. "One of your enemies planned to use them to spread chaos in the world. After using their mana for years, they would become cursed spirits that wouldn't belong to dungeons, and they would cause many problems for decades. Your mother would feel terrible about that, and her health was going to deteriorate, and she would eventually die out of sheer despair in ten years. To avoid that, I changed how they are being controlled. They won't find anyone. Once their hosts are killed, they will search for another with the highest quality of mana. That would be you."
Things were escalating too quickly… Still, if that was some crazy lie, that woman sure planned that well since she was almost convincing Aion.
He had never heard of something like that happening to ghosts. Still, it would make sense that the people of the Milleris kingdom change or act differently due to their magical nature and for being treated like tools. In any case, he needed to confirm all that with someone else… Sauros and Seris probably knew if something like that had happened before. Still, he didn't know where or when he would find them.
"You can confirm that with Sauros and Seris. They live on a small continent on the Eastern side of Xhanxis country," Arlana replied as if she could tell what Aion was thinking. "While not on the same scale, something similar happened fifteen hundred years before you were born. Someone decided to keep killing monsters of a dungeon while sealing the place and using their spirits as a power source. The people of that place got lucky since the ghosts were weak, but they still lost half of the population of their country."
"Which country and how did you know all this?" Aion asked.
"It happened in a place you haven't visited before, and you do know that you only explored a small area of the world in the last year, right?" Arlana asked. "Also, I know that because all the events that you are involved in changed the future a lot, and thanks to that, you got the attention of some beings that you didn't want to. Listening to me won't convince you. You need to use the relics to understand things more clearly. To make you understand that I am telling the truth, I will cancel my spells and then make the spirits of in this whole country go to your body. It is the only way to secure the souls of the Millerians."
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