Chapter 15: Chapter 15: Shadow Line

Mila

The sage smiled back, but there was an undercurrent of sadness for a split second and the assumption Mila had been fishing to confirm seemed much more likely. Without showing any reaction, though, she asked her next question. “What advantages do you get from having apprentices?”

“There are quite a few. Given the purpose of the System, which I cannot tell you as it is classified, raising up another power to your level or beyond is greatly rewarded. For me, though, the principal draw has to do with my main class.

“I was at the peak of A rank when I died, at the level just below gods, but what I died from was old age. My body couldn’t take it anymore and, had I not made a deal with the System in exchange for some rather ridiculous feats, my soul would have perished as well.

“I messed up and blocked my path to apotheosis due to a lack of information, severing the two main paths to my class’s advancement, and that left only one rather ridiculous achievement which would allow me to be reborn as a god.

“I have to raise a student from G rank all the way to godhood.”

Mila didn’t hide the shock she felt at that statement. She couldn’t confirm the veracity of what the sage said, but it did recontextualize what she knew about the woman in a way that fit.

“I don’t expect my plan to actually work.” The sage’s smile grew wider again. “It’s an act of desperation and mainly I just want to have fun.

“Still, I’m not going to choose an apprentice with no chance at all of rising that high. I didn’t kidnap hundreds of extreme talents to seed my experimental world for no reason.”

Having dropped another conversational bomb, the sage smiled, but Mila had already been planning to ask about the woman’s experiments on Earth next, anyway, so she didn’t really care.

Now, though, it was the sage’s turn.

“If Earth would stay normal for your entire life, no integration with the System and no apocalypses, yet you could go back and change one thing, what would you change? Would you stop the car accident which killed your parents before your first birthday in Boston? Have your grandfather not kidnap you back to China and instead move to Poland with your mother’s family? Stop that human trafficker from taking you when you were twelve? Or would you not go after Aalam? Maybe stay when you knew he’d find out what you’d done instead of running?”

Mila started to grow a bit angry. She hadn’t known about her grandfather kidnapping her, but that was very much in character. Thinking about that trafficker always got her in a bad mood. There was a reason she’d killed him, getting on the Ministry of State Security’s radar as a result. Mostly, though, she was angry about how much information the sage had on her.

She was tired of feeling like a pawn in other people’s games. She was tired of being disposable. “No comment.”

The sage smiled. “There is a secret to being the one in control, Mila. It’s called having the biggest stick.” She bowed her head slightly. “I’m sorry about deliberately pushing your buttons.”

Mila just looked at the woman for several seconds and something which should have been obvious clicked into place in her head. “My lack of control over my energy exposes my emotions, doesn’t it?”

The Yin Yang Sage grinned at her, a grandmotherly look of pride in her eyes. “Yes, though it’s more control over aura than energy.”

Mila took a deep breath and dropped the facade she’d been showing. She didn’t glare at the sage, as she honestly wasn’t that angry anymore, especially not with the woman in front of her. She was just tired.

The sage was trying to understand her, which was annoying, but she didn’t need to go about it the way she was, offering way more information than she had to in exchange, and Mila could at least respect that.

“Is your uniqueness of the Shadow line?”

“You already know the answer.” Mila’s expression changed to a glare. “And you know I wouldn’t feel comfortable answering out loud after what you said before.”

The sage waved her hand in the air, but this time the robots didn’t attack. “Oh, the System isn’t recording now. I’m not an idiot.”

“Then yes.” Mila decided not to waste any more time trying to hide information from the really, really old woman, as it almost certainly wouldn’t work. “What experiments did you perform on Earth?”

“Nothing too extreme.” The sage leaned back in her chair. “Just a little eugenics, no actual tampering.

“I had a husband for a while and a family, but most of them died of old age long before I did. I also had an organization, but it was crushed by a couple gods when it grew a bit too powerful and I was approaching the end of my life, so I brought the survivors of both to Earth and they were its initial human population.

“Over the next hundred thousand years, I mostly wandered, just kind of playing around with no real responsibilities, but I also killed a grand total of thirteen low level gods invading from other dimensions—an accomplishment far more impressive than you have the context to realize—and I could choose what to do with their subordinate organizations, so I crippled their talented humans and moved them to Earth.

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“As a result of this, Earth’s population is way above average when it comes to magic cultivation talent and the amount of the population with uniquenesses is about 1 in 20,736, which is quite high given the average of humans in the universe is closer to one in nine trillion.”

The sage smiled again, but this time it was more of a smirk. “I’m an ancestor to all of Earth’s human population, including you, so you should call me Granny Xara.”

Mila’s Omniglot reader kicked in with that last statement and she realized the word granny meant ‘Supreme Holy Leader’ in some other language, so she instead decided to go with a different term with the same level of informality. “It’s your turn to ask your last question, Nana Xara.”

“Right, Omniglot Reader.” Nana Xara frowned for a few seconds then seemed to get over it, and Mila was pretty sure she was trying to lighten the mood. “Do you know why your boyfriend blew himself up?”

Mila just stared at the old woman for a few seconds. Then she closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. “No.”

“Well, there were a few reasons. As you’ve suspected, his sister is my first apprentice, so I’ve gotten this information from the person closest to him, who sadly still thinks he’s dead due to System rules, but was likely more honest than normal as a result.

“From what I’ve been able to tell, he was quite depressed and angry after you left, but then Diana got sick. It was a reaction to the rising mana on your planet, as Diana’s mana wells are the largest on earth and she has a uniqueness which greatly boosts the effectiveness of her Magic stat, functionally making them even bigger, but Aalam didn’t know that at the time and, for the first time in his life, he felt helpless with a science problem.

“More importantly, though, his actions with that trojan program and releasing all the world’s secrets was about to start World War III, this time with everyone having nukes, and that made him feel kind of desperate.

“Diana’s conjecture is he found out from the leaks that some other organization or government was going to blow up the Capitol and prematurely activated the bombs while he was inside. She thinks his goal was to trigger a pause in the rising global tensions through an unexpected tragedy from an unexpected source, and, if that was the case, for the three remaining days of your world at least, it worked.

“The thing is, and this is actually the most important part, it wasn’t supposed to. The System’s calculations, based on the Laws of Fate and Divination, were that a short thermonuclear war would wipe out over a billion people, and it was by stopping this prediction that Aalam earned a major boon, allowing me to give him access to all my knowledge on monsters, classes, laws, bloodlines, and skills, as well as the rules for various System-hosted competitions, including the rules of this tutorial.

“I managed to hide the granting of the boon and the System error, thankfully, but this is a rather huge deal. The System, while in truth more an artifact than a life-form, is at a higher level than most gods. Normally, it would require one of the most powerful gods taking action for it to mess up a prediction, yet your boyfriend seemed to manage it on his own.

“The only other way this would normally be possible were if uniquenesses were involved, specifically uniquenesses of the Shadow line.”

Taking another deep breath, Mila opened her eyes.

“This line of uniquenesses provides resistance to—or, at higher grades, the ability to manipulate—karma and divination, as well as an extremely useful general effect, an increase in the effectiveness of the Aura stat.

“Someone with the Shadow Soldier uniqueness, the weakest uniqueness of the line even though Epic in grade, has a 12.5% increase in Aura effectiveness and a resistance to divination and enforced karmic bonds of C rank power or lower. Someone with the Shadow Agent uniqueness, the Legendary grade in the line, like your grandfather, has a 25% increase in aura effectiveness and resistance to divination and enforced karmic bonds of B rank power or lower.

“To mess up the System’s divination, however, Aalam would need to have a much more powerful uniqueness of the line, one three grades above Shadow Agent, Shadow King. I’ve been watching, however, and his Aura stat doesn’t have an increased effectiveness. Yours does. Yet for him to cause such a large shift in the divination with you acting as the catalyst, you would normally need to have an even higher grade of uniqueness, Shadow Empress.

“Your aura, however, is not that strong. From what I can tell, your aura is only double the strength of what it should be from your Aura stat, so you have the Shadow Princess uniqueness.”

Nana Xara looked irritated as she leaned forward in her chair. “Now, normally you having such a great uniqueness would be awesome. Sure, the gods would all want to kill you if they found out, as you have the perfect ability to become a spanner in their workings, but I love that. And I like you as a person. You’re crafty.

“I would normally have already given you an offer to become my apprentice and, given your personality, it would have been really fun to try and convince you after you say no. But, sadly, I can’t.

“Confirming you have the Shadow Princess uniqueness means your boyfriend has the uniqueness I thought and I can’t have another apprentice linked to someone so unstable, even if he is the greatest talent I’ve seen in my life.

“Do you know while we’ve been talking he’s already advanced two of his Law Eggs from early to middle grade. That is utterly ridiculous.

“Were you the type to abandon him, I wouldn’t like you as much. But, if you stay with him, you’re going to die, and I can’t risk one of my only two chances dying without even getting out of the tutorial.”

Nana Xara sighed and then tapped her cane on the ground, causing the hovering robots to fully disappear. “Go ahead and ask your final question.”

Mila looked at the woman, guessed her frustration was genuine, and felt extremely worried as a result. “What is wrong with Aalam?”

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